Sometimes I sensed I was a disappointment to him, made him sad, made him feel like a failure.
Because he saw me as a challenge, and that, with time and the right sort of moulding, he just might transform this wimpish urban waster into a contender for Young Farmer of the Year.
It was a challenge he wasn’t up to. It just wasn’t ever going to happen.
I didn’t like the smell of oilskin wet-weather gear, I didn’t like the smell of wet sheep, or “awful” pits.
I preferred the cosy, comfortable dry fug of the city.
So there were some very basic and insurmountable obstacles to The Hat’s plans for me.
“What do you want to do with your life?” asked The Hat one night.
I think he was hoping I might have had an epiphany, a realisation, and had suddenly embraced the soil as the true meaning of life.
But no, it was just yucky stuff that got down behind your nails.
“I don’t know what I am doing tomorrow, or next week, let alone my life,” I admitted to The Hat.
A ship without a compass. A person without purpose. A lost cause.
He nodded in despair yet again and shuffled off.
And I went back to my school history essay on Giuseppe Garibaldi, though that was as interesting as lambing percentages and facial eczema spores.
The next day, The Hat was again staring despondently at me as he threw his head 45 degrees to save his eyebrows while lighting his pet cigarette stub.
He then asked me to take the old truck and dump some stuff in the “awful pit” - three blue, bloated, moulting carcasses on the deck.
I backed the truck up to the “awful” pit and tipped the tray.
I would raise it until just the carcasses fell off into the pit, then drop it again.
I wasn’t counting on the avalanche.
Everything on the deck – shovels, post-hole borers, other fencing gear, rolls of wire and a large tool box, as well as my future in the agri-sector - careened off into the “awful” pit.
I was doomed and damned. And it would only confirm what The Hat was already thinking.
