Rain brings many good things to us here on the farm. It nourishes the grasses in the pastures and the vegetables in the garden. It replenishes the stream and water holes for the pigs and the chickens. It even washes clean the abundant foliage of the surrounding forest restoring the vibrant greens of the trees and shrubs.

Here at Red Tool House Farm, the rain also brings garbage – an endless supply of garbage. I don’t mean that trash and debris literally fall from the sky (although sometimes I wonder if that is not the case). I mean the rain unearths a wide variety of buried items from generations passed.

Now we all would like to think that we can take better care of our land than the previous generation and we now know more about the harm we can do when we don’t dispose of things properly. On our farm, we seem to have an endless supply of junk that has been left behind by previous land owners and squatters. Which makes us wonder if they cared in the slightest about being good stewards of their land.

This summer has been excessively rainy. The volume of rain has not only been way more than normal, it has tended to fall in large doses causing our streams to become raging rivers which carve out the hillsides and creek banks.

One morning while performing my morning farm duties, I discovered a small piece of treasure had been unearthed in the pig pasture. A cassette tape was sticking up ever so slightly from the mud. I immediately flashed back to my high school days and envisioned my 1975 Chrysler Cordoba. Yes, it did have rich, Corinthian leather – which I often wondered how does one skin and tan a Corinthian? Anyway, my “chick magnet” had an 8-track cassette player that I had adapted to play the more “modern” cassettes.

I quickly snatched up this cassette from the sloppy mud and wiped it clean in order to reveal the label. Was it Mozart, Led Zepplin, Duran Duran, or opera? No, no it wasn’t. It was Trucker Music. Yes, that is typed correctly – trucker music.

Now, I don’t want to imply stereo-types or make rash assumptions, but that morning I got a glimpse into the lifestyle of the people that had misused this property for so many years. What possesses a person to listen to trucker music? Could you not find any other genre of music that entertains and inspires?

Like a rubber-necker wants to watch the mayhem after a car crash, I wanted to listen to this cassette out of shear morbid curiosity. I realized I do not even own a cassette player and if I did, this beauty was not going to release any sounds whatsoever.

When I made it back to the house, I quickly Googled the regale performers name and to my surprise discovered a Youtube video for the title track of this album. Now, before you do the same (since you like to watch car crashed as well – admit it), be warned that the “clever” dance of words around obvious profanity only exists on the label. The song itself sounded like a redneck and a merchant marine had a baby and that baby really liked to swear.

This little time-capsule jewel quickly found itself in one of the empty 100# feed sacks we use as heavy-duty trash bags. We challenge the kids to place randomly discovered garbage in these sacks and once full they make it out to the roadside along with the rest of our household garbage. We even had a contest one recent Saturday to see who could find the most bizarre relic of the previous land owners. I think the winner was a fully intact rotary phone that I had to explain in detail to the boys how it worked.

We eagerly anticipate what the next rain storm will bring. My oldest son fantasizes on finding a trunk full of treasure, but I don’t think that will happen. Judging by the things we have found, I am holding out for the Conway Twitty box set.