Not a Clue Dad

Not a Clue Dad

Tractors are a great invention. They make a farmer’s life more bearable and make it possible to do many, many times as much work as with horses. It should be noted however that tractors, in the twenty first century, bear little resemblance to the tractors I grew up driving in the 1950s and 60s. Steel seats with little or no padding mounted directly on the read differential have given way to climate controlled cabs with stereo systems, cell phones and many other conveniences. The price of these 200 plus horse power monsters also far outweighs the price Dad would pay for a tractor.

By the same token, farms are much larger than those of the mid twentieth century. When I was a teenager, it was unusual to see a farmer, in our area, who was farming more than two or three hundred acres. Today the sky’s the limit. With huge farms come huge tractors and equipment, and also huge prices.

Those of us fortunate enough to have grown up on a farm in those days were allowed to drive tractors from, in many cases, a very young age. In my case it was five years of age because that’s when I could push the clutch all the way in without taking my bum off the front edge of the seat. The tractor was a Ford 8N. If memory serves me, it had about 24 horsepower and could pull a two-furrow plow with twelve inch bottoms. That meant that with each pass down the field you could turn over a whopping two feet of soil. It was our only tractor at that time and we farmed fifty acres with it. I know that’s a hobby farm today but we made a decent living from it back then.

I said decent, not great. Dad also owned and drove a school bus and a few years later he drove a feed truck part time as well. Nobody thought anything of that, because it wasn’t unusual at all for the farmers in the area, or their wives to have jobs off the farm to generate that little extra cash they always needed. One neighbor drove the road grader, another ran the mill at the feed store in town and yet another drove big-rigs and would be gone for days at a time while his wife and kids held down the fort at home. My uncle had a full time job off his farm operating heavy equipment.

If you were lucky, enough or the bank trusted you enough, to be able to acquire a new piece of equipment it was a big deal. When I was about seven years old, Dad decided to buy a hay bailer. Up until then he had either hired the bailing done or used a hay rack and hays forks the way it was done in the really old days. This was actually equipment that had been converted from horse drawn to power drawn. It was my job to drive the tractor on the bailer and it had to be done right. It was a brand-new bailer and Dad insisted that it was going to last us a long time. Dad still had it when he retired. He sold it to a neighbor who used it for many years after that.

We managed with that small tractor for a few years, until Dad found a slightly larger one for a good price. It was a used Fords on Delta. It had a front end loader and we thought we had the world by the tail. It still only pulled a small plow but I soon discovered that it would do it a lot faster. I was about twelve by now and to me fast was good. On the road with nothing behind it and a good tail wind down hill I could get that tractor up to nearly thirty miles an hour. I was warned that this tractor had to last a long time, “So don’t abuse it!”

Now, you have to realize that I was becoming a teenager, and teenage boys like to drive fast. They also love to compete with each other and show off a bit. Put this all together with what I have already said about the fathers in the area having jobs off their farms, and what you get is a bunch of young teenagers with access to tractors and little or no supervision around. Thus evolved, The Tractor Races. You may not believe this but we never got caught either. At least if we did, our fathers chose to say nothing to us about it and that wasn’t at all like our fathers, so I believe the former.

These tractor races were never prearranged. It was always something spontaneous. I would, for instance, see my friend across the road on the tractor and, having seen his father leave for work earlier, I would wave him over. It only takes two tractors for a race and we were off. Some times we’d have a third or a fourth show up but never more than that. You see our farm was on a corner so the other guys could see the tractor going down the road with nothing in tow and would have a very good idea what was up. Too many tractors would attract attention and we knew it.

At the very back of our farm there was a lane that ran along the front edge of a bush lot. It was quite straight, at the bottom of a hill and it couldn’t be seen from the road because of hills and trees. The other good thing about it was that Dad didn’t go back there much, so he wasn’t likely to notice if it got trampled down or torn up a bit. We would use that lane as our race track. The races never lasted long. After one or two runs each, we would declare a winner and be back to work before anyone was the wiser.

The scariest part of the tractor races certainly wasn’t the speed we went. It was the track. It was, as I called it earlier, just a lane. It wasn’t graded or graveled. It was just a grass lane that grew weeds instead of crops. There were pot holes, rocks, tree branches and any manner of other stuff laying around, not to mention the wildlife that a noisy tractor would scare up out of the underbrush. It was usually littered with tree limbs, leaves, stones and other assorted items that could seriously impede the forward progress of a tractor.

Our Dads were just as scary. If we got caught racing we would be in trouble with both our parents, but if we broke a tractor in a pothole or on a rock we would be in trouble with our fathers and nobody wanted to be in trouble with their Dad. When you were in trouble with your parents, Dad would always be a little bit on your side because after all “Boys will be Boys” but when you were in trouble with your dad only, the almighty himself could help, or wasn’t about to.

Dad set out the work schedule. It was only because the Dads trusted us that we were allowed access to the tractors when they were away. If any of us broke a tractor we would all be relegated to shoveling manure away from behind the animal of each father’s choice, until we once again proved ourselves worthy to handle the keys to power. Shoveling manure is not fun. Thank good luck but we never broke a tractor, or got caught. I came really close once though.

I was racing with my best friend one fall day when a cock pheasant flew out of the brush along the lane. I wish I could say that he startled me but he didn’t. A male pheasant is a beautiful bird. If you haven’t seen one, they are about the size of a chicken, but with bright plumage reminiscent of all the fall colors rolled into one bird. They have long tail feathers that trail out behind them when they take flight. They are truly magnificent. I was so far ahead in the race that I watched him flying across the freshly picked corn field instead of paying attention to where I was going. At full throttle, I dropped the front wheel of the tractor into a large hole. Now this wouldn’t have even been a huge problem, had I been paying attention. I would have bumped through and kept on going, but oh no. I was looking over my right shoulder, at the magnificent creature I had just sent flying into the air, and only had one hand on the steering wheel. The wheel was unceremoniously torn from my hand and the tractor made a sharp left turn. I have been told that it was actually up on two wheels for several seconds, before hitting a large rock with the right rear tire and being thrown
back on all four wheels.

The tractor had stalled at some point during its unguided journey and on impact I had been thrown off into a scrub tree that grew along the lane. A small tree, but it bit. It had thorns about an inch long that showed no mercy. All I was thinking about at that point was my funeral. I might have survived the accident but I would surely, I believed, not survive the wrath of DAD.

Once I managed to scramble out of the tree with more than a little help from my best friend, I looked the tractor over and to my amazement there was no visible damage. The world began to brighten, as I climbed back aboard. Still, no visible damage. I turned the key and pressed the starter button. The engine roared to life like it was born to race and wanted nothing more than to get back at it.

There was no more racing that day. As a matter of fact that was the last time I ever remember a tractor race taking place on our farm. I drove the tractor, carefully, back to the shed and put it away, just as Dad had left it the night before.

If he ever knew anything about those races, he never said a word to me about it. He did, however, mention many times that the tractor had somehow developed a strange wobble in the right rear wheel and wondered if I knew anything about it. Of course I told him the truth.

“I haven’t got a clue Dad!”