Parked Dust

Everything in a barn gathers dust. Equipment parked in here is subject to a gradual accumulation of dust. Years of sitting means the bright colors of antique tractors are muted, their showy paint jobs — the curlicues, the calligraphy and pin-striping — are all dim.

Dust doesn’t hurt the tractors — they are designed to run in it — but parked dust is different from field dust. Parked dust speaks of disuse.

A farm keeps old equipment because even if it is parked, it doesn’t need to be. It is in the barn because, to a degree, it is in working order, and should the highly unlikely scenario arise where we needed to plow the fields with a steam engine and wood fire, we could.

My father told me that our farm went directly from horses to petroleum. The massive steam engine parked in our barn came from elsewhere, and our farm rebuilt it. My father loved working on engines, and he believed that an important part of farming was preserving and demonstrating the ingenuity of (antique) farm equipment.

Today, we are clearing a path to the steam engine because we are towing her out — she has been sold. In order to get there, we have to roll other old equipment out of the way. Getting these engines to crank (start) is a time-consuming art form, so we quickly decide that I will steer the antique and Dean, my brother, will pull with a small modern tractor.

I shout, asking if there is a clutch; with old tractors, the clutch is often a lever. Or a brake? Going was the problem, not stopping, so most do not have obvious brakes.

My brother knows each of these oddball relics and their eccentric configurations. He shouts back and tells me not to worry and just to watch where I am going.

I am sure that, as he pulls a tractor into the sunlight, he is considering its beauty. But also I imagine that he is surveying his time. The time he spent — all those winters when they rebuilt them. The men who would gather because the resurrections were real. The bending, the welding, calculating, riveting — it’s all there, remembered in the physical form of the tractor.

He puts his hand on the massive rear wheel of the steam engine. “These wheels alone …” he says. The steel-cleated wheels are expertly covered with the tread of a modern tractor tire. “You have no idea how much went into these.”