Dear President-Elect Trump:
Loa Utah is a small Central Utah town. In the center of town is an old rock church, built by early Mormon settlers in 1906. At 7,064 feet above sea level, it is not the ideal spot for a farming community. Nevertheless, Loa is a farming community of about 500 people. Stretching South, East, and West from the rock church are farmer’s fields. Alfalfa is the predominant crop. The old rock church has a bell that, when I was a teenager, rang every Sunday at 8:30 a.m. to beckon the farmers to the church from their chores.
When I was twelve, my parents arranged for me to spend the summer with my Grandma Okerlund and to have a summer job changing irrigation pipes on a local farm. Jerry Chappell—a wiry, diminutive farmer with huge hands took me on as his summer project. It was his job to cultivate an improved work ethic in me.
Those in the Eastern part of the United States are used to crops grown without the use of irrigation. That doesn’t work in the Western United States. Without irrigating, nothing grows. Crops eventually wither and die.
The farm I worked on was a 1000 acre spread of alfalfa and barley. Three-inch diameter, aluminum sprinkler pipes, each forty-feet in length, irrigated the field. A sprinkler head in the middle of the pipe stuck out of the center of the pipe about two feet. The pipes interconnected, starting at the water source, snaking their way width-wise across the field.
Jerry Chappell taught me how to change a line of sprinklers. In many ways, he changed my life.
Once in the morning, once at night, you turn off the water, drain the water from the entire line, and move each pipe approximately twenty yards, to the edge of where the sprinklers had just reached. Grasping the sprinkler head in the middle of the pipe, you pick up the forty-foot pipe, disconnect it from the pipe behind it, and walk, balancing it like a circus high wire the twenty yards. Once there, you connect it with the pipe in front. Then repeat the process for each pipe in the field.
Jerry gave me charge over one particular line of sprinklers. Jerry would drop me off at the sprinkler line and move to another area of the farm. When I finished, I would make my way to him. The sprinkler line had about twenty pipe lengths. It was a hard job for a twelve-year-old boy unaccustomed to such work.
It quickly became distasteful.
I could always tell where Jerry was on the farm because I could look across the acreage and see which sprinkler line was turned off and which was on. I monitored his progress by keeping an eye at the sprinklers in the distance.
One morning I decided that I was too tired to move the sprinklers. I turned the sprinklers off, telegraphing across the farm to Jerry that I was doing my work. Then I lay in the tall grass next to the wire fence, resting. After around thirty minutes, I rose from the grass, turned the water on, and went to Jerry.
Jerry would never know the difference, I thought. With that in mind, I started making a habit of turning the water off and sitting in the grass, hidden from view.
I should have given Jerry more credit. Certainly, he knew I wasn’t doing my work. The sprinkler line wasn’t moving gradually down the field. But he said nothing. He let the consequences of my laziness follow.
In time, the field dried up and the alfalfa withered. There was no way to hide from the reality of what I had done—or had not done.
It took me one summer to learn that pipes need changing when pipes need changing. Otherwise, the crops die.
Washington is not dissimilar. We elect members of Congress. They speak, elaborate, criticize, and critique and then return home for re-election to explain how much they have done. But as our governmental and societal issues wither or decay, it is evident that collectively they chose to do something other than the job we sent them to do.
We didn’t send them to ram one ideological position down the partisan throat of their adversaries. We sent them to work to find a collaborative middle that probably fails to satisfy either fringe, but which serves the whole.
I hope you will work to accomplish that.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
