It was a beautiful spring day, and Bill Garvey, of
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
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.
