Not something that happens every day
Just this past week, Burnell Shifflet was in the field just east of Cambridge on the north side of the highway when the oddest thing happened. A young man, small in stature and dressed in what appeared to be a flight suit and helmet, came running through the field toward him.
“At first I thought a plane had gone down,” said Shifflet. “When I opened my tractor door, the man said ‘This is a Case IH Steiger and I’d like to take a picture’ in broken English and I had to find out more.”
As the story was told, Igor Giedl, 22, is from Germany and on a 16-day VISA to the United States. He flew into Chicago and rented a moped, hoping to head north to Montana and North Dakota, but when Mother Nature surprised them with a spring snow his plans changed. Coming west from Omaha, he passed through Cambridge and is headed toward Benkelman then south through Kansas, on to Oklahoma and northern Texas — bigger farm country according to Giedl. Shifflet also called to Imperial where they were planting potatoes but was informed tractors wrapped up in the past few days.
“Finding and photographing tractors is his hobby,” explained Shifflet. “He applied to Case IH in Germany but they didn’t take him, so he switched gears and now is a mechanical engineer for Porche. He kept running back and forth through the field and had to have taken at least 100 pictures of me in the tractor. After endless trips on foot, I told him just to climb in.”
At the end of the day, Shifflet asked Giedl if he would like to join him and Michelle for supper and he graciously accepted, spending the entire evening with them, leaving after breakfast the next day. He shared that his mother was born in the Ukraine and his grandmother just got out of the Ukraine two weeks ago with the assistance of her neighbors.
Shifflet offered Giedl money before he left, but he said, “No, you’ve already done enough with food and a place to stay. A hotel in Germany is $30 — it’s much more expensive here. And I can go 150 miles on a gallon of gas, but thank you.”
Shifflet chuckled and said the experience “sure wasn’t something that happens every day!”
