In southern places where weather permits, DOT mower tractors are out manicuring roadsides. Most of the machines are green with leaping deer in their logos. Their operators ride comfortably high in enclosed cabs, warning lights flashing. Behind them, blades swirl mercilessly under wide decks turning scrumpy, brown weeds into neatly mulched shoulders.
It must be good to be a tractor, perhaps especially as a ward of the state, beautifying in daylight, securely sheltered at night. Weekends and holidays off. Regular check-ups and oil changes. Time mostly spent trimming roadsides, as opposed to struggling across softened fields amid mushrooming dust clouds.
There’s some danger, of course. Weary drivers sometimes race up on a slow-moving mow-tractor traveling between work locations and ram it. A tragedy for man and machine.
Yet such encounters are rare. Most tractors on and off highways accumulate a requisite number of hours on their engines without incident and are retired. State-owned ones generally are auctioned off while still work-worthy, glory days behind them, but useful yet.
Coincidentally, after I came upon the roadside mowers last week, I passed an equipment auction yard just a mile or so farther down the road. Parked there were tractors similar to the mowing units. They shared space with dump trucks and cars, bailers and screw elevators, flatbed trailers and a lone converted school bus.
It was the tractors I eyed. I sure could use one of those. That I have no need for such a machine is irrelevant. Wanting was sufficient reason to ponder the idea.
In any event, the lined-up tractors struck me as forlorn. Once valued for their power and strength, they now were auction bait for weekend farmers. Their remaining years likely would be spent puttering around a poopy barnyard or pulling grandkids on a bale-filled wagon to and from a pond.
A few minutes later and a few miles farther along the highway, I witnessed the ultimate destiny of too many tractors. Next to an unpainted barn on the far side of a barbed-wire fence, a steel-wheeled tractor of an earlier era faced the highway. It wasn’t green. It was 100 percent rust-colored—frame, steel wheels, hood, steering column, engine housing… all a dull brown.
The tractor obviously had been positioned there for display. It was its own headstone, and announced to passersby, “Here rests a noble beast that clawed the ground at the behest of its master, pulled its weight and plenty more besides, roared as it plowed and disced, powered a timber saw with its side belt, and otherwise got jobs done.”
Rusting away at the side of a road isn’t exactly heraldic. It certainly is not the same as being restored and positioned in a museum or a town square park. Yet a roadside tribute is better than being shoved into a pasture ditch and altogether forgotten, half buried in rotted leaves. Or, worse yet, being dumped on its side in a scrap-metal yard, shorn of all dignity. Old tractors deserve better than that.