Rural Heritage August/September 2025

and manageable with “appropriate technology” and low-tech solutions. Those who use animal traction— whether horses, mules, donkeys, or oxen—know that beyond the satisfaction of working with animals, the equipment is typically less expensive to use and easier to repair, and relies on fewer inputs. You don’t have to be big to be productive—small farms and homestead gardens produce a lot of food. Similarly, small-scale solar or wind systems make sense for small farms and homesteads. Large vehicles and houses take more energy to operate and maintain. Complex technological systems can become unmanageable, unpredictable, and unreliable. Nine. Don’t take shortcuts on safety. It’s easy to get complacent and think you’ll do something “quickly” or “just this once”—tie a horse to a rickety post, or chainsaw firewood without safety glasses. But it only takes once to lead to serious accidents and injuries— especially around large farm animals and machinery. Take the time to take sensible safety precautions. Ten. Wear your seatbelt. Part of the previous lesson, this is worth emphasizing separately. Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, helped Dad appreciate how dangerous cars could be, and how seatbelts can reduce the risk of serious injury. Seatbelts weren’t standard equipment in the 1960s, especially on the used vehicles we owned, but Dad always made sure to find a way to rig them up. He reclaimed seatbelts from older vehicles or visited a junkyard to salvage some. In one pickup truck, he simply tied a thick rope from one side of the bench seat to the other around whoever was sitting there. Long before the age of children’s car seats, he built a wooden booster bench for me so the seatbelt would go around my hips rather than too high around my belly or chest. It's easy to think you don’t need your seatbelt for short trips—but remember half of all car accidents happen within five miles of home. And it’s tempting to skip your seatbelt “just this once”—but it only takes once. I’ve been a passenger in two car accidents. Both times, I almost didn’t put on the seatbelt because it was hard to find in a friend’s unfamiliar car. Both times in those pre-airbag days, I likely would have gone through the windshield and suffered serious injuries without the seatbelt. Eleven. Be open to new ideas and new experiences. When Dad was a teenager growing up poor in rural Minnesota, he heard a neighbor describe why he was

voting against a popular “sin tax” proposal to fund veterans’ benefits with tax on cigarettes. The man argued that all of society should take care of veterans, not just smokers. From this exchange, Dad learned to be open to new ideas and to consider political issues for himself rather than going along with prevailing politics. He eventually developed views different than those pervasive in his neighborhood. For example, Dad never met a Black person until his late teens, but he became an active advocate for civil rights. One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting on his shoulders at a civil rights rally when I was two. Keeping an open mind and embracing new ideas applies to books and music as well. Dad modeled intellectual curiosity—he read widely and deeply. He would read about training not just Western reining horses, but also English hunter-jumpers and draft animals. He read about animal care, feeds and feeding, horseshoeing. He read histories of South America, critiques of industrial agriculture, and the emerging science of animal intelligence. During the late 1960s, he and my mother selected record albums from mail order catalogs to explore different musical styles, so I grew up listening to everything from cowboy songs to Irish music to African drumming to German children’s choirs, along with Mozart symphonies and Broadway musicals. And the Encyclopedia Britannica ,

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