From the very beginning, I was mechanically challenged. I couldn’t understand how the simplest things worked. I was stumped by the relationship between cause and effect.

Once, in boyhood, I found myself stranded in a row boat that had floated from the dock on a Minnesota lake. All I had to do was to pull on the rope that attached the boat to the dock, but to paraphrase Hume’s example of the billiard balls, I could see “no necessary connection,” between the rope, the boat and the dock.

I cried for help. The dockmaster came and rescued me. He gave me a look of disbelief. It was clear what he was thinking: How can someone that stupid expect to survive?

When I was growing up in the ’50s, before cars were run by computers and parents felt obliged to furnish their children with brand new SUVs, many of my friends bought broken -down, used cars and made them run.

They were mechanical wizards. They loved tools and spent hours tinkering with engines. Their conversations overflowed with arcane observations about transmissions, carburetors, differentials, cam shafts, alternators and distributors. They spoke fluently about cars that had been “chopped and channeled, nosed and decked.”

These expressions meant nothing to me. I lived in abject isolation from machine society. The world beneath the hood of the car all those coils and belts, forbidding cylinders smeared with blackened oils was a mystery to me. I couldn’t tell a cam shaft from a Johnson rod.

I peered into that abyss dumbfounded. How did it work? I might as well hope to understand why people on the other side of the earth aren’t upside down and don’t fall off. When my car broke down I had only one skill to call upon: opening the hood, the universal sign that “Something is wrong, I know not what.”

A kind of torpor came over me when I was faced with a mechanical problem. My eyelids closed like a lizard’s when the temperature drops, all of my energy devoted to keeping up a heartbeat.

I yearned to be known as a “fix-it man,” but I couldn’t even wash the car without disaster. Once when I was attempting this simple procedure, my mother flew out of the house, screaming, “George! George! Ajax is an abrasive!”

One of my life’s ambitions has been to fathom the working of a gasoline engine, at least at the lawn mower level. Moving to the country and acquisition of a 1950 Ford 8N tractor a machine of elegant simplicity have given me the chance to develop some rudimentary skills. But the path of education is steep and rocky for one of low aptitude.

My first step was an attempt to grease the tractor. As usual, I began impetuously, without reading instructions or thinking the job through. The proper way is to pull back and lock the plunger of the grease gun and to load the canister of grease from the top. But I reversed the operation. I unscrewed and removed the plunger and loaded the canister from the bottom of the gun.

When I tried to push the plunger back in, it naturally met resistance from the tube of grease. I applied force. I uttered oaths. I wrestled with the grease gun which began to squirm like an eel in my hands. With a groan and a violent thrust, I launched a fat wad of purple grease. The grease gun leapt from my hands and appeared to scamper around the shed. Grease was everywhere, dripping from the rafters, covering the floor like carpet of banana peels. I too was covered with grease like a real mechanic.

Not long ago I found what I needed all along, a mentor Mark Lauber, a bearded sage with a cigar clamped in his teeth who presides at Kaw Valley Industrial, a shrine to the internal combustion engine.

Few things inspire me to such wonder as watching Lauber with his ear to an engine, listening to its music, then reaching for a tool and tuning it to the harmonious, “unlabored running” he strives for.

I pester him with questions “What’s a solenoid, Mark?” and have offered to pay him a “nuisance fee.”

Often I call him from the field to report that the tractor won’t start.

“Have you checked to see if it’s got any fuel?”

“Oh.”

Or, “You didn’t mess with the high speed mixture adjustment, did you?”

“I wouldn’t know. What is it?”

I have made some progress. I’ve purged a flooded engine and re-charged a dead battery. I call my mentor to report my successes.

“Mark! I hooked up the Bush Hog by myself.”

Still, there are mountains to climb: the Matterhorn of the oil change, the Everest of the spark plug installation.

And there are dangers, particularly for the disaster prone bungler. High among them ranks the PTO, or “power take-off.” This rotating bar powers implements such as the Bush Hog. And it rotates relentlessly when engaged. You can’t talk to it like you could to a draft horse. Many a farmer has gotten his overalls caught in the PTO and wound up “ungloved,” that is, with his skin removed.

The PTO has yet to get me, but I watch it as you’d watch a rattlesnake.

One day I was mowing when the tractor suddenly reared up like a bucking bronco: “Hi, ho, Silver, away!” Higher and higher the front end rose as if ascending an invisible ramp. I was stricken with fear. At last, it occurred to me to let up on the gas and depress the clutch. The tractor slowly backed down to earth.

I put it in neutral and dismounted. I crawled around it on the ground looking for obstacles and could find none. I tried to move forward again and again with the same sickening result.

Finally my eyes focused on the foreground and I spotted the problem. I was riding up the nearly invisible guy wire of a utility pole.

I shared my tale of near electrocution with my mentor. He removed the cigar from his teeth, stroked his beard, studied me gravely with a look of pity and evoked the local funeral home.

“Funny things happen on the way to Rumsey’s,” he said.

George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.