Another week in September, my dad and I went to a class about steam tractors. Many of these monsters are over 100 years old. They run just like old train locomotives. Most of the tractor is a giant water tank with a separate chamber for a fire. You fill the tractor with water, keep shoveling in fuel such as coal or wood to boil the water, and use the steam power to plow fields, power a sawmill, or demolish roads. (It's way more complicated than that, but the instructors made it look easy.) They actually let us drive these working pieces of history. The instructors and other volunteers own and maintain most of these machines themselves. They were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. Here's me driving one - I don't think my fingers are supposed to be over that gear.
And this is another tractor in action.
2 comments:
That machine is like something out of a magic card, just intensely exotic. I can't believe it was part of our history. There's so much I don't know.
I love that hat.
That's what I thought, too. When we first pulled up, a couple of the tractors were running and about a dozen others were parked in a group. It was like suddenly encountering a herd of live dinosaurs in the middle of Wisconsin. Completely foreign, ancient, and fascinating.
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