As Hannah Bissell watches her neighbors tinker with a tractor engine late into the evening, she wonders about the connection between shared memories and hard work:
Though the moon rose hours ago, I see a farmer and his son are still in the field, toying with their combine’s engine. The machine is older than both of them, probably purchased by the farmer’s father or grandfather, but still they drive it faithfully to the fields and back no matter how many seasons pass by.
They probably hold on to that old machine because the cost of new equipment is too great. The surplus of a good year gets put away toward a lean year like this. But these lands aren’t farmed for the money; they’re farmed for history and tradition—the feeling of putting hands and backs to the same land worked by the farmers’ fathers and grandfathers. These tractors carry an oral tradition in their sloughing paint and cobbled-together engines: memories of boys and their fathers, girls and their mothers, talking over the day as they hand each other screwdrivers, ratchets, and baling twine. They are mosaics of days worked and reworked. Every scratch, dent, and weld line recounts a memory--like the day the farmer accidentally drove over the gate or the day the son turned too tightly watching a golden eagle pluck a ground squirrel from the field.
As years progress I see more and more Western Montana farms sold to developers, but those old tractors remain, rusting by the backyard shed. If you ask a farmer for the story of his machine, he’ll tell you his father or his grandfather’s story with pride: “He did it with horses before he bought that tractor,” he’ll say. “Eighteen hours a day to plow and plant. The day he bought that tractor, he said he was buying a better life. And he did. By God, he did.”
Poet Victor Charlo - the great-great grandson of Chief Charlo of the Bitterroot Salish - sees language and labor together forming the fundamental stories of who we are. His poem, Agnes, appeared in Charlo’s volume of poems, Put Sey.
We hide-tan here at Agency Creek and at Valley Creek. Hard work that lets your mind go as you wait for the rest of your life. Soft hide, so soft wind blows like cloth. Hair white with hide. She, Agnes, watches and lets us know in old Salish tongue the word for scraper that I remember now. So hard. So to the point. Why did I learn how to write? Why did I want to? Is it worth the loss of your world going away?
(Broadcast: "Reflections West," 6/17/15. Listen weekly on the radio, Wednesdays at 4:54 p.m.)
