The Girl on the Green Tractor
Ann Marie Potter
My father flew B-26s in Korea. A few years later, at forty-five, he was the oldest combat pilot in Vietnam, although he had been relegated to flying cargo during his final tour of duty. Reticent when sober, after a beer or two, he’d talk about fuel barrels exploding on the Da Nang airstrip and delivering humanitarian aid to South Vietnamese villagers–frightened, bellowing cattle shoved out of the belly of a C-130, destined to die upon impact with the rice crops below. In 1970, when the air force finally snipped his umbilical cord, my father trudged silently back to Pennsylvania to raise his own cattle. I have a picture of my dad, taken our first summer on the farm. He is sitting on a John Deere 2010 in the sturdy blue cotton trousers, work shirt, and decrepit leather boots that had become his new uniform. With his flight suit retired and his metals and ribbons stored away, he looked like a man whose wings had been clipped to the quick. He would stay drunk for the next thirty years.
Although that tractor represented the sad grounding of my father, it became the breeze that finally helped me get lift, albeit modest, out of the smothering quicksand that had been my early life. I was twelve or so when I could finally reach the clutch on that wonderful green and yellow machine. My father taught me how to operate the gears, time the brakes and clutch, and drag a rake around acres of mown hay, turning it to dry in the sun. In the years to come, I would spend hundreds of hours on a Deere, hauling implements and hay wagons. For a child, especially a girl-child with a stuttering sense of self, driving 5,054 pounds of machine was a confidence-infusing tonic.
*
John Deere began manufacturing tractors in 1918, machines that resembled gigantic blocks of metal strangling on a tangled clump of chains and rods. Advertised as a row-crop tractor, the 2010 was manufactured between 1960 and 1965 at the John Deere factory in Dubuque, Iowa. Faithful to Deere’s iconic image, the tractor was ryegrass green with a seat and wheel rims the color of wild mustard. A stag with a four-point rack leapt gracefully from the center of the steering wheel. The 2010 was a decade old when we moved onto the farm, but there would be another green and yellow tractor, and then another.
*
When John Deere was four years old, his father boarded a ship bound for England and was never seen again. The one piece of correspondence we have from William Rinold Deere indicates a tender father encouraging his children to be honest and kind to all. John’s mother, Sarah, took in seamstress work to support her five children, but anything beyond a rudimentary education was out of the question. At seventeen, John apprenticed himself to local blacksmith Captain Benjamin Lawrence. Deere’s biographers note that Lawrence was a strict master, but also a skilled teacher. John had found a surrogate father.
*
My father collected pickup trucks, implements, and tractors as if they were Matsen miniatures. Some we stored in our barn, a hundred-year-old heap of dark brown wood, rickety hay lofts, and petrified mouse droppings. Our big equipment, the dump trucks and larger tractors, we kept at my grandfather’s farm, an enclave of modern industrial buildings a half mile south of our place. I spent a lot of time on my grandfather’s farm. My horses were pastured there in the summer and I spent delicious afternoons riding trails cut through the woods. I fished for blue-gill in the pond. When my father was incapacitated by alcohol, I ran the auger that supplied grain to our herd of feeder steers.
For a man who had spent all his adult years in the cockpit of an airplane, my father had good instincts about farming. For a girl who had spent her whole life on military bases of concrete and tarmac, I seemed to have an affinity for it as well. Aside from the occasional popped clutch and crooked row, I handled the green and yellow beasts beautifully. As a small girl on a big tractor, I fantasized about the admiration of the grownups driving by the farm on Rt. 18. My father took on the more dangerous jobs like plowing and baling and moving equipment on the highway. He took on the ugly jobs, like spreading manure and dragging dead animals into quicklime pits in the pasture. I never saw him do it, but I can’t stop my mind from making pictures; my first pony, Old Red, scooped up in a front loader, belly bloated, stiff legs in the air; my Appaloosa stud colt, Little Joe, being drug to his grave on the end of a long chain.
*
In the 1820s, the Erie Canal succeeded in unplugging the arteries from inland agricultural centers to market ports like New York City. Welding economic success to patriotism, the American government encouraged aggressive, expanding, commercialized agriculture. Farmers, once grateful to feed their families, were now being told that they needed to feed the world. The West offered free land and, by the end of the War of 1812, settlers were pouring westward like something sticky flowing from an overturned jug. By the 1850s, over two million people had moved into the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. The land resisted their advances, however, seemingly determined to shake them off like a new crop of fleas. The thick, coarse root systems of the prairie bluestem grass were impenetrable with the common plow. Most traditional farmers believed the iron plow poisoned the land and refused to use it. Instead, they resorted to using the unwieldy “prairie breaker,” a steel and wood plow so heavy it took three oxen to pull it. A farmer couldn’t hope to bring more than eight acres under cultivation with this archaic equipment, a heartbreaking realization for a man who had dreamed of golden grain as far as the eye could see.
*
As a hay crop, my father planted timothy mixed with birdsfoot trefoil. Timothy is a perennial bunchgrass with a single seed enclosed in an urn shaped husk. Trefoil is a non-bloating legume with clover leaf greenery and a seed pod tucked inside a bright yellow flower. Planted together, they create a thick, sweet-smelling fodder, the envy of cows, horses, and deer everywhere. My father would mow the hay in the morning, and I would rake in the afternoon in preparation for the baler. Each field took four to five hours to rake. It was hot, dirty, itchy work, but I loved it. My favorite hay field was across the road from my grandfather’s house. Surrounded on three sides by woods, it was the best place to watch for wild things. One summer I saw a sleeping white-tailed fawn secreted just inside the tree line. The air was always thick with birds and birdsong while the sucker-shrub undergrowth hid rabbits, raccoons, and foxes.
*
Gorgeous in autumn leaf and winter snow, Middlebury, Vermont, was a tiny town on the banks of Otter Creek. In retrospect, it was fortunate that John Deere’s smithy shop burned down twice and that he was in danger of going to prison over a $78.76 debt. These circumstances drove him west to the flatlands along the banks of the Mississippi, to the struggling settlement that would become Moline, Illinois. As one version of the story goes, John Deere walked past a pile of rubble and plucked out a broken steel saw. Taking it back to his blacksmith’s shop, he filed away the teeth and fashioned it into a plowshare, which he attached to a wrought iron moldboard. It didn’t look like much–a piece of highly polished metal attached to a hunk of wood–but the steel plow was a godsend to farmers desperate to bring more land under cultivation and improve their yields. It could be pulled by a single animal and, unlike other materials, polished steel self-scoured, meaning farmers no longer had to stop every few feet to scrape clumps of dirt and mud from the blade. In fact, the polished steel blade moved so easily and quickly through the sod that it became known as “the singing plow” for the slight whining sound it made. Manufacturing tens of thousands of his plows in the years to come, he would soon be known as “John Deere, the Plow King,” best remembered for the “Plow that Broke the Plains.”
*
John Deere and his wife, Damarius, put four of their nine children under the stubborn sod of Rock Island County, Illinois. Two-year-old Hiram shares a grave and a stone with his big brother Frances Albert. Seventeen-year-old Francis Alma rests with her infant sister, Mary. Of the five remaining children, four were daughters who were, as the era dictated, groomed for their wedding day. Charles, the only remaining son, was educated at the best schools in preparation for the day he would step into his father’s shoes at Deere and Company. He did so at the age of twenty-one.
*
One summer, my father drove his John Deere into the middle of a field and set the hay on fire. To this day, I don’t remember how my mother and I saved him and saved the tractor. I only remember her calling him a “drunken son-of-a-bitch” and my father’s sad attempts to stay on his feet in the freshly mowed timothy and trefoil.
*
The August 10, 1917, edition of The Oklahoma Farmer could be seen, in retrospect, as a recipe for impending disaster. An ad for the John Deere-Van Brunt grain drill admonished farmers that “Bare Spots are Costly. Make All Your Land Produce.” The Deere ad played on the long-cherished belief that increased crop yield was always the goal of good farming. Never dreaming that the American agricultural tradition could be anything but robust and self-sustaining, John Deere and those of his ilk provided farmers with the tools to claw their land to death. Not only did increased yield drive down prices, but refusal to let the land rest–to lie fallow between crops–exhausted the soil. Only seventeen years after the ad came out, much of the country would experience the “Most Costly Bare Spot” in U.S. history. When I lived and taught in Oklahoma, I made a practice of showing Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl to my students, many of whom are going into agricultural research and production. My father was a good farmer. He fallowed his fields on a rotation schedule and cooperated with the agricultural extension service to learn the best strategies to leave the least impact on the land. I don’t mind being one more voice preaching for thoughtful farming practices.
*
John Deere’s official portrait seems designed to terrify. When describing his glaring visage, stern is an understatement. The encapsulation of the wrath of God would be more accurate. This was common in nineteenth-century portraiture. At times this can be attributed to poor dentition. More often, however, it is owing to the fact that portrait painting was the offspring of fine art and there were remarkably few Mona Lisas in the bunch. Additionally, we must factor in the Puritan mindset that big smiles were considered uncouth and indecorous, possibly even a sign of madness, lewdness, or drunkenness. In the end, we can assume nothing about John Deere’s character or temperament by studying his death-ray countenance. His last will and testament, however, suggests that John Deere was a thoughtful father who “endeavored to deal justly and fairly by all my children.” His daughters Ellen, Emma, Jeanette, and Alice received long lists of properties, stocks and bonds, and cash. Charles was willed “an advantageous position in my business, so that he is not only above wants, but has an abundance of this world’s goods.” John Deere died on May 17, 1886, at the age of eighty-two. Black drapes covered the factory windows as Moline shrouded itself in mourning.
*
My father died on May 4, 2009, at the age of eighty-three. My mother kept him on the farm until the last possible moment, but liver cancer plays hardball at the end. I’m glad that he was gone when it came time to sell the farms. The livestock was long gone, the dogs furry memories, the cats living feral in the barn. My mother’s chickens were so old they were falling over dead in the front yard. My sister brought in a firm to auction off the equipment and vehicles. No doubt that included at least one green and yellow beast. I’m glad that my father wasn’t there to watch his barns empty out–his heart would have shriveled in his chest. I’m glad I wasn’t there to see his farms evaporate, acre by acre, cow by cow, tractor by tractor. I don’t think I could have stood it.
Parts of me know that my father was a profoundly damaged man who deeply wounded others in turn. But other parts of me were crazy about him. We wanted so much to bring some joy into his tortured life. If I could have him another day or two, I would take him on one of the John Deere factory tours in Moline, Illinois, or Waterloo, Iowa. He would get that curious, interested look on his face and he would fumble with his glasses so he could read the brochures. He’d chew on his ever-present wooden toothpick as we walked through the factory–no doubt a little stunned by the dizzying preponderance of ryegrass green and wild mustard yellow–and together we would see where our first–and last–green and yellow tractor had been born.
Ann Marie Potter
My father flew B-26s in Korea. A few years later, at forty-five, he was the oldest combat pilot in Vietnam, although he had been relegated to flying cargo during his final tour of duty. Reticent when sober, after a beer or two, he’d talk about fuel barrels exploding on the Da Nang airstrip and delivering humanitarian aid to South Vietnamese villagers–frightened, bellowing cattle shoved out of the belly of a C-130, destined to die upon impact with the rice crops below. In 1970, when the air force finally snipped his umbilical cord, my father trudged silently back to Pennsylvania to raise his own cattle. I have a picture of my dad, taken our first summer on the farm. He is sitting on a John Deere 2010 in the sturdy blue cotton trousers, work shirt, and decrepit leather boots that had become his new uniform. With his flight suit retired and his metals and ribbons stored away, he looked like a man whose wings had been clipped to the quick. He would stay drunk for the next thirty years.
Although that tractor represented the sad grounding of my father, it became the breeze that finally helped me get lift, albeit modest, out of the smothering quicksand that had been my early life. I was twelve or so when I could finally reach the clutch on that wonderful green and yellow machine. My father taught me how to operate the gears, time the brakes and clutch, and drag a rake around acres of mown hay, turning it to dry in the sun. In the years to come, I would spend hundreds of hours on a Deere, hauling implements and hay wagons. For a child, especially a girl-child with a stuttering sense of self, driving 5,054 pounds of machine was a confidence-infusing tonic.
*
John Deere began manufacturing tractors in 1918, machines that resembled gigantic blocks of metal strangling on a tangled clump of chains and rods. Advertised as a row-crop tractor, the 2010 was manufactured between 1960 and 1965 at the John Deere factory in Dubuque, Iowa. Faithful to Deere’s iconic image, the tractor was ryegrass green with a seat and wheel rims the color of wild mustard. A stag with a four-point rack leapt gracefully from the center of the steering wheel. The 2010 was a decade old when we moved onto the farm, but there would be another green and yellow tractor, and then another.
*
When John Deere was four years old, his father boarded a ship bound for England and was never seen again. The one piece of correspondence we have from William Rinold Deere indicates a tender father encouraging his children to be honest and kind to all. John’s mother, Sarah, took in seamstress work to support her five children, but anything beyond a rudimentary education was out of the question. At seventeen, John apprenticed himself to local blacksmith Captain Benjamin Lawrence. Deere’s biographers note that Lawrence was a strict master, but also a skilled teacher. John had found a surrogate father.
*
My father collected pickup trucks, implements, and tractors as if they were Matsen miniatures. Some we stored in our barn, a hundred-year-old heap of dark brown wood, rickety hay lofts, and petrified mouse droppings. Our big equipment, the dump trucks and larger tractors, we kept at my grandfather’s farm, an enclave of modern industrial buildings a half mile south of our place. I spent a lot of time on my grandfather’s farm. My horses were pastured there in the summer and I spent delicious afternoons riding trails cut through the woods. I fished for blue-gill in the pond. When my father was incapacitated by alcohol, I ran the auger that supplied grain to our herd of feeder steers.
For a man who had spent all his adult years in the cockpit of an airplane, my father had good instincts about farming. For a girl who had spent her whole life on military bases of concrete and tarmac, I seemed to have an affinity for it as well. Aside from the occasional popped clutch and crooked row, I handled the green and yellow beasts beautifully. As a small girl on a big tractor, I fantasized about the admiration of the grownups driving by the farm on Rt. 18. My father took on the more dangerous jobs like plowing and baling and moving equipment on the highway. He took on the ugly jobs, like spreading manure and dragging dead animals into quicklime pits in the pasture. I never saw him do it, but I can’t stop my mind from making pictures; my first pony, Old Red, scooped up in a front loader, belly bloated, stiff legs in the air; my Appaloosa stud colt, Little Joe, being drug to his grave on the end of a long chain.
*
In the 1820s, the Erie Canal succeeded in unplugging the arteries from inland agricultural centers to market ports like New York City. Welding economic success to patriotism, the American government encouraged aggressive, expanding, commercialized agriculture. Farmers, once grateful to feed their families, were now being told that they needed to feed the world. The West offered free land and, by the end of the War of 1812, settlers were pouring westward like something sticky flowing from an overturned jug. By the 1850s, over two million people had moved into the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. The land resisted their advances, however, seemingly determined to shake them off like a new crop of fleas. The thick, coarse root systems of the prairie bluestem grass were impenetrable with the common plow. Most traditional farmers believed the iron plow poisoned the land and refused to use it. Instead, they resorted to using the unwieldy “prairie breaker,” a steel and wood plow so heavy it took three oxen to pull it. A farmer couldn’t hope to bring more than eight acres under cultivation with this archaic equipment, a heartbreaking realization for a man who had dreamed of golden grain as far as the eye could see.
*
As a hay crop, my father planted timothy mixed with birdsfoot trefoil. Timothy is a perennial bunchgrass with a single seed enclosed in an urn shaped husk. Trefoil is a non-bloating legume with clover leaf greenery and a seed pod tucked inside a bright yellow flower. Planted together, they create a thick, sweet-smelling fodder, the envy of cows, horses, and deer everywhere. My father would mow the hay in the morning, and I would rake in the afternoon in preparation for the baler. Each field took four to five hours to rake. It was hot, dirty, itchy work, but I loved it. My favorite hay field was across the road from my grandfather’s house. Surrounded on three sides by woods, it was the best place to watch for wild things. One summer I saw a sleeping white-tailed fawn secreted just inside the tree line. The air was always thick with birds and birdsong while the sucker-shrub undergrowth hid rabbits, raccoons, and foxes.
*
Gorgeous in autumn leaf and winter snow, Middlebury, Vermont, was a tiny town on the banks of Otter Creek. In retrospect, it was fortunate that John Deere’s smithy shop burned down twice and that he was in danger of going to prison over a $78.76 debt. These circumstances drove him west to the flatlands along the banks of the Mississippi, to the struggling settlement that would become Moline, Illinois. As one version of the story goes, John Deere walked past a pile of rubble and plucked out a broken steel saw. Taking it back to his blacksmith’s shop, he filed away the teeth and fashioned it into a plowshare, which he attached to a wrought iron moldboard. It didn’t look like much–a piece of highly polished metal attached to a hunk of wood–but the steel plow was a godsend to farmers desperate to bring more land under cultivation and improve their yields. It could be pulled by a single animal and, unlike other materials, polished steel self-scoured, meaning farmers no longer had to stop every few feet to scrape clumps of dirt and mud from the blade. In fact, the polished steel blade moved so easily and quickly through the sod that it became known as “the singing plow” for the slight whining sound it made. Manufacturing tens of thousands of his plows in the years to come, he would soon be known as “John Deere, the Plow King,” best remembered for the “Plow that Broke the Plains.”
*
John Deere and his wife, Damarius, put four of their nine children under the stubborn sod of Rock Island County, Illinois. Two-year-old Hiram shares a grave and a stone with his big brother Frances Albert. Seventeen-year-old Francis Alma rests with her infant sister, Mary. Of the five remaining children, four were daughters who were, as the era dictated, groomed for their wedding day. Charles, the only remaining son, was educated at the best schools in preparation for the day he would step into his father’s shoes at Deere and Company. He did so at the age of twenty-one.
*
One summer, my father drove his John Deere into the middle of a field and set the hay on fire. To this day, I don’t remember how my mother and I saved him and saved the tractor. I only remember her calling him a “drunken son-of-a-bitch” and my father’s sad attempts to stay on his feet in the freshly mowed timothy and trefoil.
*
The August 10, 1917, edition of The Oklahoma Farmer could be seen, in retrospect, as a recipe for impending disaster. An ad for the John Deere-Van Brunt grain drill admonished farmers that “Bare Spots are Costly. Make All Your Land Produce.” The Deere ad played on the long-cherished belief that increased crop yield was always the goal of good farming. Never dreaming that the American agricultural tradition could be anything but robust and self-sustaining, John Deere and those of his ilk provided farmers with the tools to claw their land to death. Not only did increased yield drive down prices, but refusal to let the land rest–to lie fallow between crops–exhausted the soil. Only seventeen years after the ad came out, much of the country would experience the “Most Costly Bare Spot” in U.S. history. When I lived and taught in Oklahoma, I made a practice of showing Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl to my students, many of whom are going into agricultural research and production. My father was a good farmer. He fallowed his fields on a rotation schedule and cooperated with the agricultural extension service to learn the best strategies to leave the least impact on the land. I don’t mind being one more voice preaching for thoughtful farming practices.
*
John Deere’s official portrait seems designed to terrify. When describing his glaring visage, stern is an understatement. The encapsulation of the wrath of God would be more accurate. This was common in nineteenth-century portraiture. At times this can be attributed to poor dentition. More often, however, it is owing to the fact that portrait painting was the offspring of fine art and there were remarkably few Mona Lisas in the bunch. Additionally, we must factor in the Puritan mindset that big smiles were considered uncouth and indecorous, possibly even a sign of madness, lewdness, or drunkenness. In the end, we can assume nothing about John Deere’s character or temperament by studying his death-ray countenance. His last will and testament, however, suggests that John Deere was a thoughtful father who “endeavored to deal justly and fairly by all my children.” His daughters Ellen, Emma, Jeanette, and Alice received long lists of properties, stocks and bonds, and cash. Charles was willed “an advantageous position in my business, so that he is not only above wants, but has an abundance of this world’s goods.” John Deere died on May 17, 1886, at the age of eighty-two. Black drapes covered the factory windows as Moline shrouded itself in mourning.
*
My father died on May 4, 2009, at the age of eighty-three. My mother kept him on the farm until the last possible moment, but liver cancer plays hardball at the end. I’m glad that he was gone when it came time to sell the farms. The livestock was long gone, the dogs furry memories, the cats living feral in the barn. My mother’s chickens were so old they were falling over dead in the front yard. My sister brought in a firm to auction off the equipment and vehicles. No doubt that included at least one green and yellow beast. I’m glad that my father wasn’t there to watch his barns empty out–his heart would have shriveled in his chest. I’m glad I wasn’t there to see his farms evaporate, acre by acre, cow by cow, tractor by tractor. I don’t think I could have stood it.
Parts of me know that my father was a profoundly damaged man who deeply wounded others in turn. But other parts of me were crazy about him. We wanted so much to bring some joy into his tortured life. If I could have him another day or two, I would take him on one of the John Deere factory tours in Moline, Illinois, or Waterloo, Iowa. He would get that curious, interested look on his face and he would fumble with his glasses so he could read the brochures. He’d chew on his ever-present wooden toothpick as we walked through the factory–no doubt a little stunned by the dizzying preponderance of ryegrass green and wild mustard yellow–and together we would see where our first–and last–green and yellow tractor had been born.