Chapter 1
This is a story about making a life-long friend.
My first real engineering job was in a medium-sized Midwestern City, far from where I grew up in Arizona. It was an interesting job with plenty of variety and lots of travel. The company I worked for was very small, so everyone on the engineering team was essentially permanently on call, and since I was the young single bachelor with no family, I usually volunteered to head out to a client’s plant to get them up and running at 2:00 in the morning, sometimes driving 6 hours in a blizzard to do 30 minutes of work and then drive 6 hours back.
Being new in town, I looked for things to do in my rare moments of free time. Things which I was familiar with and put me in proximity to people other than my co-workers. I got a membership at the indoor rock climbing wall downtown.
The rock climbing gym shared a parking lot with a few office buildings. One evening, after a few hours of climbing, I was at my pickup repacking my climbing harness and shoes. A businesswoman in her middle fifties was at the car next to me, switching her high heels for more comfortable looking Mary Jane shoes, undoing her tight bun and shaking her head back and forth to untwirl her hair. She wore a business skirt, her legs trimmed nicely in black pantyhose.
I noticed that she had a flat tire, and I told her so.
“What?! No…. This is just what I needed. I have to drive to Sioux Falls still today!” Exhaustion fell across her face like a curtain.
I said, “the tire shop closes in 10 minutes, let’s put the tire in my truck and go get it repaired.”
She hesitated for half a second and then reached into her front seat to pop the back trunk. I used her jack and had the tire off in a couple of minutes. She jumped in my truck’s passenger seat, and we made it to the tire shop just as they were about to lock the front door.
The woman gave her sweetest smile as she told her tragic story. It worked and the mechanic took her tire from me, rolled it into the back and had a plug set 5 minutes later. He didn’t charge her anything.
As we drove back to her car, she looked honestly relieved and leaned back into the seat as she sighed.
“What a long day, I was giving a training seminar at the office here. I haven’t sat down all day. My name is Becky, by the way, what is yours?”
“Nice to meet you Becky, I am Sam. Do you live in Sioux Falls?”
“Yes, my whole life. It’s grown a lot since I was young. How long have you lived here?”
“Five months now. I’m still getting to know the area. I like it fairly well.” I replied.
The small talk continued and when we got to her car I put the tire back on and packed the jack back into her car trunk.
She tried to give me $20. “Thank you so much for your help. You are truly a good Samaritan. I would have been stuck driving 45 miles an hour to get home on the donut, that is if I could even get the spare on by myself.”
“Of course I won’t take that money. I’m happy to help, maybe sometime you’ll have a chance to help someone else. Oh, and tomorrow take it to a tire place and have them torque your lug nuts for you.”
She squeezed my hand and then drove away.
My life was full of these random connections, but my work was not conducive to a robust social life.
One Friday night, after a 70 hour week, I told my boss that I would be turning off my cell phone. I needed 2 days of rest. As I drove home from the office, I did not take freeway exit to my house. Instead, I kept driving. I had no plan. I just did not feel like going home to an empty house. I was a little lonely and a little antsy to do something meaningful with my free time that I had negotiated—-no– wrested from my boss.
I drove for 45 minutes just thinking, pondering life. An idea occurred to me that I should visit a ghost town I had seen on the map previously. There was something about these small abandoned farming communities in the Midwest that puts a wistful twinge in my heart and sparks my imagination for what the lives of these people were like. I enjoy walking through the cemeteries which are the only things that are maintained still. Reading the grave stones, messages that loved ones had carved into them. Sometimes an area would be reserved for a certain family, and then I could find a street name with the same family name.
It was summer so the sun set around 9 o’clock. As the clouds above me turned from red to purple, I returned to my pickup and turned down a narrow country road. At one point, the road turned to dirt and had a yellow sign that said “NOT A COUNTY MAINTAINED ROAD”. Against my better judgement, reckoning that the highway was only one mile further, I pressed on in my little 4 cylinder Ford Ranger. Very quickly I realized that I had made a mistake. The mud was deep and I knew that if I stopped I would not be able to start again. 100 feet into the road, the tail end of my truck started to slide sideways and then, in slow motion, the front end slewed into the ditch.
There was no escaping the deep sticky clay, so I grabbed my phone. No signal. Resigned to a long ordeal, I started walking back to the farmhouse which I had seen a mile back.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/lr2lcj/the_farmer_friends_part_1_sfw_intro_chapter_1