PART 2 — THE BLUE RIBBON
Uncle Walt laid a faded blue ribbon on the table and slid an old photograph out from under it. It was a barn full of calves and 4-H kids, and a younger woman in the middle of them.
Two summers ago, when the derecho came through, he said, the fairgrounds barn was full. Two hundred animals, and a storm bearing down with winds like a freight train. The power was out and the roof was already groaning.
Everybody else ran for cover. One woman drove through downed power lines to get to that barn, and she led those animals out, two hundred of them, calves and hogs and the 4-H projects these farm kids had raised all year, and she got the last one clear just before the roof came down.
The woman Brent mocked for running a petting zoo had driven through live power lines into a collapsing barn and led two hundred animals out before the roof fell.
Half the livestock in this county belongs to families who would have lost everything, Walt said. Mine among them. I have raised stock sixty years and I never saw courage like it. This blue ribbon is the one her 4-H kids won that same fair, after she saved their calves.
Brent, the seed company executive who had never touched a pig, set down his Busch Light.
Lori just passed the sweet corn and said the animals mostly led themselves once the doors were open. But old Walt shook his head and said somebody had to open those doors in that wind, and she was the only one who would.
My daughter runs a petting zoo, her son-in-law had joked. In a derecho she led two hundred animals out of a falling barn. That is the extension agent.