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By Root 356 0

rear wheels, so you rode high, with a clear field of vision. Rather than a foot pedal, the B model had a hand clutch consisting of a slender steel rod capped with a round ball—rather like a solid iron walking stick. To engage the clutch you fed the walking stick forward; when you wanted to stop you pulled it backward, and the works disengaged with a steel-drum ping! Dad and his neighbor Jerry shared the Johnny-Popper back and forth during haying season. One morning when I was nine years old I went out back to watch Dad rake hay. When he was done, he unhitched the rake and let me ride back with him. On the return trip, we came to the gate beside the twisted Norway pine. Dad got down from the tractor to open the gate as he always did, only this time after he swung it open he looked up at me and said, “Why don’t you take ’er through?” I still remember the offhand way he uttered the words, and how the adrenaline surged through me when I heard them. I realize now that he was probably anticipating my wide eyes.

The John Deere was a good starter tractor, because you didn’t have to reach any pedals. The tall hand clutch, the position of the steering wheel, and a broad steel deck between the seat and the steering column made it possible to operate from a standing position—in fact when I was older I often drove standing up, if only because I could fantasize that rather than some hayfield in Sampson Township, I was navigating the Mississippi in a Mark Twain paddle wheeler.

Back there at that gate, with the John Deere going pop…pop…pop at low idle, I addressed the wheel with knees trembling. Reaching down to the gear selector, I ran it through its cast iron maze and into first. Then, with one hand on the steering wheel and heart tripping, I pushed that hand clutch slowly, slowly ahead until sure enough the green machine was inching forward, and there I was, driving tractor. The gate was plenty wide, but I felt like I was piloting the Queen Mary through a checkout lane at the IGA. When I passed through—head swiveling left, right, left to make sure I hadn’t snapped the fence posts—I pinged the clutch out of gear with a combination of exhilaration and relief. Dad took the wheel back for the journey home, and I rode happily on his lap, still his small boy but much taller in my heart.

If you’re going to train your youngster in tractor driving, hay raking is a pretty good first assignment. The rake is a relatively simple machine for a relatively simple task. Because it is ground driven, there is no power takeoff in which to become entangled, and when the the tractor stops, the moving parts stop. Also there is the advantage of turning the novice loose in a wide open field. Plenty of room for error, and if the kid gets drifty, odds are the worst you’re gonna have is a windrow that wanders off course—as opposed, say, to a plow hooking forty feet of fence line, a cultivator ripping up half a row of corn, or a haybine trying to digest a pine tree. And because hayfields are dry by their nature, there is little risk of the kid freelancing and getting bogged in a mud hole. In short, it is tough to mis-rake hay. So for the nascent farm-hand, a Johnny-Popper hooked to a hay rake is the equivalent of training wheels.

By the time I was old enough to saddle up, Dad had replaced our original rake (a rusty monster with oversize steel carriage wheels and a fixed hitch in front and wobbly trailing wheels to the rear) with a New Holland Model 256 fresh off the lot. Just like the old rake, it was a ground-driven side-delivery edition, but it ran on small rubber tires and was painted deep red and bright yellow. After pulling the rake into the field, I would stand on the hitch that joined the tractor to the rake and spin the plastic-handled cranks that raised and lowered either end of the reel—the key was to run the teeth low enough so that they combed up all the hay but not so low that they were gouging dirt, in which case you were alerted by little clots of sod smacking the back of your head.

When you got everything set right and got to rolling, the