Whatever the sun touched, it turned to gold. Such is autumn in our part of the Wisconsin countryside, and nowhere more than beneath the canopy of a woodland thick with maple and oak trees. The path between the packing shed and the field winds through a woods like this. Traveling it each day provides a brief respite from our work, as well as a display of the seasonal magic that nature has to offer. In winter I ski through the bare trees to check on our dormant fields, a completely unnecessary task that I am diligent about accomplishing after a fresh snowfall. I am not a great skier, and it is a rutted, uneven path. I invariably fall on the steep jog down into the woods from the gravel road outside our shed where I start my trip. After I’ve gotten up and dusted the snow off my pants, I’ll continue along the rest of the trail which is all downhill to the field as well, but much less steep than the beginning. The trees have traded in their leaves for snow, which scatters off the branches in no particular pattern and floats silently down around me. It feels like being in a snow globe, especially when I find myself sprawled on the ground tangled in my skis suddenly and without warning, like my world has just been shaken by an overeager child. I prefer the magnitude of that image to the reality of the small rock or twig which actually sent me toppling over into a disheveled snow angel pose. On the way back, I slip, slide, penguin walk, or crawl up the path toward home.
In spring the woods surrounding the path is awash with purple flowers and the translucent green of the newborn leaves on the trees. The path itself is a mess of mud, making a golf cart ride akin to the MarioKart race course called “Moo Moo Meadows.” I think of this video game during the challenge of the uphill return from the field, and I relish the real-time rush of fishtailing my way through the mud holes on the track and then racing up the straightaway into the final hill before slamming on the brakes and skidding over the gravel to a complete stop at the finish line outside the packing shed. On the way out to the field, we often shout the Nintendo game’s opening tagline, “Here we go! Here we go!” as we plunge down the dirt road into the trees. Ralph has been known to toss a banana peel on the path from time to time, too, for added effect. Getting through the woods on the wettest days requires mastery of the art of fishtailing.
In summer the woods’ greatest gift is shade. We drive slowly through with our heavy loads of tomatoes and overflowing stacks of lettuce. There is no racing when we are carrying in the harvest because we are tired and because the ruts and the mud holes make it all too easy to spill the crates of vegetables. One rainy summer day I was hauling a load of potatoes home on our harvest wagon and on the steep spot coming out of the woods a stack of crates tipped and one spilled into the edge of the woods, landing in a patch of buckthorn. The rain poured down on Kristin and I as we knelt among the thorny brush, reharvesting the dumped taters, no less than fifty pounds of them. But it had been a good harvest that morning, with the remaining five or six hundred pounds having reached the pack shed safely, and we were in high spirits despite the mess. The rain and the mud and the buckthorn all mixed with the potatoes to make, if not exactly the highlight of our day, a lively, memorable sort of harvest. On summer nights, coyote song ripples through the trees, and I am glad to not be going through the woods then.
We did not always travel the woods in order to farm. The field beyond it was added to Old Plank Farm as rented land in our ninth season and with it came the shortcut beneath the trees that connected the two properties. The woods has been a part of our lives ever since and is where this story begins. It was autumn of that same season, and the leaves were starting to fade from gold to brown. We had turned our calendars to October a few days earlier and were heading into the final harvest month of the year. Autumn brings a welcome change to the rhythm of the farm. The work day is shorter, the restful nights longer, and the weeding done for another year. Harvesting, the most satisfying farm work, fills the end of our season. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, Brussels sprouts and cabbages are among the last of the crops a Wisconsin season provides for us. We compete with the frost to bring them in, a quiet urgency added to our work provided by mother nature’s reminder that nothing lasts forever and that she will claim any unharvested vegetables after a few hard freezes settle over the land. We bring a little in every day, trying to stay ahead of the dropping temps, the occasional snow flurries, our fingers freezing, and the pace of the falling leaves. Most of the late season vegetables are packed into the last few weeks of our CSA boxes, and the leftovers are squirreled away for the long winter ahead.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood critters are busy doing the same tasks, adding another layer of challenge to our own work when they set their sights on our prized pickings. They aren’t packing CSA boxes with the loot (although I wouldn’t put it past the crafty chipmunks, who most definitely are organized, possibly more than me), but they are fattening up for winter, gleaning, gorging, and storing whatever they can. Deer love to munch on our rutabagas or any late lettuce plantings, and field mice and voles nibble on sweet potatoes out in the field waiting to be dug. The chipmunks hang out around the packing shed, waiting for the opportune moment to swipe washed and ready-to-eat sweet potatoes. Pound for pound, no critter has ever given me more trouble than Alvin and his cohorts. One time we lost half a crate of the orange tubers in one night to one of these brash intruders (Ten pounds? Twenty pounds? I can’t say for sure but relative to the featherweight thief, he’d stolen a carload). That was back when we washed and packed vegetables in the old barn, where the doors and windows did not seal or latch. I don’t know where he put the pinched goods, but one day they were there and the next they were all gone, save a few crumbs at the bottom of the crate we’d mistakenly left out of our walk-in cooler. We set traps but the rascal evaded them, and eventually we got used to having him come into the barn while we were working and sit on the outskirts and boldly snack on a chunk of sweet potato.
Chipmunk battles aside, October is a grand time to be on the farm, with all its splendor and gratifying labor which shepherds in the repose of winter. I, however, was not full of the joys of a fall day at the moment, although I had come up through the woods a short while earlier, where a slick carpet of bronze leaves led me home. That afternoon I was mowing the field, prepping the retired gardens for fall plowing. A sweatshirt and jeans was enough to keep me warm that day. I don’t remember the weather being above average for the first week in October, but it must have been, because otherwise I would not have been warm enough with only a sweatshirt and jeans. But I know that’s all I was wearing, so I know it was an Indian Summer sort of day, perfect for being outside. But at present I sat inside, waiting, my phone open to the summons of a message. Evening tide had begun to wash away the day, turning the golden world to dusk before my eyes.
My mechanic, a friend named Scott who lived on the farm with his wife that season, was texting me. I had called him not long before but he hadn’t answered and I didn’t leave a message. “Did you break something?” his text read and then, without needing a reply to the question, continued, “I can fix it when I get back.” His confidence on this subject is warranted. He had, as far as I remember, fixed everything I’d broken since the time he moved onto my farm a couple of seasons earlier. He could patch cars together, tinker with tractors, weld cultivators shattered in my rocky ground, and tackle the toughest jobs a farm dishes up. Indeed, his confidence is warranted, and appreciated.
But this time it was not to be. I stared down at the message for a long time. After all, I wasn’t going anywhere soon. Sure did, I thought, but you’re not fixing it. I was more amused than I probably should have been, as if outdoing my mechanic was some sort of triumph, which it wasn’t. At my side, my disfigured right arm hung limp and useless.
***
The urgent care clinic in town displayed little urgency the evening of my accident. The crowd that was gathered in the waiting room resembled a daycare more than a doctors office. I suspect the large sign outside the clinic entrance announcing that it was “Get your Flu Shot Day” had something to do with the unexpected throng of happy, healthy children and their parents visiting at the very same time that I came in with my dangling, discolored appendage in tow.
At first I thought it was a bad bruise that was crippling my arm. I had walked away from the accident with my tractor, an Allis-Chalmers D-15--my smallest tractor at 45 horsepower--with a big brush mower mounted on back, with nary a scratch elsewhere. I was grateful to the stand of trees that broke the fall of the tractor. I managed to safely shut the machine down once it got caught in the trees and climb off before it had a chance to slide any further toward the side of the hill and into the short but steep dropoff to where our path meets the fork of an old, overgrown path from a previous era. Although it was no deeper than an average roadside ditch, had the tractor rolled, I likely would not have gotten up again. Once off the tractor, I walked shakily up the final incline out of the woods and home. That was lucky, I thought in the first few moments afterward, especially before I realized that my arm wasn’t working. It throbbed loudly and I paced in circles on the gravel drive, breathing heavily from the strain it was creating throughout my whole body. That’ll be a really big bruise, I thought again, sucking air and trying to overcome the raw, cramping pain in order to lift my arm and inspect the damage. But it wouldn’t lift, and I couldn’t see the part just below the elbow where the pulsing radiated from. I went inside the packing shed to my tiny office and sat down, which immediately felt worse, so I went back out to the fading afternoon and paced around some more. It was a little after five on the first Monday in October, and nobody else seemed to be at the farm.
By rolling my shoulder forward and twisting my head around as far as I could, I was able to see enough down the backside of my arm to realize that it wasn’t hanging quite right, nor responding to my call to motion. I decided I would stop by the local clinic, to see if there was anything to be done about it. I was sweaty and relatively weak, and figured I should get a ride into town. Reaching my other arm across my body, I shimmied my phone gingerly out of the right front pocket of my jeans and called Angelica, who lived on the farm that season, but she didn’t pick up. The camper she lived in appeared empty and besides, it had a view of the yard where I had been roaming for some time by then, so if she was around, she would have noticed that something was amiss and come to check on me.
Next I pulled up Scott’s number and called him, but he too did not answer. When I dialed his wife, Lori’s, number, she picked up but only to tell me that they had just run into Sheboygan for the evening. Not wanting to be a bother, or to wait any longer for a ride, I told her that it was nothing important, when she asked why I was calling, and then bid her a good evening, holding my voice as steady as I could.
Having failed to track down any of the farm’s residents, I put my phone away and, slow as a glacier, wedged myself down into the driver’s seat of my little Honda. I got it out of park with my left hand and soon discovered that focusing on driving, rather than being a challenge, offered a bit of relief from the stress of the past half hour. I easily arrived at the urgent care clinic just a few miles away from my farm. The successful drive briefly made me question whether or not I even needed medical attention. Probably a bruise, I still told myself. But I was there, so I parked and went in, walking past the flu shot sign on my way through the front door.
The look on the receptionist's face at the clinic brought my first round of tears that night. She greeted me politely when I came through the door, where she sat behind a tall desk which offered only a partial view of her newest patient. “I think I hurt my arm,” I told her plainly. Then I turned around partway to show her what I couldn't quite see for myself. Like a mirror giving me a glimpse of the damage I’d done, her expression changed from courteous to queasy in one startling second. Whereupon I choked down tears as I gave her my name and check-in information. Once she entered me into her computer and I had calmed down again, she reluctantly sent me to wait my turn along with the rest of the party that evening.
Toys cluttered the space and kids scurried around with them, getting out their after-school energy while waiting their turns for a visit with the doctor. I sat as removed as possible from the lively play scene and glared away any youngsters that came within a couple of paces from my mangled arm. Even a gentle bump by a tripped up child frightened me, now that I’d seen the receptionist’s worried eyes. And so a few innocent toddlers were scared away by the dirty farmer sulking at the edge of the waiting room that day, but they’ll get over it, I trust. By farm standards, I was not actually very dirty that evening, although I had not been dressed to go to town, either. In the days to come, getting dressed would be my biggest accomplishment, along with staying out of Angelica’s way, a difficult adjustment from my regular course of activity.
Sitting on the tractor mowing all afternoon had kept me relatively clean. I only mixed with dirt once when I stopped to untangle an irrigation line from the mower blade. During planting season, we can spend whole days in communion with mud, when freshly tilled earth and potting soil from transplants works its way all over our hands, shoes, clothes, and even faces when we wipe hair from our eyes without thinking, using muddy fingers. But planting season was long past, and my jeans and sweatshirt were dusty, but not caked with dried mud.
Along with rocks hidden in the spent vegetation, plastic irrigation lines pose the biggest obstacle for the mower and its operator. We try to move all of the thin, black tubes out of the way before starting to mow, but by autumn some of the lines are hidden under the thick growth and they escape our notice until, while mowing, one will catch the driver’s eye as it starts to slither around in front of the tractor like a long snake scrambling to get out of the way. But it isn’t trying to get out of the way, it is getting wrapped up under the mower quicker than you can say should’ve done another walk-around... In the instant between discovering the out-of-place drip line caught on the blade and shutting down the mower, a hundred feet of it can be wound tightly around the blades and shaft. Untangling it is a dirty job for a farmer’s psyche, if not their attire.
When teaching people at my farm to work with tractors and the implements hitched on back, I tell them that if they ever get frustrated with the equipment they are to walk away from it. It doesn’t matter if they are racing a rain cloud, or if I’ve told them to do something, or if completing the job will save a crop in some way. If something’s not working right and they are alone and frustrated with the tractor they are to walk away from it. I don’t think this is good advice for handling all of life’s problems, as perseverance is a virtue in many of the struggles we all face, but when it’s man versus steel beast with a fire in its belly, frustration cannot be in the equation because that’s when the tractor will be most likely to get the better of you, as in getting your life or your limbs.
Coaxing drip lines out from under the mower is always a test of this maxim. It’s a job I did that Monday afternoon, lying on my stomach on the ground and puzzling out the chaos beneath the shadow of the mower, a monstrosity as wide as I am tall and close to ten times heavier. I slowly unraveled and cut apart the ruined line until the two blades of the machine spun freely again. I had shut the tractor off while I worked; it was quieter this way and therefore I was less prone to frustration, and it was safer too, as it guaranteed that the blade wouldn't accidentally engage while I had my hands on it. I had the mower propped up on cement blocks for added security, even though the tractor’s hydraulics were suspending it about a foot and a half off the ground. It is not wise to trust hydraulics alone, especially when the tractor is not running and half your body is underneath it.
This mower in particular needed the extra support before I was willing to crawl under it, because it’s rear guide wheel was missing. Normally the back wheel on these big brush mowers helps to take the weight off the tractor, keeping the whole unit stabilized. Without the guide wheel present, all day I’d been dealing with the front wheels of the tractor bucking slightly up off the ground when I hit any dips in the terrain. It was like riding a wave, as the rear weight momentarily overtook the stability of the tractor and lifted the front tires into the air just a few inches, only to gently bob them back onto the earth when I quickly adjusted the height of the mower to reestablish the balance I needed for moving forward on all fours. My field is generally flat, I’m an excellent driver, and I had no trouble doing this maneuver as needed throughout the afternoon.
All in all, the day had been a success. Shortly after five I shut off the mower and raised it up as high as my little, orange Allis would hold it, to ensure the blade didn’t scrape the rocks on the path ahead. Then I pointed the tractor into the woods towards home.
***
A half hour passed and I hadn’t moved from my chair on the edge of the waiting room. Complete lack of motion served me best at that point and, aside from the occasional head swivel to stave off boredom and any tots who drifted too close, I sat and waited as patiently as I could.
One wrong move on the tractor cost me a lot more than the rest of the evening, but I wouldn’t know that for some time yet. Navigating the path through the woods without the mower’s guide wheel supporting it is what proved nearly fatal that afternoon. The tractor chugged up the shallow grade going into the woods without complaint, kicking up wet leaves as it went. But when I reached the steep slope leading out to the packing shed, it lost its balance. Without warning, the front wheels bucked high into the air like a frightened horse. Startled, I grabbed at the steering wheel, but it was useless while the front end was flailing around. The rear wheels, still in gear, were spinning forward, churning leaves and mud into a slick paste. At the same time, the weight of the mower was dragging me backwards and sideways downhill. It was an impossible combination of motion, and I was caught on top of it all. I hung on tight, unable to anticipate what was coming. Although I had driven the path in all sorts of conditions with many combinations of equipment, I hadn’t foreseen any of this, partly because the mower I was carrying was not mine. I had borrowed it for the day from a neighboring farmer. It takes time to get to know equipment, and to anticipate how a tractor will handle it. But I was out of time that day.
The receptionist came to check on me, bringing over an ice pack and a bottle of water. She opened the bottle for me and then went back to her desk. There was little else she could do. The waiting room thinned out slowly. At that point no one at the farm was missing me yet. I took a drink of water and slumped further in my chair as the evening wore on.
It doesn’t take much to roll a tractor, once it gets off-balance, so I counted myself lucky when mine was saved by a trees on the side of the hill. I was sliding down it when one of the front wheels hit the first tree. After that, it was over in a matter of seconds, with the tractor and mower wedged precariously against several trunks. The next day, Angelica and her boyfriend, Jake, would manage to tow the tractor out of the scrape without further incident. The only real damage done was from the impact of the tire as it hit the tree in midair. When driving normally, the steering wheel controls the motion of the front tires. But when those front wheels are three feet off the ground and punched sideways by the blast of a tree trunk, the control process is reversed. When the tire hit the tree, the steering wheel spun around with the force and speed of a karate black belt wearing shoes of solid steel. The Allis is a 1960s tractor, built before the power steering era began, so to aid in turning the heavy steering wheel, there is a knob on top of it that gives the driver a stronger hold. And my arm got in the way of that knob. There was a short, blunt crack of steel striking bone and then everything stopped moving. It wasn’t until I was walking away that I started to listen to my arm for the first time, and it wasn’t until after the x-ray that I understood what I was hearing.
It was the receptionist again, rather than a nurse, who eventually ushered me into the x-ray room at the clinic, bypassing the initial doctor’s visit that I had been waiting for since I arrived. The woman running the x-rays agreed that we could save a little time by doing this while we waited for a doctor to see me. Neither of them had any doubt, looking at my arm from an angle that I couldn’t see, that x-rays would be the doctor’s orders. I’ve never liked having my picture taken, and the x-rays that day were no exception.
Once the agony of the skeletal photoshoot was over, I found myself back in the waiting room again, which by then was mostly deserted. My arm ached deeply now, from all the x-ray poses I’d had to do. That was when Scott texted me to ask if I’d broken something. I amused myself thinking about what to reply. I imagined the look on his face, and the swear words coming out of his mouth, if I wrote back saying, “Yeah. My arm. Any other questions?” I was sorely tempted to come up with a smart remark, such as how I’d like to bet him a hundred dollars that he couldn’t fix what I’d broken this time. But in the end, I didn’t reply at all. There was nothing to be done at the moment, I didn’t yet know what exactly was wrong with my arm, and I didn’t want them to cut their trip to Sheboygan short. Scott and Lori are the parents of my friend Sami, who works on the farm too, and they’d gone to visit her, her husband, and their two young children at their house in the city.
As I waited to meet with the doctor, I did, however, text Angelica to let her know where I was, and I left it to her to tell the others when they got home. She asked if I needed a ride, but I assured her I was fine, and I didn’t know when I’d be coming home. It turned out best for everyone that I drove myself back, because they wound up with their hands full too that evening, once they returned to the farm.
Finally, I sat in the doctor’s office, waiting for him to share the results of my x-ray. “Do you think your arm is broken?” he asked me after he came in.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It feels like it might just be a really bad bruise. But it hurts too much to move it.”
He pulled up my x-ray on his computer screen. “We’ll take a look at this,” he said, “and you can help me decide if it looks broken or not.” He zoomed in on the screen and then turned it so I could see it too. I agreed and pulled my chair in closer to the image. I searched for cracks on the bone shown on the monitor in front of me. It was a grayscale image that seemed blurry, especially as I stared harder at it, trying to find something that might signal the source of my pain, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary. We were looking at the bone just below my elbow. It appeared thin, smooth, and unharmed. I glanced up at the doctor, who had been watching me as I analyzed the screen. “It looks alright,” I told him.
He nodded and smiled. “Keep looking,” he said, and then he scrolled down the picture of my lower arm. I’d never read an x-ray before and wasn’t quite sure if I was doing it right. What does a fracture look like? I wondered. Is it hard to identify? I squinted and stayed focused as the doctor showed me a few inches of my arm at a time. About halfway down the image, the bone came to a sudden, jagged end, the blackness in the background of the photo highlighting the white, unnaturally sharp points where it had abruptly stopped. I sat straight back in my chair, wide-eyed. He kept scrolling slowly, letting me take in the larger-than-life view of my injury. More blackness on the screen, followed by the puzzle-piece match of ragged bone which started the lower part of my arm, now detached from the rest of my body, as portrayed by the x-ray.
“Ok, yeah, that looks broken,” I said, owl-eyed and unblinking. We both laughed at the Orthopedics 101 lesson I’d just been given. Then the doctor zoomed out on the screen to show me the complete picture. Considering what I was looking at, I now felt that the pain was not so bad, or at least, it could have been a lot worse. The blow from the steering wheel had snapped my forearm in half.
With the help of a nurse, the doctor wrapped my arm in a temporary splint, tucked it into a sling, scheduled a visit with an orthopedic specialist in Sheboygan the following day, and then sent me home. It was long after dark when I finally left the clinic and headed back to the farm.
Night may have settled over the farm, but everyone’s day was far from over. I arrived home to the unlikely glare of headlights shining through the trees on the berm between the new tiny house (being built by Angelica and Jake) and Scott and Lori’s camper. The vehicle was not coming or going, but was parked at an awkward angle, suggesting it was shining a light on something just below the berm. I couldn’t see what that might be, but I could hear the buzz of a power saw mixed with the sounds of several distressed voices coming from the same place. Normally I would have trekked through the dark yard and over the berm to see what the commotion was about, but it was pitch black and the yard that year was less a lawn than it was an abandoned demolition site from where the old mobile home was that Scott helped burn down (intentionally) earlier that summer. Instead of picking my way blindly through rocks and rubble, I shuffled cautiously over the driveway in the opposite direction, towards the kitchen in the packing shed.
At the same time as I was returning home with my bum arm, Angelica, Jake and Lori were helping Scott, who was in the midst of sawing his fishing boat apart under the glow of the truck’s bright lights. Meanwhile, somewhere deep within the boat frame came the desperate yowling of Angelica’s cat, whose every panicked move was tearing his skin, tangled in lures, further off his own flesh.
…to be continued…
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