I just watched Oscar Jardine’s entire family go by in a fleet of trucks and combines yesterday and it suddenly occurred to me that all of his kids finally have drivers’ licenses. It’s a formality, I suppose, because they’ve been operating heavy equipment ever since they gave up short pants. We see a snowy egret out here on the Sideroad more often than we see a police cruiser, but it’s nice to know that they are finally operating within the system.
Child labour is a hot topic everywhere, not just on the farm. The farm safety people probably have no option but to say that kids should never operate machinery. We have become a risk-intolerant society. At school and on the street, kids are bubble-wrapped from the time they leave the womb until they finally break free of their parents’ clutches and take up hang-gliding in rocky mountain passes. Not everyone submits to the dictates of the nanny state. Marty Ebers has two pre-teens who wheel his backhoe up and down the back streets of Larkspur like they were on staff at the public works department. My wife was scandalized by this until her brother reminded her that she was driving a 60 hp hand clutch tractor before she had her first sleepover.
The whole point of teaching a kid to drive is to make him/her understand just how much damage you can do by moving your foot a half an inch at the wrong time. Most farmers will tell you the precise moment they absorbed and processed this thought. Oscar was 12 years old, running a wide-front loader tractor when his dad waved him over to pick up some pallets beside the silo. He watched his dad’s hand and his dad watched the pallets. Without either of them noticing, the outside tine of the loader passed the inside seam of Father’s coveralls and gently trapped his leg against the silo. There was no damage, but they both looked at each other and knew they had just had a very close call.
“Don’t tell your mother,” said his father and they went on with their day, but the moment was engraved on Oscar’s mind forever.
A scandalized female voice is an essential part of learning to assess risk. I had a friend, Andy, who drove the old farm truck into town a full two years before he got his license. His aunt spotted him sitting behind the wheel on the main street and went up on her hind legs like a startled mustang. “You have no business letting that boy drive in town!” she scolded his father, Ern, who was just coming out of the hardware store with a length of used garden hose.
Ern told her to mind her own business, hurled the bundle of hose into the back of the truck and banged the door shut. In his usual haste he failed to notice that he carried one loop of the hose into the cab with him around his right foot. As Andy pulled away, part of the hose must have dropped down from the box and caught under the rear tire. Ern went out the door like the little guy fired out of James Bond’s car with the ejection seat and tumbled up against a storefront window. Andy jerked to a halt. Ern got up and climbed back in the truck while at least a dozen people stood there open-mouthed.
“Don’t tell your mother!” he barked.
I reached my own moment of understanding while I was learning to drive a D-7 caterpillar bulldozer on a cattle station in the central plains of Australia when I was 18. (I had a learner’s permit for my motorcycle, but no other credentials.) The dozer had a top speed of only four miles an hour and there was only one farm building on a thousand acres, but I managed to hit that building on the first day. On Wednesday, I drove the dozer waist deep into a pond. On Friday, I ran into a cow and killed it. (The cow was a raving lunatic and had actually committed suicide by charging the blade, but the owner told the story loudly in the pub as if I had smacked into it without noticing.)
I assumed I was fired after the cow incident, but the farmer just said, “The only thing you haven’t hit is the house, mate. Would ya like to have a go at that now?”
In my letters home, I didn’t tell my mother.
- Dan Needles