A thousand miles from home, I'd just left an acquaintance's homestead in the arid hills west of Salina, Kansas, with fresh memories of his skillful work on the old hand-hewn sandstone blocks he was re-using to build his cabin. I remember glancing at my dust trail in the rearview as I stopped at a rusty one-lane iron bridge to allow an old blue pickup to cross. The driver's face was familiar, which happens in such places. Ray had worked with my wife at a Salina industrial firm a decade earlier, before his son was born, and he greeted me as if I'd never left. Rural America is like that, or used to be, and so are the men and their sons who farm there.