Driving
Sunday, June 1, 2008
So let's talk about driving.
Well, not talk, exactly, as you are there where you are and I am over here, and I am typing and you are, at most, reading. Or if you reply, holding up your end of the conversation, then it will be in what they call a "time shifted manner".
Actually, it is possible that you are talking or typing while reading this, and not fully paying attention to this online log thingey. And that is ok also. This is not mandatory, even for you, Mom. Truly.
Driving is really what we do a lot of these days. Our eye is more on this fact what with the increasing price of gasoline and all the concern about global warming. I do have an opinion on those topics that I will share later, even if you are not reading.
Dryland farming
In a younger, previous life, I worked on the family farm. In those days, horses had pretty much found something else to do, as they didn't feel that trying to keep up with tractors had much profit for them. So there were lots of vehicles involved. Should one care to keep a log of what a wheat farmer's day entailed, driving would be a major component of it.
The number of vehicles involved was kind of impressive. On our 800 acre dryland wheat and barley farm, we would use a tractor to work the fields, meaning to keep the summerfallow free of weeds, and to plant seeds in the fall or spring.
Driving truck
My first exposure to driving was to pick up rocks from the fields. These were rocks that were half the size of basketballs that could damage a duckfoot plow or other machinery. I was 11 when I first drove the truck for that.
In the fall during harvest, the trucks were used to take the wheat to town, and during seeding to bring wheat to the field. Or sheetrock to that room you are adding to the house, or lumber to the barn repair site, or cattle to market.
So in driving a truck, you might be tempted to think of it as a large car, and that you might have to take the corners a little differently, right?
Well, there is a whole lot more to it than that. Let's say that you are hauling water with a 1000 gallon tank pushed onto the bed of the truck. Even if you are hauling in the dead of winter in Montana, water is a liquid, and as such has the property that a particle physicist might call "slosh". That is, come to a stop quickly and the water rushes to the front, causing an interesting dynamic as you are sitting there at a stop, or what you thought was a stop.
That was kind of fun, right? Well, what might not be fun is if you are picking up the load of water in town and turning left onto the street to take you out of town to the homestead and after you have finished the turn, the water hasn't and you are unexpectedly wrestling the truck. Kind of a negotiation, see?
So hopefully after one or at most two of these, you keep in mind what might happen. That is to say, you are paying attention to the driving, and paying attention to what the water is going to do as part of the shared leadership that you and the water have with the journey, so to speak.
Many cows, one mind
Now if you are hauling cattle, the negotiation, if I can call it that, becomes a little less predictable. The cattle, as a group, and as I am sure you know, cattle do nothing except as part of a group, decide that a left turn in the middle of no particular place, might be a good idea, they most likely have not told you ahead of time, leaving you to wrestle the wheel at an unexpected moment.
Perhaps you are driving a load of freshly harvested wheat to town. If the journey is but six miles, there is no need to put a canvass cover on the truck, as that would take just about as long as the journey. But you need to keep in mind that above 30 miles per hour, the wind will likely begin to pick up the grains and scatter them before their time. So you stick to that speed. If you have the appropriate tires for driving in soft fields, it is likely that they make a significant noise, and, being around engines and all things driving, you are attuned to the tone of things, you identify a particular tone as being associated with 30 mph, and you don't even need to look at the speedometer.
Look out
However, if this is the first time you are driving the 11 tons of wheat and truck on the highway, you might not take your foot off the gas as soon as you are about to learn to, and the truck Doesn't Slow Down as much as you thought. Sheesh. So you have to use more than a little brake and downshifting combined to stop just a hair over the line, panting slightly.
So as you can see, there is driving truck and there is driving truck.
Combining
Let's talk (in the sense I mention above) about driving the combine. That seems like an odd name, suggesting some sort of faintly suspicious social organization. After the threshing machines (that is pronounced "thrashing machines" for you easterners), which were stationary, came a machine that did the cutting and separation of grain from stalk. This machine, which combined the operations of cutting and threshing was pulled behind a tractor. In my day, the combines had become self-propelled.
The engine of a combine has a lot of functions. First, they power the internal threshing parts of the machine—the rotating bars that whack the grain to separate it, a fan that blows the chaff and straw but not the grain, the auger that lifts the grain to the bin behind the operator, the sickle that cuts the grain, the reel that encourages the cut grain to fall backwards rather than forwards, the auger that moves it all to the center towards the threshing cylinder. Oh, and the hydraulics that raise and lower the header to adjust for higher or lower grain, and the power to drive the big wheels that moves the thing forward. The engine is controlled by a governor so it runs at a constant speed, as the threshing part is speed-sensitive.
So the operator sits up in the middle of all of this and controls some of the aspects of this moderately loud machine. He has a four-way lever that raises and lowers the header and speeds or slows the ground speed of the combine itself, to adjust for heavier or lighter crops. Or more often in that neck of the woods, lighter and even lighter crops.
Attention
The operator needs to watch all the stuff being cut, to avoid rabbits, for example, or large rocks that you did not get out of the field back when you were 11, or particularly uneven pieces of ground. He needs to pay attention to the particular sound given off by the cylinder to tell how loaded it is, to listen for any unusual clanks, to listen to how loaded the engine is, to hear if a chain has fallen off.
Then there is the unloading of grain. As the bin gets full, you need to find the truck. If everything goes according to plan, the truck is right there when you are full. If not, you have to find him and get him to come over to you.
Harvesting is about time pressure, so you most often unload the grain from the combine to the truck while continuing to run. So now the operator, in addition to watching all the above things, needs to pay attention to the truck, how it is positioned, whether the wheat is piled too far in the back, how close the truck is to the combine, and whether the truck driver is paying attention to his part. If he is too far forward or back, you have to signal him.
So there are these multiple things going on, you see. Multiple tasks. Multiple tasks at once.
Multitasking reality
I suggest, for your consideration, that driving truck or combine is truly a multitasking affair. Similarly, driving a car is as well, although perhaps not much. With kids in the back, you need to pay attention to the possibility that they could become unwitting projectiles, or spill something, or get in a fight, or consider leaving the car at speed. With the radio going, you need to be sure to catch the clue to be the 99th caller, switching stations as you see fit. Then there are the other drivers. You find that you need to have conversations with them—you behind your windows, they behind theirs—possibly with gestures.
A good driver, or at least one that went to the same driving school that I did, needs to pay attention to all the things going on that relate to the physical journey at hand, and, perhaps most importantly, pay attention to how the attention is being divided and how to allocate it properly, like right away.
If this seems like too much trouble, then perhaps you should hang up and drive. And I mean the radio as well. And all too soon the kids will have their own cars.