The Tractor Graveyard
le 21 juin 2021
It must have been a late afternoon return home, driving in the old Peugeot 1007, when my daughter and I descended the hill that leads into our local farmworking village. The sun was setting perfectly behind the Massif central and the sky was orange-pink, with elongated clouds that made me feel like I was in living in a storybook. “Look,” she pointed out, “a tractor graveyard.” Although I’d entered the village from this road many times before, I hadn’t quite registered the scene this way. I glanced to the side of the road, just on the edge of the village and next to the semi-dried Lirou river. Sure enough, I spotted the half-dozen different tractors and small vehicles, some rusted and half taken apart with others intact but tire-less. It was not necessarily an awesome sight but certainly one that unabashedly demonstrates the cultural wealth in this community.
Such a “graveyard”, indeed, might reminisce readers of other rural communities with abandoned cars, tractors, and various motor vehicle parts. I was reminded of a conversation I had recently had with a US colleague who told me that in her preservice teacher preparation program, she specifically brought students to rural communities with vehicle parts strewn across front lawns. The students initially saw ‘junk’ and ‘clutter’, but, she instructed, those vehicle parts are integral to the ongoing functioning of the community and contain a deep well of knowledge surrounding farming and vehicle repair. Why, she argued, would anyone in the community throw away old car parts when they could be salvaged and recycled for use later on?
A similar scene tapped my memory from a recent trip I took to Cuba several years prior. Cuba is renowned for its use of vintage vehicles, or “time capsules on wheels,” from the pre-Castro 1950s era. The vehicles, like the 1950s Chevrolet Bel Air, are surprisingly common and used continuously for transportation and taxi services. Knowledge of vehicle maintenance and repair is an important skill for community survival. In the case of Cuba, people travel from around the world to experience riding in those antique vehicles, which have come to be symbolized as an example of Cuban resilience.
For this farm community in France, resilience involves tractor tires, motors, and cabs. It cycles its way through the seasons, carefully calculating the vineyards and grape production. Tractors make their ways throughout the village on a daily basis; farm work doesn’t know weekends, as attention to crops and animals is a daily commitment, from sunrise to sunset. I’ve come to appreciate the need to safeguard those parts and recycle them as needed. But they are more than just parts: these are place-based knowledges are critical to both the social and environmental ecology, and vary in distinct, culturally-sustaining, and essential ways.