A Beginner's Guide to Plowing Fields with a Tractor in the Spring Rain of February

This year, the Start of Spring fell on February 4th. The old farmer said the best time to transplant rice seedlings is within ten days before or after the Start of Spring, so as soon as the Lunar New Year was over, the farmers of Chishang once again laid out patch after patch of green carpet over the land, and the fields of the rift valley seemed to brim with life again overnight - all except my three-fen plot on the Coastal Mountain Range...

Having scattered the seedling seeds at the end of January, I had been waiting all along for a good window to tidy up the other half of the field that I had not yet roughly plowed. Unfortunately, the blazing sun never showed its face for more than three days at a time. My clayey field would barely dry out under the sun, just beginning to turn white and hard, when the next day a cold front would roll in with sharp, icy rain, flooding the field again and turning it muddy and wet. And after the Lunar New Year, every household was busy transplanting seedlings; once a professional nursery releases its seedlings, they wait for no one, and if you miss the timing you face the miserable prospect of having no seedlings to plant.

So during that stretch, even though I begged everyone I could think of, it was hard to find anyone to help work the land with a rotary tiller. Every day I watched one rotary tiller after another at work in other people's fields, their huge engines droning as they drove rows of spiral blades two or three meters wide. As those blades churned through the flooded fields, the soil was blended into thin mud. Although I had grown my own seedlings and did not need to scramble with others for plants, I just could not feel settled with the field unprepared. After asking many elders for advice, I decided to borrow a traditional power tiller (commonly called an "iron ox") and plow the field myself.

It was not until mid-February, about 25 days after sowing, that I finally borrowed an iron ox: a simple diesel engine, its whole body covered in rust, mounted on two iron wheel rims, looking every bit the old veteran of the battlefield.

To be honest, having to control such a wild machine for the first time felt a bit like getting an electric train as a kid - I was beside myself with glee. But that fleeting excitement vanished the moment I held the starter crank and could not get the thing to start. I cranked with all my might, trying to ignite that old engine, trying again and again until my muscles ached, until I was gasping for breath and sweating. Just when I thought the day's work would end in this ridiculous, humiliating tragedy with no progress at all, the old engine finally came back to life like a dying patient taking one last breath, puffing out burst after burst of white smoke and rumbling to life. I hurriedly pressed the throttle and would not, for dear life, let it stall.

I thought that humiliating opening was the end of it, but little did I know that as I pushed the iron ox down the road toward my field at a snail's pace of about 1.5 km per hour, every old grandpa I passed looked at me with the most curious eyes. In that instant I felt as if I were parading down the street stark naked. A white jeep came toward me and honked, and a young man with a mouth full of betel-nut-red spit leaned out and shouted at me. "Hey~ come weed my place~" whooshed past, and ever since I first met him, every single time he saw me he had to tell me to go weed...

By then my face had frozen into a smile, and apart from a foolish grin I truly had nothing to say. Those short 200 meters felt as far as Taitung to Hualien. I suddenly thought of the scene in the novel "The Village of Divine Departure" where the protagonist Yuki first arrives in the mountain village, and I could not help feeling a pang of kinship. Gritting my teeth, I swung the iron ox into a big turn and drove it up the hill in one go...

Up on the hill everything returned to calm. Many white butterflies fluttered over the field ridges, and I let out a sigh of relief at feeling safe again. That afternoon the sunlight was gentle, and I smoothly finished roughly plowing the rest of the field. Though there were a few scary moments along the way, I truly did learn how to handle that iron ox.

Now all that is left is to wait for the seedlings to grow!