Lani got a John Deere 2010 -- a sturdy green tractor with a wide front end and lots of space between the seat and the steering wheel. John Deere tractors are designed for maximum driver comfort. I am sure there are other design features that are notable, but that's the one that I remember the most.The seats are soft and squishy, with a back that is cushioned. Her tractor was a diesel. It spent much of its life perched at the top of the hill so it could be roll started by just sitting on the seat and putting it in gear and pushing the clutch. By the time you got halfway down the driveway the smoke was puffing out of the muffler. I remember the sound perfectly because I still drive a Deere today. It's a deep, loud rumble that you can sing along with.
I got a Farmall C -- a tricycle tractor, red, with a fantastic turning radius (a tricycle can turn on one wheel), gas powered and made sometime in the 1940s, probably. It is the next size up from our all-time favorite Farmall B. This series of tractors was designed for vegetable farmers -- good clearance, very easy to see everything from where you sit, narrow tires so they can fit between the rows. The C had a bunch of implements that attached to the two arms on the back -- it was called a "two point hitch." It also had a Power Take-off (so did Lani's and hers had a Three Point Hitch, with a third arm behind the seat that made it possible to lift implements off the ground). It had a metal seat with a big spring under it, very comfortable but no back. The steering wheel was metal. There were three gears and reverse. Top speed probably fifteen miles per hour.
I loved my tractor. Lani loved her tractor. There were lots of differences between these tractors and we generally always felt that our own tractor was the best of the two. Mine was more elegant in so many ways. Hers had more versatility and power. Mine looked better. She thought hers was more attractive.
What really differentiated our tractors and their use was the mowers they powered. Lani's tractor did the bushhogging (rotary mower with big blades, powered by a PTO shaft, attached at three points) and mine did the sickle bar mowing. This is why I say my tractor was more elegant. Sickle bar mowing is an elegant activity that takes a lot of dexterity and skill and patience. Bushhogging is just driving around blasting everything to bits. Both are deeply satisfying. Sickle bar mowing is much harder.
The sickle bar mower that went with the C was attached at the two points behind the tractor, so it could be lifted off the ground with the hydraulics. That mower was used to mow down rye before baling. The rye had to be standing. If it had already fallen down, then it had to be bushhogged to bits. Not optimal. Much nicer to have long, not tangled stalks of rye.
On a hot dry day in May, out I would go with my tractor and mower to a field of rye. (Usually I had to drive on Route 7 to get there, since all the rye fields were between one and four miles away.) Gear shift in one hand, steering wheel in the other, one foot for the clutch, one foot for one of the two brake pedals. I would approach the first pass for mowing, straight on, and drop the mower and engage the PTO, all in motion. The sickle bar was seven feet long and it would ride just above the ground, its triangular teeth gnashing back and forth so fast I couldn't even see them. The blades had to be in motion as we entered the field or everything would get gummed up. Second gear was good. If all went well, we could just chomp our way around the field. If all went well, the rye would just fall gracefully behind us, all nice and neat. Then it would dry for a few days before I came back with the rake.
Of course everything didn't always go well. If I hit a big rock, one of the triangular blades could just break or pop off. Then I had to stop everything, pull the blade out of the mower, use a punch to remove the broken tooth, get a new tooth from the toolbox, use a hammer to smash the two soft little rivets into the holes and attach a new tooth. The hardest part was pulling the bar out of the mower and putting it back in. Everything had to be lined up just right. I was not an intuitive mechanic type. It would be many years before I met Jon and could give him all my mechanical tasks.
Mowing was so satisfying when it went well. Bad things happened all the time (most memorable was cutting the legs off a baby deer, that was awful) but there were many hours of happy bouncing through the fields, laying the rye or the grass down neatly.
After we stopped doing our own baling, my tractor stopped having so much purpose. It became a statue in front of the stand in Purcellville, just sitting out in the weather. We didn't know it, but that was the death of that tractor. A few years ago, we decided to bring my tractor back into the fold, but when Jon and Benjamin were doing some work on it they found that the block was cracked from water freezing in it. Alas.
Just the other day, Jon figured out what to do with my tractor. He convinced an incredibly dedicated mechanic who only works on International Harvesters to buy the tractor, even though it had a cracked block and was in pieces. He loaded it onto a trailer and drove it to Shippensburg, PA where he was retrieving another IH tractor of ours that had just had a major make-over. Jon got $1000 for my C. I hope the mechanic does bring it back to life and someone else can love it as much as I did.
This is my last view of the tractor that my father made me buy. It was a great purchase.
