The Little Ford That Pulled the Excavator Out

Brent climbed down off the excavator with his gloves in one hand, looked across the crossing at my little gray tractor, and laughed loud enough for the whole crew to hear it.

“Harold, you can park that thing in the yard and put petunias in the seat,” he said. “That’s not a tractor. That’s a lawn ornament.”

The two young men setting culvert forms laughed with him. Shane, the operator, smiled down at his boots and kept quiet.

My grandson Cole laughed too, the way a boy laughs when the men are laughing, and then he looked at me and stopped.

I didn’t say anything. I sat on the seat of my 1952 Ford 8N with the engine ticking over and let the words go past me like a truck on the county road.

That was a Tuesday afternoon in October, out on the creek bottom on my place in southeast South Dakota.

I farm eighty acres there, some hay ground and some pasture, and I run a dozen cow and calf pairs because I don’t know how to quit.

The creek cuts the place in two. For forty years we crossed it on an old corrugated pipe my father put in, with gravel packed over the top, and every spring the water ate a little more of it out from under us.

That summer the pipe finally rusted through. You could see daylight through the bottom of it.

My cattle were on the far side, and I was hauling hay over the crossing a bale at a time, holding my breath every trip.

My daughter Jenny married Brent Hollander nineteen years ago. Brent owns an excavating company out of Yankton.

He has eleven men on the payroll, four trucks, two skid steers, a dozer, and the big yellow excavator he bought new three years ago for a little over $300,000.

When Jenny told him the crossing was going, Brent said he would put in a new culvert at cost.

I want to say that plainly, because of what comes later. He didn’t have to do it. He fit it in between county jobs, and he brought his best operator.

So I was grateful. I was also seventy years old and sitting on a tractor my son-in-law had just called a lawn ornament in front of his crew and my grandson.

The 8N was my father’s. He bought it in the spring of 1952 from the Ford dealer in Freeman for a little over fourteen hundred dollars, and my mother cried because she thought they couldn’t afford it.

It plowed this ground until the 1970s, when we got a bigger tractor for the fieldwork.

After that it mowed the ditches, pulled the hay rake, scraped snow, dragged calves to the barn in blizzards, and started on the first pull more mornings than I have.

It weighs about 2,400 pounds with fluid in the rear tires. It has a four speed transmission, a six volt battery, and a seat that has been recovered three times, once by my late wife Ann with a piece of a feed sack and some upholstery tacks.