Spirituality and Stuff

Some years ago, I lived in a hamlet in Nebraska. The village consisted of a handful of houses, a Lutheran church, a basement beauty shop, and a miniature post office that was open every day (except Sunday) from 8-10 a.m. Main Street was paved, but the other street was not. I lived in the parsonage on Main Street.

I was raking leaves in my front yard one Saturday morning, when I heard from behind me the unmistakable "PUTT-putt-putt-putt" of a "B" John Deere. I turned and beheld a grizzled old fellow on a green tractor. He wore a gray parka and a seed-corn cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He had a severe expression on his face; maybe it was determination. The man cruised past me without even a glance, chasing the leaves in the street as he drove. He appeared to be headed towards the post office at the other end of the street.

I stood watching him for a while. The man was a striking figure. He even seemed vaguely familiar.

I was told, later, that this fellow was called "Smokey," because he had had a lively fastball in his younger years. They said that he lived about two miles south of town, and that he made his run to the post office every morning, rain or shine. Folks claimed that he had lost his driver's license many years ago--the same time he crashed his pickup into a light pole--so now he made his way around on that antique John Deere.

People remembered that his wife and children had gotten fed up with his drinking and his temper, and had moved away from him a long time ago. Smokey lived off of the largesse of others: he stayed in a farmhouse for free, although he did mow the yard. Someone else brought him groceries.

He was, at the same time, a comical figure and a tragic one--tooling into town each morning to fetch his mail. Smokey even made his mail run on his rickety old tractor in the dead of winter, clattering down Main Street and bursting heroically through the snowdrifts. Sometimes I wondered what was so all-fired important about getting the mail. I could not believe that he kept up a lively correspondence with anyone.

Smokey was an odd fellow, and yet, somehow I sensed that I knew him.

This man was more than just an eccentric old bird. He was an archetype. He was a Tractor Man.

A tractor is a symbol of power, of brute force, of the will to go forward. The man astride that John Deere was a metaphor for an ego that will not be denied. A Tractor Man is one who will not yield, or one who cannot.

Dr. Harry Tiebout was a psychiatrist and a friend of Alcoholics Anonymous in the early years of the movement. He studied alcoholics, and the factors that brought them to the point of surrender. Tiebout observed: " . . . the act of surrender . . . is an unconscious event, not willed by the patient even if he should desire to do so." An alcoholic, in other words, cannot choose to capitulate. A Tractor Man cannot dismount from his machine of his own accord, not even if he wants to do so--not without some help, not without some influence of the divine.

I figure that no one really knows how chemical dependency treatment works. There is a great deal of mystery about how and why people surrender. Treatment is a combination of the elements that sometimes enable people to descend from their tractors: abstinence; compassion; confrontation; acceptance; focus on feelings; review of chemical usage; and respectful treatment (to name a few of them).

Some people manage to climb down from their tractor while in treatment, but others never do.

Perhaps old Smokey reminded me of some other alcoholic I have known, or maybe he reflected my own tractoresque ego.

Whatever the case, Smokey died about a year after I first laid eyes on him. They found him slumped over his kitchen table. People around town remembered that he had always insisted that he wanted to be buried without any ceremony, so they honored his wish. I suppose that old "B" John Deere is rusting out in someone's grove right now.

Finally, the tractor is at rest