After five days of driving around the back of beyond in the Land of Enchantment, I sensed my perspective was shifting when I visited the Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces and found myself saying it was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time.

After watching a mustachioed blacksmith make a nail, fondling different kinds of wool, and making my own stamped-leather souvenir, I was all softened up for admiring a row of attractively dilapidated old tractors. Just as I was composing a photo on my digital camera screen…

…up rolled a cheery guy on a bike. He was a museum volunteer, and he was already on his way home (he had his helmet on and his pants tucked into his socks), but he just couldn’t leave when he thought he saw a fellow tractor enthusiast.

“So, you’re into vintage tractors, are ya?”

I’ve never heard that sentence, and I probably never will again.

In truth, I was taking a picture of the tractors because I wanted to send it to Peter, as a bit of a joke. Years ago, Peter and I and a couple of other friends were in Hama, I think it was, in Syria, walking around at night in the downtown area, which was a pretty modest affair. But the John Deere showroom was huge and shiny, and there was a giant green super-deluxe tractor sitting there all spotlit on an otherwise dark, empty floor. We walked toward the tractor, and when we reached the giant plate glass, we saw we weren’t the first to be transfixed: the glass, at nose height, was smeared with greasy spots, left from the others who had (probably much more seriously) stood and wistfully imagined a day of the poshest tractor-riding money could buy.

I told the volunteer a truncated version of this story, leaving out the fact that it was in Syria, because that was just too confusing. (In most parts of New Mexico, I don’t even say I live in New York, because people usually say, “Why’d you wanna go and do a thing like that for?”) But then my story made no sense at all, and exposed me as not actually caring about tractors in the least.

The volunteer tractor fan was undaunted, though, and told me all about the clever John Deere folks, who introduced the short-lived Model GM during World War II (uh, apparently everyone knows that John Deere ordinarily only sells the Model G), so they could charge more for its innovative and sleek engine housing. The “M” was for “modern,” he wagered. And then he biked off, foaming a little at the mouth.