Tractor Rides

I grew up in the sleepy cracked-cement downtown blocks of the city, but my grandparents lived a good five miles north of town, out in the rolling hills of the sparsely populated countryside. Their driveway consisted first of a long paved dead-end road that hooked off of the main road, and ran a good mile or two straight up a vast slow-rising hill, with massive corn and wheat fields on either side of it. Parson’s barn could be seen half way up the hill on the left, and near the top of the hill, where the road suddenly plunged into the forest, one could just barely make out Mr. Mcdonald’s A-frame house, a local school teacher. At the foot of the woods the paved road abruptly disintegrated into a dirt driveway, as it plunged into the darkness of the high-ceilinged tree canopy, hooked around a mossy stoned lump of land, and revealed the gray 1960s architecture of the quiet house my grandfather largely built by himself. It sat barely within the tree line, on the crest of the rise, and peered out over a Vincent Van Gogh painting of rippled descending golden hills and fields, few of whom were actually tended by other human beings. A house or two could be seen in the distance, as well as a radio tower, but beyond those few small reminders of civilization there was little more than the long-reaching unkempt emptiness of the partially wooded and partially fielded countryside.

Although my grandfather was a traveling salesman, he was raised a self-sustaining farmer, and had a barn for general home maintenance purposes. One of the things that he kept in this barn was a large Kabota tractor, used mainly for hauling wood in the autumn, and blowing snow out of the driveway in the winter…and on this tractor was a good sized frontal bucket, which could be raised, lowered, and tilted for digging purposes. It’s greatest purpose, however, was to accommodate us children in what we affectionately referred to as "tractor rides," wherein we would climb into the bucket with our feet dangling out of it, and enjoy a ride down the long looped two-track trail that wound several miles through his property.

The sound of the tractor starting in the metal barn always frightened me, made all the more eerie by the fact that the engine had to be primed before it could be started…which consisted of pressing a strange circular button and waiting in terrible silent expectation until the center of the button turned red. The acoustics of the barn didn’t help either, and even though I clenched my little hands against my ears, I always jumped when the thing roared to life. The view from the very front of the tractor was interesting, as from the bucket there was nothing to be seen of the tractor above, below, or behind us…and it generated the sort of sensation of flying down the trail on a magic carpet…if magic carpets bumped around a little. Anytime a rut or a swell would slide beneath our feet, there was always a delay in action regarding the bucket’s positioning to the trail…so that on some occasions we would dip very low, almost touching the ground, and on others we would be lifted very high, the trail sinking far below our feet.

There were three major attractions along the route that my grandfather would take through the woods. The first was simply an ancient discarded spool of rusty barbed wire fence, which dwelt near where the two track slunk off into the woods after it’s brief stretch along the forest perimeter. The second attraction was just a little ways up the trail, past a strange part of forest that housed only young trees that abided extremely close together with thin trunks; it was a fork in the trail, but made significant in the fact that it was blighted with thick black puddles of mud, and crooked ruts. The tractor never had a problem maneuvering through it, but compared to the rest of the neatly dry trail, this brief abominably muddy hole stood out distinctly. The final attraction was much farther up the trail, and was by far my favorite– an old discarded horse trailer, set back in a twisted blackberry thicket…dark gray, rotten, and slowly melting into the underbrush..