Slippery City Shoes

In his classic song Summer Wages (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o43TMGS9MU4) , Ian Tyson tells of working the logs on the West Coast in his “slippery city shoes”, something he vowed he would never do again. That is, until he spent his summer wages on beer and hookers, and then had to do it again.

I love Tyson’s song, because I know exactly how that goes, although my story is a little different.

One autumn when I was working on a patent case in Saskatchewan I had occasion to round up and interview a handful of witnesses with respect to the design of a bale shredder. It turned out that there was more rounding up to do.

One witness was a farmer-handyman near Lumsden, Harold by name. Another was a Hutterite not far away, and we were all going to meet at the farmhouse of a third yet further out in the prairie. The rest of the witnesses would meet us there, bringing precious documents with them.

Knowing that I would end up in a farm kitchen with half a dozen rural men around the kitchen table, I knew not to overdress, but city clothes were all I had in my suitcase. Certainly my workboots were not along on this trip. So, essentially I looked like a city lawyer minus a tie and a jacket.

As it happened, Harold (“Witness 1”) agreed to pick me up and drive me to the home of Witness 2, where the others would join us.

But, of course, there was a detour.

Harold’s farm was along the way, and he explained as we roared along those straight mud-gravel roads of Saskatchewan, he had to stop in to the homestead because a bunch of his yearling heifers had broken through a fence and run off. Being a farm boy, I understood the importance of dealing with this ASAP.

So we pulled into Harold’s dooryard, an October soupy mess of mud and cow pies and panicky chickens and barking dogs, and we stopped. Harold looked at me, the big city lawyer, and said simply, “I’ll be back.” And then he left.

It’s important to interject that to this point, Harold had treated me with the deference which country folk pay to city slickers, that is, a kind of respectful contempt, a knowledge that while I might have some value back in the office, I really didn’t have a clue about real life.

In a few minutes he could be seen in his farm boots and coat, headed out to catch some cows. Instinctively, I did what any farm boy would do – I joined him. Slippery city shoes and all.

“Cow boss!! Cow boss!! Cow boss!! Co-co-co-co!!!”, I called out to the wayward beasts, just as I had decades earlier.

Harold stared at me, the big city lawyer, mud up past the ankles of his shiny city shoes, speaking farm talk to the heifers, and circling around behind the sneaky, crafty creatures.

Heifers, of course, will do what heifers do, which is whatever they like. That said, they’re pretty dumb, and before long Harold and I convinced them that life would be better in the pen, and they formed a sullen line homeward.

The cattle safely in the barn, Harold and I sped down the dirt roads of southern Saskatchewan to the home of Witness 2. The womenfolk (I mean no disrespect, it was a time and a place) were in the livingroom, snapping beans from the garden in preparation for canning, and the menfolk (ditto) sat around the table for a drink before getting down to the business at hand.

I sipped a single beer. Most of the rest downed a couple of tumblers of straight whisky as though it were KoolAid. They will always have my respect.

Over the next few hours we ran through a thousand documents and drawings and hardware store receipts and motel billings and handwritten notes, and I noted their stories of the evolution of a particular model of bale shredder, checking and cross-checking. But always at my right hand was Harold, riding shotgun, pushing the witnesses to come clean and produce forgotten documents. Witnesses who might have held back or danced did not do so, because Harold vouched for my bona fides. This guy, he said, can be trusted and should be supported. He’s one of us.

You see, somewhere out in a muddy field in Saskatchewan, a farmer handyman decided that a big city lawyer wasn’t such a bad guy, after all, because he was willing to get out and round up heifers in the cold mud in his slippery city shoes.

The lawyer who knew how to round up stray heifers.

A long story, I suppose, to make a simple point: being genuine is critical to success in life.

I could go on at great length, but you get the point, don’t you?