Too Close to the Tractor to Factor

Out beyond Winnemucca, where the land is honest, the fences are tired, and the government is thankfully scarce, a man named Joe Sicking met the sort of end that only modern progress can arrange with such efficiency.

It was past noon, that hour when the sensible are either eating or pretending to, when the Nevada State Police got called to State Route 290, about 35 miles north of town. That is a distance carefully chosen so that help arrives with dignity, but not haste.

Now the road was occupied by two fine examples of American industry. In front, a John Deere 7700 tractor, towing an Adams fertilizer spreader, rolling along at the deliberate pace of a sermon. Behind it, a Ford F-350, Detroit’s declaration that size is a substitute for patience, was headed north with rather more ambition than the situation required.

What happened next is a lesson in both physics and human nature: the truck became introduced to the trailer’s left rear corner, uninvited and at speed. The meeting was brief and conclusive.

The Ford departed the roadway to the right, as if it had suddenly remembered an appointment elsewhere, and came to rest against a fence that had seen better decades.

The trailer, having lost faith in its tractor, detached itself and stopped squarely in the lane, like a bureaucrat blocking progress with quiet confidence. The tractor, left to its own devices, behaving with more composure than most committees, moved to the shoulder of the road without complaint.

Mr. Sicking, 79, suffered fatal injuries and was declared dead at the scene, a solemn end on a quiet road that had no vote in the matter. Now, a man might feel tempted to blame machinery, or fate, or even the road, which was minding its business at a pace approved by nature and common sense.

But the truth is less fashionable.

We have built a country where everything is faster, larger, and louder, except judgment, which remains scarce and stubbornly underfunded. There was a time when a man approaching a slow-moving tractor would ease his foot and accept that the world does not revolve around his schedule.

Today, we place our faith in horsepower and expect the laws of motion to negotiate. They never do.

So the road keeps its tally, the fence collects another story, and the rest of us are left to marvel at how a perfectly avoidable thing manages to happen with such regularity. In a nation that can engineer a truck to conquer a mountain, we have yet to invent the good sense to slow down before we meet one.