Dad's Tractor...

Dad's Tractor

Of course, I thought I could fix it.

That is how these things always begin. Not with skill. Not with training. Not with even the most basic mechanical understanding. With confidence. Loud, misplaced confidence. The sort of confidence that only comes from being raised around country men who carry fencing pliers like an extra finger and have spent half their lives saying things like, “Nah, she’ll be right,” over machinery that is visibly smoking.

So when I put the wrong fuel in Dad’s tractor, I did not immediately panic.

Not outwardly.

Internally, yes. Internally I saw my whole life flash before my eyes in a series of very specific images. Dad’s face. Dad’s silence, which is much worse than his face. The tractor sitting there like a witness. Me trying to explain how a grown woman, who can de-escalate trauma, talk people through grief, and write formal letters with all the right words in all the right places, had apparently looked at a fuel container and thought, close enough.

It was not close enough.

To this day, I do not know whether it was the colour of the drum, the angle of the sun, my own arrogance, or just God stepping back to see what I’d do next, but I tipped the wrong fuel in. Not a lot. Just enough to create the exact amount of trouble that cannot be ignored but can still be made catastrophically worse by someone determined to handle it privately.

Me.

At first, nothing happened.

Which was almost insulting.

The tractor started, coughed a bit, carried on, and I thought, well there you go. Maybe people are dramatic. Maybe machinery is more resilient than men say. Maybe I have, against all odds, stumbled into an untapped natural talent for diesel and poor judgement.

That was my first error, if we do not count the fuel.

Because there is a particularly dangerous window in any unfolding disaster where things appear fine. It is the same phase in toxic relationships, plumbing issues, and badly worded text messages. A little pause where the universe gives you one last chance to tell the truth before it commits to teaching you something.

I did not take that chance.

I thought, woohoo, I got away with it.

I may even have said it out loud.

Then the tractor died halfway across the yard with a sort of shuddering, offended cough, like it had considered pushing through but decided not to on principle.

I sat there for a moment, hands on the wheel, looking out across the paddock as though perspective might help. It did not. It remained very obvious that I had killed Dad’s tractor. Not fully, perhaps. But enough to move from private inconvenience into family folklore.

There are some people who, at this point, would ring someone sensible.

A mechanic. A neighbour. Their father. A farmhand. A fourteen-year-old with YouTube and too much confidence.

I am not those people.

I am the sort of woman who once fixed a gate with baling twine, positive thinking, and a level of swearing that altered the local birdlife. I am also, unfortunately, the sort of woman who believes that if she can keep human beings from emotionally collapsing in front of her, she should be able to outwit a tractor.

This is not true. Human beings will at least tell you what is wrong eventually. A tractor will sit there in silence while you embarrass yourself.

So I did what any deeply unqualified person does when faced with a machine they’ve personally sabotaged. I started fiddling with things.

The first stage was denial dressed up as practical action. I looked in the fuel tank. I looked under the seat. I lifted the bonnet, or whatever the tractor version of a bonnet is, and stared into the greasy little mechanical scrub beneath it as though one part might point to another and say, this one, love, you’ve ruined this one.

Nothing did.

Everything just looked expensive.

I got a rag.

There is no reason for this. Rags are what people get when they want to feel like they are involved in repairs. The rag did not repair anything. It simply gave me something to hold while I nodded at hoses and muttered, “Right,” as if I was halfway through a sensible process rather than standing in the yard improvising my own humiliation.

Then I decided the contaminated fuel had to come out.

This was, in theory, the correct thought.

The trouble was that my understanding of how fuel moves through a tractor existed only in broad cinematic terms. I knew there were lines. I knew fuel went through them. I knew this because I had heard men say things like, “Might be the fuel line,” in the same tone therapists say, “That sounds like avoidance.”

So naturally I thought, well, I’ll just clear the fuel lines.

Just.

A dangerous word. Right up there with quick, easy, and nearly done.

I found a line. Or a hose. Or a tube. Something flexible and important-looking. It was attached to something else, which seemed promising. I got a container. I undid a clamp. Fuel came out faster than I was emotionally prepared for and all over my hand, the tractor, one boot, and the ground where I was standing.

This is when the whole thing shifted from backyard redemption story to active farce.

Because once there is fuel on you, you stop feeling competent and start feeling flammable.

I scrambled for the rag. The rag was suddenly inadequate in ways I cannot overstate. It merely spread the fuel around and made me smell like an unfortunate servo incident. I looked over my shoulder every few seconds as if Dad might materialise from the horizon like judgement in work boots.

Still, I pressed on.

This is the thing about bad decisions. They rarely travel alone. Once you have committed to one, the others queue up politely behind it.

I managed, through nothing that should be called technique, to drain enough fuel that I felt optimistic again. False optimism, obviously. But strong. I even thought I was being quite clever. Bush clever. Resourceful. The kind of woman who can handle a rural setback with grit and a butter container.

I put fresh fuel in.

I waited.

I got back on the tractor.

And it started.

Started beautifully.

Like it had a renewed appreciation for life.

I could have cried.

Instead I laughed. A big ridiculous laugh of relief and self-congratulation. I drove it in a little lap just to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, a danger to internal combustion. I thought about the story I’d tell later. Casual. Understated. “Oh yeah, sorted that. Bit of fuel line carry-on, but got it going.” I was already drafting my own legend.

Then I turned slightly uphill.

The tractor spluttered, lurched, and died again with a finality that felt personal.

Not only died. Refused.

That was the moment I knew I had crossed from ordinary mistake into consequences.

Because a tractor that dies once can be unlucky. A tractor that dies twice is trying to tell a story about you.

I sat there again in silence, this time with less hope and more heat in my face. It was not just that I had failed. It was that I had briefly succeeded, which is much crueller. A false summit. The mechanical version of a man saying he’s changed.

At this point I should have stopped.

Instead I thought perhaps there was still bad fuel further through. Filter. Pump. Injector. One of those words. A whole chain of little engine organs now apparently carrying the consequences of my actions. So I escalated.

I got more tools.

That sounds impressive until I tell you the tools were mostly selected on the basis of being nearby and looking capable. A screwdriver, pliers, a socket set I do not understand, and one skinny implement whose purpose remains unknown but which felt very useful in the hand.

I took more things off.

Nothing teaches humility quite like having a small metal piece land in the dirt. You know at once that it mattered. You may not know what it did, but you know it had a job and you have now removed it from its post.

I spent twenty minutes on my hands and knees looking for something I could not name, in grass I had already dropped three other things into, while trying not to inhale too much fuel and bad language.

When I found it, I held it up like treasure.

Then immediately forgot where it had come from.

It was around then that I started bargaining with God, ancestry, and the spirits of practical women before me. Surely somewhere in my bloodline there had been one grandmother who could birth a child, pluck a chook, fix an engine, and tell no one she was struggling. Surely she could now descend and guide my hand.

She did not.

What happened instead was that I disconnected something else, tried to blow through a line to clear it, and got the full foul taste of fuel fumes and regret for my efforts.

Now, I have helped people through panic attacks. I have taught grounding. I have spoken professionally about nervous system regulation. But there is nothing in my therapist training that prepares you for the particular indignity of standing behind a disabled tractor, gagging into the breeze because you tried to manually outsmart petrol.

I stood there for a while, hands on hips, tasting poor judgement.

And then, because the universe likes structure, Dad rang.

I let it go to voicemail.

Not because I am a coward, although there is room for reasonable debate there. More because I needed ten more minutes to either fix the tractor or set myself on fire and move interstate. It felt premature to answer.

So I kept going.

I cleaned what I believed was the relevant area, though even now I could not swear to that in court. I wiped things that looked wipeable. I tightened things that looked loose. I reattached one line incorrectly, realised when fuel dribbled onto my sock, corrected it, and called that growth.

By now the tractor looked worse than when I started. Not broken exactly. More violated. Like it had survived a home procedure.

I tried one last start.

Nothing.

Not even hope.

Just the sad dead click of a machine that had, understandably, lost faith in me.

That was when I had the realisation that arrives eventually in all genuine confessions. Not that I had made a mistake. That part was old news. It was that every step afterwards had been driven less by problem solving and more by ego. I did not want to fix the tractor because I respected machinery. I wanted to fix it because I wanted to erase the evidence that I had ever damaged it in the first place.

Which, if we are being honest, is not just how people ruin tractors. It is how they ruin half their lives.

Still, a tractor is more immediate.

So when Dad came home, I did what any adult daughter with professional communication skills and a fuel-scented shirt would do.

I opened with selective truth.

“Something’s up with the tractor.”

That bought me perhaps four seconds.

He looked at it. Looked at me. Looked back at it. Men of a certain generation can smell nonsense before they hear it. He crouched down, touched a hose I had disturbed, saw the tools, the rag, the little trail of attempted redemption across the yard, and gave me that long quiet look that says he already knows, he just wants to see whether you’ll insult him by lying.

“I might have put the wrong fuel in it,” I said.

A pause.

“Not much.”

Another pause.

“And then I tried to fix it.”

That last part landed hardest, because by then the tractor itself was contributing evidence.

To Dad’s credit, he did not explode. I almost wish he had. Anger you can work with. Silence just lets your own stupidity echo.

He climbed up, checked a few things, and within what felt like an offensively short amount of time, had narrowed the issue down to exactly the parts I had interfered with. Filter. Line. Air. Something else. All the words I had thrown around in my head now said properly, by someone with the moral authority of not having inhaled unleaded for half an hour.

He did not say, “What were you thinking?”

He did not have to.

The entire yard had already asked.

In the end it was fixable, though not by me and not quickly. Which somehow felt worse. Not total destruction. Just enough damage to prove effort is not the same as competence.

So yes, I confess it.

I put the wrong fuel in Dad’s tractor. Then I tried to quietly sort it out like some sort of bargain-bin MacGyver from the bush. For a brief shining moment I thought I had beaten the system. Then I dragged the whole thing downhill through fuel lines, loose parts, fumes, false confidence, and the sort of self-belief that should require a licence.

I am a therapist. I have 3 bachelor's and a Master's degree. I have won awards. I can help people sit with discomfort, unpack patterns, and own their mistakes.

What I cannot do, apparently, is meddle with farm machinery without turning a manageable problem into a family event.

There is probably a life lesson in that.

Something about honesty. Humility. Staying in your lane.

Or perhaps just this.

If you are ever standing in the yard with the wrong fuel in a tractor, a rag in your hand, and a thought that begins with, "I’ll just fix it myself," do not listen to that voice.

That voice is a liar.

And it smells like petrol