Back-sliding-hoe (not what you think)

These images are of my father's latest adventures in the winter-wonderland of Vermont which I abandoned years ago in favor of warmer climates.

Using his trusty backhoe, he was attempting to plow the driveway to my brother's house, which is extremely isolated (about a mile and a half into the woods) and not EMT accessible. The backhoe slid backwards about twenty-five feet, slid off the side of the road and rolled over. Remarkably, he's fine. (My father, it should be noted, is 84 years old, in his second year of stage three leukemia and undergoing a sixth round of chemo.)

Not a worry, though, as long as you have a trusty skidder (pronounced "skidda" in the regional dialect) to set the world aright again. There's also a nice shot of my brother's house in the background which he designed and constructed almost entirely by himself with some assistance from various family members--including my oldest brother who passed away two years ago.

Note the landscape's limited color palette. Five months a year of a sunless sky and snow drifts just makes you tougher.

Looking at these pics, though, I'm struck for the first time by the composition of the image and my father's pose, which I recognize from countless other photos of heavy equipment mishaps over the years but which are only just now defamiliarized for me. It's a very conventional pose, knee up and hand resting on the machine, like a big-game hunter with the kill; it's also interesting that my brother knew the familiar and familial practice of taking a picture of this incident before and after my father righted the backhoe. The machinery itself seems to be the primary subject of the image and there's a mixture of both the havoc and order brought by machines, as well as the tacit reverence for the limits of various machines' abilities. There are dozens of photos like this in my family's albums--overloaded log trucks with their noses pointing skyward, overturned trucks and cars, one fully loaded log truck partially descended through a compromised bridge.

I'm not sure I understand the semiotics of the image; there's a lot going on in terms of working-class masculinity, machines, and disasters. Maybe now I'm reading too much into it--after all, the real reason people watch NASCAR is for the crashes, right?