BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 56

APRIL 2012

DAVID

The museum, if you can call it that, is all but ready to go. I mounted the barbed wire collection and set up the Indian artifacts on loan from John Hoagland. The nineteenth century train replicas are in place. I have engineering map copies of the 1901 Mackay Branch and 1910 Aberdeen Branch, plus that of the Short Line of 1878 that ran from Utah to Montana (and still does)—they're on the wall. The County Historical Society provided early railroad photos and others ranging from cattle roundups to Sun Dances to street scenes to old agricultural methods—horse-drawn implements and primitive tractors. They offered to deliver some old equipment but I told them that space is limited. Maybe down the road, I said, if the museum takes off.

To the north of our family's old field, a John Deere tractor pulls a combination of implements that includes a disk and a grain drill. Twenty-four or thirty foot wide, by my estimate, it will plant and till the entire eighty acres in a single day—it took me a month to plow the equivalent the year I graduated high school.

Closer, across the road on our old farm, an International pulls a ripper, the driver's rows perfectly straight in a way mine never were—thank you GPS. His effort slips across the field so fast it hardly invites comparison to my own decades ago. The juxtaposed eras spark a question: how similar is this incongruence now assaulting me to that of the old timers I interacted with back in the day. Jack speaking about topping beets with a knife, Eldon about driving a team of horses with a buck rake. Change has come fast in the last century.

It's a sunny morning, but brisk. A low wind increases the chill, but on the trailer's east side with my coffee I'm shielded from its southwest influence and instead absorb the high desert sun. The tractor kicks up dust that trails behind it, its engine's sound varying as it moves through different soils and slopes. In places of extensive gravel the implement clangs as steel meets rock—blindfolded, I could draw a rudimentary map detailing where those stretches are. I remember the hidden rock ridges and cringe with muscle memory just like I did years before, hoping nothing breaks when the unyielding substances meet.

The driver has his phone in one hand, his other hand loose on the steering wheel. The tractor turns on my end of the field. He waves at me, GPS in full control. I marvel. Judgmental, I can't know how it is to always be connected through a phone. Or how it is to listen to whatever music you wish instead of that offered by two radio stations. How it is to have a comfortable cab temperature and not be sweating in an enclosed glass case, to pay no heed to the reach of the implements behind you—worrying if you're leaving a gap untilled or unplanted, fretting if you're overlapping a prior sweep through the field.

I can't compare our experiences, can't compare mine with those before me—those who drove smaller tractors or followed horses for hours through the day, who used a shovel to irrigate instead of moving a sprinkler line through the field. We are all bound by our context and few threads bridge the gaps between us. This generation of workers and farmers, from my perspective overly-connected, will probably consider the next flow of differences as strange and mysterious as I now adjudge the present flood of changes.

The ripper shanks pull away from me and a hundred yards out I hear a thump that matches a memory. It is a sound just slightly different—duller, with a deeper tone—than that which occurs when striking a rock. I know where it roughly is. A dozen times throughout the years, maybe more, I considered the possibility of treasure being buried there. Upon relating my notion to others, in a drunken moment at the end of a host of other drunken moments, I was a laughed at. "More likely a rusted chassis," said a fellow drinker, drawing laughs from all.

The cymbal-like cries of rock against metal disappear as the tractor follows a slope into a swale—a drain when we first bought the place. The engine lugs and the driver downshifts, the going rougher as the soil gets deeper. It may still be slightly too wet to work, but the hillsides, scraped to a more powdery, alkaline texture, are borderline dry, so in the statistical enterprise of farming the decision gets made to straddle the bell curve's cusps.

I should be attending to my mail. Multiple letters from administration in Coos Bay. Maybe I left prematurely, but I didn't leave in disgrace. Some medical businesses—bills or diagnoses or solicitations, it doesn't matter. I open an envelop from a literary magazine, 'The Partisan', read a form rejection for my essay 'When the Buddha Meets Rube Goldberg'. It was submitted online, so the form letter must be a holdover of past policy.

It occurred to me once to wallpaper a room with my rejection slips. The notion seemed funny but the idea wore thin. I can laugh at pain, but only so much. After reaching that tipping point, humor only makes it worse, doubly so.

I finish my coffee, go inside and grab some flyers to announce the museum opening next week. Blackfoot, Aberdeen, and the little towns in between will get a copy but my first stop is Springfield.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston