The Grain Elevator Man Who Outlasted Betrayal
Forty Years of Grain Dust
Voss Grain and Trucking started the year I married Rosetta, on one leased scale house at the edge of a rail spur, a secondhand grain truck with a cracked windshield, and a promise between the two of us that we would either build something real or go down swinging trying.
We built something real.
By our tenth anniversary we owned the scale house outright. By our twentieth we had bought out the elevator itself from a retiring owner who trusted us to keep paying farmers on time, which we always did, harvest after harvest, good years and drought years both. By our thirtieth we had a fleet of eleven grain trucks running three counties, hauling wheat and durum and soybeans to the rail line, and a payroll that fed fourteen families besides our own.
Forty years of grain dust in my lungs and under my fingernails. Forty years of two in the morning wake ups during harvest when a truck broke down on the county road and somebody had to go pull it. Forty years of Rosetta doing the books at the kitchen table with a pencil behind her ear, catching errors the accountant missed, telling me which farmers to extend credit to during a bad year because she knew, better than any spreadsheet, who was good for it.
We were never the biggest operation in the state. We were never going to be on the cover of anything. But by the time Rosetta and I had our thirty fifth anniversary, Voss Grain and Trucking, the elevator, the trucks, the land under both, was worth a little over two million dollars. Not a fortune by the standards of the coasts. A fortune by the standards of Talcott, North Dakota, population eleven hundred and shrinking, where two million dollars built by two people from nothing is the kind of thing the whole town still talks about at the diner on the county road.
I have been a member of the VFW hall on Second Avenue since I came back from my own short stint in the service, and I have poured more coffee at that hall’s pancake breakfasts than I could count. Rosetta ran the sign up sheet for the Lutheran church potluck every fall for twenty five years, and she kept a mental ledger of who brought the good hotdish and who brought the same tired jello mold every single year, and she never once let either fact slip in public. That is the kind of town this is. Everybody’s business is a little bit everybody’s business, which is exactly why my declined card at the feed store was already the talk of the co-op elevator down the road before I had even made it home that afternoon.