Coffee Shop Moments - Wanted: Missing Tools

I had no one to blame but myself for losing my pocketknife.

We'd leased some ground for a few cows and one of them found a low spot in the fence. The dogs and I went out to put the girls back where they belonged.

I hopped the dogs off the ATV near a couple of old grain drills. The younger one got overly excited and bounced off a couple pieces of equipment in his haste to work.

The dog lost the contest, but not seriously. He needed some quick first aid before we finished the job.

I grabbed a fresh roll of vet wrap and used my pocketknife to open the package. In a hurry, I put the knife down on the back of the ATV. After attending to dog damage, we put the cows back where they belonged.

The next day I needed my pocketknife. My mind flashed back to the dog doctoring incident and I knew the knife was probably somewhere in an eighty acre field.

I walked and searched—no luck.

Lost pocketknives appear and disappear without reason or warning. I didn’t want to buy another knife, this one might turn up. Much to my wife’s disgust, I started borrowing her knife.

Months went by—I was still borrowing my wife's pocketknife and hoping mine would appear.

Later that fall, a neighbor was in the area with his bulldozer. I asked him to stop by and push over a half dozen juniper trees. Then I hopped on the ATV to guide him to the location and ended up climbing around the rocks and through the field on foot.

After he was gone, I went back to patching fence. When I reached into my back pants pocket to grab my favorite, most trusty, pair of side-cutter pliers—it was gone.

‘Aw....rats,’ I thought.

I headed out in the field to look for my pliers and I was grumbling about the cost of replacing lost tools. After three hundred yards of backtracking, I saw the shine of metal in the field ahead of me.

‘Alright,’ I thought.

There in the dry grass was my pocketknife—dirty, dusty and the hinge made a grating noise when it opened and closed. I never would have guessed it was in that part of the field.

I was so excited that I ran to the house to show my wife. She smiled politely and wanted to know if I was going to quit borrowing her knife. Then she asked if I'd found the pliers.

“No,” I said as I went back out to look.

Hand tools seem to come and go like the tides of an ocean. Sometimes they're here, other times they're gone. Once in a while, they wash back up on shore.

Two days later, I bought myself a new pair of side-cutter pliers.

- Bing Bingham © is a syndicated columnist, rancher and storyteller. If you have a story to pass along, contact him at bing@bingbingham.com.