The Farmer on the Bucket

When I was about fourteen or so, a farmer sat on a five-gallon bucket and changed my life.

My first real job was hired hand on a family farm in Kansas. I got it off a school bus ride: a friend was getting a new job, and handed me the farmer's phone number.

In the interview I told Karl the truth: I didn't have much experience.

I may have oversold my stick-shift skills.

Day one, he pointed at a green 1966 Chevy pickup, the truck they'd bought brand new, and said: finish filling it with diesel, start it up, and come pick me up over at the shop.

I killed that truck five or six times just getting it moving. Couldn't see out the back past the fuel tanks. Only had one mirror.

He could have fired me on the spot. I was sure he would.

The bucket

Instead, a few weeks later, he put me in the biggest tractor I'd ever seen, pulling a thirty-foot disc, and sat down on a five-gallon bucket in the corner of the cab.

My hands shook the whole way.

I botched every turn. Too fast, too slow, couldn't hold a line. At one point he told me flat out: "If you don't get this right, I'm gonna lose it on you."

But he didn't lose it. And he didn't leave.

He watched me fail, corrected me, and stayed on that bucket until I could do it.

By the end of that one summer, I could drive every stick shift on that farm and work a field like I belonged there.

Karl passed a few years back.

But I think about him every time I sit with somebody doing something for the first time: first house, first sale, first big scary decisions and moments.

Everybody kills the truck on day one.

What matters is whether somebody's willing to sit on the bucket while you learn.

Karl, this one's for you.