The Transgressive Joy of Tractors
by Gowan Batist
I have been farming for approaching 15 years, and before that work, I was a shop kid working in large industrial studios.
When I did metal fabrication for a living I wore ear protection, a particulate mask, a hair covering to keep it from burning or getting full of soot and particulate, or getting tangled in spinning hand pieces, eye protection with magnification lenses that could drop down over it, suction hoses at my hands, my elbows in support rests, and when working with valuable pieces, a lemel apron attached to the bench and clasped behind my back. It was like being in a space station.
I always wore earbud headphones under my bulky hearing protection.
At the time I was working in that intensely focused job, I was mourning the loss of my childhood best friend and first love, who had tragically died one early morning in the driving rain on Mendocino’s twisting roads. In order to do my job, I spent up to ten hours per day completely separated from other humans, unable to talk or hear, smothered in gear, with all our music and favorite audiobooks piped into my ears via headphones. Some days I cried literally all day while working, in the utter privacy of a loud and crowded shop. No one could see my face; I was unreachable.
Initially I found that work very freeing, but it went from cathartic to living burial very quickly. I became addicted to the weekends I spent volunteering on farms, with my hands in the dirt. The pure physicality and embodiment and ability to communicate was thrilling and grounding, and the immediate return between my actions and their obviously necessary result—food—cut through the existential floating and meaninglessness of grief. Is there any point to consciousness in a random and cruel world? I sure didn’t know, but I did know that the kids in the transitional housing program I gardened and cooked for would be hungry that day, the same as every day. The needs of the world of farming were understandable, immediate, and most importantly, able to be met. My own needs were none of those things.
Meeting a single practical need for another living being is a great antidote to the molecular drift of loss. On the farms I was increasingly involved in volunteering for, I could meet many dozens of them in a day, spreading water and compost for plants and food for humans behind me like the wake of a ship.
This is how my farming career started: a paradoxical crawling out of the grave into the dirt. It was also the mid ‘00s in Portland, Oregon, and farming was suddenly cool. The Omnivore’s Dilemma had been published, the French Laundry was popular, and it was suddenly fashionable to work in the fields, which shocked the hell out of me, having been decidedly uncool as a kid for doing all the same things. I realized a lot of the people working and volunteering had never done any of this before, and I had. I could save them hours of miserable effort with a small nudge, just by sharing a trick my grandpa had taught me as a small child. They appreciated this, and I soaked up feeling valuable in a new way.
Of course, because I was already a shop kid and had some experience with heavy equipment, when I stopped volunteering and actually made the jump to farm employee, I got put on tractors right away. There was a huge social, cultural, class, and usually racial difference between the long-time farm hands and the crews of idealistic volunteers on the farms I was on, and entering the heavy equipment world dropped me solidly into the farm hands’ camp.
My early teachers were maliciously disinterested in having a girl on their crew. For my first experience on one farm, I was put on a tractor so old all the symbols had long worn off the clutch. It was put in gear, and as the old farmhand stepped off it, he told me I had 500 row feet to learn to shift and turn. I learned fast out of spite and defiance and felt bitterly vindicated by their grudging respect.
Heavy equipment became another way that I was entombed in my work, with all vulnerable forms of information intake covered or filtered. I loved it. It felt good in the way that smashing bottles feels good. Like scratching a mosquito bite feels good. Like gossip. Toxic, powerful, transgressive, addictive—liberating as a fairly small person with hand injuries. On a tractor I weigh 7500 pounds of hydraulic powered metal. I can do anything. And no one can come near me.
Sure, I had male employees interact with the tractor shop for me because I was tired of being disrespected, condescended to, and ripped off, but when I was actually on the machine, it was a great equalizer.
I loved the roar, and I loved the feel of the work and its attendant smells and textures. Hydraulic oil and dust remind me of my grandpa. They feel safe and homey, even as I intellectually know they are dangerous. My Gramps loved me deeply and he taught me the things he thought would help me in life. He also collapsed every one of his vertebrae and had to support his chin in his hand, elbow propped on the dinner table, in order to sit up in his later years. He worked with dangerous tools and they hurt him, and he was in pain a lot as an old man.
The fact that I was using this tool to do what I consider to be objective good—clearing invasive brush, making compost, growing food—doesn’t mean that the tool itself is good. It’s powerful. It runs on the condensed blood of eons. Its skeleton is the same as the earth’s, torn loose and forged into a tool we can wear like a dress to dance in, but it’s not good. Purity, wholesome moral goodness, and fun don’t always go together.
In the last year, I spent much, much less time on the tractor. I was warned that being pregnant was not safe on the tractor. The one time I saddled up to move some wood chips, very slowly, across a flat field, my mom came running outside yelling at me. “You’re going to bounce that baby right out!” We hired an amazing operator who I’m very grateful for, but I have since had people assume that I never have been on a tractor myself.
I was reminded of Good Husbandry, Kristin Kimball’s book about her farming journey in which, after she was taken out of the field by having children, people assumed she’d never farmed at all. Interns even scoffed when it was mentioned. My face burned the entire way through those passages with a rage and grief that was finally being articulated in another woman’s words about farming.
As a butch woman, we have no cultural cache once we retire. Old men get to be oracular fonts of wisdom about farming long after their knees and eardrums have been consumed by their work. As a woman, the moment you are sidelined, aged out, injured, or caught in a growth area, your whole past competency is nullified. You have to carry the totality of your experience into every moment, and any weakness is holistically and immediately applied to the past, present, and future. I have even seen women do this to each other. A young intern spoke disdainfully about a woman who wrote a book about farming despite the fact that she “… only did the accounting and office work.” The author was elderly by the time she wrote her book, running the business after a long career in the field. She had made her bones by any stretch of the imagination in any field—if she had been a man. Because she was no longer in the field herself, her decades of experience were sneered at, presumed to be a fraud.
Today, my baby was entertained by our squad of farm grandmas while I covered for our tractor operator, who was out of town. Though I had done the specific job at hand for a decade, after a break filled with months of body-breaking and mind-altering child rearing, I was awkward and jerky when I first started the tractor. It felt uncomfortable, like shoes a size too big on rocky ground, slipping where I expected it to hold.
When I settled into the machine, started wearing it, everything changed. I felt the same thrum of power and connection and extension of will. The same smooth burn like a good whiskey. The same knowledge that this tool, while so powerful and so useful, is also a type of power that disconnects, that pollutes even with our fancy diesel particulate filter and efficient hydrostatic transmission, so different from the dinosaurs I was raised on. It’s still a tool that is the exact opposite of the tending tasks I spend my days doing now.
I can feel the sneer now, the disavowal of my competency, since my life isn’t on a tractor every day anymore. That’s okay. If the youngsters stick with it—which most don’t—they will understand someday.
Ultimately, I’m less and less interested in forcing patriarchy to respect me in the limited conditional ways it will as a woman in the trades. I’m less in love with the acetylene burn of heavy equipment and its paradoxically destructive creative potential. I recognize my attraction to it as part of my cultural indoctrination, and the way the tractor freed me from the limitations of my body as a diesel-soaked bandage on a wound I was avoiding—the work of healing.
I’m grateful for these skills and the work they can create. I don’t regret the time I spent on tractors, and I will use them in the future when appropriate. However, I’m no longer attached to being defined by them. I want to work, most of the time, with my mouth, ears, and eyes open and uncovered, my feet on the soil, and in the realm of human connection.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.