“Where
would we be without beef?” the TV voice posed. It was 1989 and everyone in this
town of a thousand had tuned in to this prime time commercial. “Out of luck,
I’d say.” A handsome father had just been fork-fed a morsel of low calorie,
round tip steak by his five-year-old daughter, who beamed at the camera. “Beef.
Real food in Luck,” pregnant pause, “Wisconsin.”
To a
degree, most of us did feel lucky to live in such a town: its proud golf course,
its well-stocked lakes called Big and Small Butternut, its eclectic
industry—from Duncan yo-yos to wire manufacturing to butterfly farming, wherever
any of these could end up.
On a
run-down farm a few miles west, a high school dropout named Kyle decided to be
a farrier.
“A what the
fff?—” most people queried.
Urbanely, Kyle
doled out a calling card: his full name + Esq., his county road address,
‘farrier’ in Champignon font, as well as a pair of interlinked horseshoes, to
suggest what he’d do for a living.
“Is this something
like ‘close only counts in horseshoes’?” his former math teacher challenged,
sardonically.
Kyle would
remain a cool cucumber. “This is my business. Shoeing horses—what a farrier
does.” Beyond his salesman visage was an unmissable, mini-mustache twirl: fuck you.
One would
imagine, in what’s called the ‘Indian Head’ of Wisconsin, plenty of horses—some
needing cast-iron shoes to handle demands of this erstwhile frontier. Kyle, age
sixteen, had shrugged off the doldrums of high school to corner this market—what
visionary wouldn’t do likewise, seizing the horse by the hooves?
Truth told,
the sporadic horses here weren’t worked so hard. Days of cowboys and rustlers,
non-tractor plowing, rodeo shows or derby races had no remote foothold in or
around Luck. Kyle was fitting to fight an uphill battle, and those quaint
calling cards only set him back further—a couple hundred dollars or more, when a
drop-in customer might land him twenty, thirty on a lucky day. The tautology
‘one needs experience to get experience’ had a new poster child in Kyle, who
hadn’t been known to handle horses, let alone pound nails into them.
From what
little was known about his parents—indigence, alcoholism, chapter 12
bankruptcy—Kyle had basically reared himself. Third grade through tenth, the
kid had packed his own garden-variety lunches, moved himself around by bike and
ATV (never on horseback, to anyone’s recollection), and occasioned the odd
youth group gathering at church, not that he or his parents had anything to do
with Sunday services.
Yeah, if
you telescoped the place, you could see a few skinny horses behind a
culvert-style barn, smoke rising out of perhaps some kind of smelter—he’d have
to forge those horseshoes before hoofing them, one would think. More likely, he
got his hands on enough wholesale crates of drop-forged stock to even conceive
of this loopy idea. They’d constitute a nest egg of sorts: all a startup needed
was such a cache, a few customers, and… a little
Luck. What could be better for entrepreneurs
or acne-aged fellows? One imagined a partner, a Dulcinea for this Quixote, a Wozniak
for what Jobs could front, a Linda for Paul, composing so ingenuously: “with a
little luck, we can help it out, we can make this whole damn thing work out.” One
imagined… nothing, if Kyle would not do likewise.
His skills
were suspect. Take it from a horse’s mouth how a given shoe fits or doesn’t—there
wasn’t anything Cinderella in Kyle’s process. There weren’t enough curious cats
or prospective clients on that county road, traveling deliberately or otherwise.
The calling cards might as well have indicated ‘far-fetched’ or the ‘derriere’
of a maverick dream.
Go back to
school, Kyle, as more calculations await.
Of course
he didn’t. But those interlocking horseshoes—go figure—gave him an idea: if
meaningless to the beast that bears them, they inspire untold blasts of fortune
and bonhomie. The picnic throw, spurring nothing-at-stake rivalry between uncle
and niece, grandpa and tipsy neighbor, mom demurring the nonsense of time
wasted and—wouldja look at that!—the
niece plugged a late ringer to send the tipsy neighbor packing—‘for the
meantime, Missy. I’ll be back’ in some Schwarzenegger shtick—Mom approving,
after all.
And then
there were the barn doors and everything emblematic of Irish blessings on
decidedly not-so-mapped-out roads and roils of weather. Kyle felt he could own
this niche, having had his share of put-it-out and let-it-happen, as any amulet
would promise, if sheepishly (perhaps the reason they’re disguised through
horses’ or rabbits’ feet). A horseshoe above a doorway could mean anything, regardless
of some story or its random provider. The hyperbola itself held untold power.
Now to
unleash it—Kyle might have had a plan for that, too.
Fact is, I
left Luck, Wisconsin, before the big could burst, if that is how capitalism
should flourish. Not quite a regret, I wish I had stopped by Kyle’s operation
on that county road to chat, purchase something, belie a bastard sense of
business and pronounce ‘the sky’s the limit’. I’ve certainly thrown my own
thousand rounds of horseshoes at family picnics in my day, sometimes beating
the tipsy neighbor, losing to my niece, usually agreeing with Mom on better
ways to wile away an afternoon.
But where
would we be without an occasional throw-caution-to-the-wind, as Kyle so aptly
represented? A game of horseshoes often meant that tosses tumbled out of
bounds, even inches away from ringing. We’d sometimes thresh moist prairie
grass for hours, yet rarely feel frustrated. The visiting was better with such
a thing to do.
A simple
Google search might seek out ‘Kyle—farrier—Luck—Wisconsin’, and results would
be:
Anyone’s guess.
Should I venture further? Flesh out the inquiry? Confirm the common sense of a
high school diploma and snarkiness withal?
Wish I’d kept
the calling card to honor where the chips may fall.
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2019)
