Vine maples arched over trails in the woods in several places. The arches were formed by a half a dozen or so four to six inch vine maple trunks that started on one side of the path, rose up eight or ten feet and then descended again to the ground. Often, a single trunk was rooted on both sides of the arch. From base to base, the width of the arches were about double the height of the arch– sixteen to twenty feet. That was ample room for a cow to walk under and just high enough to drive under with a small tractor.
For no particular reason that I knew, Dad favored tractor routes through the woods that went under the arches, which may be the reason the arches went over the trails. Or maybe cows favored walking under vine maple arches because the arches came in handy for a good back scratch on the way through the woods. In any case, arches over trails were more frequent than would have occurred by chance.
The kids climbed all over them, jumped from them, and above all else, claimed them. Like many other things, vine maple arches have the ineffable independence from their surroundings that qualifies them as a fort. A vine maple arch could be a Sherwood Forest hide out, a guardhouse at Fort Apache, or the rampart of a crusader castle. They were ideal for planning ambushes and the famous confrontation between Robin Hood and Little John was reenacted time and time again by daredevils carrying quarterstaves and balancing themselves eight or ten feet above the hard ground on a tangle of vine maple trunks.
No one ever admitted to a broken a bone. but there were hard falls that knocked the wind out of a kid and scratches and scrapes beyond counting that were beneath notice. Of course, you must know that my cousins and I were a bunch of thugs who could not separate fun from physical peril. With that mindset, as danger went, vine maple arches were no worse than hay stacks, cedar trees, or even open pasture.
Trading Horses for Tractors
My dad traded the team of horses for a tractor. I don’t know exactly when, but it must have been shortly after the war. I remember riding on and even driving that first tractor, but that first Ford 8N or 9N was replaced before I started school. What I remember best about that first tractor was the starter, which was a big black rubber knob next to the steering wheel. On the next two tractors we owned the starter button was metal and next to the gear shift.
I learned to drive tractor sitting on Dad’s lap. The easiest tractor driving job was driving the tractor for the hay wagon picking up bales in the field. When I was old enough to wrestle bales up from the ground onto the wagon and no one was around to drive, we would put the tractor in the lowest gear and let it steer itself, running over and adjusting the steering wheel when it wandered too far astray. A little kid who could not even drag a bale was better than no driver at all, so I had to drive, but when I was big enough and strong enough, I was on the ground, wrestling bales onto the wagon.
Dad did not like horses, he said, although I never saw him happier than when he was working with animals. When he was growing up, he was always the first out of bed in the morning, going out to bring the horses into the horse barn and giving them a feed of grain, then harnessing them up for the day’s work in the fields. He resented his father and his brother who slept in and went out to milk the cows after he had been up for an hour. His mother had the best deal: she did not get up until even later to make breakfast, which was served after milking.
According to Dad, horses, unlike tractors, do not follow orders well. Turn the steering wheel right and the tractor turns right; pull the right reigns and the team will turn right if it feels like it. Dad claimed he never once had to catch a tractor to harness it up in the morning, but as the season wore on, the horses got better and better at avoiding the harness and Dad had to get up earlier each morning to get his breakfast before he had to start work in the fields.
Ah, but what about the warm relationship between man and beast? Dad would roll up his sleeve to show the scar on his upper arm where a big Belgian bit him so hard his arm was in a sling for a month.
Sometime after the war ended, a horse broker showed up and offered Grandpa a new Ford Ferguson tractor for the team and a few hundred dollars. Grandpa was not interested, but Dad spoke up. He was old enough to have a say in the running of the farm by then. Dad had looked at tractors and he liked the low, wide profile and 3 point hitch of the Ferguson’s and he knew the price was good. Grandpa had begun driving a car instead of a horse and buggy long ago and a tractor was not a new idea, so Dad was able to convince Grandpa to trade the horses. In an old notebook where Dad kept his accounts in those days, I discovered that Dad paid four hundred dollars for the tractor from his savings from odd jobs and the twenty dollar a month allowance that Grandpa gave him. Grandpa contributed the team, maybe more. The notebook did not say.
Field Corn Eight Inches Tall
We had a good rain today and yesterday. My renter’s field corn is doing well– it’s at least eight inches tall now. I planted my sweet corn later– dad always said sweet corn does better if it is planted after the soil is good and warm. Now that I am trying to grow a crop of sweet corn, I realize that I don’t know what “good and warm” means, but I waited two weeks after the field corn was planted to plant my sweet corn. We’ll see. The rain has brought on growth. I’ll be cultivating this weekend. It will be the third time already. I suspect I am over cultivating, but I don’t intend to use any herbicide and I don’t want to do any more hand hoeing than absolutely necessary.
I am not an organic farmer, but I avoid herbicides, pesticides, and cormmercial fertilizer. I am not an organic farmer because I reject reductionism. I do not make decisions based on slogans or rules of thumb. Some day, when I have a good reason, I may decide to use a pesticide. If I decide that, it will be because I have considered all the evidence and the consequences. On the whole, I think using pesticides and herbicides is a risky proposition, but there may be situations when not using them is even riskier. Rejecting those possibilities out-of-hand is irresponsible sloth, at least as bad as blindly accepting the self-serving claims of the chemical salesmen.