Every town has one

A cheesy, Chinese restaurant.  In "Swuf Kerin", a.k.a. Swift Current, it was Wong's.  "If you don't mind me sayin', I'd get two dinners for one," said neighbour "Wayne" at the adjoining table.  "That's what the wife and I do here.  She's at a 'Red Hatter' affair, so I'm here on my own, but we always get two dinners for one, that way we switch dishes," he explained. 

Well, that's what we did.  As dinner continued, Wayne became our table mate and boy, did I learn a ton from this genial, 300-+-pound farmer.  "It's all beef (or as he called them "cows") and oil here, plus canola and wheat of course," he explained, answering my questions about the hundreds of head of cattle we passed grazing alongside the "pump jacks".  "I only have one pump jack on my land without oil rights, so I only get $2,500 per year because we farmers lost our mineral rights.  But if I owned the rights I'd get $200,000 a year for one rig."  Man! 

According to Wayne, potash is booming and the snow geese I found so beautiful are "ruining the crops".  And you can forget both Trudeau and Chretien...."they didn't do nothin' for the West," he pronounced.  Funnily, he used only the present tense to describe everything -- past, present and future.  "They come (not came) out here and done this and done that," would be the sentence.  Come to think of it, it was present for past and past participle for past....or some such unique gramatical concoction. 

But Wayne is very wealthy.  "I sold one quarter (160 acres) for $900,000 and I have another five left," he said, making him a millionaire several times over.  "But the thing I don't like is them Hutterites.  They don't pay no taxes at all."  Have to say I agree with him.

Dinner ended with a toothpick wedged firmly in his mouth and a discussion of the wheat board.  "65% of us voted to keep the board, but it's gone anyway.  They made a bad mistake getting rid of the small feeder rails lines to get grain out because hauling it by road is much more expensive," he added.  

Were I a federal politician, I'd hightail it to "Swuf Kerin" and have a chat with Wayne before I formulated any Western policies.