L’Ecluse, Picnic Day 1976

But, really, joining the Antique Mechanics Club when I was a freshman in 1975 was about a guy.

It seemed obvious then that spending nights out at the airport pushing around greasy machinery and sanding dozens of spokes on a doctor’s horse-drawn carriage would gain me access to this guy’s heart. He was an engineering student, after all, and he enjoyed delving into the workings of old Case tractors and Mack trucks. So a girlfriend and I, along with a couple of other newbies from our dorm, joined the club to help out, learn a few things and flirt. While the flirting didn’t work—I never did get a boyfriend out of it—I did gain an appreciation for the alternative uses of cow manure and the importance of garden hoses.

It was Picnic Day 1976, and we’d spent weeks preparing, trying to get all the tractors, threshers and other machines in working order for their trek around town in the annual Picnic Day parade. The night before the big event, rather than drinking beer and howling at parties like other good college kids, we all gathered at the barn—the hangar at the UC Davis airport—lamenting the condition of the radiator on the big Case steam tractor.

This was the marquee piece, the big green tractor with wheels taller than most of the population and a steam whistle that could pierce eardrums all the way to Woodland. It was slated to pull a big water tank and lead a caravan of other old vehicles. But the radiator had holes—big ones—and we didn’t have the time or wherewithal to fix them before the parade.

Then our adviser, Lorry Dunning, came up with the remedy used by farmers for decades: cow dung. Put cow dung down the radiator and that will plug the holes right quick, he said. Sure, it might cause problems later on but, hey, that was later on.

Well, most of us looked a bit skeptical, but a crew of three or four of the more adventurous members drove out to the cow barns to collect some . . . material. Hours passed, the clock moving past midnight, until at last they returned with a bag of dried-up cow dung. They pushed it down the mouth of the radiator, and lo and behold, it worked.

For a while, anyway.

The long drive early the next morning to the start of the parade is a treasured memory of quiet and calm in the still, fresh air you get only out in the country. Another member and I took the back roads to get the tractor there, slow mile after slow mile, the only sound the punctuated rhythm of the Case engine.

Everything seemed fine until we got to the start of the parade and the day began to warm up. We chugged there for a while as others came up to ride on the water tank or in the tractor. We all planned to switch around, sometimes driving, sometimes riding. It was my fortune to be at the wheel when the radiator started to boil over. I think we were driving up C Street or D Street—it’s all sort of a steamy haze—when the hissing began and water seemed to stream from the bottom of the large radiator. We panicked—it was my girlfriend and I at the wheel, remember, not exactly the mechanical geniuses of the bunch and, boy, wouldn’t that put women’s lib back a few centuries if a couple of girls killed the Case in the Picnic Day parade.

So my friend ran over to one of the homes on the street, grabbed the garden hose and cranked on the faucet. Thankfully, it stretched to the Case, and water gushed into the radiator, going in far faster than it was coming out. With big grins and the proud strut of people who had fixed a problem they didn’t know they could fix, we drove on down the road, tractor well under control.

For a while, anyway.

We ended up filling the radiator several times that morning, keeping an eye out for handy hoses or water fountains. Between the dozen or so of us who ran the Case that day, we kept water in the tank—and even a refresher of manure at one point. We all made it through.

I remember those days through a hazy shade of rose that makes it all seem sort of surreal. Twenty-five years will dim any memory, fray the edges of accuracy. Did this really happen, the cow dung, the Case tractor, the hose?

But recently, when the radiator in my car started to give up the ghost, I felt a sudden urge to pull over at a pasture and start collecting cow chips. And I knew then that I didn’t imagine my time behind the wheel of a steam tractor the size of a dorm room and my slow trip through heaven one early Picnic Day morning.

Kathleen L'Ecluse ’79 graduated from UC Davis with a degree in international agricultural development. After spending two years overseas, she earned a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern University. She now works as a city editor at a newspaper in Northern California.