A northeast Iowa farmer’s average day became anything but when an unexpected passenger hitched a ride. AJ Friedges got his five kids off to school on a sunny morning in mid-May, went to the field to spray and then this happened.
“When I got to the field, I actually had to change a tip. So I walked all the way around everything and, yeah, made my first pass around the field and on my second pass going across the field, I looked over and I seen him,” Friedges says. “He started crawling out on my boom and I had no clue where this thing came from.”
That thing was a raccoon, hanging on with the noted dexterity of its species, working the end of that boom like a veteran acrobat does a tightrope. Likely, it is a story some would have difficulty believing, but Friedges, who has a robust following on Facebook, quickly captured the hitchhiker’s dramatic dilemma and posted the reel, writing, “Well this was a first. I hope he had a good time.”
Friedges is no stranger to attention. He averages hundreds to thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of views on his posts and videos, but the unexpected adventure with the black-masked stowaway has now reached more than 2 million clicks.
He figures some of the online traffic is thanks to his children, chuckling, “They couldn’t believe it either. ... half the two million views might be theirs because they watched it so many times.”
Friedges is a busy man. He grows crops, raises cattle and custom feeds about 2,500 pigs near Cresco, but that’s not all. He started posting social media videos because he didn’t like himself on camera.
” ... I wanted to kind of get over that, so I just started posting,” he says. “I work as a feed salesman for a full-time job, so I started talking, just doing some education on animal nutrition, which has led me to where we are now.”
Friedges never expected the raccoon’s ride to go viral, but it did. The hundreds of comments varied from humor to concern for the raccoon’s well-being, with some wondering why Friedges didn’t stop and let the critter go.
“Obviously at the end of the field I did,” he says. “When I got to the end of the field, I just dropped my boom to the ground and let him crawl off.”
He watched his unintentional boom-riding companion make a getaway and hasn’t seen it since.
