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Jul 15, 2023

Tractor Lazarus: Naked Farmer Survives Gruesome PTO Accident

White on white, sprawled stark naked in a cut cornfield atop 1’ of snow, Tim Vander Zwaag stared into a clear night sky of stars and moon. Alone and violently shuddering in subzero temperatures,

White on white, sprawled stark naked in a cut cornfield atop 1’ of snow, Tim Vander Zwaag stared into a clear night sky of stars and moon.

Alone and violently shuddering in subzero temperatures, Vander Zwaag was a bloodied shell of a strapping 6’, 250 lb. farmer: scalped skull, crushed vertebrate and torso, and a left leg stubbornly hanging by strips of shredded tissue. Only feet from his tractor and out of options, Vander Zwaag was minutes from death. Finished.

“It was over. I had no strength left and I said a final prayer,” he recalls. “‘God, I need help. I can’t get on this tractor without your hand, otherwise I’m ready to come home to you.’ And just like that, my prayer was answered.”

Gruesomely rag-dolled beyond reasonable expectation of life by a PTO, Vander Zwaag insists he was pulled from the brink by Providence. “To this day, I don’t know how I got back on the tractor. I never passed out or lost consciousness, but there is no memory of getting back in the seat. That field should have been my grave.”

Lazarus on a tractor.

Feet Freeze First

In 2013, Vander Zwaag and his wife, Teresa, were living the finest days of marriage to that point in time and blessed with the wealth of family—four kids ranging from sixth grade to kindergarten. Every day a new day.

Home was Ottawa County in western Michigan—God’s country to Vander Zwaag who was raised on a hog farm outside Holland and lived on 40 acres just a mile-and-a-half from his parent’s homestead.

At 39, Vander Zwaag split time between 10-hour workdays at a tool-and-die shop (Quality Machine and Automation) and his cattle-crop operation, Tim’s Meats, LLC. Between mainstream tool work, side-stream farm work, four kids, school activities, ball games, and church functions, life was a blitz—and he relished every minute.

On Saturday, Dec. 7, 2013, Vander Zwaag had three big plans: butcher cows in the morning, spread manure in the afternoon, and bookend the evening on a date with Teresa.

Accordingly, Vander Zwaag woke Saturday morning with extra pep in his step despite the grind before him—butchering was payday. He walked into the kitchen, scarfed down an egg sandwich and coffee alongside Teresa, and prepared to brave particularly brutally cold temps—even for Michigan. With highs expected close to 10 F, Vander Zwaag would be solo on the farm. His children were responsible for a steady regimen of farm chores, but not on days when the mercury bottomed.

“There was nothing out of the ordinary except the cold,” Teresa says. “I expected Tim back in late afternoon or early evening for our date. He’d be finished when he was finished.”

“That morning he switched out a microwave above the stovetop, threw the kids in the air, wrestled with them, and was gone,” she adds. “Just another great day.”

Steady. Quaint. Blessed. Hug the kids, kiss the wife, out the door at 7:30 a.m.

Vander Zwaag crunched snow for 100 yards across his farm and greeted an incoming butchering crew on a concrete pad behind his barn. He was bundled for the day: wool socks, boxers, work pants, t-shirt, button-up shirt, Carhartt bibs, and an ugly-as-sin cloth work coat over the top—likely a gift from a loving, but blind aunt.

Additionally, he stuffed a jackknife and leather gloves in his pockets, along with a smartphone in a chest-front slip. His core was covered, but his extremities were not: Ball cap and non-insulated rubber boots. Considering overall attire, the plain rubber boots would be the weakest leak in the chain and prove a costly choice.

Feet freeze first.

Ducks on the Pond

Open-air slaughter under clear, blue skies. But so cold. Bone-chilling. “The water buckets were icing over while we were butchering and the hides were thickening. It was about 10 degrees, but I’d say wind chill pulled it close to flat zero,” Vander Zwaag describes.

By 11:30 a.m., slaughter was complete and the butchering crew departed with meat for processing. Vander Zwaag fired up a no-cab Massey-Ferguson 1130, brought out the skid-steer, moved cows—and began spreading manure in early afternoon.

At approximately 5 p.m., Vander Zwaag finished working his ground and closed the workday with a final manure load for his father’s nearby farm. He lodged a pitchfork on the back of the three-point hitch, made certain all cows were penned and bedded, and began the mile-and-a-half drive. Ducks on the pond: spread the last load, knock off clods, and go home for a big date.

As Vander Zwaag began the mile-and-a-half drive, bare hands tucked inside loosened bibs for warmth, the textbook day was countered by a solitary, nagging detail: Tucked into thin rubber since 7:30 a.m., his feet were growing wickedly numb.

Snagged

Darkness falling, Vander Zwaag drove into a cornfield directly adjacent to his parent’s home, turned on the Knight 350 spreader, and drove to the opposite end, roughly a quarter-mile distant. Fieldwork finished, he took the tractor out of gear, PTO still running at low rpm, and climbed down the vehicle’s clutch-side left.

“I hit the ground and knew my feet were about frozen. I then did what I’ve done 1,000 times.”

He walked alongside the rear left tire and grabbed the pitchfork off the three-point hitch for a final cleaning. During crop season, the field had been in corn and the stalks remained. With roughly 1’ of snow cover, the stalk tips barely dotted the surface. As Vander Zwaag maneuvered, he stepped squarely atop a stalk with frozen feet—the ball of his foot centered on the stub.

The lack of dexterity in his feet shot his left hip toward the PTO—the shaft covered by rotating plastic. Cognizant of the danger, he attempted to compensate by flinging his body away from the moving machinery. Too late. The lower left section of his bibs, already loosened for hand warming access, was swallowed at a speed Vander Zwaag struggles to describe.

“For a split-second, I felt my pants on my left side wind into the shaft and I grabbed for the spreader to hold on, but the fight was over before it began. Instantly, I was in the PTO.”

The Fade

Backwards. The 6’ tall, 250 lb., big-boned farmer was pulled backwards into the PTO’s revolution and hurtled through an absolute death trap. “The gap between the PTO and channel is about 10”, Vander Zwaag says, choking up as he describes the moment of impact.

Fighting tears and a flood of emotion, he continues: “There was no room for me to get through the gap. I never passed out, but I can’t explain the physics. I think I went around three times, but it may have been more. On the first spin, I was stunned; the second I felt overwhelming pain everywhere; and on the third I specifically felt my leg smash into the frame of the spreader. Each spin was tighter, but after what I believe was the third, the PTO let me go and flung me to the opposite side where I landed in snow about 6’ away.”

Naked. Every stitch of clothing was torn from Vander Zwaag’s body, save his right sock and boot. Scalped to the skull atop the front center of his head, Vander Zwaag’s wounds were horrifying: brain trauma, four fractured vertebrate, four broken ribs, spleen split in half, broken hip, crushed leg attached by tissue, countless lacerations, and skin grossly abraded by fabric friction.

Unable to comprehend his condition in the moment, Vander Zwaag repeatedly attempted to stand and walk to the tractor, immediately collapsing with each effort. Limbs flailing like a downed deer, he crashed into the ground once more, overwhelmed by a flooding realization of helplessness.

“It was like the feeling when you’re underwater and out of air, and you’re trying to swim toward the surface, craving oxygen, and every cell in your body is begging to break out of the water. That’s how bad I wanted to reach the tractor and survive.”

“I wasn’t at all afraid of death or eternity, but I was terrified of not seeing my wife and kids again,” he continues. “No matter what happened, I was desperate to see their faces before I died.”

On his back in darkness, adrenaline roaring through his bloodstream, Vander Zwaag experienced little pain, but he could clearly feel his core begin to fade. As his body shut down, the sensations were accompanied by a surreal dirge, clearly audible over the rumble of the Massey-Ferguson and churn of the PTO—the staccato flap of his tattered clothing bundle snapping against the spreader with every turn of the shaft.

Phone out of reach, broken and twisted in a macabre noodle, Vander Zwaag stared into the night sky. “I could see the silhouette of moon and stars, and I said my final prayer and asked God to help me get in the tractor seat or take me home. I instantly felt a peace wash over me. I rolled to my right side and started crawling.”

“Hit Me or Help Me”

A body literally on ice. The snow and subzero temps prevented Vander Zwaag from bleeding to death, but the brutally cold elements also curled his fingers into immobile fists. As he dragged his naked body along the right, brake-pedal side of the tractor, Vander Zwaag reached for the engine’s warmth. “I put my hands on the bottom of the motor to get warmth to make my hands open. I needed grip because I had no idea how to get my body on the tractor.”

Of all the links in Vander Zwaag’s survival chain, his mount of the stepless Massey-Ferguson is the missing memory. “When I get to heaven, I want to ask God to play the video of how He got me off the ground and into the tractor seat. To this day, I don’t know how I climbed aboard.”

Intent on driving to his parent’s house, Vander Zwaag could not press the left-side clutch with his mangled leg. Reaching under his thigh, he lifted the left leg over the steering wheel, and crossed his right foot to the clutch, placing the tractor in second gear at three-quarters throttle to guard against a stall. Upon release of the clutch, the Massey-Ferguson was rolling.

Making a loop in the field, Vander Zwaag turned west toward his parent’s house, but saw dim lights within, indicating an empty home. Fighting to maintain consciousness, he drove another half-mile, heading for a relatively busy thoroughfare into Holland—120th Avenue.

Seeing headlights in the distance coming from both directions, Vander Zwaag pulled the tractor and spreader into the middle of the highway. Thirty minutes after hurtling around a PTO shaft and escaping the scene on a tractor, adrenaline stores exhausted, Vander Zwaag’s primal fight for survival ended. Excruciating pain arriving in waves, he pulled the kill-switch and collapsed on the wheel.

“I didn’t have any lights and I sure didn’t want to get anyone hurt, but I had no more cards to play and I was dying,” he says. “The first car down the road would hit me or help me.”

57-Day Date

Arriving first at Vander Zwaag’s roadblock, a trio of wide-eyed, elderly ladies spilled out of a sedan and beheld a buck-naked, broken, bloodied, and frozen freak atop a tractor. Unable to administer medical help, the women possessed a godsend—blankets. They covered Vander Zwaag as vehicles began stopping and help arrived from all directions.

At the Vander Zwaag home, Teresa noted the clock and assumed her husband was running late or dealing with broken machinery. After a phone call from the county sheriff’s office, her world flipped. A deputy provided minimal details of an accident, described the precise location, and asked her to “come now.” In the background of the call, as the deputy spoke, Teresa could hear gut-wrenching, primal cries, and she immediately recognized her husband’s voice.

“It tore me apart to hear his pain,” she remembers. “I drove so fast, but it seemed like slow-motion, praying in my minivan. ‘Lord, I trust you to take care of Tim. Please prepare me to take care of him.’ I had no idea what I was about to see.”

Arriving on scene, she found her husband still on the tractor seat, held up by a multitude of men preparing to ease him off the vehicle. “I was losing consciousness and so close to dying, but then I heard the sweetest music of my life. It was a heavenly sound I can hear in my ears right now—the voice of my wife, Teresa, saying, ‘Honey, I’m here and you’re gonna be OK.’ That was when I truly let go. Live or die, I could then handle either.”

While watching first-responders slide her husband off the tractor seat, onto rigid boards, and down to a gurney, Teresa’s faith held strong as she climbed in the ambulance holding her husband: “You believe that God’s promises are the same from one moment to the next, and then you’re in that moment,” she says. “I had a supernatural peace that no matter what, God would take care of our family.”

The ambulance pulled onto the highway and toward the hospital, carrying Vander Zwaag and Teresa on the longest date of their lives: 57 days until the couple would be back on their farm.

“It Came for Me”

After two months of surgeries, muscle transfers, skin grafts, and endless rehab, Vander Zwaag and Teresa went home. “Beyond his physical recovery, it was mentally tough on Tim for a long time," Teresa says. “He’d be in a wheelchair, at the front window of the house, watching me or his brother, or our kids doing chores. The barn was another planet to him because he couldn’t risk infection.”

“When a farm is taken away for a little bit, and then you get it back, that’s a beautiful thing,” she continues.

On June 1, 2014, six months after the accident, Vander Zwaag returned to fulltime work, and only a year later he was released from all medical care—fully functioning with no loss of limbs. “I could tell stories for days and weeks about what God has done for me and my family,” he says. “I’m nobody special, but from the moment this happened, my community support was overwhelming. My parents, Gene and Carol, were vital, and so many other people were too.”

Repetition, he stresses, is an ever-present farm danger. “It’s not the big flashing danger sign that gets you; it’s the things you do 1,000 times that you disregard. When you do repetitive work, your logic fails because you think it’s safe just because you got away with it the last time. I had hopped off a tractor 1,000 times with a pitchfork to make sure no big manure chunks had formed. That one time it got me.”

“Now I shut off the PTO to clean. Every time. Guys can be just like me and not even realize they are being careless, but that one time can come back with a vengeance if you stick with that attitude. It came for me.”

Statistics, Vander Zwaag believes, only tell a portion of the farm safety story. “I believe there are far, far more accidents than what get reported. Most stories stay on the farm, but all I want to do is thank God and tell others. I’m a walking miracle and I know the Lord saved me that day: I did not come off the ground and crawl onto the tractor by myself.”

To read more stories from Chris Bennett ([email protected] 662-592-1106) see:

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Judas Goats: Agriculture’s Bizarre, Drug-Addicted Masters of Deceit Once Ruled the Killing Floor

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man

Young Farmer uses YouTube and Video Games to Buy $1.8M Land

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

The Arrowhead whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland

Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam

Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History

US Farming Loses the King of Combines

Ghost in the House: A Forgotten American Farming Tragedy

Rat Hunting with the Dogs of War, Farming's Greatest Show on Legs

Evil Grain: The Wild Tale of History’s Biggest Crop Insurance Scam