Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [25]
He thought for a moment. “Well. I really don’t see why not, if you want to.” He clucked as if there were some joke in his reply that only he understood. I was following him now as he led the horses and contraption down a sloping pasture from his barn. We came to a small opening in some trees, then entered a round field of dark, recently tilled earth completely surrounded by woods. “Just be careful not to fall forwards,” he said, handing me the reins. He smiled good-naturedly and ambled back toward the barn.
He was leaving already? He evidently had believed my line about the horses. I looked at the cultipacker and frowned. How heavy was the roller, if I should…?
Hesitantly, I stepped onto the perch. It was about big enough for my two feet and had no handrails. I wasn’t even moving yet, and already it was hard to keep my balance. Hesitantly, I uttered a feeble, “Giddyup.”
The cultipacker lurched forwards, and I went backwards. I almost fell off but managed to hunker down and grab the side of the platform with one hand. But doing so distorted the pull of the reins in my other hand, which the horses interpreted as a left-turn signal.
“Whoa!” I screamed.
The horses dutifully stopped. I rested a minute or two, closing my eyes and waiting for my heart to stop thumping. Eventually I mustered my will, stood up, and let the dread word escape my lips again: “Giddyup.” Preparing for the worst, I now planted my body on the platform in a rigid and slightly bent posture. Despite my intention to go straight through the center of the field, we were still turning left. Sharply. I tried to correct by pulling the reins far the other way. Now we were veering right. We were circling back to where we started from.
For several minutes, as I toyed with the reins, we jerked this way and that—any way but straight. The small ridges of the roller were etching most artistic patterns in the dirt. I was about to lose my patience…when I remembered something.
I had had similar trouble in my first lesson in driver’s ed.
The teacher back in my high-school class, as my car veered in and out of its lane, had given me a tip: keep your eyes on the middle distance. Emboldened with this memory, I gazed straight ahead about thirty feet, and at once the problem was corrected. I had reconceived the team as a long, ambling front hood.
Once I got the hang of it, cultipacking became quite satisfying. At the merest tug or click of the tongue, two hirsute animals weighing over half a ton each obeyed my every command, pulling a piece of farm equipment surely as heavy as themselves. The pace was slow and relaxing. The weather was idyllic. In the stillness of the wooded enclosure, imbued by a sense of accomplishment, my mood quietly soared. Man had triumphed over beast, mind over matter, and skill over stupidity.
In a couple of hours the two-acre field was cultipacked, Sylvan’s rows included. I felt pride in what I had achieved but disappointment that no one (except the horses) had witnessed it. I led the team back to the barn and turned them over to Sylvan. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“Once I got the hang of it, it was a lot of fun!”
His eyes began to roll, and I realized I probably shouldn’t have acted as though the job was not work. But there was an important truth to be found here: In our new life, mechanical skills I had previously acquired were not utterly worthless. Some, like steering a vehicle, could be readapted, shifted down to a lower horsepower.
Yet now Amos stood on my back stoop, gazing up at me plaintively and tempting me to shift back up again—to the speed and conveniences of the self-pumping ram. I had to admit our outdoor hand pump, quaint as it was, had some drawbacks. The joy of lugging heavy, sloshing buckets in and out