Mountains, Machines, & Memory

One of my earliest memories is of watching Babe Ward arrive on his red Farmall International tractor to break our fields in early spring. I must have been about three years old, for we were living in the old Morgan house above the bottomlands along Green River. We did not have a truck or car or tractor of our own. We did our plowing with the horse called Old Nell and kept our milk and butter in the spring house.

I heard the bark of the engine first, and looked into the sky where the Chicago Delta passed every day on its way to Atlanta, appearing over Mount Olivet to the north and disappearing over Cicero Mountain to the south. The sky was empty except for a few white clouds. The knock of the motor seemed to come out of the ground, or through the row of junipers along the road to the barn, and echoed off the wall of the house.

Running up the bank and under the hemlocks, I looked between the junipers and saw the red machine. The blasts of the motor were regular as a drum beat or a heart beat. The engine rode high above the two front wheels, spurting smoke from the pipe on its top. Babe sat on the lofty seat between the enormous cleated tires, holding the steering wheel with both hands. When he saw me he nodded but didn't stop the tractor. He rolled past, bouncing on the ruts.

Never had I seen anything at once so scary and so thrilling. With its two headlights and toothy grille, the machine seemed alive, a bright and smelly beast. Exhaust smoke filled the yard with machine incense. The rear tires were tall as buildings. The plows raised behind the tires gleamed like two big leaping fish.

The tractor rocked and swayed over the washed out road toward the field, and I ran after it. Dangerous as this invader seemed, I could not let it out of my sight. Beyond the log barn Babe Ward whipped the steering wheel to the left and turned into the edge of the field covered with old cornstalks and dead weeds. The plows lowered until the points cut into the stubble and sank farther until the curved bodies were half buried. I stood amazed as the tractor roared toward the river, then turned and snarled and grumbled back toward me. As the machine came closer I stepped back on the bank to get out of its way. The motor shouted with the fury of a thunderstorm, or the fiery furnace into which the Hebrew children were thrown in the Bible.

Babe raised the plows, spun the tractor around, and started back across the field. Birds arrived to peck worms from the fresh turned furrows. Oily exhaust hung in the air as if some sacrifice had been burned on an altar. I must have stood there for an hour watching the tractor transform the land from dead stubble into bright new soil. At its upper edge the field was red clay, and in the middle brown, with splotches of silver clay. But along the river the loam was dark as gunpowder. From a distance the field made a rainbow of earth colors. Two strands at a time, the tractor turned over every thread in the tapestry of dirt.

I must have returned to the house eventually, but later that afternoon I heard the tractor creaking and banging back up the road from the field and ran out to watch it go by. By this time Babe had stopped the machine, leaving the motor running, and climbed down to the ground. Daddy ran from the house to talk to him, and give him some dollar bills from the bib pocket of his overalls. I ventured closer to the panting monster. As the engine idled it rumbled and jerked a little, and heated the air like a stove in winter. Oily dust stuck to the red paint. The base of the motor was high as my head. In front of the seat were pedals and levers and dials like clock faces. The steering wheel had a knob clamped to its rim. It was a toy bigger than any dream. Some day I knew I would have a tractor of my own.

“You want to drive this thing?” Babe said to me. I was embarrassed to be caught so close to the tractor. Babe took me under the arms and set me high on the leather seat. I gripped the steering wheel and looked far down at the ground, and the men grinning up at me. I was so high it made me dizzy to look out over the hood of the engine, past the exhaust pipe, at the trees beyond the pasture.

I turned the wheel a little, like I was steering the huge machine. The heat from the motor felt good in the cool evening breeze. My feet could not reach the pedals. The dials and levers under the steering wheel made the tractor seem even more mysterious and powerful.

“He’s going to be a tractor driver,” Babe said, nodding his head.

From high on the driver’s seat I could look out over the puffing motor to the poplar trees showing the first gold-green buds, over the little chicken house with its one window, the Early Transparent apple tree, to the wide stretch of bottomland that in the late sun glistened like it was paved with gold.

Soon after the tractor broke up the field, the power company sent trucks to string up electric lines. People along the river road had already had electricity for years, but those in hollows and remote coves were just then getting wired. The Duke Power truck had a post-hole digger at its rear like an auger. It backed up in the field and lowered the big bit. As the shaft spun, it sank into the ground, and a collar of fresh dirt swelled up around the hole. We had moved to my grandpa’s house across the pasture from the river, and I stood under the June Apple tree there to watch.

Another truck appeared pulling long black poles on a kind of cart. With a crane they lifted a pole and stood it in the fresh-bored hole. Fixing the pole upright, they tamped the dirt around it firm. Impressive as the hole digger and crane were, the best was yet to come. As I watched, another truck appeared loaded with an enormous spool. The spool turned, paying out a cable, and I saw another pole with the cable draped from its top. They were stringing the cable the way Daddy stretched wire from pole to pole in the bean field. 

One of the linemen took something made of leather straps and steel from the back of a truck. He buckled the irons to his boots, fixed a heavy tool belt around his waist, and draped a cord over his shoulder. Grasping the pole with both hands, he stomped into the wood and raised himself, then stomped his other foot to get a purchase higher still. Snapping a leather safety-belt around the pole he mounted to the top, lifting the belt up with each step. I loved to climb trees in the woods, but I had to shimmy up them barefoot since I had no climbing spurs.

At the top of the pole, the man leaned back in the security of the belt and took a glass fixture from a holster on the tool-belt and bolted it to the wood. He leaned back in the safety belt and tightened the bolts on the fixture. He worked slowly and with confidence, his feet secure on the spurs stuck in the wood. He handled the wire that would carry electric juice with leather gloves. Daddy said the juice came over the mountain on the wires from the power house beside the dam on Lake Summit.The electricity was deadly, and one lineman had been killed when he touched a hot wire.

The lineman worked a long time in the sky, then stomped his way back down, sliding the safety belt around the wood. On the ground he and the rest of the crew moved on across the field and started another hole.

Later that fall we could see electric lights in houses all up the valley. As dusk came on lights went on in the far hollows and on the ridges. On the distant rim of the Cicero Mountain, the Prettymans from Greenville turned on the light on their porch, and it shone there like an  evening star.

After we moved from the Morgan house above the river to the house beside the county road, I got to watch the road scraper that came through every few months smoothing ruts and bringing back to the surface the gravel that had been packed down by traffic. The scraper was a machine that dwarfed even the farm tractor, a mammoth contraption riding high on its large tires, frame stretched far out in front and holding the wide blade beneath that tilted, turned, and raised or lowered. The driver sat behind the window of the cab, manning countless levers and shifts, as well as the steering wheel. Except in the coldest weather, he drove with the side doors open. 

The road scraper could tilt its blade and scour out the ditch, strewing weeds and roots, cans and other trash high on the bank. The blade re-carved the road, making it new each time, leaving so many rocks exposed in the dirt it was hard to walk there. Sometimes the scraper would not return for months, and the gravel got packed into the hard clay, and rain made pot holes and washed grooves across the ruts, creating what we called “wash-board” ripples like big rumble strips.

I had heard grownups talk about gasoline engines and diesel engines. And then I asked a question that had been troubling me for months. Why did a truck, when stuck in the mud or snow, spin the rear tire on one side and not the other? Why didn’t they turn at the same speed? My cousin said that was caused by the differential gear that could transfer all the spin to one side or the other, allowing the wheel to turn at different speeds when going around curves, for example, or when stuck in a ditch. I wasn’t sure I understood what he said, but I loved the word “differential.” I was still mystified that one rear tire could remain still while the other spun furiously, flinging mud or dirty snow.

One day dump trucks appeared after the road scraper had passed.They were painted brown and had lettering on the doors. A driver could reach out of his window and pull a lever behind the cab that released the flap-gate at the rear of the bed. As the front of the bed began to lift, gravel showered out the back, and the truck rolled forward, spreading in dust a covering of small rocks. The bed of the truck raised higher and higher as it drained its load, until it was empty. The driver then lowered the bed with a bang, and the flap gate at the back slammed closed with an even louder bang. 

One afternoon when I was almost five Mama and Sister and me walked out to Aunt Wessie’s house on the hill across the road from the church. From the porch we saw a long flat-bed truck loaded with a bulldozer roar into the church parking lot and stop. Two men got out of the cab and leaned timbers from the ground onto the back of the flat-bed.

“Why they’ve come to grade the house place,” Mama said. A shiver of thrill shot through me. I’d heard my parents talk about building a new house and seen the design Mama had drawn with a pencil and ruler on a sheet of paper cut from a brown paper bag. But I’d barely paid attention to the plans. As we watched, one of the men climbed onto the seat of the bulldozer and started the engine with a shriek and spurt of blue smoke from the pipe over the motor. Clanking and creaking, the heavy machine, with its blade raised high on steel arms, eased backward off the flat-bed on the timbers to the ground.

When it was off the truck, the driver turned the bulldozer with a furious roar and started out the road beyond the church. We hurried down the hill to follow the yellow giant which left wide tracks in the road. But before we caught up, the bulldozer turned and lurched up the bank into the woods above the road.

“Where’s he going?” I asked.But I already knew that Mama had picked out a spot for the new house in a little clearing where her brother Robert had kept a cot for sleeping on summer afternoons after he worked third shift at the cotton mill. After he was killed in World War II the family left the cot springs rusting in the leaves there.

The bulldozer pushed aside a sourwood and then a dogwood tree in its way. Avoiding a big black pine, it cleared a way right up the hillside, tearing small trees out of the ground, knocking roots and trunks to the side. My dad came running from the field, and we all stared as the bulldozer raised its blade and pushed down big white oaks and Spanish oaks, red oaks and tulip poplars. It shoved the fallen trees aside in heaps of tangled roots, trunks, brush and dirt. As it cleared a patch in the woods, the pile at either end got high as a house.

When the space was free of trees, the machine began carving out a shelf in the hillside. The blade cut through roots and leaf rot and black top soil into red clay. The raw, exposed earth seemed to glow red-hot. Where the blade cut clean, the clay looked polished, almost varnished. Deeper in the hillside the clay was speckled with white gravel. The dirt carved out was pushed onto an apron below, where the yard would be.

The smell of fresh dirt, the perfume of diesel smoke and hot metal, the sour scent of the oak sap, filled the clearing. It was the odor of thrilling, new change. Everything would be different now that we had a new house place and would later have a new house there. The bulldozer rocked backward, lurched forward again, snorted and snarled and grunted, climbing so steeply it seemed ready to tip over backward. 

When the level place was cut out of the hill, I thought the bulldozer’s work must be done. But the machine began to widen the clearing, shoving back the fallen trees and root clusters, brush and spoil dirt. The driver guided the brute machine by slowing the track on one side to turn in the direction he wanted to go.

When he finished widening the clearing, the driver turned the blade toward the center of the level ground. Dropping the blade to cut into the floor of the site, he pushed red dirt to the other end of the open space. Turning around he dropped the blade again and tore a deeper passage in the ground, pushing clay up to the other side.

“What’s he doing?” I hollered.

“Making a basement,” Daddy said.

And then I saw that the bulldozer was indeed ripping out a hole in the clearing that would be the cellar under the house. The bulldozer went back and forth, scraping up the dirt and shoving it to the side of the site. Soon the pit was deep as a man’s head. Flecks of mica sparkled in places. The clay was so bright it seemed luminous.

Soon as the basement was finished, the bulldozer returned to the edge of the clearing and began pushing down more trees. I saw it was opening a way at an angle to reach the road at the bottom of the hill. 

“That will be the driveway,” Daddy said. 

The bulldozer cut a track at a gentle grade. The driveway would swing around the bottom of the yard, to reach the county road. 

Daddy spoke to Junior Freeman, the driver, and then with a blast of its motor, blade raised on heavy steel arms, the bulldozer headed out the road to the church. A leaf or two floated into the clearing and landed on the freshly sculpted dirt. A squirrel fussed in the oaks on the hillside above. The house place was bright red where sun touched the clay, a whole new world where the woods had been, and it was quiet.

A few weeks after the bulldozer graded the house place in the trees, the well-digger truck arrived. I knew even less about well-diggers than I had about bulldozers. What I saw was an enormous truck with machinery and a smoke stack on the bed. There was some kind of furnace there, and a steel tower lay horizontal over it all, reaching almost to the front of the cab. The heavy truck drove through the orchard to the edge of the woods and through the woods to a spot above the house place.

When the well-digger truck stopped, they jacked it up until it was level and raised the steel tower at the rear straight up. With a whoosh and roar, the furnace under the smokestack was lit and steam began to gurgle in the pipes and hiss at the outlet. The furnace sounded like high wind on the mountainside, and smoke leapt from the stack. But the sound of the furnace and steam were nothing compared to the bang as a kind of ratchet began to move, jerking the cable over the top of the tower and letting it go, jerking it up again and letting it go. Ba-Ba-Bang, Ba-Ba-Bang. And then I saw that the cable raised the metal pole and dropped its point into the ground, raised and dropped it again, as the point pushed deeper into the soil. Rising and falling, the steep pole sank farther and farther.

The Ba-Ba-Bang was so loud that it echoed from across the river and from the pasture hill. It was a music that went on and on, the music of steel hitting steel, and the puff and hiss of steam escaping. I thought I’d seen the whole of well drilling until a smaller truck arrived with barrels of water taken from Grandpa’s well. Men lifted the barrels off the truck and set them beside the platform. They hauled the long pole out of the pipe and poured gallons of water into the shaft. Fixing a long tube with jaws at its tip to the cable, they lowered the tube into the pipe, let it rest for a moment, then pulled it up, dripping and streaming muddy water. Tilting the tube to one side of the platform, a man opened the jaws at the end, and muddy water shot out onto the leaves of the forest floor. In the water there was a lot of mud and pieces of rock. The muddy water painted the leaves and ground as it washed down hill.

“Do you want to be a well-digger and play in the mud?” one of the men yelled to me.

Once the new section of pipe was driven down into the ground, the men dropped the steel pole into the shaft and let it down and the cable again went up and down and up and down. After a long time they pulled the pole out and poured more water down the pipe. They were drilling through rock, and then drawing out the pieces in the water. Hour after hour they kept driving the pole into the ground far below and then washing out the shaft, screwing more sections of pipe onto those in the ground.

When I finally walked back across the field to the old house, my ears still rang with the banging. The Ba-Ba-Bang echoed across the valley, but the field was quiet, the sky wide and peaceful, and the repose of the distant mountains reassuring.

Later, when the well was finished, the muddy water had stained the ground far down the hillside like a spill of paint. On the last day, the men lowered the tower across the top of the truck and the furnace cooled and was silent.

“Listen to this,” one of the well-drillers said to me and Mama. When I leaned my ear to the top of the pipe in the ground, I heard the murmur of moving water. The pipe whispered from far down in the ground. “There's a river down there,” he said. “You'll never run out of water.” 

He lowered a smaller tube into the well and drew up cold water which I drank from the metal jaws at the end, water splashing across my cheeks and chin.

After the well-digger the next big machine I saw was a combine. My grandpa grew rye in the fields along the road, and each year the “thrashers” came through with their harvesting machine pulled by a tractor. The first I remember specifically was in 1952, when I was seven. The yellow thrashing machine was pulled by a huge gray tractor that must have been army surplus, and the young man who drove it was just out of the Army. He still wore his Army shirt and pants and an Army cap.

In the July heat the tractor roared and blasted diesel smoke and dust and grasshoppers fogged around the combine. The paddle wheel that swept the rye against the cutter blade turned like the wheel of a steamboat. Something inside the machine rumbled and thundered, and straw spewed out of its back, bright and tangled. From time to time the tractor stopped and men held sacks to a door in the side of the machine and filled them with grain. It seemed a kind of miracle that the combine could eat the rye in the field and spit out bushel after bushel of seeds.

When he stopped for dinner and rested in the shade of the oak trees, the young driver talked about fighting in Korea. He said the U.S. government denied there were Chinese or Russian troops fighting Americans in Korea, but he had seen them with his own eyes. He said he had been wounded by a bullet that went through his heel. Taking off his shoe and sock, he showed us a dark place on his heel were the bullet had passed through.

The combine ticked as it cooled in the breeze, and the big gray tractor spread its aroma of burned oil and hot steel and grease. I wondered if the machine had also been in Korea.

From my earliest memory I had envied those who owned trucks. We had no car or truck, and had to depend on an uncle or neighbor with a pickup to carry our beans to market. If no one had extra space in their truck the day we picked beans, our hampers of beans had to wait beside the road until the next day to reach town, and by then they were a little wilted and never brought the best price. It was an embarrassment that when we needed to go to the doctor or get groceries, we had to find someone to take us. We walked to the store on the highway to trade our eggs and butter for coffee, sugar, flour. Sometimes we caught the Greyhound bus at the highway and rode on it to town and back.

A truck meant independence, freedom, power, prestige. A truck was a sign of prosperity and status. My dad had never had a truck. He didn't seem interested in acquiring one. We used the horse and wagon to gather corn, spread manure in the fields, carry sand from the river to make a sandpile.

But when I was eight, my mother sent her brother in Fayetteville, North Carolina three hundred dollars to buy a 1946 Chevrolet pickup. When my uncle arrived with the truck in the late summer of 1953, I was thrilled and a little scared. The truck was dark green with lots of chromium in the front. It was the most beautiful machine I’d ever seen, because it was ours. The sideboards on the bed were painted black. The headlights glistened like giant eyes.

Daddy would later learn to drive the truck himself, but that first day my uncle took us for a ride up on Mount Olivet. Mama and Daddy sat in the front, and my sister and I rode in the back. It was a bright late summer day, and the truck whined and grumbled as we wound up the steep twisting road. It seemed too good to be true that we had our own transportation and could go wherever we wanted. Once the truck almost stalled and the engine coughed, but it started again and continued climbing the curvy road.

In the years ahead the truck would prove impossible to start on cold mornings, and the radiator would leak and the engine burned oil as well as gasoline. But that day the thrill of riding in a vehicle of our own was total. As we came out of the trees on the top of the mountain, near where my grandma had been born many years before, and followed the road out the ridge toward Pinnacle Mountain to the west, it seemed that nothing could ever be more wonderful than this, as the wind washed over my face, drying the tears of exhilaration.

About the author

Born in October 1944, Robert Morgan grew up in the Green River section of Henderson County in western North Carolina. Most of his poetry and fiction is set in that region. Author of eleven books of poetry, most recently The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems, he has also published eight works of fiction, including Gap Creek and Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the James G. Hanes Poetry Award, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and the Kentucky Literary Award for 2008. Since 1971 he has taught at Cornell University, where he is now Kappa Alpha Professor of English.