Our society is obsessed with the supernatural. Nearly each week we read about visits from outer space or some type of strange circles  in somebody’s wheat field.

This fascination with the unknown must be a recent phenomenon. Nobody worried about that kind of stuff when I was a kid; we had bigger things to worry about.

If someone told my father there was a hole in his bean field or a goat on the henhouse, he didn’t think about extraterrestrials or get excited and call the police. He simply said, “Where are the boys?”
I grew up in a time when the unusual was commonplace and the ordinary was worthy of suspicion. There were five boys and two girls in my family, and if two of us didn’t think of something, the other five probably did.

My dad would be combining and notice an acre or so of wheat mashed down into a strange, geometric pattern. He didn’t think about aliens, though. He simply looked over the fence at the base paths in the pasture and said, “Must have been a homerun.”
Dad’s reaction was probably similar, but more excited, when he found that huge crater in his corn field one autumn. Nobody knows for sure what he said, because the hole appeared and disappeared without question or fanfare.

An untrained eye might attribute such a crater to the blast from a flying saucer, or an asteroid, at the least; but a man with five boys recognized it immediately. This had all of the earmarks of a tractor pull.

Readers who haven’t seen a tractor pull will have to use their imaginations. A tractor pull is that event at the fairgrounds where a juiced-up tractor is hooked to a heavy sled. Then engines scream, wheels spin and smoke rolls, while otherwise sane people cheer their favorite machine.

That’s how it was that June day when my brothers were supposed to be cultivating corn. Two of the boys had been arguing for months about which tractor was more powerful, and they finally decided to settle it once and for all. One drove an old Oliver with wide front wheels. The other piloted an Allis Chalmers with narrow wheels and enough power to pull a two-bottom plow on a really good day.
Nobody had a sled, of course, but my brothers found a chain in the truck. So they hooked the old Oliver and Allis together – and turned them loose right in the middle of the cornfield. Engines whined, smoke rolled and tires spun.

A third brother was smart enough to stay out of the whole thing. He became the eyewitness, referee, innocent bystander – depending upon who you ask. All three have remained silent for more than 50 years, but now admit the main result of their impromptu tractor pull was two huge holes in the corn field.

“How did you fill the holes?” I asked recently.

“We didn’t,” they said.

“What did Dad say when he found those holes with the corn picker?” I quizzed.

“Who knows? We surely weren’t going to ask him!” they said.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.