Draggin' the field
I have been posting for a year on the Goatweb bulletin board. Since I'm not creative enough to come up with stuff too often, sometimes I'll post old articles that I wrote over there. Here's one of those articles.
I went out to spread some rabbit manure yesterday, but it was too wet, so I started fiddling with the old John Deere B tractor and it started me thinking back to when I first got the tractor and how I ended up dragging an 84 y/o man through the field and almost got a divorce within minutes of each other. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.
This whole thing starts years ago. For some reason, my wife’s dairy farming family thinks I’m from the city. I lived on a dirt road, in a city smaller than they live in, but I’ve become known as a city slicker. It probably comes from the fact that when I was dangerously close to asking for my wife’s hand in marriage, my Father in Law asked me to help round up a wild bull. His plan was to have me stand in the trailer and get the bulls attention. When the bull came after me, I was supposed to swing out of the trailer and he and his son would close the trailer door and they’d take the bull to the stockyard. I was waiting for them to break out in smiles, but they didn’t. In fact, when I refused, they both told Kathy that I wouldn’t help them and she was mad at me for a couple of days after that.
Anyway, we have since patched things up and when my Father in Law heard I had some acreage, he offered me his old semi-retired John Deere B if I could get it to Alabama. A couple of months later I had a trailer up there ready to go. I have operated tractors, but not one that old, so I thought I’d better get a lesson. Well he showed me how to ease the hand clutch out and that I had to be careful with the brakes because they were on both sides of the tractor etc. etc. He took it out to the alfalfa field and told me to give it a try.
I got up in the seat, and was finding all the controls out and getting a feel when I hear behind me, “let er rip”. I looked and my octogenarian father in law is standing on the drawbar waiting for me to give the tractor a go. Talk about pressure!! Well first gear wasn’t bad, second was OK to, but I noticed the tractor was getting more sensitive when I let out the clutch. Then I heard the faithful words “OK lets try 5th gear”. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but I had flashbacks to the bull incident and resolved never to go through that much family ridicule again. I put the tractor into fifth gear and eased out the clutch, the tractor jerked and the front wheel rose about two feet in the air.
Now my wife has two rules in our house; Don’t Break the Kids, and Don’t Mess with My Daddy. I have broken the rule about the kids often and have survived, but our marriage was about to be tested on the second rule because I was dragging a daddy’s girl’s daddy around an alfalfa field just like I will be dragging the disc around the garden soon.
When the tractor reared up, his feet slipped off the drawbar and he started yelling. Now I haven’t been able to understand a whole lot of what he says just sitting in the living room, but I’m pretty sure he was going to have an interesting confession the next time it came around. I, in the meantime, had gone into full blown panic mode. I hit the right brake while trying to undo the hand clutch which seemed to be stuck, which made the tractor take a right turn and sent us off the lane and into the alfalfa. Now my Father in Law is not only cussing about his situation, but also about the crop I’m ruining.
Just as I’m finally getting the clutch unstuck and slowing the tractor down I heard a scream over the popping cylinders. It seems my wife wanting to capture a Father-In-Law/Son-In-Law moment decided to come out and take a picture. All she says she saw were my arms flailing, another set of hands holding onto the seat and her dads straw hat. She said she knew immediately what had happened. As she came running up, her dad said something like “Well Brad, I think you got the hang of it”, she gave me one of those looks like only you women can do and ushered him off to the house.
That was about five years ago, the tractor story is told every Christmas. It has replaced the bull story and the time I got into “a disagreement” with one of her brothers (another story for another time). Everyone including my FIL laughs every time it’s brought up. Everyone except my wife who just keeps giving me that look……. Rule #2 must never be broken….
I went out to spread some rabbit manure yesterday, but it was too wet, so I started fiddling with the old John Deere B tractor and it started me thinking back to when I first got the tractor and how I ended up dragging an 84 y/o man through the field and almost got a divorce within minutes of each other. It makes me shiver just thinking about it.
This whole thing starts years ago. For some reason, my wife’s dairy farming family thinks I’m from the city. I lived on a dirt road, in a city smaller than they live in, but I’ve become known as a city slicker. It probably comes from the fact that when I was dangerously close to asking for my wife’s hand in marriage, my Father in Law asked me to help round up a wild bull. His plan was to have me stand in the trailer and get the bulls attention. When the bull came after me, I was supposed to swing out of the trailer and he and his son would close the trailer door and they’d take the bull to the stockyard. I was waiting for them to break out in smiles, but they didn’t. In fact, when I refused, they both told Kathy that I wouldn’t help them and she was mad at me for a couple of days after that.
Anyway, we have since patched things up and when my Father in Law heard I had some acreage, he offered me his old semi-retired John Deere B if I could get it to Alabama. A couple of months later I had a trailer up there ready to go. I have operated tractors, but not one that old, so I thought I’d better get a lesson. Well he showed me how to ease the hand clutch out and that I had to be careful with the brakes because they were on both sides of the tractor etc. etc. He took it out to the alfalfa field and told me to give it a try.
I got up in the seat, and was finding all the controls out and getting a feel when I hear behind me, “let er rip”. I looked and my octogenarian father in law is standing on the drawbar waiting for me to give the tractor a go. Talk about pressure!! Well first gear wasn’t bad, second was OK to, but I noticed the tractor was getting more sensitive when I let out the clutch. Then I heard the faithful words “OK lets try 5th gear”. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but I had flashbacks to the bull incident and resolved never to go through that much family ridicule again. I put the tractor into fifth gear and eased out the clutch, the tractor jerked and the front wheel rose about two feet in the air.
Now my wife has two rules in our house; Don’t Break the Kids, and Don’t Mess with My Daddy. I have broken the rule about the kids often and have survived, but our marriage was about to be tested on the second rule because I was dragging a daddy’s girl’s daddy around an alfalfa field just like I will be dragging the disc around the garden soon.
When the tractor reared up, his feet slipped off the drawbar and he started yelling. Now I haven’t been able to understand a whole lot of what he says just sitting in the living room, but I’m pretty sure he was going to have an interesting confession the next time it came around. I, in the meantime, had gone into full blown panic mode. I hit the right brake while trying to undo the hand clutch which seemed to be stuck, which made the tractor take a right turn and sent us off the lane and into the alfalfa. Now my Father in Law is not only cussing about his situation, but also about the crop I’m ruining.
Just as I’m finally getting the clutch unstuck and slowing the tractor down I heard a scream over the popping cylinders. It seems my wife wanting to capture a Father-In-Law/Son-In-Law moment decided to come out and take a picture. All she says she saw were my arms flailing, another set of hands holding onto the seat and her dads straw hat. She said she knew immediately what had happened. As she came running up, her dad said something like “Well Brad, I think you got the hang of it”, she gave me one of those looks like only you women can do and ushered him off to the house.
That was about five years ago, the tractor story is told every Christmas. It has replaced the bull story and the time I got into “a disagreement” with one of her brothers (another story for another time). Everyone including my FIL laughs every time it’s brought up. Everyone except my wife who just keeps giving me that look……. Rule #2 must never be broken….
posted by Brad Bachelor at 4:12 AM
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