The land of Dancing Cabbages

When I look back now, I'm surprised I got to keep my job at Mid-Rivers Telephone Cooperative, especially after my first two weeks on the job. People think I have a hearing problem now, but it turns out I couldn't hear when I was younger either.

It was January 1983 and I was 23-years-old. I had worked at couple of weekly newspapers and had just landed a job as a community relations coordinator for a telephone cooperative headquartered in Circle, Montana. I really didn't know what the job entailed so wasn't surprised when someone from the accounting department asked me to look through a stack of expense reports and pull out any that had to do with Dancing Cabbage.

I didn't give it a lot of thought because I had just gone through the Christmas season and knew that Cabbage Patch dolls were all the rage so Dancing Cabbages shouldn't come as a surprise either....although I had never heard of them before that day.

When the day was over I told the person who had asked for my help that I hadn't come across even one report with Dancing Cabbages. She looked at me with a quizzical appearance and asked me to repeat myself.  So I did. She then laughed and said that I would have to go through reports again the next day because she wasn't looking for Dancing Cabbages. She was looking for expense reports for a former employee of the cooperative, a man whose name was Dan Sincavage.

That episode was just the precursor. The next occurred in the middle of the week when I was asked to drive an old four-wheel drive pickup to interview an old couple who lived southeast of Baker, Montana...almost where the states of Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota meet.

When I reached their ranch, I spied a big pile of manure across the road from their home. After conducting the interview, I asked the old man if he would mind loading up the pickup with manure because I hoped to start a garden in the spring and the manure would fertilize the soil that I planned to spade up in March or April.

I was living in an apartment in Glendive, and the landlord had told me that he wouldn't care if I planted a small garden behind the parking lot.

The old rancher was very generous with his manure and he used a tractor to pile it nice and high in the back of the pickup. The old couple thanked me for coming to visit and asked me to stop by again if I was ever on their road because of travels for the cooperative.

As I left their ranch, I was delighted with myself. Not only had I gotten the interview and photos for the cooperative's monthly magazine, but I also had this load of fertilizer. And then somewhere between Baker and Glendive, my mood changed. The gray sky opened up and it began to rain, and then it began to snow. By the time I pulled into my parking lot, the manure had turned to a large frozen mass.

The next day, I drove the pickup -- manure and all -- to Circle. However, thinking that I could somehow sneak by without getting caught, I parked the pickup on the edge of town and walked the two blocks to the center of town and the headquarters of the co-op.

It was getting late into the afternoon and I thought I had been successful. But then my boss called me into his office and asked me to swing the pickup around as there were some bills that he wanted me to load into the back of the pickup and take to the post office in Circle, which was also about two blocks away.

Needless to say, he wasn't too keen on the idea of me using a cooperative-owned vehicle to haul a load of manure for this garden that I intended to start in the spring.

In fact, he told me that the next time he saw the pickup, the manure had better be gone and I had better have the back-end cleaned out.

As it turned out, this was a Friday so I drove back to Glendive in the pickup and then I drove to Roundup to visit my folks for the weekend. My dad gave me a small pick that he used for hunting rocks so that I could chop out the frozen manure before I drove the pickup back to Circle on Monday.

So on a cold Sunday night in January, I backed up the pickup full of manure to a spot where I hoped to plant a garden. I threw a trouble light over a tree limb and I picked at the manure until I had chopped up the frozen top layer. Then with a shovel, I was able to remove all of the rest of the manure. It probably took a couple of hours before every last inch of manure had been removed from the back of the pickup.

As I look back now, these episodes are funny. But at the time, they were serious glitches in good judgement. Luckily, my supervisor was an understanding fellow and later we became good friends. However, at the time, I was wondering if I was going to be able to work long enough to cash my first check.

These stories came to mind because a guy I know was telling me about a job opening in Circle, Montana, and wanted to know if I might be interested. I asked him what it entailed and he said I would be the manager of a gas station. With my luck in Circle, I had to quickly decline. Otherwise I might blow up the whole town.