Red-Lined and Grateful

I didn’t have the heart to tell the guy his transmission was melting down.

That chatter before the 2-3 shift? Classic symptom of a gearbox ready to throw in the towel. Not surprising, considering how they drive around here.

Turn signals? Optional, probably a factory upgrade.

Right of way? Never heard of her.

Driving in Puerto Rico takes a set of lead nuts and nerves that won't flinch when a Vespa trades paint with your bumper. It’s not for the dash-clutchers or the backseat breathers. You need laser focus. Distilled adrenaline. Red-lined on all fronts.

I’ve never felt more at home.

As this trip winds down, my mind keeps circling back to something I’d let slip through life’s cracks—gratitude.

Not just for a week in the Caribbean but for all of it.

Sitting in a room with some of agriculture’s sharpest minds, shaping the future of one of the most potent companies in the business. A company that’s not just slinging buzzwords like “innovation” and “sustainability” for the marketing brochure—this is the real deal.

Sound Agriculture is built on this crazy idea that less is more. But try selling that to farmers with “more is more” tattooed into their DNA since they learned to walk.

More bushels, more nitrogen, more iron, more debt—like force-feeding a ten-inch auger full of wet corn until it chokes and grinds to a halt.

The plant-signaling technology we’re backing? It’s almost too fresh. Too different.

When you’re trying to rewire generations of muscle memory, some days it feels like parallel-parking an 835 Versatile.

I sit in these meetings, surrounded by Ph.D.s and Silicon Valley thinkers, watching PowerPoints on adoption curves and market penetration, wondering how to translate all this fancy talk into something that makes sense across a shop table or from the seat of a truck cab.

How do you convince someone to change course when they’ve been running the same rows for forty years?

And the whole time, there's this voice in the back of my head screaming: How the hell did I get here?

---

Three years ago, I stood behind a service counter, catching hell for broken-down cars like I was some kind of voodoo mechanic. As if I spent my nights casting hexes on Matchbox Jeeps just to watch their computers have a nervous breakdown the next morning.

Piss broke.

Morally, spiritually, and financially.

A soul stripped of everything but its raw materials.

But somehow, I kept moving. As much as I wanted to spark a doob and binge-watch Breaking Bad for the thirteenth time, I dragged my ass through the shit swamp.

I’m not even sure why—probably for my kids.

Didn’t want them to think life could knock you down and keep you pinned.

Couldn’t let them see their old man give up.

Or maybe forty years of chasing unavailable dirt taught me something: You don’t understand why your story is what it is until you’re far enough down the road to review the game tape—study the X’s and O’s of a life plagued by insecurity, paranoia, and self-doubt—and still muster enough gumption to call another play.

I thought I’d lost my identity for eight years.

But maybe I never really had it.

Maybe this whole trip—life, farming, writing—is all about figuring out who you are while you’re doing it. I mean, I can still drop enough F-bombs to make a few folks squirm in their seats. Gotta count for something, right?

Tells me I’ve still got that spunky spark guttering somewhere in the deep recesses—that youngster inside who wants to chase the thing that makes time evaporate like late-morning dew off spring wheat.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Never been a Dead Head, but I’ve always loved that line.

---

The other night, I talked to a Sound council member who told me a story that slapped me in the face.

“I shouldn’t even be here today,” he said.

A fragment of cast iron pulley shrapnel sliced through his arm, just missing the main artery. Doc looked him square and declared, “You’re a lucky man. Someone’s watching over you.”

Pulley shrapnel? Ma scuzzi?

“Only stopped for a minute to give my hired men a hand. I wasn’t even near the auger, but I could feel something was off—belts whirring, engine reeling, a machine pushed beyond its limits. Then—boom. Next thing I know, I’m riding shotgun with my thumb plugging a severed vein, wondering if this was the end.”

That close shave gave him a whole new perspective. I heard it in his voice long before he shared the story. With some people, you feel that raw, no-bullshit appreciation for every breath, the kind that only comes from staring death in the face and somehow walking away.

This kind of stuff knocks the wind out of your white triangle sheets.

Makes a guy think about how rare it is to be here. About how flimsy life is.

If my grandpa hadn't rushed my seven-year-old dad to the hospital after a grain auger mangled his foot, I wouldn't be here.

Wouldn't have had all those chances to fuck up, scrape myself off the pavement, and do it all over again.

Wouldn't be here hiking coffee farms and chewing on farming’s future with some of the keenest minds in the business.

None of it.

Life's a fragile thing. But every scar and stumble brought me here, and damn if I'm not gonna make it count.

All of it—the wins, the screw-ups, the lovers and haters. The ones applauding the F-bombs and the ones clutching their pearls at every gosh darn it.

It’s all part of the story.

Pretty damn magical. The most magical shitshow I could’ve ever imagined.

And for the first time in a long time, I'm grateful for every messy, beautiful, unpredictable slice of it.

So yeah, maybe life is just a series of transmission grinds and near-misses with pulley shrapnel.

But if you're lucky—and I mean real lucky—you get to keep driving, keep grinding, and keep telling your story until the gearbox finally throws in the towel.