Hey, hey that's a tractor!

For a few years now, I have heard the Country Western song by Craig Morgan “International Harvester.” Being from the city (Santa Monica CA and Las Vegas NV)  I had no idea what an International Harvester was. In fact it took a few listening of the song to figure that it was about farm equipment.  The gist of it is it’s about a farmer who is unapologetic for slowing down traffic. To quote the singer: “cussing at me won’t save you no time, Hoss!”  Some of the lyrics sounded like foreign words to me (County 4-H, combine driver??) Later on, when I would hear the first notes of the song on the radio, I would switch to another channel, I couldn't relate to it at all.

That is until I moved to the rural community of Middleton ID. There is an abundance of farm equipment on the spring time highways that you share the road. Crop sprayers, threshers and tractors abound during the morning commute. It was somewhat unsettling to me since I was only used to seeing cars, trucks and buses on the city roads.   It was refreshing to see a semi truck. Seeing in my rear view mirror a combine harvester with menacing-looking blades filling my back window nearly caused me to veer off the road.  Then there were mornings when I was trapped in a slow moving crawl of traffic with an even slower moving tractor in front. Times like these, I would channel-surf in search of this song-- now the lyrics made perfect sense to me! I’m not sure that I would go so far as to “tip my hat” like the song suggests, (since I don’t normally wear a hat!) but I sure appreciate the farmers just trying to make a living like the rest of us commuters.