John Deere Green

It is called many different things. Farmer blow. Loogie. Snot rocket.

Grandpa T had an old John Deere tractor, a “Johnnie Popper”. Those old machines were a marvel of simplicity with a slow firing two-cylinder engine rather than the more fashionable and higher revving four- or six-cylinders engines.

The old green tractor had an almost animate presence; it was nearly its own being. The engine rotated and fired so slowly that instead of vibrations it created pulses. Those lapses between power stroke pulses coupled with the torque multiplication passing through various gearsets to the rear wheels almost made the forward motion feel plodding, like a lumbering workhorse more so than a soulless amalgamation of cold cast iron.

My brothers and I spent a lot of time at Grandpa and Grandma T’s farm. They owned 120 acres but only about 15 were pasture, hay, and garden plot farmland. The rest was woodland.

Glorious woodland.

Grandpa had spent a good portion of his working years in the lumber camps and spoke fondly about those experiences. The era of the lumber camps eventually ended just before the Second World War and the Iron County forester then lamented that there was no longer a marketable stick of wood left in the county. The old gyppo loggers joked that a woodpecker would have to pack a lunch when flying through.

But Grandpa T’s woodland was different. Bought as cutover when he was a younger man, he carefully manicured and culled and transformed what his contemporaries might have referred to as a “worthless stump farm” into a very stately and park like stand of mature sugar maple.

The surrounding parcels of land were also cutover. But in the absence of meticulous care, those adjacent parcels only became scrubby unmanaged second growth forests.

Grandpa’s Forest was majestic.

Our role as grandsons in Grandpa’s Forest was to help make firewood, which happened to also be his primary forest management tool.

His favorite harvests were smallish hard maple trees that had been standing dead long enough that they were beginning to shed their bark. They resembled weathered bones and were often small enough that they did not require splitting. He called them ram pikes and proclaimed, “No need to cut a live tree for firewood”. Another favorite to harvest were small young black cherry trees which would often die off quickly after their initial growth spurt. “Cherry burns hotter than sunshine”, he proclaimed. Cherry firewood was specifically reserved for the sauna woodpile.

The dead trees were felled and blocked into stove lengths then neatly stacked into piles in the woods.

In the winter he would carefully maneuver Grandma’s wide track Ski-Doo Nordic snowmobile through the woods with a homemade sleigh in tow, collecting the piles of cut firewood.

When there was no snow on the ground, he navigated through a very carefully planned series of trails with his two cylinder “Johnnie Popper” tractor towing a homemade trailer built out of the repurposed front end from a 1937 Ford.  Grandpa would putt-putt through the forest, sitting bolt upright in the tractor seat and rhythmically and ever so slightly bouncing up and down seemingly in synch with the “pop-pop-pop” of the John Deere exhaust note.

The trails were very tight, and the forest was dense. Masterful and meticulously timed turns and deft application of the cutting brakes brought the tractor right alongside each of the precut piles of firewood scattered about.  Seldom did Grandpa have to back up to make a second attempt at the notorious hairpin corners on his trails and never did he run over or skin or bump into a living tree alongside.

We would ride in the trailer as it bounced along behind the old John Deere. Upon reaching one of the many small piles scattered about, we would jump out and load the trailer.

Grandpa T apparently also had sinus problems.

He would be bouncing along and then would suddenly pinch a nostril then turn his head the opposite way. Upon suddenly giving a hearty blow, a large, um, phlegm ball that closely color matched the tractor would be launched into the atmosphere at what appeared to be supersonic speed.

Now most folks evacuating mucous from their nose sans tissue or a handkerchief might opt for having the gooey projectile fly harmlessly onto the ground. But Grandpa T was a man of many talents, and one well-honed talent that always impressed us boys was aim.

Grandpa T could always stick the slimy missile onto the rearmost apex of the rotating tractor tire. Centrifugal force would then transform the gelatinous splat into an extended mucous whip, sometimes a foot or more long. It projected out radially from the point of impact on the tire much the way centrifugal force radially extends a bullwhip out from the swinging hand of the user.

This biohazardous whip would swing forward and then disappear as the tire rotated forward, only be pummeled into the ground. On a bad sinus day this amazing spectacle might be repeated half a dozen times.

Grandpa T has long since left this world and I have never since seen another display of such talent.