The Promise of Technology
The Promise of Technology
The Avant-Gardeners bought a tractor from a neighbor, obviously before they’d learned horse trading was a bloodsport down in this neck of the woods. What they’d learned from constant repair on their bespangled VW bus was mostly unhelpful on the Massey-Ferguson antique they’d acquired in a trade for some standing timber soon to be prostrate.
In the spring of their second year they bogged the Massey in a swampish corner of their property, buried it deep as a skunk cabbage root and burned up the clutch trying to free it. Another neighbor had a medium size Caterpillar and Zeke, the most outgoing of the group, propositioned him into a loan so that they could extricate their own tractor from the mud.
Many a good plan ‘aft gang awry’ as the bard once said, and the Avant-Gardeners ALWAYS did. Zeke powered up the borrowed diesel and off the crew went back into the tarpit where their prized tractor was slowly fossilizing. Jeremiah hopped aboard the Massey, the better to steer it across the muddy abyss, and Zeke pushed the Cat up against its rear tires. Later, no one could say why they pushed rather than, oh, say, pulled it out, but the Avant-Gardeners were never much for logic. Predictably, they drove the Cat into the same quagmire, and being, apparently, slow learners, promptly burned up the neighbor’s Cat engine trying to cross the wetland.
Much breast beating and self-deprecating curses ensued. Too embarrassed to admit to their neighbor they’d ruined his loaner, they decided to overhaul the engine, restore it to almost new condition and return it without comment. So they tore that diesel down. Without the Idiot Repair Guide for D-5’s. Needless to say, the spring became the summer, summer fall, fall to winter. They finally located the parts, the tools, the expertise to rebuild that baby and when spring rolled around once more they torqued down the last of the head bolts, put the key in the ignition and turned it ON.
Oh the joy! when that diesel caught, jumped to life and ran like a spring mule. For about 4 minutes…. Until the engine seized. The boys recovered finally from stunned and deflated silence. Ralph, coming down from the house at the celebratory sounds of moments earlier, asked if anyone had filled the crankcase with oil.
It wouldn’t take a year to rebuild the engine the second time. Only a month. And they remembered to add the oil too! They parked the Cat in the neighbor’s barn and neither ever said a word at its one year absence. The Massey-Ferguson never left its muddy grave and if you know where to look, even today you can find, down past the brook that only runs in spring and winter, the shadow of the thing beneath a salmonberry thicket, its rusty muffler pipe poking skyward, a not so subtle reminder that technology isn’t everyone’s friend. Certainly not the Avant-Gardeners’.
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