Saturday, March 28, 2009

Professional traffic


Professional traffic is normally taxis, buses, lorries and delivery-vans. In Luxembourg professional traffic includes (in a very major way) tractors and any other kind of driven farm-equipment such as a lorry full of cows taken out to the fields. (Sometimes it might also be a bunch of cows being walked home for milking.)

The other day I was driving down one of the unsigned country-lanes that criss-crosses Luxembourg when I got stuck behind a tractor = professional traffic. These country-lanes are very narrow and barely paved, so to pass another vehicle entails going a bit off the road. Usually this is no problem for tractors. Some farmers are wonderful and facilitate your passing in a very expedient manner, others consider you to be an impostor on their turf, making sure that you stay behind them for the duration of their ride which, admittedly, is their right on a hardly-used country-lane used mainly by farmers.

The one I got stuck behind didn't even know I was there. His decrepit old tractor was held together (I am sure) with chewing-gum and string. It lacked lights and rear-view mirrors. The man in it was as old and decreptit as the tractor, half-hidden under a old stained feodora. Steadfastly he puttered on in 24km/hour downhill, 20km/hr on flat road. Going up the hill I was afraid he might start rolling backwards and dump his load of manure on me, that is how slow he was. After quite a while of this I started signalling that I wanted to pass by honking my horn. It resulted only in the realisation that the man was stone-deaf. So there I crawled in a speed almost slower than my first gear, km after km until he drove off onto a field to dump his load of manure. I passed him and he was so busy that he didn't even see me. He never knew I was there.

This amused me for days. I could only love this old farmer, so slow and decrepit in a land of speed, flashiness and busy appointments.

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