Tractor rides

A Montana man and his tractor and we remember the things that could've ended really poorly

One of these days I will acquire a tractor. Before I do, though, I should probably move out of suburbia and to a place like Montana.

Me on my Grandpa’s tractor many moons ago. Don’t you agree I need one?

Until then, my very suburban morning walks are getting 5-stars these days, thanks in large part to them being phone-free. It’s incomprehensible how many more birds sing and fly overhead when I don’t bring my phone. We’re having an unseasonably dry winter, one upside of which is that I’ve been able to quite possibly trespass on a new section of trail they’re working on by the lake near my house.

I get out fairly early, but not early enough to beat the construction man, so when I have to pass his truck, I try to look like I have all the business in the world being there. I haven’t technically trespassed to get to the trail, and it was only one time that I had to waltz right past the “TRAIL CLOSED” sign. There may have been other directions or fine print, but I wasn’t really paying attention.

The other day, a large tractor was blocking the entire trail, almost like it was there to deter people such as me. I was not deterred. As they say, there are more ways than one to skin a situation like this.

As I navigated my way around it, I started laughing out loud to myself at memories of tractor bucket rides offered by my grandfather to his many grandchildren. My Grandpa Burnett loved his tractor probably as much as Grandma loves her garden, and both may have loved the object of their affection more than their vast progeny. That’s saying A LOT.

Grandpa’s tractor was used to pull heavy things, like logs (not bodies—get your mind out of Dateline!) and push and move heavy things, like snow. And it was used for tractor rides. Maybe one of my relatives will chime in on the comments with the origin story of “tractor rides” as we called them, but by the time I was pre-teen and old enough to remember, here’s how they went:

1. Grandpa, garbed in his usual button-up shirt, suspenders, jeans, and hat, would drive his orange tractor out of the rustic shed where it occupied a place of sacred prominence.

2. As many grandkids as possible would clamor into the front bucket of the tractor. 4 or 6 kids seemed about right.

3. Grandpa would raise and lower the bucket, while tilting it unpredictably, down toward the ground, then backward toward his grinning face.

If you promise not to tell OSHA or gosh, maybe CPS would like to retroactively get involved here, I’ll add a little more color to the situation.

There was no age limit for which grandkids could get in the bucket. A parent representative of each child in the bucket often not present, which means an older cousin assumed responsibility for whichever much younger cousin they were holding. “Older” was a loose term. Ten years old seems about where the designation of “older” started, and the age at which you were old enough to be made liable for the safety of your, you know, two-year-old cousin who clambered in next to you.

Grandpa didn’t dumb down the ride for the younger ones. Oh no. No coddling for us! He rounded up, giving a ride the oldest grandkids in the bucket would enjoy. He perhaps forgot to factor in the additional, um, thrill these older kids got from clutching a small child WHILE clinging to the round “bar” (it wasn’t really a bar, just the fat part at the top of the bucket and something you tucked your arm over and squeezed as tight as possible).

Sometimes there wasn’t an older kid to hold on to a younger one, which is what we see here in the below photo. Would you just LOOK at those precious, tiny hands at the left side of the picture grasping the sharpish edge of the tractor bucket for dear life? I can’t be sure which of the two cousins it is—my money’s on Nathan or Russell. Whichever cousin it is, he has to be all of three years old. I guess that’s plenty old enough to take his life in his hands. In the olden days, kids were DRIVING tractors at three. You’ll be relieved to know that both Nathan and Russell are still with us today, happy and whole. Curiously, though, neither owns a tractor…

Anyway, mostly these tractor rides were really fun. They were also scary. Especially as Grandpa and his hearing aged, is was impossible for him to distinguish between shrieks of delight and those of terror. It all just sounded like a cacophony of joy to him over the roar of the tractor he loved. We never got all the way to terror, but I at least wondered what if we did? I also remember wondering if the pistons could fail, plummeting us all to the ground. They never did.

Since we asked for tractor rides at every opportunity—gluttons for punishment we were—he understandably assumed we loved them. We did. Mostly. There’s one picture I searched for and couldn’t find where a few smiles look a little on the thin side, and I can almost remember how tenuous my hold on a smaller cousin was. But hey, especially those of us raised in semi-rural Montana had to get our “kicks” where we could, including these tractor rides and stomping at cows in pastures.

To my knowledge, no grandkid was ever lost in this make-your-own-theme-park experience. Many, many memories, though, were made. Even as we got older and potentially too cool for school in other arenas, we never got too cool for Grandpa’s tractor rides. Even as young adults, we asked for them. And even with our impressive maturity and strength, they could still be exhilarating affairs. Bonding affairs between cousins, too, and something we still all loved.

See how happy these cousins of mine look?

Probably because we adored the grandpa doing them. And we adored this among the other Bear Canyon traditions we made and shared as an extended family. And we adored having grandparents who gave their best efforts to just three things: their faith, music, and their large family. And their garden, and their tractor.

Isn’t life cool and aren’t people interesting? See you in the next one…