Zen Tractors

I got an impromptu lesson on tractors today. Dave’s been getting the new muffler ready for the old blue tractor, and he got it, but I guess it cut out on him when he was out by the road on it. Anyway, he had his daddy come over and borrow one of the Perkins boy’s big old tractors to tow the old blue one back to the barn.
I was coming up the driveway just as Dave was parking the big old red tractor facing the field by the barn. He jumped off, turned around, and walked back into the barn and didn’t notice that the tractor was still in gear and had started rolling and then running straight into the field.
“Dave! Hey Dave!” I yelled as I jumped out of the E-Z-Go and started sprinting after the driverless tractor careening through the field. It was a big old tractor that’s for sure.
Dave turned around and saw and started chasing it too. I started to laugh imaging what we must look like from a bird’s eye view- a big old red tractor running through the middle of the field with two silly white guys converging on it in a dead sprint. Dave’s cowboy boots never moved so fast, I’ve got to give it to him. He jumped up on in from the back, grabbed the reigns and got her stopped. I was laughing and out of breath, but still kept on laughing. It was great.
“That was great, like saddleing a horse from the back at a full sprint,” I teased him.
“Sure glad you hollor’d or the only thing stoppin’ that’ad be the woods.” Dave went to take the red tractor back and I went and talked with his daddy who was in the barn by the blue truck, laughing at us.

“How’s it goin’?”
“Jus’ fine,” and I sensed myself being perceived as the city slicker I appear to be by this old hardcore farming man.
We small talked for a bit, I introduced myself, “I’m Cole, Allan’s youngest,” and he mentioned about how he knew Pop real well, about what a fine character he was and everything. He said to tell Grandma hello and whatnot, and then he told me a story about how he had asked Pop one time if he could go up on the mountain and pick up some good sized rocks for his garden at home. Pop had said anytime he wanted he was welcome to, but he hadn’t quite had the chance to get a load of rocks yet. Well of course I got excited and asked him if he’d been to Labyrinth. He said he hadn’t but Dave had mentioned it, so I told him he should let Dave take him up there sometime because I can assure him that I, like himself, know how good this mountain is for finding good sized rocks.
“Oh yeah I’ve been rock hunting through here many a time. Good rock hunting up there, no doubt about it. “ I said.
I returned his story with a story about how when we were building the Labyrinth we’d go out and pick up rocks everyday. Well Pop didn’t really understand what we were building because he couldn’t make it out there on his own after his stroke. Sitting on his throne by the big picture window his imagination would try to piece it together, “I spent 50 years movin’ rocks outta these fields and now ya’ll are movin’ ‘em back in!” Good-naturedly of course. Don’t worry, Pop got to see the finished product and he approved and it put his mind to rest.
Dave’s daddy picked up on this instantly though and said, “That’s right, you young kids go ‘round screwing up everything we old folks worked so hard for,” still good naturedly of course.
“No no, we’re just excited about life, it’s that naïve innocence of the youth, right? You gotta screw something up to learn how to do it right, right?” I said defending all the stupid things young people have ever done with a big grin on my face.
Dave’s daddy actually put a foot up on the bushog and leaned back in his Liberty overalls and nodded his head, “Well ya gotta good point there, I’ll give that,” he said, nodding his head. And with that, the ice was broken, I was in.
“Yeah I hear Dave’s got ya’ll all conned, says ya’ll all think he’s top notch,” he was bullshitting with me. “Ya’ll don’t know the Dave I know’s I guess.”
‘Hey, we’re just looking for team players is all. Dave’s a good team player,” I bullshitted back with the old man.
I asked what he thought the trouble was with the old blue tractor with its brand new muffler. He started talking and walked around to the front of the tractor and then I realized he was expecting me to follow him because class was in session. I got the message and walked around next to him while he gave me a serious answer to my question.
Standing near the front end of the tractor in about 10 minutes he explained, “I figure since its probably been so long since the engine got cranked, rust particles an’ dirt and such probably sucked all that dredge into the filter and clogged it up,” pointing to the filter, “ and so there’s no fuel getting’ to the engine cause it can’t get through. If that’s the case, and I suspect it is, you gotta change to the filter here and then see if it works. If that’s not it then it might be your getting’ air in your line. To check that out you gotta unscrew these four lines,” tapping on the lines, “then tighten ‘em back on there once you see fuel comin’ out instead’a air. Now you should see bubbles, bubbles are ok but if there’s just air comin’ through you ain’t gettin’ enough fuel. Now she can run on two probably lines if she had to,” followed by slow, choppy, chunky engine fire sounds,” but what you really want is all four.”
Dave was back from returning the big old red tractor by this point and had a can of something he said he wanted to try. It was in an aerosol spray and he sprayed it on the engine exhaust, and tried to start it up again. From a distance even I could see that whatever he sprayed was full of fumes. When it hit the heat of the muffler the fumes mushroomed and it was almost overwhelming just standing in the barn.
“What’s that?” I asked as I turned around to get a breath of fresh air.
“Ether,” Dave’s daddy tells me with a smile on his face. “Ether’ll get just about anything to turn over if it’s gonna.”
“So it’s like an adrenal shot for the tractor?”
“That’s ‘bout right, adrenaline shot for the tractor. You spray some of that on the exhaust and get ready.” He chuckled, either at the adrenaline shot metaphor or the way the fumes sent me running.
I was in.

Well the ether didn’t work but the invisible fumes were so strong I see why it might have. We got back to the lay of the tractor and he gave me some more lessons. In my head all I could think about was how this moment I was in the middle of having corresponded almost exactly to Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I was about to launch into my, “Have you ever read a book called Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?” conversation like I usually do when this happens, but I curbed it and realized that might not be the best road, the best context for getting on the same wavelength as Dave’s daddy. Keep it simple, but try and make it sweet I thought.
“So all tractors are basically the same, but kinda different?” I asked.
“Yeah that’s ‘bout right. They all have the same functions, they all do the same things, they just each do it a little differently.”
“I see, that’s why each one is kind of unique. I can see how someone could really get into tractors,” I thought out loud as I remembered all the sweet tractors I’d seen on display during the Liberty Day Parade.
We kept talking while Dave started to do just what his daddy had told me he would have done in the five minutes before when Dave was down at the bridge taking the tractor back. I was laughing on the inside about how they didn’t say anything to each other about it, Dave just took the same steps to diagnose the problem. There were some strong father/son vibes coming through here. It was clear Dave had probably learned how to do this watching his daddy do it growing up, by no wits just second nature. This was universal tractor knowledge being shown to me I could tell, I was honored.
I still couldn’t stop thinking, “God this is just like Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” but I wasn’t about to bring it up. It’s funny because I love that book so much even though I see that I’m sometimes more like the antithesis character to the narrator. There’s the narrator who rides an old motorcycle that he maintains and runs and understands the process of completely by himself. It isn’t a fancy bike, but it’s a good one, a fine machine, and its just simple enough that when something’s wrong there’s a way to check all the connections and see where there’s a break in the overall functioning of the thing. There is an art to maintaining it and he has the knowledge and the right attitude to do so.
The other character is his best friend and his wife who go on road trips with him and his son. They ride a brand new, top of line BMW motorcycle. They buy the highest “quality” they think they can, but they don’t understand how the machine itself works. When something breaks they have to take it to a mechanic to fix it. When the handle bar starts to shift the narrator offers to fix the problem with a little piece of shim, or in other words a strip of aluminum from a beer can. The guy who drives the BMW bike doesn’t think using a beer can to fix his high priced, finely tuned machine is such a good idea. Maybe for an old beat up bike like the narrator’s, but not his BMW, no way.
That was a digression but I chuckle because here I am, the city slicker with a BMW in the driveway, talking to this good old boy, and he’s an old good old boy because his son Dave sure is a good old boy himself. I was thinking how much better Dave’s daddy looked in his Liberty overalls than I did in mine, but I didn’t tell him that.
Even though I’m the city clicker with the BMW in the driveway, and I will be the first to point out my shortcomings when it comes to that too, honest, I still respect the beauty of the functional systems of an engine, say a tractor engine for example.
“It all makes total sense once you have it explained to you, that’s pretty neat,” I commented out loud. When there was a pause in the lesson.
“Yup yup.”
This is where the narrator in Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance explains about the romantic versus the classic understanding or view of the motorcycle. On one hand there’s the romantic view, the idea of the cycle, the wind in your hair, taking turns, smooth and fluid actual experience of riding on a fully functioning motorcycle.
On the other hand is the classical view of the cycle, the schematics, the systems of systems that all come together in a hierarchy of sorts to each play their part in the overall functioning of the cycle. This is the sum of all parts perspective if you will, and there is a particular type of beauty to a well crafted machine there. An appreciation for the design. Even though each part of the bike- fuel line, filter, engine, steering wheel, whatever- are all doing something different, they have to all be doing what they are supposed to do properly in order for the overall, romantic view of the bike to be a reality. The romantic and the classic view are interdependent on each other. They both exist and both have to exist in any machine.
That’s why if the engine doesn’t start, there is a process, an art perhaps if you have the right attitude about it, to going back through the chain of things that needs to happen in order for the engine to start and see where there’s a dysfunctional link. How each individual goes about doing so is the art of diagnosing the problem. Whereas the narrator understands this and has the knowledge and the experience to do this himself, the other rider doesn’t have the knowledge to do so, he’s also a little caught up in the glam of the BMW logo and thinks he has to take it to a specialist. He also doesn’t have the right attitude to go about solving the problem himself because he gets caught up in gumption traps along the way. He would rather just pay someone who can do it right to it, but who exactly are these specialists? They’re mechanics that get paid to fix the same functioning systems that have to happen on any cycle, BMW or not, but they do it in the dealership’s garage, and that affords certain people peace of mind.
Well think about how well you take care of something when its your own, verses how well you’re likely to care of something if its not your own? Think about how you treat a rental car. Are you sure there isn’t more quality in doing it yourself? Maybe you do it ten times before you get it right, but the next time that same thing happens, you’ll already know what to do, maybe, but that’s more about gumption. You’ll have already put in your time learning from experience and will be able to make a higher quality diagnoses. That is what quality is, it’s the time you put into learning how your machine works.
I, by a chain of curious events, happen to look like the BMW guy, but I’m humble and shy about it, I know it’s my weakness. I never had the chance to learn from watching people fix tractors when I was growing up because I didn’t grow up on a farm having to fix tractors. I don’t know if Dave’s daddy sensed this or if it was a motion from one of those hidden determinants of human behavior we’ve been talking about, but when he wanted to teach me a thing or two I was happy to listen and he seemed pleased to inform me. I really did learn a lot in just a few minutes.
Dave checked the line up to the filter and there was definitely fuel getting to there, so he screwed that back. Then he went to the end of the fuel line on the other side of the filter, unscrewed it and left it open and tried to start it.
He walked around to the other side of the tractor to start it, “Ain’t nothin’ comin’ outta there is it?”
“Nope, sure ain’t.”
“Yup, it’sa filter,” and just like that he had it figured out.

The beauty of the classical view of the machine is that there is a universal idea about what has to happen to get the overall idea to exist. All the little ideas within the big Idea are not arbitrary or less important in anyway either, they all have to be good, beautiful ideas for the machine to work. The ideal, though invisible, is real nonetheless, and you can test against to see where the problem is. This is a good place to give the caution of the theory of relativity as proposed by Marx. Everything is relative but everything is not arbitrary, everything is relative to the beauty and truth of the Absolute, not to itself. Though invisible, the idea of a quality machine is real nonetheless. You can measure how close you are to it in your model of that perfect machine with things like how smoothly the engine is running. (Go read up on kinesiology with this in mind.)
In a way this is sort of like the body and optimum health. The body is always healing and regenerating itself at different intensities from the time of birth to the time of death, in relation to some sort of “whole” that it keeps trying to get back to. The universal “wholeness” of a healthy body and the way the body always tries to get back to in terms of healing and reorganizing itself can be scene as easily as you scratch yourself. You fall down and scrape your knee, what does your body do? It automatically scabs over and starts to regrow skin and heal itself, there’s nothing you can do about it. Though its rare for optimum health to be a living reality for people in a world that beats you down so often, it is important to keep your vision of the ideal wholeness of yourself in mind as a means of having a window to the absolute to keep track of yourself with. It is possible and worth trying to get close or as close as you can to that ideal vision of yourself. It needs fuel, or food and water and exercise, in order to function properly. On an emotional and psychological and spiritual level, it also needs fuel. Where the infinite potential of the human steps away from the machine metaphor is when you start to talk about what different sorts of fuels there are for body, mind, and spirit.
When the body is running smoothly you hardly even notice it, but when something gets hurt or diseased and the underlying form, the systems of connections and relationships of different functionary wholes, like organs, aren’t all functioning, then the whole isn’t working just right either and you begin to see symptoms. Cancer, for instance, is a cell within the body its self that just sort of goes haywire and grows out of control. A cancer cell is like a cell that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. If there’s a schizophrenic liver cell that thinks it’s a big toe cell instead, then what have you got? Well, you’ve got a big toe in your liver and that’s not good.
I don’t know what makes some cells go crazy and not others. It seems like such an in-house thing, but it must have some sort of outside cause you would think. Power lines, cigarettes, McDonalds, who knows? You know the symptom before you know the cause it seems like, but if you don’t trace back in the line of things and figure out what the root cause is, then your problem isn’t going to go away. Sure she can run on two lines, slow and chunky and choppy like, but what you really want is four. You don’t want to be just getting by on two, do you? If you ignore a problem or half-ass fix it and patch it up with a Band-Aid, that’s just poor quality and its going to effect your romantic experience down the line, sooner rather than later. If you repress things, psychologically or physically, they mutate behind the scenes and come back as bigger problems, and then it’s even harder to trace back to the root cause because of the mutation.
Optimum health, like a smooth running tractor engine, is a universal given you can test yourself against. Wholeness. If you were a whole, how whole do you think you are right now? Do you think you could be “wholer” if you tried? How would you try if you wanted to? I guess you’d have to notice your self, first, wouldn’t you? Notice how much of your self you can notice. How aware are you? How conscious of your whole self are you?
This makes perfectly rational sense, doesn’t it? This may sound “far-out” but really its rational, right? You saw all the idea systems there right? It makes sense that the sooner you work back to optimum health, the more healthier you are going to have the potential to be because the more root causes you are going to be able to find. Does this sound true? Did I really just learn all this from my tractor lesson today, or is that just the context that helped bring the universal knowledge and understanding I already contained within me to the surface? What are the human determinants of human behavior? That’s a fun one to think about.

Dave took the filter off and sure enough it was clogged solid. “Hope they still make ‘em for this ol’ tractor model. Don’t make no sense go up there on a Sunday afternoon, I’ll get it t’mmorow.”
“You didn’t know what you were getting’ yourself into offerin’ to fix this tractor did you?” I joked with Dave.
“Aw it’s always somethin’, jus' life on the farm s’all.”
He’s right, its just life on the farm, that’s all.