The Fiberglass Seat
It was a beautiful spring day, and Bill Garvey, of White
Lake, Michigan, had decided to take a vacation day and get
his garden ready to plant. Enjoying the scent of morning
grass, he jumped up on his tractor, an old International
Harvester model H, built sometime in the 1940's. Old Betsy,
as he called the tractor, didn't have hydraulics to lift up
the implements like the new tractors so Bill was using a
double bottom, trailer plow instead. In this arrangement,
disks cut up the sod which is then turned over by the plow.
The front tires are close together, which causes the tractor
to be tippy. But Bill wasn't worried. He and old Betsy had
worked together for a long time, and what could go wrong on
such a simple job?
As Bill sat down on the fiberglass seat he had installed 10
years earlier, it pinched his leg. "I should fix that
crack," Bill thought. "But not today.." The garden area had
two-foot-tall grass in it, and was way overdue for shearing.
Maneuvering the tractor, he drove it down the hill with the
plows cutting deep into the fresh ground, then raised the
plow, turned around, went back up the hill and did it again.
But the tall grass was getting caught and wrapped around the
plow blades, and by the time Bill had made the third pass,
he needed to stop and clear off the plow, so it would turn
the sod over properly.
"I carefully backed the tractor and plow back up the hill I
had just plowed," Bill recalls. "Success! I was able to push
the grass off." But just as he pushed in the clutch to stop,
the cracked fiberglass seat broke away from its mounting.
Bill was still going in reverse! He fell back off the
tractor while it was still moving.
"The lever that adjusted the depth of the plows went up the
back of my shirt, my legs were up in the air and I was
trapped," Bill says. "My face was right beside the right
rear tire, which is five feet tall, and I could hear it
thumping, trying to finish the climb up the plow, which was
jack knifed. The right rear tire of the tractor was already
on top of the tire of the trailer plow. The narrow front end
of the tractor was only inches from tipping over---I could
hear and feel it tearing my shirt."
This was it! Bill was going to be crushed by the tractor.
"Dear God!" he cried out. "Please help me!"
Just then, the crank handle, which adjusts the angle of the
plow, flipped up, and hit Bill in the face. It cut his
cheek, but now he had a chance! Grabbing the handle, he used
it to push himself up and get his feet back onto the deck of
the tractor. With one jump and a lunge, his left foot hit
the shut-off button. The engine quit.
"I crawled off the tractor and got down on my knees," Bill
says. "I had tears in my eyes and thanked God for sending
one of his angels to help me." It took him awhile before he
could stand again, but he did. He was fine, except for some
small scratches and his shaking knees.
Carefully, Bill pushed the clutch for the tractor and let it
roll slowly, down off the plow. As it moved forward, it
almost turned over again. Bill was afraid to start the
engine. Somehow he got it back on all four wheels.
As his heartbeat returned to normal, Bill looked at the
tractor more closely. What had caused the crank rod to turn?
Maybe the tire hit it? And yet the handle had moved
immediately after he'd asked God for help..
Bill's wife Lorraine was as grateful as he was when she
heard the story. "Don't ever plow with your tractor alone
again, Bill," she begged.
"I wasn't alone," Bill pointed out. And he thanks God each
day for sending the help that he needed.
Joan Anderson Copyrighted by Joan Wester Anderson, used with permission. Originally appeared on the Where Angels Walk website, http://joanwanderson.com .