If you want to begin to understand what it takes to run a farm or ranch, spend a few minutes inside a shop or barn.

I made an impromptu visit to one recently — a side trip during a story I was working on — and the experience was revealing.

It was, I think, typical of such structures. It’s a plain metal building with a concrete floor. Not so bucolic (or photogenic) as a wooden barn, I suppose, but utilitarian. A place, like a farm or ranch itself, where function must always triumph over form.

As I stood there I looked about, and over a few minutes what I initially took for a sort of disorder came into better focus, as it were. I recognized that this space was devoted wholly to the completion of tasks. What mattered is that the items needed to accomplish any job be at hand, not tucked into neat rows on a shelf, like soup cans or cereal boxes in a grocery store.

The shop wasn’t neat, as that fastidious adjective is most typically employed.

But as I glanced around and pondered what I was seeing, the sense of purpose, pure and beautiful in its way, was distilled.

A pressure washer was parked beside the front door. Although there appeared to be space to confine the machine to a corner, which would create the illusion of order, such a placement would also require the person wielding the hose to lug the thing into place before blasting away the obstinate spring mud from a truck’s fenders.

Efficiency dictates the layout, not superficial matters.

I was more impressed, though, by the sheer volume of the shop’s contents. The inventory, were it ever cataloged, would no doubt rival that of a modestly sized hardware store or mercantile.

There were cans of brake cleaner and bottles of engine and gear oil and buckets of axle grease and gleaming metal parts I couldn’t identify with any precision except to recognize, say, the cogs of a gear.

I daresay that any machine which requires occasional lubrication could be coaxed back to smooth operation by one or a combination of the elixirs.

A section of wall was lined with bins containing all sorts of plastic and metal pipe sections and fittings and connectors — sufficient, I imagine, to perform emergency arterial surgery on the irrigation system that carries the lifeblood of such operations.

A block and tackle was set up, seemingly capable of pulling an engine or transmission, or bearing a freshly gutted elk to simplify skinning.

As I took in the scene it struck me that there must be, in Baker County alone, some hundreds of buildings which serve the same purpose. And in the whole of Oregon the structures surely number in the tens of thousands. Few parts of the Beaver state lie far from productive land, after all.

I’m sure their appearances, both inside and out, vary according to the whims of their builders and the personalities of those who use them now. Certainly the settings would differ dramatically depending on which part of our sprawling state you were visiting.

A barn that serves the cranberry bogs around Bandon, for instance, could scarcely seem, at a cursory glance, comparable to a lean-to in the great sagelands of the southeast corner, what Jackman and Long so aptly deemed the Oregon Desert in their inimitable book of that name.

But at their core, which is to say their purpose, these structures are close kin.

Each, I’m sure, has seen days of despair, when a mechanical malady or an untimely blizzard or just a persistent headache made it seem to the occupants, temporarily, that extracting a living from the land was, if it was any bargain at all, then surely of the Faustian variety.

But I thought too of the moments of triumph, the innumerable episodes when the combination of experience and the right tool and the irrepressible stubbornness of the farmer or rancher prevailed.

I also imagined the countless conversations that have played out in these unprepossessing buildings, the bantering about sports and politics and families, the inevitable return to the real truths — the fields and the herds, the yields and the markets, the cruel insensate vagaries of frost and drought, the destitute brown and the promise of the green.

There’s not much to see when you drive past these buildings.

But they are, in their way, as richly endowed with history as any museum.