Girls don't drive tractors....

If Friday night football, yellow and orange tinted leaves and a slower growing lawn wasn’t enough to tip you off, you should know by the cool weather that fall is upon us. This means a whole slew of harvesting on local farms. Farmers wrapped up the hay crop and a few are trying out the corn head on the chopper, I see. It won’t be too much longer and the soybeans will be buzzing through the combines, then the corn.

With all the field work to do on a farm, it’s surprising I never really learned how to drive a tractor very well. Actually, I’m a little scared of the whole idea. You see, where I grew up, driving a tractor can be dangerous work. I hated the steep side hills. We only had one flat field on the whole farm, so there weren’t too many good places to teach a girl to drive. It also didn’t help that our fleet consisted mainly of battered Farmalls. Steering and brakes could be iffy, not good for inexperienced operators.

I guess I remember the accidents at home more than the easy drives. Two really stick out in my mind. The first was when I was very little and my dad tipped a nearly full chopper box over on a side hill. Luckily, the tongue gave in and the tractor was left upright. In the second incident, my dad took a ride down a snowy hill and landed in a ditch when the hydraulics gave on a tractor in January. It was a bumpy ride, but he made the right decision not to try and jump. Just recently my brother took a ride down our sloped driveway on a wild tractor. He climbed a hill off to the side to stop before he went out into the road. Two wheels were in the air when he finally stopped, but no harm done.

So all these things flash through my mind whenever I get behind the wheel of a tractor. As I grip the wheel with blood rushing from my white hands, it almost gives me a panic attack. So I just avoided the whole thing until now. Nate is determined that I overcome my fear of tractor driving.

“You know, you could be doing this,” he said last week as I rode along with him cutting hay. And I probably could. It might take a little hypnotherapy, but I could do it.

I’m not a complete baby about farm equipment. I will drive the skidsteer, although I’m not very good at it. I don’t get a lot of practice. Last weekend, while all the other help was out of town, I helped Nate with chores. Saturday morning I insisted he let me load the corn silage into the TMR mixer. It took a while. The problem with that is there’s just too many things going on: hand controls, two foot pedals, etc. I have to think about every move I make. Right foot, lift the bucket...oops, must be left. Tilt the bucket down, move forward, a little turn to the right, bucket back up. Back out. Repeat.

After a few trips back and forth, I started to do two things at once. But it’s going to be a long time before I’m a very smooth operator. Luckily, Nate was pretty patient with me, considering he’s not generally a patient person. However, that night when it was time to load feed again, I let him do it. Then it would get done before dark.