December 9 2020: The farm awaits its blanket of snow
The strawberries are under their winter blanket of straw. The final CSA box has gone out the door. Machinery is parked in the pole barn with care, in hopes that spring sunshine soon will reach there. Workdays have gone down from 11-14 hours a day for the principals in summer to 35-40 hours for the winter crew. Everybody has weekends off (most of the time). There is even time for a nap in front of the woodstove stove. Before dinner…
The holiday season also brings a time for reflection. We love the music, the decorations, watching birds at the feeder and walking around our farm in the seasonal quietude Reflection normally is a good thing, a chance to contemplate. Usually some fundamental cosmic truth is revealed to the reflectee ( the person doing the reflecting..? ) from having the spare time to do all this serious contemplation .
That would be me.
I wish I could report that my time spent in deep thought post op shoulder surgery has revealed spiritual truths. Certainly my life has slowed down with both recovery and time of year. Truth is, I have been considering a particularly bad habit of the male gender, and that is the love of inanimate objects. It is manifested mostly is the love of ancient cars, guns, (for me guitars and old clocks) trucks, old tools, muscle cars and for a few of us involved in agriculture… elderly tractors and farm machinery. I love my old 2004 Toyota Tacoma. It’s small by current standards, the last of the small trucks manufactured by Toyota before American truck engineers decided we needed a behemoth to carry 2 Pee Wees and their hockey bags to Campion Arena . and we had to seat the family in absolute luxury while driving said truck, My little Toyota is a sensible little truck. I have put 130,000 miles on it and it hasn’t cost me any more money than 1 ball joint, a few batteries, tires, and a complete exhaust. I oil undercoat it, so it has little to no rust. It’s sixteen years old and it has a few dings, but not as many as my body. We are a good match. It has carried wood, parts from Townline Equipment, full gas cans to other elderly farm truckson this farm with non functional gas gauges, guitar amplifiers, groceries and an occasional bushel of broccoli. I love it. It likely well be running errands for the farm long after I am removed from service.
I love it because it’s a dependable and reasonably comfortable. (It’s not supposed to be as comfortable as a Lexus, it’s supposed to be a damn truck!) Also its easy and handy to put stuff in and out of. . I cant replace it, because the auto industry thinks it is too small and too obsolete. Now I am confronted with replacing my Toyota with something newer. I have the choice between Behemoth Truck Model #1 and Truck Model #2.
Model #1 has heated seats and a step up rail so you can actually get in the truck without carrying a step ladder. However, the body height and oversized tires will require that you carry a stepladder in the backseat because you wont be able to get your groceries out of the back of the truck without it. The truck comes with a small refinery because it gets about 8 mpg while running a motor that in 1978 would power a ten wheeled dump truck. The cab will be equipped with more electronic navigation and convenience electronics than I will ever have need, or actually figure how to utilize in my remaining lifetime. You wont be able to find a CD player, or — heaven forbid— a cassette tape player in amongst all the electronics. ( I know, the cassette tape player is a bit much, but hey, my old Toyota has one, and it listed for $20,000, not $55,000…) You cant buy a truck with manual lights or mirrors. It comes with a computer that barks at you every time you drive too close to a tree, or prematurely release your seatbelt. The computer needs to blink incessantly at you notifying that you will be needing an oil change in 12000 miles. (And it wont stop until you do. ) I half expect there is even an option buried somewhere in all the electronics to launch drone missiles or track movements of the Tajikistan National Army … but I cant get the screen and dashboard to stop notifying me about oil changes and the buzzers buzzing at me. And every truck is lined with fur. I have not seen so much fur since the Rich’s plaza had three flea market vendors hawking Velvet Elvis and Jesus portraiture. I don’t know about other work venues, but we don’t vacuum and shampoo the furry carpeting in our trucks. We scrape out the dirt, often with hand brooms and putty knives.
Model 2: This truck cleans out easily with the vinyl and rubber floor mats. You can get it with manual transmission or automatic. You can access the back of the body by reaching over and into the body, without stepladders. All mirrors and window rollers are manually operated. It has a relatively efficient smaller engine because you really don’t need your truck to pass an Aston Martin on the interstate. It is comfortable enough to get around your work area as long as you don’t have a regular need to drive nonstop to Kearny, Nebraska.. Finally, you wont have to use your home owners equity loan to replace tires on this truck. That is because truck Model #2 does not have the massive wheels and rims that visibly state you to be a bad ass inner city crack dealer.
However, you cant get Model #2 because its not made anymore. By anyone.
Tractors are marginally better. Try buying a tractor that is not tricked out like a man cave. There are more dials and switches in my new tractor cab than there are in the cockpit of a Boeing 737. The first thing to go will be the air conditioning controls in the cab…so that you either can be hermetically sealed in your tractor cab in 110 degree heat on a sunny late April day or you can take the doors off the cab. And so on… You get my sense of displeasure and lack of confidence in excessive use of electronics in tractors.
Yeah, so all this proves that I am just another grumpy, old, almost-septuagenarian; grumping on and on about the good old days. I plead guilty, but so doing I have come to understand why guys love old vehicles and bond with old inanimate objects. It’s because it’s a connection to a simpler time, where arguably the pace of planned obsolescence ran at a slower speed. Thing were designed and built to last. Tractors especially were designed to be fixable by ordinary mechanics and they were designed and built to last a long time. Your tractor could be fixed by any number of shops and mechanics and not need to have an envoy dispatched from the John Deere headquarters in Moline to be flown in to fix the computer lockout on your combine.
Here are a pair of tractors grew up with and learned to drive on. They could be considered my first car, I guess…
.I have two tractors at Edgewater that my father bought for our family dairy farm back in the mid 1950’s. I bought back my fathers old 2 cylinder John Deere Model 60 from Stevie Robertson in Bennington NH in 1994. He bought it at our farm dispersal in October of 1966. Dad originally chided me for buying it back, but when it finally arrived here at our farm , he allowed with a slight hint of a tear in his eye that he loved that tractor like an old friend. Yes, those two old tractors have done and continue to do a little work for us, spreading manure, planting corn on occasion , hauling wagons. But we could use other tractors more effortlessly and perhaps efficiently without them. But I won’t, and just spiritually can’t. For others…be it a ‘53 Chevy sedan, a 1979 Ford pickup, a 1974 Plymouth Fury or 1956 John Deere Model 60…we have this strange attachment to ancient iron.
I wont do the right thing, not in my lifetime. The correct business decision would be sell them to another collector and take the money and put it toward a carrot harvester. But I will continue to put some money into them, drive them around mostly recreationally now while doing very light work, and think of my Dad baling hay on the steep hillsides of my home town where that tractor should have never been. When I take it out on the road today and I get a whiff of the exhaust and feel the thump of those two pistons, I reconnect myself to the same thrill that I experienced as a 10 year old when my Dad had would have me me drive it back to the farm on my own. I will make disposing my Dad’s tractors be the responsibility of my son when I am not around to cry when they go down the road.
Local musician and farmer Jason Cann recorded a song about old things in life. I think this verse of his song resonates with many of us.
I got an old truck, its been lots of fun, But it got squirrely, and it got hard to run.
So I bought me a new truck, but its got no soul. So I fixed up the old truck, now it’s back on the road.
And so 2020 is coming to an end, to most people’s delight. And we are in a midst of the holiday season, and despite a pandemic I think there is still a lot of things to be positive about, and much to look forward to. Maybe your remembrances and reflections will not be about old machinery or inanimate objects that connect you to your past. But it is a holiday wish that we all look a little deeper into who we are , where we came from and where we maybe are going and ultimately be to be grateful for those experiences, memories and friends that have come before us. Be they old friends or those whom are old friends that are tractors.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from all of us at Edgewater Farm.
And may your holiday season and new year
be THIS joyous!