When my grandpa was a teenager, around 15, he found himself driving a tractor down an old dirt road, wondering about his future. He thought about if he'd marry and have kids, and how that would be. He wondered what kind of jobs he'd take. Would he stay on the farm in North Dakota, or would he go to college and end up in the city, possibly in another state? Would he have grand kids? If so, how would they turn out?

53 years later, at the age of 15, I found myself behind the wheel of the same tractor, with my grandpa sitting on the wheel well just behind me, telling me stories from when he was a kid as I slowly drove the tractor across the open pasture. I was helping out on the farm, clearing out old trees. The soil was struggling to hold so many trees in one place, and many of the trees were dying and posing a major threat to the old house.

After carefully bringing down the trees with the tractor and some rope, and sawing them into pieces, I drove the tractor with the grapple and carefully carried logs and branches to the burn piles in the pasture, where I dumped them. It didn't take me long to figure out the tractor, although I still wanted my grandpa just behind me in case something went wrong. That tractor was nearly 60 years old, and I wasn't about to trust it completely. I could never be too cautious while working with heavy equipment. 

I really enjoyed my hours behind the wheel of that old cab-less tractor. I sat tall in the tractor above the waving sea of golden green grass, under a deep blue sky, with the smell of diesel exhaust mixed in with the sweet scent of prairie grasses and canola that was carried along the wind. The weather was almost perfect. It was just too windy to wear my hat forward, so I had to squint for most of the time I was in the tractor, and I had to flip the tractor around before dumping the trees into the junk pile, or else I'd get a face full of dust, leaves, and ash. Even then, I couldn't wipe the smile off my face. I loved every minute of it, and the hours went by in the blink of an eye. Before I knew it, my job was done, the sun was sinking below the western horizon, and dinner was ready. 

I was starving by the time I was seated for dinner, which I didn't realize until the smell of roast beef basically sucker-punched me as I walked into the house, but my great-aunt already assumed that I would be. She had enough food to feed an army. I had worked hard alongside my grandpa and great uncles, as well as every farmhand and neighbor that decided to help us out as well. And while I was teased a little bit for being a city girl, no one actually called me a city slicker. In fact, they really enjoyed my help. 

To reward me, my great uncle Courtney took me out shooting the next day, using the pile of logs as a place to staple some paper targets up. I shot everything from the .243 I'd eventually use to hunt my first pronghorn, to an AR-15 with high-tech laser sights I never used before until then. Courtney coached me on how to shoot from nearly every shooting position, including using a forked stick as a makeshift standing tripod, in case I found myself hunting in some tall brush. We had a blast. In fact, we were having so much fun, that we didn't realize we had left the stapler on top of one of the logs we were shooting at. When we decided to replace the old targets with new targets, my uncle's eyes widened with the realization that he left the stapler on one of the logs, and when we came back to it, it had a nice bullet hole shot through the end of it. 

I couldn't stop thinking about how amazing it felt to be in the tractor, and how much fun it was to use the results of our hard work as a gun range. It felt like I belonged there, like I was right where God wanted me to be. And, I remember pondering my own future as I drove back and fourth between the farm and the pasture, just like my grandpa had done 53 years earlier. Ever since my first day on the tractor, I've considered doing it as a career.

Why waste so much money and so many years getting a college degree, only to make near-minimum wage in an office cubicle, struggling to pay off debt, when I could learn how to operate a few tractors and get up to $80,000 out the gate in my city? To me, it seemed like a no-brainer. And according to my dad (who has worked closely with construction all of his working life, and spent a few years driving tractors), it would be the best thing I could possibly do for myself if I could do it.