Welcome to Modern Agriculture!
Before wire feed, before TIG and MIG, it was arc – farm repair by the arc welder, also known as the arc-angel. If the angels couldn’t fix it, the only recourse was prayer.
A lot has been said of those inventions whose consequence changed the face of agriculture, and in turn, changed the landscape. We all know the list: tractor, silo, hay baler, vacuum milker, rural electrification (REA), potato digger, hydraulics, center pivot, four-wheel drive, cabs … Subtract air conditioning from any modern tractor, and agriculture as we know it would collapse before the day is out.
My grandfather believed this list was corruptive, meaning just short of immoral; he was a horseman. For him there was no day as glorious as a day behind the handles following the flight of Clydes. He meant rapture in the Biblical sense. My grandfather’s definition of deliverance was to follow a furrow rolling over as smooth as silk and the earth’s scents rising up reeking and munificent. This, my grandfather believed, no tractor could duplicate.
Of inventions, seldom is mentioned the arc welder as the game-changer of agriculture. There was an interval in the early chapter of REA when a welder was rare on the farm. The device was widely believed ample proof of the dark arts, same as eating chicken with the feathers attached. The arc welder was on the same order as satanic worship, at least way too close to hell.
My dad had an arc welder the year REA arrived, ever since at the center of the shop, malevolently humming the way arc welders do, same as satanic rituals.
The arc welder spelled a critical difference in management, budget, economics, and, most of all, creativity. This melancholy device was the difference between replacing a broken bit and repairing it. Still there was something in that sinister, drear hum of amps, that theatrical salvo of sparks, a daunting device like as not in league with the devil.
It was common knowledge in those quickening days, the world in the grips of a brutal depression, that some had signed a pact with Beelzebub to gain an arc welder for the shop. Because those farmers did seem to get their corn off quicker, their potatoes out the week before the freeze, and a few other things before their neighbors. Never mind the explanation was they didn’t always have to go to town for parts. No matter how lousy the amateur weld, a classic bubblegum, it was still faster, cheaper, and closer to the field than a new part.
The farm shop was once a diminutive place, equidistant between the house porch and the barn, the doorway facing the town road. On Saturday mornings a gaggle of neighbors gathered, their trucks, tractors, each bearing some wounded creature. Rainy days were even worse. Lucky if the shop had a commodious box elder tree to accommodate this congregation, behind which was the two-holer. The tree prospered accordingly. Seldom was real money involved, if a new pair of fence pliers were hung on the door handle, also peach pie, apple pie, or blackberry pie; barn rubbers, comb honey, a fresh slab of bacon. Pay for a couple of welds.
They seldom gave this stuff to my dad but stood it up, hung it, left it in gunny sacks, next to the shop door. Kinda like an act of worship.
The same way as the collection plate at the kirk-house, money doesn’t have to go to God, just close enough. Arc angels were like that.