Sleeping with Tractors

Illustration by Nik Garvoille

ESSAY

I confess to sleeping with tractors. Somewhere in the township is a child of grease zerks and diesel breath, and wanting to play baseball. My adultery with tractors is a vocational hazard since I am off with her at sunup – 4:38 am precisely. Tractors, in case you are wondering, are mostly female.

There are numerous versions of spring; mud spring is first followed by watercress spring, these about middle March. By habit watercress is the two months previous to asparagus spring, a serviceable soup can be made of watercress if a better salad and quiche. Watercress is a required tonic of what once constituted a good farmstead. Any place out of reach of watercress wasn’t fit for human habitation. Watercress defined in biological terms whether the water was fit to drink or not. Whether this notion has any scientific credibility doesn’t matter if you are that thirsty in the first place. I have long maintained as a former farmkid if you ain’t ever been thirsty enough to drink a mud puddle you ain’t ever been thirsty.

Potato spring is third in the order of spring hierarchy. Some to say oat spring precedes potato spring, to my observation they both are cruel enough to tempt fate and snow flurries.

Something about the chance once again to be in the field defines this profession. Every farm neighborhood has its cock robin, its spring Magellan, in my township this office served by Myron Soik. I will not guess at Myron’s age, it is this side of two hundred but not that far. Ordinarily when a man reaches his seniority he ought by God’s law lose his hair, isn’t Myron’s case. Quite contrarily with the scalplock lush and weedy as when he was sixteen, as throws the odds of accurately detailing his age out the window. Because Myron is so furry positions him as the perfect clinical arbiter of potato spring. Myron going at it a week previous to when the rest of the tater clan has fully roused from hibernation. Myron is first to plow, first to plant though the Kizewski boys might challenge my ranking. They too don’t seem to feel right with the world unless part of their potato crop has the chance to meditate under six inches of new-fallen. What decent and sane people would acknowledge as a trifle early.

My personal arbiter of spring is that particular shade of green of grass next to the snow bank. And if you can walk across that patch of grass without leaving behind a bas print of yourself it is more properly called an intaglio. Bas relief is when you slip on the ice and leave your corporal person likeness on the ground.

4:48 am, I started the tractor ten minutes previous, tractors, to reiterate, are sexual in nature. They function better if warmed up beforehand. By my observation of sexuality, when we are younger we don’t require as much warm-up, but now that I’m forty-five years (since high school) I like to idle at the business awhile; it’s good for the hydraulics. My son, a graduate of John Deere College – and yes it really does exist – often reminds me to warm the hydraulics of a big tractor. To let the engine oil circulate awhile. Not only are tractors sexual, they are conscious beings.

5 am straight up, the seed is loaded, my starter tank is full. I somewhat regret the development of liquid fertilizer despite it is portable and has more accurate metering. Adding saddle tanks of three- to five-hundred gallons each to the side of a tractor deprives the tractor of its god-given image. Doesn’t look like a tractor as much as an arthropod. What former Soo Line engineer Carl Menzel once related about new diesel/electric locomotives, his long career being steam locomotive. Said they didn’t look like real locomotives, and he was glad to end his railroad life with the genuine article. I occasionally think the same about tractors with cabs, as if they are too much refinement to bestow on a farmkid. Besides you can’t learn the right lessons about life driving a cab tractor, how to dress like a walking talking igloo in order to survive potato planting. I understand they now have permanent cell towers on Mount Everest, to know escalators will be next, to ask what will climbing that mountain prove?

Technology, besides being generally unpretty, tends to deprive human beings of our basic animal zeal. I know Luddites have felt this way ever since the bow and arrow replaced the atlatl. Or the car replaced the horse, and the air conditioner the front porch. What sects like Amish and Shakers and Mennonites have long prophesied, that somewhere all of us run up against our personal gut-tolerance of technological betterment. Had the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1969 outlawed at first appearance the tractor cab, agriculture today would be fundamentally different. Another million of us would yet be doing this farm thing, such the days and the seasons foreshortened by an open station tractor.

It is 3:11 pm, I can’t keep my eyes open. I have nodded off several times only to snap awake so fast it’s unhealthy for my vertebrae. I have never taken a yoga class, but I do know those same positions from finding a posture to fit a tractor cab that allows me to drop off to sleep. I don’t shut off the engine, just let it idle to equalize the temperature gradient across the engine block. There are 4,000 extra engine hours if you do this religiously, so says my John Deere graduate.

3:21 pm, that felt good.