Hotrod and I just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. He was and is the one that I want. And he sold me on our very first date.

I was 19 and Hotrod was 26. We met in Park City, Utah, while I was on summer break from college. I was working as a hostess at a restaurant and he came in for breakfast. I thought he was dining-and-dashing but that turned out to be a misunderstanding (and another story.) In spite of that, he asked me if I wanted to go with him to see a movie.

I heard him pull up to my house …brmmmBRRMMMbrrmmm as he downshifted. (BTW, HR wants me to add that it was 650 Yamaha named Shadowfax. ☺) I’d never been on a motorcycle before and I was pretty intrigued. I watched through the window curtains as he made his way to the front door. Black leather pants, a purple paisley shirt and a bandana tied around his long hair. I ran out to get on the bike before my mom had a chance to meet him or weigh in. I’d been on a horse before so I use the same basic approach to mount up. And off we went. No helmets. Just HR gunning down the road, natural as can be on that machine. And me hanging on and watching over his shoulder as the speedometer crept up and up and up.

We were flying along 7th East in downtown Salt Lake City when Hotrod’s bandana flew off. Hmm, I thought, that’s goodbye to that. Then, Hotrod braked, and took a sharp left hand turn. Bu bumpbump. Left, over the median. Full throttle for about a mile in the other direction. Brake. Bu bumbump. Left over the median. Then, at over 100 mph, Hotrod reached down with his boot, snagged his bandana from the asphalt, grabbed it with his hand and put it back on.

Swoon. That was it for me. No one else could ever, or will ever, compare. I remember thinking if not saying out loud, “We don’t need to bother with the movie.”

We took off in different directions that fall. But I knew he was the one. I bided my time – and dated a few other guys. Hotrod was also involved with other women and neither of us were ready to settle down. We would connect every few months and go for a ride. We did at long last get married.

And we became parents. Max is our perfect son. And he also rides motorcycles. Hotrod took Max for his first motorcycle ride when he 18 months old. Hotrod mounted itty bitty footpegs on the side of the gas tank. He put Max on the tank and had him clamp his itty bitty hands on the cross bar. As a glance to some kind of safety, he put a helmet on his head. Hotrod laid himself over Max’s body and took to the highway. Responsible people were shocked. “How could you let him DO that?” they challenged me. “I don’t. I forbid it!” I responded. HR and Max would ride anyway.

Recently, Max and Hotrod and I went for a ride together in Alaska. I rode with HR, and Max led the way on perfectly engineered highway curves. Max gets it. He gets the arc of a turn, the pursuit of a perfect one, and the sweet swing into the next one. I imagine he will soon have someone to ride with him. Yes, it’s risky. Yes, you could die. Still, it’s worth it. Because when you are riding you are so deliciously and wonderfully alive.

So, mamma, let ‘em ride.

Xo$, Ellen

When Hot Rod and I were first married, we lived in a cabin outside of Whitefish, Montana. It was 11 by 15 feet and the foundation was four, almost-flat rocks. We had all of $5,000 between us and we contracted a well driller and a “diviner” to help us find – and hit – water. Three days later, we had a $5,000 hole, but no water.

So, my husband, The Plumber, figured out an alternative water system. He routed the rain into a barrel (which doubled as a dog washer), as well as to an underground cistern. We “poached” water (shhh!) from a neighbor’s creek when he was out of town. We would sneak over with out pickup and trailer, hauling an old 700-gallon dairy tank. Hotrod would fire up a gas-powered, hand-held water pump and we would look right and left as he filled the tank.

And you know what? It was pretty civilized living. We even had a hot tub! It was all fired with wood heat and recycled solar panels. Hotrod worked some magic with what was available. I learned how to make a 5-gallon tank of drinking water last  a week, because we had to haul it – water weighs 8 lbs. a gallon – from town – 15 miles away.

Sometimes the worst things become the best things. it was heartbreaking when I realized we had no money and no water, as the well driller’s rig pulled off the property. However, I learned that we could make things work. That marrying The Plumber was a very good move. And that I could conserve when I needed to. It was an amazing confidence building adventure! (And pretty romantic.)

Xo$, Ellen

By, Hot Rod Rohr

Growing up in the 1960s, I was one of the thousands of boys that longed to own a go-kart.  My dad was a plumber but also an ace mechanic.  I worked with Dad from the time I was old – or strong enough to lift a toolbox.  He had always tinkered with motorized devices.  After enlisting in the Army during WW2 he taught mechanics at Ft. Benning before shipping over to Germany to run the motor pool.

Dad preferred building “stuff’ as opposed to buying.  So the promise was to build a go-kart when I was old enough.  Usually a project got started when a few of the major components showed up in the shop.  My dad had a friend from his days working at the Lackawanna steel plant that was in the scrap business.  He would come by and pick up old pipe and salvage-able materials and drop off interesting parts for me to disassemble and tinker with.

My dad tasked him with finding four similar wheels to build a go-kart.  The days ticked by like an eternity.  Finally one day John the junk man showed up with two nice industrial strength wheels and tires –   one even had a braking mechanism involved.

So the decision was to build a mini-bike instead of a go-kart.  At this point anything with a motor and wheels was a step up from my Schwinn bicycle.

Most projects started with a frame built from black steel pipe – the stuff plumbers use for gas piping.  Enough short scraps littered the shop to build a frame, forks, etc.  I was nine at the time, and small for my age.  So dad’s goal was to build the smallest size mini he could assemble.  A Briggs and Stratton 4 cycle 3 HP engine was selected, from an old reel type mower.  A centrifugal clutch and a handy jack shaft so I could easily swap sprockets to make gearing changes.  The seat was from an old Indian motorcycle.  It was a tank, but it purred down the trails.

My grandfather lived out in farm country.  So weekends we would haul the mini out and I got permission to ride the lot roads between the fields of vegetables.  Life was good.

As the years went by I upgraded engines trying to squeeze more speed from the two-wheeled tank.  One time I installed a 2-cycle engine from a push mower.  These were a bit higher revving motors and a new “louder’ sounding engine.   Being a vertical shaft engine I had to mount it on its side and build a custom carb adapter.  This located the carb down under the engine, tough to service and adjust.

I learned to reach down while riding and adjust the mixture screw to lean out the engine and coax the best performance.  One fateful day I reached a bit to deep and got my hand caught in the jackshaft chain.  I suppose the equivalent of driving while texting.  I lost part of one index finger and my mom insisted the mini be “moth-balled” for a while.

A year later it was pulled down from the shop attic and a new engine Clinton “Panther” 2 stroke that I had saved fore was installed, along with a chain guard!

Throughout my mini bike years I learned how to weld and run the, lathe in the shop.  I finally out grew the small frame and build a larger mini with plans form one of the “popular” magazines.   Wheel diameters increased to wheelbarrow size, engines went to 5 hp.

By this time we had moved to farm country and I ended up building minis for 3 of my friends.  Every summer evening we would ride the back farm dirt roads to Taffy’s – the local hot dog stand.  We would eat the charcoal cooked dogs and play pinball until late, and ride home in the pitch dark without any headlights.  Nothing like riding in the dark to sharpen your sense of balance.  Like skiing in a whiteout.  We wore colorfully painted safety helmets for some protection.

Of course minis led to motorcycles.  My sister’s boyfriend had an old beater CZ enduro bike that he world ride over and let me take out to the fields and gravel pits around our hometown.  I was hooked on two wheels.

My very first brand new bike was a Suzuki 250 Savage.  Street legal opened a lot more riding opportunities.  Four of my mini bike riding buddies all bought 250 Enduros of different brands and we road them everywhere.  We rode every season, even studding the tires to ride on Lake Erie when it froze in the winter months.

50 years later I still own a few motorcycles.  I had as many a 6 at one point.  All were old dirt bikes that we would take out to the west deserts of Utah to ride after I moved there from Western New York.

Every one of my original mini bike buddies still own and ride motorcycles of some sort, and their kids are also up on two wheels.

My fondest memories of growing up a plumber’s son are building and riding mini bikes and later motorcycle.  It a lasting bond when you ride and breathe two wheelers.

For months now I’ve pestered Merle Henkenius to let us showcase some of his exquisite little memoir: Farm Work Ephemera:  Squinting Into the Rear View Mirror. On its face, this is a book of fine-art photographs and related essays, which slowly aggregates itself into something more.  I think you’ll find the language so expressive, so nuanced and thoughtful and poignant and celebratory, that certain lines will burrow in and stay with you quite a while.  This is good work, and I hope you’re moved by it as much as we are.

Merle and I met in 2002 while working on a project for Popular Mechanics. He was a freelance writer and photographer then who worked 26 years for the magazine.  During that time, he also sold articles to Popular Science, This Old House, the Los Angeles Times, Better Homes & Gardens, Simon and Schuster, Reader’s Digest Books and others.  He specialized in housing related topics most of his professional life.  All the while, he worked on his projects: restoring houses and old cars, fine-tuning prints in his darkroom.

Publishers of art books have often needed help from private foundations, and that’s especially true today, so Merle’s actively working that angle.  We hope we can help with that.  He’s never submitted his personal, non-commercial work to a website, but this somehow seems a reasonable time and place to begin.

John Vastyan

Farm Work Ephemera:

Squinting into the Rear View Mirror

(Excerpts from a book in search of a press)

By Merle Henkenius©

This book is about three photographic projects, each sprouting from the ground beneath my formative years. It’s about Nebraska farms and distances they can launch you. It’s memory caught in machinery. It’s leaving home and going home and the light that falls between. It’s grievance and forgiveness in a tangle, an ordinary life pried open a bit. It’s about the conditioning nature of time.      

                                                        The Neligh Flour Mill

“Neligh is the county seat of Antelope County, (Nebraska).  The town was established in 1873 along the Elkhorn River by John D. Neligh. The water powered flour mill which was the economic anchor of the community for many years remains virtually intact as a State Historic Site”.  www.neligh.net

When I gaze east through the third story windows of the Neligh Mill, and see Nebraska Highway 275 narrowing toward Norfolk, I can see that this road is like a tabular index of my early life, with memories bristling from nearly every intersection.  Same for old Highway 14, as it steps south across the Elkhorn River and angles west to the hay plant.  The plant is closed, but the asphalt retrieves what I forgot: that I loved the scent of scorched alfalfa, and vaguely, that someone I knew didn’t.  And the northern view, it’s just as compelling, as it runs like a vandal up Main Street.  These road views through a mansard roof, they catch me off guard.  They’re like a camera to the heart through a vein.  I can fly up the slippery vessel of the past, kick up some platelet dust, or take my time, pause at the capillaries, luxuriate, cringe.

I wanted to photograph the Neligh Mill because I’m drawn to primitive machines, because I once worked in such a place, because it’s easiest of all to miss the art in the familiar, and finally, because time is picking up speed.  It’s really time’s imprint that I like to shoot, not time receding.  I’m not obsessed with the past.  I’m obsessed with the now and the next, which are filled to the brim with the past.

Growing up, I must have passed this place a thousand times, walking, riding, driving.  I ignored it, but like so many things, it left an impression anyway.  It had a certain spatial heft, plus activity.  I know it was still milling flour when I was dragged into town for polio vaccinations, because the walls around the windows were a wispy white.  I would have been eight or nine at the time.

In my teens, I sought Neligh’s other riches: English Leather aftershave in a squat, square bottle, an ID bracelet with a Twist-O-Flex band, baby-moon hubcaps, a Van Heusen shirt, a Gene Pitney 45.  I soon got over these things.  I’d lost my taste for their intentions and grew a beard instead.  Decades later, I’d return to visit my Dad in a Neligh nursing home, and would catch myself grinding my teeth an hour down the road.  With good care, his indignities would last a full ten years.  So I’d often retreat to the river below the mill, to be restored by metaphor, by the strangely-consoling indifference of its flow.  This had worked in other places.  I’d simply stand on the bridge, lean on a truss and watch the day swirl away.  There’d be no hording grief for atonement, no offering it up.  I’d then loiter above the remnant dam, crawl on broken concrete, explore the timber flume.  Without trying, I began to insinuate myself into this place.  I’d climb the Mill steps and peer into windows after hours.  I’d catch whiffs of burlap and rye, which I knew weren’t there, but in the ether 12 miles south.  In your middle years, even senses are acquisitive.

Miller's Shack

The Mill retained its original equipment to the end, so when the State took over, it immediately flash-froze everything, all its ambition, boredom, fatigue.  There’s still a chill in the walls.  A good guided tour is just $3, but few with the time to invest seem willing to pay.  I’ve studied these transactions from the top floor.  Old folks drive up, inquire at the office and depart shaking their heads, peeved that they’d be charged to view their own pasts.  They save me having to explain my gear again, but it’s a pity.  There’s evidence of life all over this place, lives as narrowly focused as theirs.  It’s in the arithmetic scrawled on the walls, where at least one old cipher forgot to carry his remainder.  (They’d like him for that.)  It’s clearly in the Miller’s shack, which doubled as a break room, but was really more like a tree-house.  It’s in a slack old rope on a storeroom wall, where its free end makes a treble-clef on the floor, and in a stiff old harness, which can no longer recall the shape of a horse.  These sights alone are worth three bucks, but they’re local, and we tend to devalue the near.

The place milled its first sack of flour in 1874, powered by the river, and it’s last in 1959, powered by electricity.  The commercial grain side of the business endured another decade.  Peak production reached 98,000 pounds of flour per day, with shipments ranging as far as England.  The best run-of-the-mill went to bakers, the worst to Indian reservations.  These dates sum up the Industrial Age out here, pinch it with quotations.  The Mill was our own little scrap of the Revolution, stitched to the river like a tag on a shirt.

I’m sure we can make too much of numbers, but the place closed for good in 1969, the very year that I left home.  I had the impression, as I drove away, that they’d be rolling up the road behind me.  There’d be no going back, so of course some things would need to change, and who knew what my absence might provoke?  And here’s a final figure: In 1958, my determined grandma Miller—yes, Miller—and her sweet old husband, Andy, took me fishing below the bridge.  This was a real treat.  It happened only once, and I nearly screwed it up.  Or perhaps I screwed it up and it never happened again.  In any case, I wanted to go after carp, whose humps we could see in the shallows, while she insisted on catfish, which are invisible.  We caught neither.  Adults are inscrutable to kids, even in their kindnesses.  It’s all that nodding toward the unconfirmed.

So if the bologna munchers in the Miller’s shack tipped back their chairs that day, what they saw was a distracted little tow-head oblivious to them.  Now that they’re all gone, and I’m finally brave, I feel like gazing back.

                                                         Inside the Neligh Mill

Buhr Mill

An old mill is built like a well ordered day; it tackles the hardest task first—lifting grain to the top of the building—then lets gravity and a little flywheel momentum do the rest.  The river could gin this action all day long, coasting through most of it.  Once lifted and binned, the wheat was dropped through elevator legs into various stands of equipment.  The mill’s three floors and basement are literally jammed with equipment, edge-to-edge.  The first floor did the grinding and sacking, the second floor the sorting, purifying, bleaching and dust control—grain dust is explosive—and the third floor the steaming and sifting.  Steam toughened the hulls a bit, causing the kernels to shatter into larger pieces, which improved efficiency.  The sifting was done through vibrating silk screens and coarse linen flutes.

Third floor sifter

                                                                          —

 Machinery like this is so simple and substantial that it can almost run itself.  It would have needed a miller, of course—the lone aristocrat in such a palace—who’d serve as line mechanic.  He may have had an assistant, who in the early years, would have doubled as water tender.  All other workers would have been sackers, sack sewers, stackers, cart runners and occasional rail-car jackers—lifters and luggers all.  In the booming 1920s, the mill employed 30 such men in two 12-hour shifts.  This would have been numbing work, the original “daily grind,” with a steady depletion of cartilage all around.  There were quotas, so

Purifier Mill

they would have hustled.  Today this would be immigrant work, as some of it must have been then.  When you make a career of lifting, it helps to remember the old country, to see your spawn as teachers and nurses and insurance men, and theirs as doctors and lawyers and scientists, all ambitious and forthright and beyond the taint of accent.  Generations would stand on your shoulders, or so you’d imagine, and your days would use you up.

What were these workers like?  It’s almost too late to know, but some of us could round up characters from other menial jobs to raise a crew.  There’d be a braggart, of course, a profligate.  There’d be a brooder, a sports nut and a love-sick boy.  The boy would suffer rude inquiries.  There’d be a wormy little ass kisser, a former school-eraser clapper.  There’d be two practical jokers, because these only come in pairs.  There’d be a pain-in-the-ass proselytizer, the victim of practical jokes.  There’d be the guy who makes a pathology out of shortness or baldness or both.  There’d be missing fingers, each a cautionary tale.  One guy would talk too much, say too little, another would cling to his Thermos.  There’d be a wisecracker, a loud and likeable sort, who’d fold and retreat when he laughed, an arm across his mouth.  There’d be an old fart, a young Turk, a grass-is-greener window gazer.  The old timer, in his fifties, would wear copper wire around his wrists to hold arthritis at bay.  He’d slather his shoes with mink oil and tell you about it.  Ask him for the time, and he’d say, “Why, you takin’ medicine?”  And there’d be that one obligatory character, whose sexual euphemisms are so hilariously precise, that years later while in the act you’d find yourself cracking up, owing apologies.

Corn meal roller

As the new guy, you’d need to negotiate terms with each and every one, and seal the deal somehow, not in that way that women have of sealing friendships with secrets, but in ordinary ways: with a wink, a story, a little-known fact, a Twinkie from your lunch box, tossed and caught.  Even with its notions and ways, this would be a pretty-good crew.  Sure, there’d be a smattering of mopes and dopes and sons-of-bitches, but mostly during the busy season, mainly on the night shift, and not for long.                                                                                                       —

The best evidence of habituated life is in the miller’s shack.  The miller kept a desk inside, where he transferred wall figures to ledgers.  I’m told he also hand-ground a little corn meal there, but the shack was mainly a break room.  It’s really just a steep-roofed shed, tacked to the south wall of the warehouse, an afterthought.  You can see in old photos that it was once free-standing and oriented east-and-west.  Proof of this move today is the six-foot first step out the

front door.  The shack was a calming place, no doubt, away from equipment noise, where a man could scarf his sardines and crackers, his butter brot, his summer-sausage or fried-egg sandwich.  On cold days, it offered a warm halo around a potbelly stove, where a fella could dunk his cookies in coffee.

With cod liver oil

This room still has a certain boyishness, a cobbled-together jazz-art charm, owing mainly to the pictures glued to its walls.   It’s long and narrow and skinned in car siding.  It was originally single-walled and ceilingless, so it would have been hard to heat, even with bushels of cobs shoveled into the stove.  Looking around, it’s easy to imagine a genesis here.  Someone would have suggested, off handedly, that if they’d line the interior walls, like in a house, that would warm things up.  Material suggestions would have ensued, a careful cost-benefit analysis, never mind the zero budget.  Slowly, a resolving momentum would have built.  The place would have sprouted potential.  And one day, out of the dense lassitude of routine, someone would have tossed a bomb, which erupted in a crescendo of expectation.  “Heck,” he would have said, “if we’re gonna’ do it, we oughta do it up nice.  Really put the pants on it!”

Worship together

                                                                                                              —

 So the miller’s shack has that kind of wallpaper, and it was applied in a hurry, clumsily, right over the woodwork.  No seasoned hangers applied.  The edge patterns don’t match.  The paper itself changes every few strips.  In a final flourish, someone laid down a narrow border strip of Art Deco geometry, a prairie echo off the Chrysler Building.

As the retrofit progressed, the notion of a “club” would have evolved as well.  This would be an exclusive club, like the Masons or the Knights of Columbus, only without the secrets and the affordable life insurance.  This would have been inevitable.  Exclusivity is simply next in line, behind food and shelter and procreation.

They’d decorate the walls with what’s important, with life-affirming symbols; the full constellation of male pleasure totems.  There’d be Jane Russell and other starlets, maybe Lana Turner, with her famous drug-store provenance.  The starlets would lounge in coy poses, each with a come-hither grin.  There’d be nothing untoward, of course, no naked babe with pubis erased to satisfy the postal inspector.  Not like that girl at the CO-OP, tacked to the back of the supply room door, exuding her essence-of-new-tire perfume.

There’d be pictures of hunting dogs and shotguns and soapbox-derby cars.  There’d be playing cards and fishing gear and funnies from the Sunday paper: Gasoline Alley-to-Dagwood.  Paste ‘em up with school glue.  There’d be a close-up of a trout breaking the surface, vested in a hand-tied fly.  There’d be a wire waste basket, looking like an upended fish trap.  There’d be a small calendar from a carnival company, trumped by a larger one urging church attendance.  The smaller illustration is about the alacrity of hillbillies.  The larger one depicts a family entering a modern church, hand-in-hand.  The family is slender and scrubbed clean and uniformly dressed, the way we were when God was into grooming.

And you can see, too, that the workers began to lose interest in style, and slowly returned to utility.  They hung tools and stencils and chunks of equipment over the faces of starlets, because that’s where the hooks were located.  Fashion ran its course with them, the fever broke.  Here was a rash of domesticity that could no longer take the itching.

Torn away girl

Today the pictures in the shack are touchstones, dim little lozenges of light.  My favorite is a print of a cowgirl starlet.  It’s glued to the east wall, just past the potbelly stove, not quite visible from the door.  Some knucklehead long ago picked at its left edge, enough to gain a grip, then tried to rip it from the wall.  He got about half of it, including most of the girl’s mid-section, forehead and hands.  She’s now a double amputee, witless and gutless.  But what survives is a wonderfully-buoyant smile, floating above its cheesy context.  Was it this concentrated smile that sent the ripper packing, made him lose his nerve?  It would otherwise have been easy to finish the job.

(Tool Project Excerpt)

 The Phenomenology of Tools

By Merle Henkenius©

                             “We are eternally subjective: but there are objects.” Alfred Kazin.

Cornhusking hook

The quill pen used to write the Declaration of Independence, we could all agree, would have greater historical significance than the pen then in service to the tenant across the hall.  Never mind that these could have been identical instruments, pared to points only moments apart.  They would remain forever distinct: the difference being the one’s habit of transferring genius to paper.  This pen scratched a watershed moment in time, while the other likely toiled over newsy letters home.  One would be like the pocket bible that stops a bullet: it could never be just a bible again. Meaning would well up around the obliterated language for generations.

Ice pick and tongs

Having made the point for exceptional use, I should say that I’d also love to own that other pen, since I’d be better suited to it.  Years of routine use will also leave their mark, as evidenced in the beat-up tools around me, in the beat-up me.  Do old ambitions live in instruments, in projects, in places?  Does the plan stay in your head, the echo in your hammer?  And if so, how would you approach such tools, photographically?

Head-on, I’d guess; certainly not in some gauzy set piece, where you prop them up on barn wood next to a kerosene lantern and a pair of leather work gloves.  Nor should they be made Photoshop-cute, with brushed edges and patchy sharpness.  Only a later generation could think that way.  If you’ve ever earned a living with tools, were said to be a good hand, you know that you’ve also resented their dim silences and limiting scope, their habit of lowering your gaze.  With items this personal, it’s better to lift them out of context and let them infer in space.  Let them auger toward abstraction, which is surely where they’d go without us.

Here’s the hammer I swung in Arizona, working that mining company job on the Tohono O’Odham reservation and living with a buddy in Casa Grande.  The rez is where we’d watch small clusters of Mexicans plod through Sonoran desert toward the irrigated fields up north.  They wore two layers of clothing and carried almost nothing, luggage being a dead giveaway.  We sometimes gave them water from our Igloo coolers, but no one said much or made sustained eye contact, including the natives and Latinos on the crew.  This was in my trailer-house phase when, out of habit, I pined for a girl in Utah while reading the Beat writers, The Crack-Up, The Nick Adams Stories, Steinbeck’s letters, The Guns of August.  It’s where I struggled with Absalom, Absalom! and quit on Ulysses.  It’s where I fell in love with biography.  Few things are as instructive as the full arc of a life.  As for the hammer, I scratched employee number 1256 into its fiberglass handle on my first day.  The number is barely visible now, and only when tipped into backlight.  This hammer later delivered me to Denver, to Alliance Nebraska and Sioux Falls South Dakota.  It helped build houses and barns and huge potato warehouses.  It paid down my college loans and financed much of my trip around the world.  It kept me in shape.  Only I know where it’s been, or care.

The point is: we seem to have it within our powers to imbue our things with meaning, simply by using them.  We invest them with purpose and they reward us with definition.  It’s an easy concept: think relics in altars, guns in museums, rings on fingers.  We don’t even need to think about it.  We can’t notdo it.  And the fewer tools we have, it seems to me, the more meaning they’re apt to absorb.  I own several hundred tools, while my Dad got by with 25 or so, and that may be a stretch.  I knew folks in town who lived abundant lives with five or six, astonishing as it seems.

Haywire tools

Wright Morris hit the nail on the head.  Some things, he wrote “. . .exist in time but outside taste; they wear in more than they wear out. . . Between wearing something in and wearing it out the line is as vague as the receding horizon, and as hard to account for as the missing hairs of a brush.”

Morris wrote of his uncle’s farm near Battle Creek.  This was not the famous box-top Battle Creek, in Michigan, but the one just up the road from us, past Neligh and Tilden.  He won an American Book Award for fiction and two Guggenheims in photography.  You leave to discover such things.

In our early teens, my brother and I were sent to dig post holes in a straight line a quarter mile long.  The pasture fence needed moving again, never mind why.  So we’d chop and chop with a clam-shell digger in that parched August ground—chop three or four times, then squeeze, lift, release and repeat.  We went as deep as a mark scratched on the handle with a nail.  We’d work a while and lean a while, and being kids, pelt each other with clods a while.  We began the day with rough hands and weathered wooden digger handles, and by the end of it, both surfaces held a waxy sheen from hand grease and abrasion.  They wore in, enough that the memory outlives the fence.

Tools can actually reshape a hand.  Heavy work will rotate finger tips a bit and cant the fingers left or right: that is if it allows you to keep them.  I had an old uncle who crushed his hand in a farm accident and spent a month or more in a hospital, until the hand finally turned on him.  The day before it was to be amputated, the entire family traveled to see it, kids and all.  I’m told it was big as a catcher’s mitt and almost black beneath an ultraviolet lamp.  Anything can happen.  In any case, heavy work will turn your hands gnarly, what they used to call “horny.”  In my case, there are divots from healed punctures, narrow scars, split nails and permanent knuckle calluses.  Fleeing the hazards of construction—trench cave-ins and the like—I worked in advertising a couple of years, as a copywriter, selling the unnecessary to the undisciplined.  I followed this with 25 years of magazine work, all of it pecked out at under 30 words a minute, with errors and many, many backspaces; the backspaces popping like spot welds. Still, it’s odd that in the end a keyboard should make me hurt.

Blow Torch

“Are the risks worth while?  Nebraska farmers paid with two lives, 194 fingers, 18 hands, 10 arms, one leg, four toes and two feet gathering approximately 225 million bushels of corn in 1950.”  The Elgin Review, October 25, 1951

When I was a little kid, helping Dad work on some reluctant piece of old machinery, he’d often send me after “the good wrench.”  I don’t know if other families had good wrenches, but we had a ten-inch Crescent, a nickel-chrome spanner, which hadn’t been mashed by hammers or over-torqued with cheater pipes.  It was purchased new, not found in the road or fished from a box at the frozen end of an auction.  Years ago, tools came to farmers well used and along circuitous paths.  The farmers, having lived through The Great Depression, preferred it this way.  In fact, the “green” movement today is laughable when compared to the daily habits of some of these folks.  They conserved by not acquiring, not by recycling their excesses.  Thrift in them was pathological.  One farmer I knew couldn’t discard a shredded fan belt.  He’d hang it on a corncrib stringer, next to the others, because you just never know.  So each tool had its history, and your work extended its narrative: this one came from Rudy’s place.  It’s Rudy’s wrench.  Call it that.  “Go get me Rudy’s wrench and make it snappy.  Here, take the flashlight.”  This was the light that caused all the trouble, the one I could never hold steady.

Our good wrench was purchased for a specific and memorable project, and therefore enjoyed a slightly elevated existence.  The optimism in that project stayed with it and was acknowledged each time the wrench was used.  Almost every item on a farm came with a peculiar association, which was layered into each new day’s work.  This can only happen if your days are long and nuisance prone and you take them personally.  Each day kept something from the last and borrowed something from the next.  Farm days are like Damascus blades: the new metal is laid upon the others, then heated, hammered and folded, sprinkled with borax and heated, hammered and folded, over and over, until they’re all one day when you finally walk away.

There were certain farm tools that I recall most of us having in the ‘50’s and 60’s, just a dozen or so, but they were ubiquitous.  Some were outmoded by then, mere artifacts, of little interest to me beyond their eccentric shapes.  Included in this category were ice tongs and picks, from the days when houses had iceboxes.  There was usually a bronze blow torch, once used to thaw pipes, solder tin and warm the oil pans of flivvers.  There were flimsy milk-cow hobbles, which only work because cows kick outward, with little momentum.  Horses kick back, which is a useful distinction: walk behind a cow, not a horse.  There were always a couple of horn weights on a shelf, to train a cow’s horns downward and take the bully out of her at the bunk.  There were bird-like fencing pliers with staple-pulling beaks.

Broom

There were sheep shears and draw knives and V-shaped magnets from Model T magnetos.  There were sheet-metal calf weaners, for when a cow allowed last year’s calf to compete at the teat with this year’s calf.  These contraptions were strapped to the yearling’s nose and featured a row of sharp teeth, which came to bear each time he nudged for milk.  Some models were designed to stab the cow, while others were meant to stab the calf.  It all depended on where you came down on the issue of blame.  Hammers and saws and hoof trimmers abounded.  These hammers showed evidence of broken handles, which had been shortened, shaved and reaffixed, often several times.  You can save a buck this way, if you don’t mind the short swing; don’t mind wearing out your wrist.  Flypaper hung in milk parlors and workspaces, and if you paid very close attention, you could hear furious little dramas unfold.  A stuck fly will immediately wind its wings to a buzzing crescendo, then slowly trail off, dissipated, like a crop duster heading home.  Flypaper is a tool of sorts, an instrument, like a bushel basket or a clothespin.

Every family seemed to have a husking hook or two leftover from the Forties, when corn was picked by hand.  These hung from pegs on back porches or in barns, saved more out of habit than loyalty.  While I vaguely knew how these hooks worked, how they were strapped to a hand to breach thousands of husks a day, I didn’t know what they meant.  What they meant was that you couldn’t plant all your tillable acres to corn back then.  You planted only as many acres as you and yours could reasonably expect to pick before winter, assuming no one sprained a wrist or broke an ankle.  So husking hooks explained oats and hay and cows and pigs and chickens, the very order of my days, and I hadn’t a clue.  And by extension, they explained why these things receded as I came of age, behind picker/sheller combines and whirlybird irrigators.  They explained why row crops went from four-wide to six-narrow; why farmers began planting fence row to fence row, even extracting the fences when they could; why they took up golf in summer and skiing in winter; why they began wearing khaki shorts, of all things.  And the strangest thing about these hooks, these wrist-numbing, spine-twisting widgets, is that they can appear sensuous on a peg, almost like lingerie.

What else do these objects mean?  I can’t say.  I don’t know everything.  They were just there when I opened a door and held it, and let sunlight suspend the dust.  Today I see them in antique malls.  I invariably pick them up and turn them over, there being something compelling about the bottoms of things.  I allow them to make their brief associative leaps, then put them back.  They’re a dime a dozen, you know.

(Salvage Yard Excerpt)

Picking Through the Tractor Bone Yard

By Merle Henkenius©

John Deere Model B

I used to sing on tractors, believing I was singing to myself.  These were made-up songs or radio songs or strung-together combinations.  None were ever complete, because I don’t remember lyrics.  Some were all refrain, while others had only one verse, which seemed to grow profound with repetition.  Craving the esteem in a straight line, I’d aim my exhaust stack at a fence post a quarter mile off, and I’d sing.  I’d stand up and sing, steer like a riverboat captain.  John Deeres were made for this.  On hot days, I’d pivot a little sideways and let a breeze billow my half-open shirt.  Days on tractors are long and dreamy, so you need to do something to pass the time.  Unfortunately, voices carry in the countryside, well beyond machinery clatter.  Mom hinted I should tone it down, which I did.  I sang Moon River just above a whisper, and I whistled, tried some tremolo.  Mom had an orphan’s heart, soft and wary.

When you can’t sing, you conjure empires, you invent scenarios in which you’re finally given your due.  These tend toward the grand sweep, the community spectacle, the clincher.  When you’re young on tractors, 11-to-14, you still dream of guns and fishing gear and fireworks, the Wellington boots in the Sears catalog.  You want a rowboat, so you build one in your head, while watching corn slip through cultivator shields.  As you fall asleep that night, the last thing you see is four-inch corn prancing, single file.  Your days and nights are seamless.

A little older, you dream of sporty coupes with cackling pipes.  You’d somehow get one, work on it.  You’d jack up the rear end, flip the shackles, put bigger tires in back, make the thing look like a monkey humping a football as it chugged down Main Street.  Out on the asphalt, blowing north or west, you’d fly around geezers like they were painted on a fence.  You’d whip tight doilies in the church parking lot, an essential rite of passage, which you now perform in your four-door sedan, renouncing Satan in a spray of gravel.  You dream of Saturday nights, of meeting your friends in town, planning something big.  You crave the twice-a-month dates your status allows, can almost summon the perfume.  And when you’ve exhausted these possibilities, in all their permutations, you run some times-tables through your head, to clear it out, or you ponder the origins of odd expressions, like “good riddance to bad rubbish,” “built like a brick shithouse,” “see ya ‘round if ya don’t turn square.”  And “Good grief,” as if there were such a thing.

Dodge Truck

You wonder where those dozen seagulls go when you’re not in the field.  You’ve never seen one roost, can’t follow them home, and there’s no Google.  They simply descend and ascend, as if the sod were sea.  It’s a mystery, and you’re a mystic peasant, a seagull shaman.  Perhaps The Nebraska Farmer will run an article on why seagulls follow kids on tractors, a thousand miles inland.  Thoughts like these slam in and out of your head all day, leaving not a trace of residue.  You count fence posts in the late afternoon, tally the rounds needed to finish, size up your likely praise.  It will be low-key and off-hand, maybe hit you walking away, which is fine.  You long ago learned to decipher that code.

I was good with machinery, both the wired up and the latest thing.  I hired out to relatives and neighbors.  A decade later, I spent two-years on a backhoe, and liked it.  I pawed through a city’s buried treasure, ten feet down, and never once cut a cable or pipe.  The world feels about right through finger tips on wobble sticks, when you’re all instinct and muscle memory.  I liked those dirt machines.  This is not to suggest that we were great farmers, that we did all the math, only that within the closed loop of a family’s circumstances, we did our parts.  Dad worked in town, sometimes at two jobs, so we needed to, and I didn’t mind.  I became good at this, just when it appeared I’d be good for nothing.  In fact, I wonder now if all that I’ve achieved so far, such as it is, didn’t root in these long and solitary days, in those unfurled fantasies.  Tractors, more than most things, will let you live inside your head.

—

Paul at work

There’s a tractor salvage yard off Nebraska Highway 2, west of Palmyra, which I’ve driven past for close to 30 years.  It’s six acres flanked by cash crops and pasture.  The tractors there are vintage, 1930’s to 1960’s, and are arrayed more or less in rows.  Most of these rows eventually disintegrate into scattered smaller components, which from the air must look like aneurisms.  There’s heavier equipment too: trucks and combines and construction cranes, bulldozers, compactors and swathers, even an old airport tug, which looks like two gigantic 1950 Chevy trucks welded back-to-back at the cabs.  There’s a smattering of old cars and mobile homes and city busses, used mainly for storage.  One of these, a ‘56 Buick Special, is loaded with dolls and puppets and other childhood jetsam, all of it swimming in a chemical fog; a salvage-yard incongruity, more parked than preserved.  And finally, there’s a large metal building to anchor the operation.  Its mostly dirt floor is covered in clusters of crankshafts, camshafts, pistons, starters, generators and clutches, plus a 1960s Montgomery Ward motorcycle, a homemade furnace, a ‘46 Chevy boom truck with a bad connecting rod, and a stack of rough-sawn lumber.  Dusty footpaths meander like game trails through these groupings, so you end up stalking what you want.

Outdoors, the grass around the machinery is cropped by a shaggy brown llama and a dozen or so fluffy sheep, and there’s a covey of Guinea hens to sound the alarm, startle you witless.  This is all recent knowledge.  I’ve pulled into the drive several times over the years and found the gate closed, and since the house is well inside the yard, up a hill, it appeared I’d need to trespass to ask permission.  Throw in a likely junkyard dog and ample experience with surly junkmen, and it was easy to back out and move on, especially when all I wanted was a picture or two.  You figure there’ll be something more desirable down the road.

Tractors in weeds

Well, there was and there wasn’t, so when a couple of years ago I noticed a woman repairing fence along the road, I couldn’t pass her by.  Here was an opportunity to make my case on neutral ground, to talk my way in with polite enthusiasm.  It’s not easy to 
explain what I seek in another person’s possessions, and I’ve found that women are less likely to cut me off mid-sentence, send me packing with half my spiel caught in my throat.  There have been exceptions, of course.  I was once nearly shot by a demented old bird with a babushka bandana and Arafat’s beard.  I later heard she was deaf, which made sense.  I do recall her studying my mouth, as if it were some festering laceration.  It angered her, but she was nuts-as-Nero before I came along.

Highway 2 is four lanes now, and the roadside is V-shaped where it fronts the salvage yard.  The right-of-way there is close to 70 feet, so the woman knew I was coming, and I was encouraged to see that she didn’t immediately return to her fence.  Here, perhaps, was that most beguiling thing: a seasoned soul not yet sick of the world, of all its types.  When I got close enough, I introduced myself, and was delighted to find her talkative.  She spoke directly and precisely, with just a hint of accent, which I couldn’t place at the time.  She later told me that she was from Mexico City, the daughter of a college professor, and had studied in New York.  I know New York, have my haunts, so here was another connection, however remote.  We spoke initially of sheep, hers being just across the fence.  I offered my limited experience raising them.  Near the end of this exchange, I said that I sort of liked sheep, which is not an easy thing to say out here, and only roughly true.  But she looked me square in the eye and answered, “Well, I do too!”  So there it was: a beginning.  Her name is Lou, which is somehow short for Maria.

Tractor Seats

The habits of sheep will lead naturally to the pertinences of tractor salvage, if you let them, and to photography, which on this day led to an invitation to meet her husband, the curator of this installation.  So I hiked back up to my truck, and this time, drove all the way up the drive.

The first time I saw Paul Lansing—and on most occasions since—-he was shuffling about in bib overalls and a pith helmet, a chunk of something in his hand.  He told me he was getting old.  My impression on that day was that he didn’t mind visiting, but he meant to stay busy, so I should bear that in mind.

When I asked if I could shoot some of his inventory, he said, “Sure, for $100 a picture.”  When I said I didn’t think I could afford those rates, he answered, “Okay then, you can do it for nothin’.”  He has the impish humor of that generation.

DeSoto Salvage

—

 And so began two new and satisfying friendships, complete with a highly unlikely connection to my family’s saddest story, to my Dad’s kid brother, Melvern, who was killed by a baseball in 1938, at age 13.  The sad irony is that the kid was no good at baseball—a family trait—and had literally begged himself onto the field that day.  Lord save us from what we want.

—

My friendship with Paul is old-fashioned; there are things we don’t ask or say.  I tell him hometown stories, which dislodge some of his.  Or something he says triggers one of mine.  We go back and forth like this, each on our bucket of bolts, usually after I’ve finished shooting.  I always learn something, always have fun.  On hot days, I’m sometimes offered a raspberry wine cooler from his shop fridge; not the fridge holding his papers, but the other one.  These “pops with beer in ‘em” were the ill-advised purchase of one of his daughters, whom I’ve never met.  Neither Paul nor Lou drink, so I’m the lucky one.

I inquire after certain mechanisms.  I’m rebuilding a dilapidated Model T, so I quiz him on babbit bearings.  I pick up an interesting item or point, say, “What’s this?  How’s it work?”  He always knows, always tells.  Like accumulators everywhere, he’s comforted by the things around him.  I have the opposite ailment:  I’m fond of the misplaced and irretrievable, the time cancelled.  These are idiopathic conditions, which can’t be helped.

Jeep with cranes

The world is strewn with salvage yards, but Paul’s has a certain look, an almost styled appearance, which comes from 44 years of moving things around, of changing his mind.  The result is a convincing imitation of chaos.  It’s not chaos, of course.  No deliberate life is without its internal logic, its hell-bent optimisms.

His homemade boom truck, built on the skeletal remains of a ‘40 Chevy, can transport an entire tractor, which is significant.  We mainly do what we’re equipped to do.  I’ve known him to plant a parted-out John Deere across one of the lanes of his yard, just to prop up a livestock panel, to corral those jailbird sheep.  So whatever else a tractor might be, it’s occasionally a fence post.  These impromptu shufflings are almost undetectable.  They don’t begin to alter the look of the place, yet when I try to re-shoot a scene, I often find that something substantial has been plunked down in front if it.  What used to be over there is now over here.  I’d had my chance.  Paul offers to move the thing.  I decline.

—

How much emotion can we pour into a machine?  A ton.  Consider the average automobile.  The first person to own that sleek new thing is in love with it.  He’s almost idolatrous.  He fancies how he looks in it: so jaunty and jazzy and prosperous.  The proof is in a snapshot clipped to the visor.  He can’t walk away from his ride without glancing over his shoulder.  He buys sunglasses that match or contrast its color scheme.  The next owner feels some of this as well, but focuses more on prudence, on the wisdom in dodging that initial depreciation.  What he fears most is buyer’s remorse, so he chooses cautiously, pays a little more, keeps it quiet.  His car is a mirror.  He buys an aerosol can of new-car scent.  A subsequent owner just wants a reliable work car, never mind the dents, the rust, the broken grill and taped tail light, the coffee-with-cream spilled down the defrost.  He knows who he is, refuses to pretend.  He plans to drive this beater ‘til the wheels come off, and almost does.  The final person to own this car parks two blocks away and walks to his appointments.  This is pretty much the full range of human emotion, the long and the short of it, from the Rift Valley down to you and me.

When I wander through Paul’s yard, and see the Johnnie Poppers, Farmals and Allises, the Fords and Olivers, the Massies, Cases and Molines, I see the folks I knew who drove these brands when I was a kid.  I was a covetous child, so I noticed.  My farmers are gone from the seats, of course, but they’re visible in the wear.

Most old tractors had stamped-steel seats and low steering wheels; a combination that made every operator appear slope-shouldered and hunchbacked.  These days, any old tractor I see can sprout a concave man in a straw hat, his chambray shirt buttoned all the way up.  Some of these men smell of sour milk and sweat, from the morning’s milking and the afternoon’s fieldwork.  Some show damp cords of soil in their neck creases each time they take a drink.  Some wear hats with green plastic visors sewn into the brims.  Some wear those yellow reversible chore gloves with the extra thumb.

When I walk up to an old tractor, I want to get up on it, to sit its seat with my feet on the brakes and take its measure.  It’s usually a zigzag ascent: from ground-to-drawbar-to-axle-to-seat.  In the days of wheeled plows and sickle mowers, a tractor’s brakes were often uneven; the plowing brake on the left riding lower underfoot than the mowing brake on the right.  These tractors had light front ends, so you needed independent braking to make sharp turns, to suck the front wheels around.  A plow was naturally a harder pull, so its brake took a longer stomp.  For reasons I can’t explain, I’m eager to know if the left brake rides low to the end.

McCormick Deering

These are old affinities, these plows and mowers and things.  In fact, I can still see my little brown-shoed-self reflected in a plowshare and moldboard.  Together they’re like a polished spoon, bright as chrome.  I’m sitting on my heels, arms dangling.  It’s late spring and Dad’s applying axle grease to the rear share with a two-inch-wide strip of cedar shingle, while I examine the barnyard swale in the front share.  Plow blades in May are like funhouse mirrors, like lenses ground by soil and conviction.  Dad dips into his dented bucket and lays down a Van Gogh-like impasto, though without the Van Gogh qualms.  The grease goes on streaky, green where it’s thick and yellow where it isn’t.  A plow won’t scour if it’s not shiny, won’t fold the ground over in silvery slabs.  Plows are shiniest at the end of its season, so that’s when you want to smear them with grease.  This grease was all about next year’s scour—now long gone—about the speed of flash rust, about weathering the weather between.

A plow may be just a plow, but a sickle mower is a wicked thing, prone to collateral damage.  Its ledger plates slam to and fro at breakneck speeds, just an inch or two above the ground.  Out of cussedness, they mimic the lulling whir of sewing machines.  A sickle bar clips every stem in its path, be it alfalfa or meadow grass, pheasant, fawn or bunny leg.  Everything clipped falls backward, startled.  You get used to these rare and incidental losses, and if you’re decent, climb down and finish them off.  Coyotes and crows and hawks do the rest.  You only worry when the family dog runs scenting before the bar, side-to-side, tail up.  He’s smart enough to know that machinery flushes wildlife, but not smart enough to keep clear.  He thinks the danger’s under the tractor, where it usually is, not six feet to the right of it, where alfalfa does a line dance.  You shout at him, throw what’s handy, get off and boot him home.  You do what you can, but there will always be inattentive dogs named Tripod.

—

What ceases to be salvaged consolidates into junk.  Left to their devices, all salvage yards would become junk yards, and fairly quickly, given their common ingredients.  Some yards are junky from the start, others drift in that direction.  Visible in salvage is the object of its detention.  Items of value are rotated forward.  Turnover is the very point.  Salvaged things are sorted by composition or design: they’re ferrous or non-ferrous, cast or steel, pinion gear or radiator.  A junk yard, on the other hand, is a thousand defections from order.  Junk scatters or is tossed in incoherent piles.  It comingles, forgets its intended purpose, shuns a teleology.  We all know junk when we see it, unless we happen to own it.  It just sits there in the weeds.

Twin Combines

Everything parked seems frozen, yet it keeps moving, keeps creeping toward oblivion.  An elm grows through an engine compartment; lifts it, wrests it, rends it.  There’s no pressure like growth pressure.  Wood and rubber and canvas rot.  Glass goes to smithereens.  Bolts in desiccated wooden wagons shrivel along their threads, narrow to rusty points and drop their nuts.  These nuts are sterile, so that line of wagon dies out.  Axle grease, pierced by the grit in a thousand winds, comes to look like pumpernickel.  Lichens, in their orange or green or putty filigrees, colonize slabs of sheet metal.  Old iron bleeds electrons into the soil, on its way home.  The ground becomes the reaper.  Nature wants it all back.  It insists! ###