Brown: Shipping day cause for celebration

W hat comes around once a year and is always an occasion for food, family, friends, and more than a little celebration?

Shipping day.

Audra Brown

Down on the Farm

You look forward to it for months, just waiting for the day when you can trade a few truckloads of troublesome adolescent bovines for a check that you can spend buying more of the same for next year. In preparation, call your friends, family, and neighbors who have the know-how and the vehicles to help round up a few fields of frisky cattle. Call the brand inspector, make sure the buyer and his trucks know where and when to show up. Find out if Mom or Grandma is bringing the biscuits and coffee.

When the morning comes, everybody shows up at the corrals bright and early, converging from many directions through different gates. Vehicles range from farm auction fodder to the pickup that usually is reserved for pulling campers or picking up groceries in town. Four-wheelers, dirtbikes, and even a Deuce-and-a-Half have shown up too. Every man, woman, and child that can drive brings a rig. Carpooling is neither an option, nor polite.

If you have to borrow a pickup to have something to drive, it can be arranged. Drivers are always more scarce.

Once all vehicles are manned and the gates are open, we swarm out onto the fields in a ground-covering formation. Cattle are pushed from the farthest weedy corners (though not by the town rigs, who stay on the open field) and the bunches are brought together and headed toward the destination corrals. It’s quite the sight to see all those pickups spread out in perfect coordination. You’d almost swear we’d practiced before. If all goes well, all the cattle go in the pen the first time. If all don’t, then the fun times begin.

When coordination and numbers fail, speed, experience, and a confrontational relationship with apprehension prevail. While a few wiser souls start sorting and loading the first truck, the rest of us go back out and show the crazy cattle who’s crazier.

Eventually, all but the cuts are on the trucks, the happy former owner is on the way to the bank, and the rest of us are sitting around eating biscuits, scones, cinnamon rolls, and hopefully apple burritos. Drinking coffee, tea, and coffee. It’s a party for a little while before everyone has to get back to their own business. No one doesn’t look forward to shipping day.

Audra Brown has never been one of the wise ones. Contact her at: [email protected].