By Jim Hagarty
1986
These days, to get some distance away from the pressures of keepin’ it together in 1986, I retreat to my lawnmower and the half acre or so of grass that grows in the ground around my house. Some weeks, the grass doesn’t grow fast enough to keep up with my need to cut it, so it gets another premature trim, whether it wants it or not.
My lawn’s not a 40-acre field and my mower’s not an old John Deere tractor but the repetitious job of walking round and round an ever-shrinking perimeter, gradually changing and improving the appearance of the landscape is a soothing, satisfying exercise that takes me back to those long and generally happy days I spent plowing, cultivating, disking and harrowing the fields on my parents’ farms. Has it been almost 10 years since I climbed up onto the seat of a tractor, let out the clutch and wheeled the machinery out the yard and over the rich, brown earth?
I say “generally happy” days because I also remember the many hours I resented the work which had to be done regardless of whether or not all the other teenagers in the world were lying on the beach at Grand Bend or sitting at the drive-in movie theatre in Stratford. At those times, it seemed no worse fate could befall a kid than to be born the son of a farmer.
But more often than not, being assigned to the tractor for the day was a real break and I didn’t have to be asked twice whether I wanted to do it. It was a chance for a bit of privacy – a rare thing in a family of seven kids – and it beat the heck out of fixing fence, cleaning stables, straightening up the driving shed or, and I can hardly bring myself to write the words, picking stones.
Plowing was by far the best job there was where tractors were involved. For one thing, it made the most dramatic change you could make to the ground and thus, what you had accomplished with your time was clearly visible. Secondly, it was the simplest of jobs – just drop that right front wheel in the furrow and settle back. The tractor practically steered itself. It was so easy that it was even possible to fall asleep shortly after starting off down the field. And plows seem more sturdy than disks and cultivators so there were not a lot of breakdowns.
Driving tractor offered another great advantage. It was the best place on earth to practice singing like Roy Orbison, Paul McCartney or the Everley Brothers. After all, who could hear you? You could hardly hear yourself above the banging of the tractor’s engine.
At least, it seemed no one could hear you. One clear, summer’s evening, I was heading from the shed to the house when I heard a farmer belting out a tune at the top of his lungs as he rode his nearly silent tractor along the road past our place. It seems a man’s voice carries better through the warm night air than the chugging of an engine. I thought, “Oh no! You mean people have been able to hear me all these years?”
I bet, at this very moment, there are a few farmers out somewhere in Perth County singing up a storm while they cultivate their crops. Others, maybe more of them these days, will, instead, be listening to FM stereo radio or cassette tapes in the climate-controlled cabs of their machines.
But, over and above the sputtering of some old Ford or Massey Ferguson tractor somewhere across this county, the lines of Don and Phil’s Bye Bye Love are breaking through at this very moment. They have to be.
Tractors were also great places to figure things out. That was all right if what needed figurin’ out was something pleasant like some romantic encounter from the weekend before. It wasn’t quite so wonderful, however, when you headed out on the tractor filled with doubt and trouble but even then, those few hours alone often helped to soothe a worried mind. Yet today, when problems crowd in, I head out onto the back roads in my car for slow drives through the country and it helps.
I never in my adult life felt so big a lump in my throat as the day of my parents’ auction sale when I had to drive each of our four tractors in turn up to the gas pump to be readied for the farmers who had bought them to drive them away.
To this day, I can still see the old John Deere AR and my favourite, the John Deere M (the Little M, we called it), heading up the road and out of sight.
They weren’t just tractors. They were my friends. They came to the farm the year before I was born, like they were getting ready for me. And they didn’t come cheap. Each one cost $500, brand new.
