The Chinook That Mailed My Financial Statement
A warm Chinook wind lifted my one signed statement off the truck hood and delivered it, page by page, to four of my neighbors.
There is a particular kind of wind in northern Colorado that comes down off the mountains warm and fast and in the middle of winter. They call it a Chinook, and it can lift the snow off a field in an afternoon and take your hat with it. I had respect for it, as a general matter. What I did not have, one February morning, was the sense to stop signing my annual financial statement on the hood of my truck, with the pages unclipped, in an open yard.
I had finished the first page and the second, and I was reaching for the third when a gust came around the barn and took all of it. Eleven pages, signed and dated, rose from the hood like a flock of startled pigeons. I made a lunge for them and got only my own sleeve. They spun up over the corral, past the windmill, and drifted off across the section, white against the brown grass, flapping out of sight over the county road.
The funny thing about a financial statement is how much it reveals about you, and I had just released mine to the neighborhood. By evening the phone started ringing. A neighbor named Hal had found page one stuck in a fence and had read it standing in the wind. He said he had no idea I owned that much equipment, and he wished I would lend him the baler. Another neighbor found page four in her garden and delivered it with a plate of cookies. Page six was recovered by a man in a feed store who thought it was a flyer for a sale.
I collected all eleven pages in the end, one at a time, over four days, from kitchen tables and mailboxes across the township. Everyone had read their piece, and nobody had said a word that was not kind. Hal asked, gently, whether I might want to use a clipboard. I submitted the packet to the lender with a short note saying it had traveled widely. The loan officer wrote back that this was the first statement she had seen with a postmark. A guide on farm money management told me to keep a digital copy as well, and I do. My neighbors, on the other hand, still know my numbers better than I do.
I told the whole thing on the farm.FM news page, under the heading Local Rancher Reaches New Readers.
Next: The Heifers I Named After Interest Rates · All 10 tall tales