I’ve been thinking a lot about tractors. The line of thinking has a little to do with the approach of spring and a lot about the recent death of my brother who spent a lifetime in agriculture. That included many decades of exposure to chemicals, which had a significant impact on his health.
On hearing word of his passing, my response was ‘Now he is where the tractor starts on the first try.’
You see, our experience with tractors was seldom good. Because we were poor, so was the equipment. This was long before the days of cooperative equipment dealers with creative financing.
We made do with what we had and if it were inoperable, we fixed it ourselves. All my siblings have had at least some experience with fixing, jumping off, pull starting or use of ether to get the dang thing running. We also all developed a deep and varied vocabulary which does not lend itself to newsprint or polite company.
The first tractor with which I became acquainted was a red and gray Massey Ferguson that I frequently refer to erroneously as an 8N. I believe that was a Ford product.
I learned to drive on the little Massey, probably about an 80 horsepower job. At about 8-years-old my brothers, trying to farm the land left by my recently deceased father, tapped me as help to move equipment from one spot to another.
With rudimentary instruction I was plopped down on a metal seat and left to figure it out. That was how we did things. And I did figure it out, with a few fits and starts, a little damage to a wheat field and perhaps an already dilapidated fence.
But I survived, the tractor did too and the work got done. It created a pattern of the boys calling on me when the work load got heavy and any help was better than none.
It also built in me that ‘inborn fondness’ for agriculture that is referenced in the FFA creed.
Later although I had married and left home, I still did a good bit of tractoring. I made and hauled hay, ran the bush hog (called brush hog in some locales) and occasionally pulled the disc.
Back home, farming grew as my brother leased a section and then shrank as he lost it to residential development. Fortunately most of the big equipment was leased as well, but there was one archaic Massey that was a permanent fixture. After he was too ill to farm at all, brother moved it on to a friend of the family who rebuilt it and uses it today.
I guess I never recognized or accepted what the departure of that last tractor signified. The passing of an era, where no Nowlins (our family name) farmed anymore. The transition of our farm to housing developments and a fire station. The day when no member of the family except a brother in law is employed in agriculture.
But no matter where you go or how far from home you are, generational endeavors do not disappear. Families of firefighters produce more firefighters and farming runs in the veins of we who were born with dirt in our fists.
It calls me, pulls me, drives me. And now it has driven me to begin looking for a garden tractor.
Am I searching for the new, shiny green kind that friendly dealers will deliver with a smile and a sales contract?
Not a chance. Instead I am drawn to the rundown, the needy, those that only start with a shot of ether, a screwdriver and a mouth held just right. It helps if they were once red.
It may not be the best choice, or the shortest path to get where I want to be in my farming journey.
But it keeps me tied to family now gone, to brothers and parents and grandparents who had it tough and kept going, kept working.
It connects me to the stuff we are made of, that I am made of, the stuff that makes me want to farm, the stuff that breaks my heart. It makes me who I am.