My son’s second birthday party took place in lockdown this past February. It was a small outdoor affair during which his auntie gifted him a Claas model tractor and trailer from Dickie’s Toys, green trim with black tires and red alloys.
Since then, my son makes me stand out in front of our house watching for large farm machinery that might pass by. We live in one of those tall skinny terraced Flemish houses on a road out of the village that heads north into the countryside. Agricultural traffic is abundant. Sometimes the tractor drivers bamp their horns when we wave at them.
My son likes to watch a lot of tractor videos on YouTube, too. One of his favorites is a highlights reel from a tractor show in the Czech town of Horní Planá where the 2,000 inhabitants come together to watch their sons and daughters navigate a range of muddy obstacles in tractors of varying sizes and abilities. My son also likes to watch a nine-minute video from the Indian farm vlogging channel, “Pramod’s Life,” in which Pramod Prajapati and his friends drive three tractors into a nearby river to have them washed.
On a recent reporting trip to the Trappist brewery at the Abbaye Notre Dame de Saint-Remy in Rochefort, I noticed a tractor parked outside their brewhouse. It was a Ford 4600, a 60 horsepower utility tractor first released in 1981 with a 3.3 L diesel 3 cylinder engine. It was backed up to a trailer into which spent grains were being dumped from the brewhouse I had just visited, a beautiful tiled room from days gone by with shining copper brewing vessels.
I showed the photo of the Rochefort tractor to my son. “Tractor! Tractor,” he shouted. The whole incident put him in the mood to watch tractors, so we sat down to a YouTube video of a tractor festival in the Czech town of Nedvězí and I cracked open a bottle of Trappistes Rochefort 8, their muddy brown, Dark Strong Ale of 9.2% ABV, which was originally known as “Spécial” when it was released in the mid-1950s.
One tractor got stuck in a muddy crater and we both willed it on from the sofa as it revved and spluttered and chugged in its attempts to get out. When the tractor finally made it out of its hole, my son and I both cheered, and I decided to celebrate by opening another bottle of Rochefort.
