Tractor Pulls and Life

Usually my ninety-two-year-old dad and I talk about ideas—like how the invention of the telephone changed daily life and why some people think before they talk while others talk so they can think and whether the form of the sonnet enhances or constricts creativity.

But the other week, our topic was, of all things, tractor pulls. The evening before, the annual roar from the county fairgrounds down the street had bounced around my parents’ porch. But my experience had been more intimate. In an act of great love for a grandchild, I paid good money to sit in bleachers, maybe fifty feet from the track, cover my ears with my hands, and inhale exhaust gases mixed with the smells of all the fair foods—fried chicken, deep-fried Oreo, fried ice cream, fried mac and cheese, fried Snickers, fried pickle. And fried butter?

My dad has never parted with money for a tractor pull. But a few years ago, when his legs still took him on walks around town, he had heard the end-of-summer roar and walked down the sidewalk to watch through the fence.

This is a man who knew pre-tractor times. Back then, he was a plough boy on his father’s farm. Each evening, he pitched hay into the horses’ mangers and threw straw onto their stall floors.

His grandpa—who appreciated that horses recognized familiar faces and read human emotions and partnered in work—once told my dad that thousands of people could have the same model car, but thousands of people could not have the same horse.

Working with a tractor was different.

“With a tractor,” my dad told me once, “you’re out to get things down. With horses you settle in to be there for a while.”

And in this patient way, he worked behind draft horses with thick muscles and large hearts and powerful lungs.

But my dad, standing outside the fence of the fairgrounds, watched tractors that each used the power of more than a thousand of those horses.

And sitting with my grandson, I also watched as one tractor after the other thundered down the track. It seemed that they’d never run out of power, that they could go on forever. But with every tractor, the weight-box slid across the trailer. And the balance shifted until the sled dug into the ground and all that power ground to a halt.

“Kind of like life,” my dad said.

Which is exactly what I had thought as I sat on the bleachers with my lively grandson.

My dad and I fall into silence. We know each person’s place on the track—my grandson’s and mine and my dad’s.

But for all of us, the balance keeps shifting.