Tractor Blog, or A Random Ramble While I Gather Kindling for My Blog on Various Stripes of Avengers

1?

Yesterday, as I was driving down the snaky and rut-rippled gravel road I live on, I encountered one of my farmer neighbors steering what appeared to be a new tractor, red as a fire engine and large as a triceratops. Tractasaurus. We each put right tires on the rim of the ditch and waved as we passed, slowly, and I realized that just a couple more coats of paint and we wouldn’t be able to complete that maneuver without scraping.

Though the gleaming piece of agricultural apparatus was impressive, the fact that Mr. Agricola was in the cab chatting away on his smart phone really caught my fancy. I suppose that a driver navigating a back road from a perch ten feet in the air on such a heavy piece of military-strength equipment might not give a lot of thought to the standard hazards of distracted driving. But he’s a bright fellow and seemed in control, so I resisted the thought that his behavior might be routine. Probably, I thought, he’s conducting some agrarian business that requires immediate attention.

But what? I must have been in need of some distraction myself, because even after I left the bendy gravel road behind and was cruising down the asphalt, I couldn’t stop thinking about that tractor and that smart phone. Agribusiness. After all, somebody has to order the feed and vaccines, contact the tax assessor, orchestrate the irrigation, alert the sheriff to the new bear in the area, ask the co-op if those new roles of fencing are in. Or was he calling up his flock of Dorsets to suggest they’d find a greener pasture across the creek? Maybe he was whispering to the chickens about egg production and yolk density or reminding his herd of Guernseys ruminating on a nearby western slope that milking time was nigh. Inviting the newly planted corn to put the recent rain to good use and break through the fertilized dirt? All manner of chores and inspections have to be done, and a good manager knows how to delegate authority and keep in touch with his troops. But the cell phone is more than a business tool, so he could have been following William Shatner on Twitter or checking to see if Poetry Daily (PoemsOnly.com?, no: poems.com)  had posted a rousing vernal sonnet. Maybe he was trying to find a synonym for “thesaurus.”

In moderation, speculation is a fine and salutary practice, but I needed to settle on an answer and move on to a more pressing question. Faced with the need to show a little enterprise, I went to my default setting: be swift, arbitrary and obvious. So I decided he was checking his contacts on FarmersOnly.com. After all, it’s a roomy cab, and he “don’t have to be lonely,” right?

RT Smith

2?
My mother’s father John (or J. P.; we’re a tribe of abbreviators) taught me how to drive on a tractor in Griffin, Georgia when I was just tall enough to reach the pedals and strong enough to set the hand brake on an orange Allis-Chalmers Type C manufactured in 1947. No cab or actual chassis, the seat a steel kidney shape molded to fit the backsides of no human being. You could see the A-C’s limbs and joints, shafts and axles. The exhaust pipe belched oily smoke, and it hurt my wrists to steer. What it resembled, parked in its hornet-haunted shed or under the bean-dangling catalpa tree with its crawly worms, was a large pumpkin-colored insect that might feed off those black-and-yellow stripy caterpillars. Allis-Chalmers, or Alice Chalmers – it sounded like a third grade teacher but was more belligerent. I loved it. I also loved my granddad, who tended to binge but did not cuss and had what must amount to the carpenter’s version of perfect pitch. I am older now than he was when I watched them lower his casket. I have gardened but never farmed. I’ve never owned a tractor and have never touched a drop of Old Crow. I’ve tried to heed his best advice: “Son, when you’re ripe, fall far from the tree.”

3?
What Monsieur Agricola has acquired is an International and not, I’ve figured out, a popular Japanese Kubota, a Deere competitor marketed a lot on TV lately. “Kubota” – sounds like something from the ocean floor resurrected to save us from a more malicious monster: “Kubota Versus Godzilla,” coming soon. But more likely his colossus resembles some vehicle engineered to fight our battles on the next planet out from the sun. I wish he’d bought an A-C, though, as they’re usually the same fregetable color as our old insect, instead of a maraschino cherry. In the Crayola eight-crayon box of my memory, orange will always mean “tractor.” (A Japanese poet named Kubota died of food poisoning a few years ago; he ate a bad clam, rather than a tractor.)

4?
One summer I worked at a public driving range, trolling back and forth across the fairway on a sub-standard green-and-yellow Deere (Nothing runs like a) with a chicken wire cage to protect me from golf balls the size of hailstones. The apparatus I was trailing collected the balls from the scabby lawn, and more than a few hookers, slicers and gaffers made it their mission to try to bounce their Titleists, Nikes and Wilsons off my mesh, probably in the hope that some gap in my cocoon would allow a projectile in on occasion and cause me discomfort while affording them amusement. No malice meant, just Southern fun. I had a walkie-talkie and could call off the barrage if I had to exit my coop and finagle the J-D’s works, but not every duffer with a bucket of rented balls understands a cease-fire order. I never did learn to love a Deere.

Besides, their namesakes gobble our hostas.

Stay tuned for Ouija and the Bard, Thor and Hulk, Steed and Peel, if you dare.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.