Steve might look like a bear
of a man, yes, and you wonder how interested he might be in things beyond the job. Well, you'd be surprised. Certainly he is interested in history; his great-grandfather homesteaded some miles the north of where Steve and Cindy now live.
"I really like the people," Steve said as he swept a view of all the Wisner and West Point area with a turn of his head. "They are friendly, godly, they are always willing to help. I can guarantee, if you stop your car along the highway, someone will pull up in five minutes to see if they can help you. It can be an out-of-state car, people will stop. People here are hard-working, they have to work for everything they've got. Life is not easy out here."
We made our first stop. Two dead hogs, a mighty big truck. That's how it starts, that's how you start to fill the truck with dead animals. Steve grabbed the dead sow by an ear, slid the chain beneath it, looped and latched it behind the sow's front legs, and used the truck's power-winch to wind up cable and drag the dead animal up into the big steel box back-end that looks like a rendering truck should. He yanked on the cable, and the pin Steve put in the loop pulled out; the whole loop freed itself from the carcass and Steve was able to unwind cable off the winch, then he looped the chain around the other hog. If he pins his loop just right, the chain will always come loose from the dead animal, and Steve won't have to climb up into the truck to untangle things. You want to spend as little time as possible in the back of a rendering truck.
"I've been around livestock all my life," Steve said. "This smell - it's just another smell."
We pulled out of the lane. There was a car coming the other direction down the road toward us. "That's my landlord," Steve said. "He's as much my friend as my landlord." His landlord actually rents the land, too, from the people who own it, and subleases the house and yard to the Engelharts.
"We're the guys they hate to see but they're happy when we come," Steve said of the farmers he hauls for. "It means they've lost an animal, but they're glad we're picking it up."
"That's a air-ride seat," he told me, motioning. "You can raise it if you want."
"There--," Steve said, pointing. "A pheasant sitting on a rock."
"The closer you get to the river, the flatter it is," Steve noted. "We're right next to the Elkhorn River here."
Wisner Rendering has been in service for eighty-nine years, Steve told me. He bought the business five years ago, after having driven truck a year and a half for the previous owner.
"I am one of the last here who went to a one-room school," Steve said. I'd guess he's barely in his forties. "We had kindergarten through eighth grade. There were nine kids in the school - District 32. When I went from there to high school in Bancroft, I thought I'd gone to the campus of UCLA - there were twenty-seven kids in my class alone. I didn't know that many kids existed."
"I'm sad," he said, "that the little country school went under."
To be continued....
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