Two Walking Plow Stories

I asked a teenage boy showing a pair of young steers at the oxen show at the Tunbridge World’s Fair why he chose to work with Jerseys. “Because they’re the hardest.” I totally relate. My favorite job with horses? Plowing with the walking plow. Because it’s the hardest. When you show horses, for the most part, whoever kicked your ass last week is going to kick your ass next week. Unless you go out and buy some better horses. But when you plow you are a team of three working together and, if you care to, you can always improve. There’s a reason why they have plowing contests but not hay raking contests.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with my Uncle Wilson Tupper. We were talking about fall plowing and the walking plow and he said  the best day he ever had was on the remote fields we call “Up North.” He was plowing every day for a couple of weeks late in the fall, after deer season. The last day before the ground froze he plowed all day in a snowstorm, the kind of storm with no wind and big, fat flakes. He said you couldn’t hear a sound or see a thing beyond the horses and when they would stop at the end of the furrow, the steam rose from his back just like the horses. He said there was something about the moisture and the snow and the near-frozen nature of the soil that made the sod turn just right so that he felt it was the best piece of plowing he ever did. He enjoyed the gentle irony of doing your career best in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm with no one about to appreciate the accomplishment. His enjoyment of that gentle irony is part of why the memory was so fresh for him 40 years later, and why his telling of it is so fresh in my memory 40 years after that.

One of the rules of plowing is to not have the lines around your waist. If something goes wrong you could get dragged. You’re supposed to have the lines over one shoulder so you can shrug loose if need be. Early in my plowing days I was at a plowing contest and, though I knew better, I was doing this wrong thing. I was confident in my equipment and my horses and it was beautiful river bottom soil. You couldn’t have found a stone if you needed one. At the end of a furrow an old man who had been watching said, “You’re reminding me of a time when I was your age and I was plowing with the lines around my waist like that. The plow struck a stone, snapped the evener and the horses took off. You know those horses hadn’t dragged me more than a hundred yards before I realized I’d done wrong.” He laughed but I took his meaning and never did it again. He was George Ainsworth and he became a great friend and mentor. He was a wise, talented horseman and it was typical George that he taught you something in a modest way and with a laugh.