In my long-ago days on the farm, an incident occurred about this time of year that still makes me chuckle.
My Dad and his neighbour were harvesting corn and because all of us extra helpers were back in school, a couple of retired farmers were hired to haul loads of the crop back and forth from the harvester in the field to the silo at the barn.
All went well most of the time. As one wagon full of corn was coming in from the field, another was heading back out to be filled up.
The two retired farmers, Tom and Norman, were driving two old John Deere tractors hauling the loads. This work was taking place on a 100-acre farm with plenty of space everywhere. Hardly a tree in sight or a fence for that matter as everything was in crops.
A 100-acre farm, even by today’s standards, is a big space. I have no way of knowing this, but I suspect that if you filled every square inch of it with tractors, even old John Deeres, you might be able to squeeze in 10,000 of them. Or even 100,000.
My point is, there was lots of room one fateful day when Tom was driving his wagon out to the field and Norman was bringing his in. There was no particular path or road they needed to follow to make the journey. They were basically free to drive wherever they liked.
And yet, they both sort of chose the same stretch of field to guide their green vehicles along. As they headed straight towards each other, Tom decided to veer left to miss Norman who decided to veer right to avoid Tom when two left turns would have been better choices.
If you haven’t guessed by now, the outcome was predictable – probably the first and only head-on collision between two tractors on a wide-open hundred acre farm.
Fortunately, not a lot of damage is done when two tractors travelling probably eight miles per hour meet head-on and no one was hurt in the mishap.
The two men worked many more years drawing corn wagons for my Dad and his neighbour, but it was clearly noticeable how far they kept away from each other whenever they met in the fields after that.
Once “hitten”, twice shy.
©2011 Jim Hagarty
