The Keys Are in It

In town, I never take the keys out of the pickup. Haven’t in years. At the farm, every truck, every piece of equipment – the baler, the sprayer, the old Chevy trap wagon that only starts if you feather the gas just right – they’re all sitting there with the keys in the ignition. It’s not laziness. It’s not forgetfulness. It’s just that no one’s going to take them.

Enterprise is the closest town, forty miles from the farm gate. It’s the county seat of Wallowa County, Oregon – the kind of place where you get to know people not because you try, but because you can’t help it. Everyone’s someone’s cousin or kid’s basketball coach. And when someone’s car breaks down, you don’t call a tow truck. You grab a chain and head out.

There was a day years ago when I was trying to cut a road across the back end of a pasture – slow work with my little skid steer. I’d been picking away at it, trying to find enough dry days between everything else. One afternoon, I had to run into town for parts, and when I came back, there was a Cat D5 dozer parked where I’d been working.

No note. No call. Just the dozer. I figured I knew who it belonged to. Turned out I was right – a neighbor who had borrowed one of my spare balers a couple of years before and used it for a few seasons. So I put the dozer to work and the quarter mile of road took shape quickly. Never even a word exchanged. He saw I needed it, he wasn’t using it, and he figured I could use the right tool.

It’s easy to think this kind of trust and mutual aid is peculiar to rural Oregon, something stitched into the soil. But I’ve seen it sprout in places halfway around the world too, where the soil looks nothing like home.

In Rwanda, my wife and I built a farm on the red earth outside Ngoma. The first Labor Day we were there, I assumed our workers, the only people in the community with formal employment, would want the day off. Instead, they came early, working through the morning planting trees and building terraces, then changed into their Sunday best. This Labor Day was a special occasion because none of them had ever had a paying job before. In the afternoon, they lined up to give hugs. There were speeches, laughter, and a long, spirited conversation about how life had changed: steady work, steady pay, a future that felt a little more secure.

Harvesting beans on the author’s farm in Rwanda. Photos courtesy of the author.

But it didn’t stop there. The workers told me they wanted the good fortune to ripple outward, beyond the farm. They suggested we plant a few acres of bananas – not to make a profit, but to sell at affordable prices to families in the surrounding villages who didn’t have jobs on the farm. Bananas weren’t a big-money crop. They knew that. But bananas were a staple. A way to make sure everyone, even those without work, could share in a little of what the farm had brought.

Trust didn’t come with buzzwords or banners. It came with calloused hands, shared meals, and a quiet insistence that good fortune should never stop with the lucky few.

In the sandy lands of Kazakhstan, one of the most rural places on earth, I was doing water development work. One farm had an old Soviet-era well, nearly four feet across, where I was installing a pump and pipe to supply livestock water. The farmer asked if I could get water to his house, some 150 yards away. His wife, he said, had reminded him, politely but firmly, that it wasn’t proper for livestock to get running water before the family did.

I told him I didn’t have time to dig the long, deep trench he needed. I could leave him some rolled HDPE pipe, but I had only one more day on his farm before I had to move on to the next place. And it was going to take most of the day to finish getting the pump in.

A pump and pipe supply water in Kazakhstan.

When I arrived the following day, there were six or eight horses tied to the rail, a couple of pickups parked near the house, and a trench running from the well to the house – three feet deep, straight as an arrow . I couldn’t have matched it with a laser level. They had let the neighbors know the problem. How, I don’t know, but I’m guessing a couple of kids on fast horses made the rounds. The neighbors showed up and worked through the night. After we laid the pipe, which went fast with all the helping hands, they killed a sheep, and we ate together as twilight settled in. The next morning, the two families with the pickups escorted me to my next farm project, showing me a shortcut and pitching in on the next project, quietly learning enough to do the same back home.

Even in cities, trust can show up when you least expect it. My daughter Grace, who is Rwandan, runs our swather. She cuts nearly every windrow of the hay we sell. Once, she made a supply run to Lewiston, Idaho – about a three-and-a-half hour round trip from the farm.

When someone heads to town, it’s understood: everyone hands over their grocery lists too. When the nearest grocery store is a ninety-mile round trip, you make it count.

Grace filled a cart at the supermarket, ticking off the crew’s requests. But when she reached the checkout, she realized she didn’t have her wallet. She rushed out to the pickup. No luck. Back inside, flustered and apologizing, she tried to explain – about the swather waiting for parts, the lists in her cart, the rush to get the hay cut before the weather turned.

Grace is young, black, and speaks English with an accent that catches the ear. But instead of suspicion, something else happened. An older woman, who’d been waiting patiently behind her, stepped forward, handed her credit card to the cashier, and said to Grace, “I’ll give you my number. Next time you’re in town, you can pay me back. Maybe take me to lunch, and I can learn about you.”

No speech. No fuss. Just simple, practical trust, offered freely.

Now when I send Grace into town for parts, the parts store people say, “Hi Grace.” They ask what she needs. She tells them. They hand her a part – sometimes worth hundreds – and send her on her way with a smile and a “you better drive fast if the baler’s down.” They don’t ask for money. Don’t need a signature. They know who she is. That’s enough.

That kind of world still exists. Not everywhere, but in more places than you might think. And it’s not just about politeness. It’s a way of living – built on memory, obligation, and a kind of earned casualness that comes from people watching, not because they’re nosy, but because they care.

Hay windrows on the author’s farm in Wallowa County, Oregon.

When people talk about rural America – or rural anywhere – they often miss this part. They see the pickups and the politics and assume they know the whole story. But they don’t see Bill turning his headlights into a field at 10:30 p.m. because he saw us still working. They don’t see the neighbors digging a trench through the night in Kazakhstan. They don’t see a Rwandan farm crew planting bananas to share with their neighbors. They don’t see a stranger in Lewiston stepping forward with a credit card and a smile.

Of course, it’s not all butterflies and rainbows. There are hard days and hard people too, in every place I’ve lived. But when you stay long enough to really see a place, what stands out isn’t the trouble – it’s the good-hearted people. The ones who look out for each other without needing to be asked. And living around them, even for a little while, tends to make the rest of us better.

There’s a reason why communities like these tend to value personal responsibility. It’s not a theory. It’s how you survive. Trust isn’t something you legislate – it’s something you live, one favor, one broken shear pin, one shared meal at a time.

Out here, we don’t lock our equipment. Not because we’re naive, but because we are part of a community, and we trust the community.