The Mountain Comes to Mohammed

I had forgotten I grew up on a farm. My entire childhood was one long sequence from the "NEVER LET A CHILD DO THIS!!" section of the farm safety videotape. Considering the number of plows (chisel, disc, and moldboard) that I've climbed on; the number of tractors I've ridden on; and the number of chemicals to which I've been exposed, I should've either lost a limb or grown an extra one. Combines, hell. The combine to me wasn't a picture in a book: it was a giant machine I could climb on and into; get a little trapped in the hopper or pull on a lever in the cab and nearly crush my sisters with header. Who knew it would actually move?

The things I wish for Max, the myriad of things I took for granted (Saturday morning cartoons, my Deadhead Uncle, my own barn to play in) that Max will know only in his own weird way, could fill it's own blog.

However, for a kid into all things large, diesel powered, with huge hydraulic accoutrement, you couldn't find a boy luckier than Max. Since the spring he was born, there's been a stupidly huge highway project going on near our house. There are miles of cranes and front loaders and piles of dirt in easy view of the construction zone-slowed traffic. More locally, though, we have the sad fate of two huge elm trees. Last summer, Max got to watch guys with chainsaws in sky-high cherry pickers saw the tree down to its trunk. Then, a few days later, we awoke to a front loader (driven by Santa Claus, no less) right outside our house. This spring, closure was reached when a crazy, huge saw-thingy came and Vita-Mixed the stump into oblivion. An hour later, this awesome grappler came to finish the job.

Here's Max, long gone catatonic after a whole day of heavy machinery-spotting. He was so zoned-out, when the cool grappler driver extended the arm out until the claw was two feet from Max and then jerked the arm so the claw slammed together, the boy didn't even react. It was like that time George Clooney pulled up at the house with a limo load of supermodels, the trunk full of tackle: he asked me to go fishing and perhaps later a baseball game. I just stood there mutely until he shrugged and drove off.