Chapter Five

If I Had a Dollar for Each and Every Rock I’ve Picked Up

I had a forty by forty foot garden all those years I farmed.  It started out smaller, of course.  It was south of my house, situated between the house and our white wooden machine shed. Beyond that building was our red pole building, a newer structure we had built.  We stored our tractors in that white shed, and the workbench was in that shed.  Barn swallows and pigeons shit on the tractors so much we had to cover the seats after getting up.  We used the same three burlap bags the whole time we farmed.  Finally we put up barriers to prevent the birds from nesting in there.

I could look out the south window in my kitchen and see up the hill to the back forty pastures and watch the dairy cattle graze.  In the morning I would watch out that window for Dave to leave the red pole building that housed our young stock and head to the barn, swinging empty buckets and know just about when he’d be in for breakfast.

The garden soil is very thin and full of rocks and bedrock is exposed in my yard, but not the in garden.  That was a plus.  I could spend hours roto tilling after Dave had run the disc over it in the spring.  We’d spread old crusty manure over it and then I would work it into the dirt, using shovels and a rake.  A disc is a farmer’s field tool, like a plow, but doesn’t go as deep.  The plow brings up big rocks, sometimes as large as small boulders, and we wanted to avoid that.  We used the disc to break up sod in an old hay field, and Dave could spend a day driving the tractor back and forth, crisscrossing that field and still the grass would grow. So finally we did buy a plow and probably used it three times: the only three times we needed to convert a hay field into a cornfield. And sometimes we would use a grass and weed killer.

The soil here in our area is littered with rocks left by the glaciers.  The soil was scraped off the earth, leaving exposed bedrock and cracks in the bedrock sometimes deep enough to reach the ground water.  This is not friendly farmland.  It’s great for orchards and there are several left from the old days.  Plant a cherry tree or apple tree and you don’t have to work that land for thirty years, which is easier than crop or dairy farming.  But what really happened is that most farms raised many kinds of crops.  Cherry, apple, and hay combined with dairy and maybe pigs or chickens provided a many layered income stream.  If one crop failed, all was not lost.  The farm wife usually had a job off the farm, and sometimes the farmer himself drove truck or school bus.  It was almost impossible to survive on farming alone.  I too had side jobs throughout the years we farmed.

Each spring we would wait until the soil was dry enough and then Dave would disc the fields to ready them for planting.  And a few times he would get anxious and go out early and get the tractor stuck in the mud.  One of our fields was next to a swamp; they call them wetlands now.  But they are really swamps.  In fact many of our fields lay next to the swamp around Peil Creek, which fed Kangaroo Lake.  They were hay-fields for just that reason.  Too wet to work in the spring. We learned the hard way.

One spring day after lunch, Dave went out with the large tractor, the Ford 5000, to pull the disc just lightly through the field, get a jump on the fieldwork.  He was excited to get out there.  Later he walked home from the field, his face dark and a cloud of anger following him. Stuck!  He needed me to follow him in the truck while he drove the smaller tractor and we would hitch the thick chains to the tractor and walk that baby out.  That’s what he kept saying.  That baby will just walk out of the mud.

So I dressed the kids and packed some apples and crackers and drove to the gray log cabin field, the name we had given it cause it was next to a gray log cabin.  It was a summer cabin, so no one was around most of the time, and no witnesses to our drama.

When we got there, I couldn’t believe that it would walk out of the mud.  The tires, close to five feet high were two thirds buried in the mud and the hole was full of water.  But, I didn’t know anything, as I was reminded again, and since I really didn’t, my feelings weren’t bruised. I trusted him, of course.  He backed the tractor and attached the chain to the frames.  This chain was thick, industrial, or rather, agricultural.  Each chain-link was about 3 or 4 inches long and heavy.  I waited until he had it all set.

Then he turned on the bigger tractor, explained how I should drive it out, explained how he would creep forward until the chain was taut and then on his signal we would both go in low gear and increase the rpms and give’er.  These tractors had a low and a high gear, with four forward gears in each one, so that we had a total of 8 forward gears.  Then he mentioned that the front end of the tractor I was driving might rise in the air, like a horse rearing up, and not to be alarmed.  I, of course, told him I would be fine.
And so the plan unfolded and all went as he said it would.  The tractors were roaring, the kids were hanging out of the truck window, watching and cheering us on, the sun was out, the breeze was chilly but the spring air smelled great and birds were everywhere.  I felt so at ease, sure of myself.  This tractor would walk out of the mud and we would all go on, happy.

And then, suddenly, the front wheels of my tractor popped up in the air.  Not inches, but feet.  Almost 4 feet in the air.  It happened so fast that I couldn’t shut the engine down fast enough.  I was shaking, terrified, and not expecting to see Dave  launch himself off the smaller tractor, screaming at me, waving his arms.  For a minute I actually thought he had been as worried as I about the tractor flipping over and pining me underneath.  As he got closer, I saw the look on his face, heard his words, and realized my mistake.  I was an idiot, and a suburban lazy person who didn’t know the meaning of work and couldn’t ever understand farming like he did, he told me.  But then, he wasn’t on that tractor.

So we didn’t get the tractor out of the mud that afternoon.  The next day he asked a neighbor to come and help him.  And of course, that was what he didn’t want to do.  Ask for help.  Show the neighbors he didn’t know how to farm.  His pride hung in the balance.  I learned years later that we should never have tried that stunt.  Hs got stuck only one other time, and this time it was worse.  He had learned some tricks by then, so getting that tractor out was easier.

Chapter Six