Part 1 I woke before sunrise to the sound of engines idling outside my farmhouse. For one half-dreaming second, I thought I was back on a road crew outside Billings,...
Part 1 The first time anyone in Harbor Point called the dog useless, he was sleeping under a rain-soaked bench near the cliff walk, curled tight against the wind like...
On a damp Saturday morning in March 1976, inside the livestock auction barn in Greene County, Iowa, a thin, gray-haired woman stood alone beside a pen that nobody else wanted...
On November 3, 2011, at 7:18 in the morning, Warren Tuttle pulled his 2008 Case IH Magnum 305 into the service bay at Plain View Implement in Ogallala, Nebraska. He...
In the spring of 1979, Gerald Hoffman was forty-three years old and milking thirty-two cows on one hundred sixty acres outside Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. His herd was mixed, mostly Jerseys,...
On a July morning in 1994, Marcus Webb stood in front of an oak stump and felt his career slipping away. Two weeks earlier, the problem had looked simple. The...
On a Tuesday morning in September 1992, Frank Donnelly stood at the edge of an Iowa swamp and watched his career sink deeper into the mud. Three days earlier, Donnelly...
The painted mare was still bleeding when Jacob Marlo found her tangled in barbed wire behind his barn. Three deep gashes ran across her flank, fresh enough that the blood...
Jonathan Wade had never believed a single act of kindness could change the course of a man’s life. He believed in weather. He believed in hard work. He believed in...
Part 1 The morning after the HOA laughed off my repair bill, I walked down to my grandfather’s dam and put my hand on a steel valve that had not...