We
got a new tractor last week. My neighbor Chuck drove his 1948 Farmall C over and
parked it in my driveway while the wife, kids and I looked on. I'm
"buying" the tractor from Chuck on time (over the next thirty years,
or so) because Chuck's a nice guy, and doesn't know my financial history.
Anyway, folks who know International Harvester Farmall tractors of the forties
and fifties remember the C being the replacement for the Farmall B, which
replaced the A. This of course at a time when model numbers actually progressed
with a discernible and predictable pattern.
Some people would immediately recognize an old C because it's the tractor
easily drawn from memories of grandpa's farm, and the kind that illustrators
like to put into kids' stories of talking pigs and such. It's big, very red, and
narrow...kind of built like an aunt, rather larger on both ends and slimmer in
the middle under the steering column. Best of all, she's beautiful; A-One condition, and the motor
roars in that uniquely Farmall way.
I
can't remember who said it about cars, perhaps Lee Iacoca: "We are what we
drive." Attorneys have their BMW's, Physicians, their Jaguars, and
professors, their aging Volvo's. But this driving axiom applies pretty well to
farmers too. Most fella's who ride up and down the street on fifty year old
tractors are making a statement about who they are too. They're mostly folks who
remember a simpler time when men were running technology and technology had not
yet begun to run them. These were times when we had so much more control over
everything than we do now, and when we felt things around us, and were moved by
them; our politics, our kids, our
tractors. Years before phones and computers had succeeded in disconnecting us
from one another, and double wishbone suspensions and air filled shocks had
disconnected us from the road, there was a delicate balance still between
technology and nature. That balance is something many of us are just old enough
to remember, and often try to recapture. In
the cooler shadows of last evening's sunset, I took my youngest girl on a
pleasant tractor ride across the newly cut hayfield. I let her drive wherever
she wished and just enjoyed the ride while she sat lifted up on my knee turning
the wheel. We rumbled up and down the field for some time, watching the sparrows
settle in for the evening, and seeing the lights at the distant barn grow slowly
brighter against the darkening landscape.
As
we jiggled and bumped over field stones and tiny furrows left from last season's
harvest, I became remarkably aware of the earth beneath us. The tractor forced
my body to reach down and be connected with the earth. It was a great feeling to
be so close to my daughter, the earth, and sky. It's the way things used to feel
when we were first courting technology back a long time ago, and it's a feeling
I'm not ready to trade in on something newer just yet.