How It Used to Be
You have to understand what the ride was before you can understand why the sign was a cruelty and not a business decision.
It was never about the money, because there never was any money. Pop filled a wagon with men from the VFW post in town, the ones who still could climb up, and he drove them out the river road and back through the standing corn, and at the gate my mother in law had hot cider and her molasses cookies waiting on a plank table under the maples.
That was the whole thing. A tractor, a wagon, a loop through the prettiest two miles in the county, and cider at the end. It took an afternoon. It cost Pop a tank of diesel and whatever the cookies ran.
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The men came every year. Some years there were twelve, some years there were six, and every year there were one or two fewer than the year before, because that is how it goes with old soldiers. They would sit in the hay with blankets over their knees and they would not talk much, and then one of them would start, and by the second mile they would all be going, the stories coming up out of them like water out of a pump once you get it primed.
My mother in law ran the gate end of it. Her name was Ruthann, and she had a way of handing a man a cup of cider that made him feel like she had made it for him and nobody else.
She kept a jar on the plank table every year. Not a price jar. A jar that said Flowers for the Post Hall on it in her own hand. The men who could would drop a dollar in it, and the men who could not would not, and nobody ever once looked to see which was which.
That jar was the only money that ever changed hands at the ride in thirty some years. It bought the flowers for the post hall at Christmas. That was the whole economy of the thing, and it worked fine.
I rode along a dozen times over the years, in the back with them or up on the fender beside Pop. I heard a man describe the sound a certain island made at night in 1944. I heard another one laugh until he cried about a mess sergeant and a goat. I heard things those men had never said at their own kitchen tables, because the hay and the cold air and the color coming down loosened something in them that stayed locked up the rest of the year.