In Alabama, we have finally found a land entirely strange to us.
At first glance, it didn’t look much different from southern Tennessee. It had the same rustic farms with tightly-wound spools of hay, the same aged signs advertising local roadside eateries, the same cattle pastures and cornfields and single-floor brick houses with well-mown lawns alongside the highway. We stayed in Huntsville our first night here, which was deceiving. Even my friend Steve Campbell, a journalist who was gracious enough to lend us his floor for the evening, mentioned that there was a popular saying that Huntsville—a relatively young city full of techies and engineers—is not “in” Alabama; it is just surrounded by it.
Sitting in the bleachers at the Hazel Green annual tractor pull, we most definitely felt “in” Alabama. There must have been more than a thousand people there, but we weren’t hard to spot, being dressed like a caddy, a barista, and a skateboarder in a sea of mesh hats, jean-overalls, and cut-off T-shirts advertising beer and souped-up trucks.
“Where’re yer redneck clothes?” a girl in a tank top named Hannah asked Ben, nodding at his green Polo and khaki slacks.
We were watching large-wheeled tractors with roll cages and fire-breathing exhaust stacks haul what looked like small barges down a short length of dirt track, and after spending 20 minutes trying to decipher the intricacies of this process in a way that probably made us look like the Space Odyssey monkeys trying to operate a computer, we had finally given up and sidled over to Hannah and her friends—a phalanx of country boys—in the hope of figuring out what was going on.
“Umm, here, Rob knows more ’bout this stuff than ah do,” Hannah said in a sweetly stereotypical twang. “Rob!”
A slight young man with jeans, stubble, and a slightly crooked baseball cap, who had been walking along the sideline between the bleachers and the rows of folding chairs pushed up near the fence, climbed toward us.
“It’s these gahs’ first tractor pull an’ they wanna know how it works,” Hannah explained, using the same tone you might use when imploring a friend to humor your kids with a piggyback ride.
“Oh,” said Rob, taking a seat on the other side of Ben. “Well, the tractor pulls the sled down the track, an’ they try to get as far as they can before it gets too heavy an’ they can’t pull it no more.”
“So it gets heavier as they go?”
“Yeah, I think so. You can see the wheels spinnin’ at the end.”
Hannah and her friends were whispering and looking at us. On the track, a pickup truck with “Big Daddy Magic” painted on its side and what appeared to be a nuclear power plant sticking out of its hood screamed down the track, sounding like a jet engine hooked up to a public address system.
“How far is a good pull?” Ben asked.
“Well…I’m not sure, really. I usually jus’ see how far the others ones are goin’ an’ see where it stacks up,” Rob said. “I really don’t know that much about it, I’m just here to see my cousin pull. I’m down from—you know Fayetteville?”
We nodded. We had driven through on the way down from Nashville.
“Yeah, ’sabout 25 miles away. I thought I might meet some girls, but you know how that goes.”
Eventually, Hannah gave Rob the signal that she and the boys were going to the parking lot to drink, and because we didn’t feel like being alone on the bleachers again, we went for a walk on the grounds. I had never imagined that a tractor pull would be a family outing—but then, I suppose I never imagined much about a tractor pull at all. There were raffles, T-shirt vendors, little kids running around in cut-off T’s with cans of Dr. Pepper. A flock of women were selling steamed corn out of a bucket, and another flock of women were selling raffle tickets. If it weren’t for the occasional banshee howl of a 4,000-horsepower engine, I might have mistaken it for a county fair.
When Ben started interviewing some of the young adults about their views on the upcoming presidential election, however, their comments seemed less than wholesome. “You just can’t trust a black man with the country, what can I say?” said one affable young man. His girlfriend chimed in by saying sincerely that she had been told in church that a black man trying to lead at that level was necessarily the antichrist, and therefore Barack Obama’s election would portend an imminent Apocalypse. “Ahm a Southern boy, born an’ bred,” crowed a third young man, “and I just can’t have a black president, and there’s nothing more to say about it.” A manatee of a young man introducing himself as “Big Cal” drove home the point. “Ah’d rather not see that Jew win. Havin’ a Muslim nigger as our president, that’s not OK.”
Obama, of course, is not Jewish. Ben is. He wisely declined to reveal either of these facts, and we left shortly thereafter.
To me, power-pulling was monotonous. The truck would start with a roar, strain against the weight of the sled, then pick up some speed and make headway down the dirt track. As it did, the momentum would cause a block of weights to slide from the back of the sled to the front, increasing the weight on the truck’s rear wheels until they could bear it no longer, causing the truck to grind to a halt. Then the announcer, who looked and sounded like he was holding six golf balls in his mouth, would rattle off a streak of jargon that I probably wouldn’t have been able to make sense of even if it weren’t camouflaged in an impenetrable drawl. The words I did recognize were almost always synonyms for “powerful.”
But for all that power, the tractor-pull offered very little theatre. I had always thought watching stock cars fly around an oval track 200 times was dull, but at least there was the inordinate speed and the occasional fire or pileup. Here, the vehicles would travel about 300 feet and top out at probably 20 miles per hour. Frankly, I would find it more interesting to watch a tractor plow a field.
In the end, I decided that the appeal of the tractor pull was the stubborn resolve of the mechanical beasts and their mounts. There was something about dragging all that weight that the Alabama crowd found especially noble— something a Yankee boy like me could never understand.
Earlier that day we had found ourselves in Decatur, a bland, low-lying city of strip malls and chemical plants west of Huntsville. Having no real agenda, we ended up following signs to a brown, circular building advertised as Cook’s Natural Science Museum. Inside, we found a series of modest exhibits with small plaques describing the habits of various species of insect and wildlife, with stuffed examples posing behind panes of glass.
Integrated into these exhibits I noticed small cards with what appeared to Biblical excerpts. “…And they traded in your fairs,” read one card next to some desiccated pieces of coral reef, “with emeralds, purple, and embroidered work, and fine linen, and coral and agate” (Ezekiel 27:16). Next to the mollusk exhibit, a card displayed a passage from Exodus wherein God makes reference to the onycha—the lid of a mollusk shell—during a command to Moses. Finally, in an exhibit on fossils, Ben noticed this factoid:
Most scientists agree that flooding provides the best way to start forming fossils. The Flood, described in the Bible, helps scientists to explain how fossils were formed, why they are found all over the world, why fossils come in groups, and why many things have died out or become extinct since Noah’s time.
It could take only a few years, or maybe 100 years, or possibly 1,000 years at most [to form a fossil]. The plants and animals that drowned in Noah’s flood would be about 5,000 to 7,000 years old.
Cook’s Natural Science Museum was originally founded by a local man named John R. Cook, Sr. as a training tool for employees of his pest control business. Now, it caters largely to the young people of Decatur who may have been deprived of natural science theories such as the insta-fossil because, as the museum’s sweet, elderly desk attendant told me, “the teachers in school have to be careful what they talk about.”
The woman, who wore owl glasses and her gray hair up in curls, told me that visitors who consider it apocryphal to dovetail natural and Biblical theories of natural history are “generally polite enough not to say anything.
“These are our beliefs,” she said, “and if people disagree with them, we’ll be glad to give ‘em back what they paid to get in.”
Posted from Travel Inn Motel, Guin, Alabama.
