The last photo of my two-day ride earlier this week was taken a dozen miles or so short of my intended destination on The Banks of Plum Creek.

I had stopped to eat at a gas station in Westbrook, MN, and probably should have stayed there to wait out the coming storm. But it wasn’t until I got well out of town that it became clear that a storm was coming.

The weather forecast earlier that day had given me hope that this sort of thing would wait until much later in the evening. And it still seemed quiet and far off until I got off my bike for the photo. Then I could hear thunder in the distance. I got back on and pedalled a little faster, but it soon became apparent that I wouldn’t outrun it to Walnut Grove. I didn’t see any ground-to-cloud lightning, but the wind clouds (as I call them) that were hanging just under the leading edge of the dark cloud mass looked ominous enough.

It was soon time to start looking for shelter. I didn’t see any abandoned farm buildings and it didn’t look like the kind of country where I’d find any. I passed a farmstead that stood close to the road, where a man was working at something on the side of his house. Then I thought, “Where else am I going to find someone out working in the yard?” So I turned around and rode back.

The man was deeply occupied in whatever he was working on (a downspout for his gutters, as it turned out) but I succeeded in interrupting him to ask if I could wait out the storm under an overhang. He took me around the house to his garage. He let his wife know that they had a guest who had asked for shelter, then hurried back to his work. I asked if there was anything I could do to help, but there wasn’t much. And there wasn’t much time, either.

A few minutes later, as the storm hit, we introduced ourselves. Don and Carolyn were the names of the kind hosts who had welcomed an uninvited guest. Carolyn went in and out, keeping an eye on weather reports. The front came, not with lightning but with a constant rumbling sound, then passed quickly. When it became apparent there would be no hailstorm to accompany it we all relaxed. I ended up being offered a chair, coffee, cookies, and conversation — all of it very good. Don was somewhat wistful as he offered me the last of what had been a very good batch of brownies. We discussed our families, baseball, farming, the local communities, and I’m not sure what else.

I told about the pasture-based dairy project back at my workplace in Michigan, and how this was the first day that cows were to be milked by robots. Carolyn immediately saw the value of something like that. She had grown up on a dairy farm where the family never went anywhere all together — no vacations all together, not even attending funerals all together — because someone had to stay home to milk the cows. I’ve seen much of that sort of thing among my own relatives and among neighbors of my boyhood. “The farmer is married to the cows” is the way I had learned to describe dairy farming.

When the rain let up a little, Don went out to check his gage. 0.7 inches. Not a bad rain to have at this time of the growing season. Carolyn suggested that my wife would be worried about me. I had tried to call Myra back when I took the photo, but had got no answer. And here in their garage, I didn’t get a signal. I explained how Myra has given up worrying about me on these rides, but finally, after no success with my phone, Carolyn let me use hers to call.

I had been hoping Myra could tell me that wunderground.com showed that the rain would pass and I could continue my ride, but she was in Walnut Grove and not at the motel or anywhere where she could use the Internet. So I suggested she should just come and get me.

It turned out that Myra had worried about me anyway, despite her previous claims that she no longer does that. When I called, she heard the sounds of laughing and conversation in the background. I explained that I had been visiting while being fed brownies and cookies. That didn’t help. She hadn’t know what else to do, so had gone into a bar in Walnut Grove to get a bite to eat and wait out the storm while worrying some more about me, little knowing that I was sitting in a safe place and having a good time. When she picked me up she announced to Don and Carolyn that she wasn’t sure I deserved such good treatment.

That’s true enough, but I’m glad that I often don’t get what I deserve.