Matt the farm hand
28 Sep 2005 
around lunchtime 
Matt Winckler
Yesterday I had the opportunity to return once more to the ancestral homelands and operate that staple of my youth, the Kubota orchard tractor. Due to the combination poor timing of truck drivers and meetings on the West Side, my dad needed some help setting out empty bins to prepare for Granny Smith apple harvest beginning today, and I was eager to oblige.
It was fabulous getting back out there on the tractor, hauling bins around on pak-forks. It would have been even better to use a bin trailer again (a trailer that is pushed rather than pulled by the tractor, connecting to the front, and consists of two long forks that carry up to four bins), but the bin trailer is unwieldy and does not go down rows of heavily laden apple trees without bashing up all the fruit. Besides that, the size of the job did not demand it. Still, maneuvering the tractor down the narrow rows and recalling the bin trailer with fondness reminded me where I got all my driving skills (driving a vehicle with a “trailer” attached in front of it at 15-20 mph and trying to avoid jacknifing the whole thing teaches one the value of attentiveness), and renewed my belief that every driver ought to be required to regularly practice maneuvering through a similar course prior to obtaining his license.
I hold that the greatest smell in the world is the combination of apples, crushed still-wet-from-the-morning-dew grass, diesel exhaust, and wooden apple bins. (A close second is probably achieved by removing the grass and replacing diesel exhaust with propane forklift exhaust.) Last night I at least got two out of the four elements necessary, and it was glorious.
The evening was one of those cool, surreal, utterly calm ones, when dust hangs in the air for five or ten minutes after being kicked up by passing vehicles. It was a perfect 70 degrees, and after it was dark, I stood for some moments drinking in the faint sound and scent of hay being baled (which probably rivals the #2 slot for “best scents in the world”) at the bottom of the hill a quarter mile away.
All told, an excellent evening.