America and the Tractor Pull

It’s a cold, rainy spring morning, and in an effort to wake up and get some kind of motivation, I am thinking about the local fair, and the tractor pull. Don’t ask me why…maybe because a tractor rolled by the house here this morning and made it rumble like thunder. Kind of like the tractor pull.

Marian Dolan, 1931

You see, I’m a farm girl at heart. I was raised in the city, but my Grandma was the 4-H Queen of her day, and that’s apparently where my genetics come from. I ran our own little hobby farm for nearly ten years. Had lots of help, but it was getting as close to self-sufficient as you can be if you still have bills to pay.  When my marriage ended, working on a dairy farm that included housing was the best way to deal with raising 8 kids single handedly. By far the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had, working with the animals and the land was as grueling as it was beautiful. Immersed in life and the earth every day – does wonders for your constitution and outlook on life!

But the most impressive part of farming is the machinery! It’s huge, and strong and unyielding and impenetrable. It’s cold and unforgiving. It is raw power. I remember the first time I sat on the fender of a small John Deere tractor pulling a plow. I watched as the teeth sunk into the earth and as we were pulled forward by the power of this machine, the blades turned over the earth like black butter, folding the grass under and making the familiar furrows in the landscape. It was awe inspiring at the time, and over the course of the next few years it never ceased to amaze me, although becoming commonplace in the spring.

And going to the fair became something you did not just for the rides and the midway and funnel cakes. First of all, it was a day off!  It was for the farm machinery on display. It was for the vendors showing off the latest, greatest dairy chemicals. And in the evening, it was for the tractor pull!

Now, if you’ve never been to a tractor pull, think of it as a drag race for transformers weighed down by megaliths. It’s somewhat surreal, the noise, the roar, the smoke, and the visual power pulling a stone boat down the track until its front tires lift into the air, and the gears are whining. And then the front end drops to the ground, the engine slows and the back wheels stop churning up the sandy track. The track hands run out and check the official measure, unhitch the stone boat and the tractor drives away to the cheers of the crowd.

And in the case of the unmodified tractors, after the festivities, they are loaded back up and taken back to the farm where they will once again spread manure, rip up soil, rake it smooth, pull the planters and the harvest equipment…just like always.

For the modifieds, well…these are the spoiled brats of tractors. They will just go back into the shop to be fine-tuned with very expensive parts and be primed for the next competition. They are tractors, all right – but they have never turned a wheel in the earth. They are a caricature of a tractor. The show and tell of all the flattering parts of a tractor: The power, the size, the weight, the roar, the tires…like a body building competition for machines. They don’t really DO anything but look pretty and show off.

Now my morning musings of fairs and tractor pulls is rudely interrupted by the news. Yes – it’s my fault for turning on my computer and reading my e-mail, but I clicked on the news link to read of the Presidents unintended “on-mic harsh words of criticism”  toward his Republican opponents.  If it weren’t so tragic I would have smiled, since in my opinion, I wished they would talk that way all the time, because then we would really know what they think, instead of cloaking everything in bullshit. I’m a writer, and I know how to do that, too.

But the part of me who is not bound by this planet; the part of me that will live on long after my body decides it’s all funned out, looks at this and all of the other world headlines and just  shakes its head. Silly people. What have you done? What are you doing? There are so many of you – and your leaders have made such foolish errors.

You are like a stone boat, being pulled along by the motor and muscle of a machine. Oh, you started out strong! You charged into the American landscape, roaring and growling, racing at speeds that gave that old stone boat quite a thrill ride. It’s not accustomed to going so fast! But the weights are shifting. The hydraulics are tilting, and the weight is getting heavier, and heavier. And instead of realizing we are near the end of the run, you step on the gas, pop the clutch again, stress every moving part in the engine. Ugly sounds emanate from the inside. Smoke begins to pour from crevices that are not supposed to smoke. The American Stone Boat has now hooked itself up to weights that are not ours – pulling the wars of other countries onto our weight stack. Our engine whines and groans, and we proudly sit in the cab and slam back the throttle once again. And the stones look about…have we stopped? There is a lot of noise coming from the front, but we don’t seem to be moving anymore.

What happens next?

You tell me, America.

Nobody’s happy anymore. The money is gone. All we do it bitch and whine at each other, divided into more than two parties politically, there is an animosity that precludes debate, because the problems in this nation have all become personal. And a debate is about issues – not the person defending an issue. We are full up with laws because we live in fear – of EVERYTHING! We fear each other, we fear our government, we fear our food for pete’s sake! I’m not sure why, because any one of the offending parties can be sued now and you could possible reap a tidy sum. We insure our insurance. The only solution we have to anything anymore is money, and we don’t have any.

No one wants to give up any of their comforts, but the hard cold fact is we can’t even afford our comforts anymore. I could go on, but suffice it to say it’s out of control and it cannot be fixed. That’s wishful thinking. It doesn’t matter if we have Republicans or Democrats in any office, it will just be a different way to screw it up some more. Somebody is going to get hurt no matter what. No one will be happy.

At some point, however, the show will be over. It will have to end. Time goes on, the world still turns, the sun will continue to rise and set – on this we can depend. But in another analogy, one could say we have reached terminal velocity. We’ve reached the end of the rainbow, and yes, it’s just a prismatic illusion. How will it end? No…the globe we ride on is plenty stable. Unless cosmic forces start lobbing stones at her, or she implodes from the inside, she’s a lot more stable than the inhabitants who are nobly trying to “save” her. She doesn’t need saving. Doubt that? Ask the residents of Louisiana, Japan or Australia if Mother Nature seems to be fatiguing with age or in need of our nursing services.

I’ve read with interest many different ideas on how the show will conclude, but none of them strike me as “the answer”. As if we could actually know. Hypotheses – that’s all they are. No matter what happens, it’s a death – an ending – and those tend to be painful.  I’ve had to ask myself, “How then shall we live?” 

What are people to do when the world they know disappears from underneath them? A part of Japan is understanding this in what is, globally speaking, a small way. How can I call that much devastation “small”? Because it’s not even in the news daily anymore. It’s been trumped by Libya’s problems and the American political process. It’s old news – yesterday’s newspaper in the bottom of the birdcage. The thrill is gone. The shock and awe is over. We are used to all major issues taking no longer to solve than the two-hour Hollywood version. My goodness, we tackled a global killer asteroid already in under two hours – what’s a little earthquake and Tsunami? Nope. We are like the rubber-neckers at a traffic accident. “Move along, people, there’s nothing to see here…”, as we get our glimpse of twisted metal and maybe even a blood-spattered car or limp body, and shake our head as we face the road again and head home. “Bummer, man.”

I like my denial as much as the next person, though. I sit here at my computer today, taking full advantage of things like weekend relaxing time, electricity, gasoline, the internet, my coffee maker, my cigarettes, the heat pouring out of the vent on my feet while the cold rain pelts the window. I’m looking forward to my warm shower, with store-bought soaps and shampoos and lotions. Warm food will be served when everyone awakens, and we will no doubt enjoy a movie sometime this weekend with our feet up on the ottoman and our butts comfy on the couch. I worked hard all week, and I’m tired, and I’m takin’ it easy today. This is my reality, and I’d certainly rather no one fuck with that.

Normal Rockwell - "Freedom from Fear"

But there is another parallel reality going on all around you. And it’s not nearly as rosy, but it’s just as real. And today I’m thinking about it. What to do? Now, I’m no fear monger – in fact, I would hope that anything that comes out of me would be the polar opposite of fear – because that’s what is killing us as I mentioned earlier. And fear is a global killer if ever there was one. Fear is what holds people hostage. It is freedom that I seek, and not the “American” kind of freedom, but the freedom of empowerment that I would seek to spread. The fact that we have the ability to reframe anything life throws at us in a different light.

Like the more humble – but still powerful –farm tractor, we could unhitch from the boat, and make our way back to the farm, and begin to do that which we were built to do: Cooperate with the land to bring forth that which sustains our families. Back to basics. One day, we may just find ourselves there – stripped of modern convenience, with money devoid of value. It has happened before. What do people do? They turn their eyes toward home. Suddenly, their family is all that matters. Their people. Their companions. Their pets. Their food and water and shelter and clothing. And that’s pretty much it.

But I’m afraid this time around, we are being pulled by a modified tractor. It just doesn’t know when to quit. It’s never spent a day in the hot sun, or the blowing snow, or the driving rain. It actually has no job at all but to look good at show time, and demonstrate for the crowd it’s oodles of useless and rather impractical power. It’s reminiscent of Buzz Lightyear before he realized he was just a toy. The flag has been waved, and the pull is over, but how long will it be before the big rig even notices? Once it realizes the show is over, where does it go? What does it do? It gets put in the shop for some very, very expensive repairs, in hopes of pulling again.

But I remember the first tractor pull I ever attended. It was just a little local affair in our small Wisconsin town, June Dairy Days to be precise. The local farmers each brought in their biggest toy, and hooked them up to a literal stone boat – not some hydraulic contraption. This was just a concrete drag, upon which the men of the town would hop on, one by one, as the tractor dragged it down the street. Pretty soon, there were more men than the Massey could pull. The men would laugh and shake hands and head back to their place lining the street for the neighbors Ford. This was the beginning of the Tractor Pulls.

For you see people, the show is over. Despite the rumblings and smoke coming from the front, we are now standing still. In the true spirit of the tractor pull, the power, though being manifest through the volume and roar of the tractors, actually lies within the men on the boat. Because while the tractor has the power to pull a stone boat just so far – it’s the men that ultimately stop it. And stopped it, we have.

Our lives will soon change, one way or the other; either we will be imprisoned on the stone boat, hostages to the crisis of who wants to fix the tractor here and now, who will pay for it and you “stones” aren’t going anywhere, because we need you for our redemption! Or we will hop off the boat.

Now that we are stopped, it would be a good time to dismount, shake hands and head back home to our families and our neighbors, risking a return to more primitive living conditions, with a chance for a government do-over of some sort. The Goliath in the street will be trailered up and shipped off for an overhaul – if anyone even finds it to be worth it.

I suppose the choice will be ours.