Copyright 2011 Sukiennik Industries. All rights reserved.
"And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field."
- Herman Melville
My dad, in his old age, has this thing about collecting lawn mowers. Why, I don’t know. And it wasn’t always like that: When my brother and I were growing up, we had just the one beast of a mower in the garage, a self-propelled Snapper of indeterminate age, Jurassic, perhaps, that ran loud and fast, like a sprint car and just as dangerous. When we were small and he was mowing, we weren’t allowed outside. So I used to look out the second-floor windows at the back yard and watch him turn laps on our half-acre, one concentric square at a time, as the dull roar of its engine grew louder or softer with its distance from the house. I could smell the gasoline and freshly-cut grass perfuming the air.
It looked like such a grown-up and important thing to do.
When it finally came time for my brother and I to help Dad cut the grass, he taught us how to start and stop that mower and use it safely. And at the end of the lesson he gave us the following last piece of safety advice: “If it gets away from you, run like hell.”
Then he damn near killed himself fixing the thing.
I don’t know if the old motor was dying or if he simply had to have a brand new 4HP Briggs and Stratton engine to cut grass, but one day, with the patient still on the operating table, he set off on his yellow 10-speed bike to fetch some fuel. Except that on the way to the gas station he hit a storm grate coming down a pretty steep hill and went head over heels, right in front of the church, twisting his left wrist a good 180 degrees. The doctors were able to put everything back together and we eventually fixed the mower and the bike, too. Good as new. But he still has the metal pin in his left arm.
That was when the collection started. Mower number two came east from my grandfather’s house near Buffalo soon after the accident. Grandpa had taken the opportunity to get himself a new mower and send his old one off to us. It was a Snapper, too, but not nearly as scary to handle. It had a dead man’s switch; it only engaged the drivetrain if the handlebar was lifted up. It cut the grass just fine, it ran more efficiently and the clipping bag was much easier to remove and replace.
It wasn’t nearly as loud or powerful or rugged or dangerous. I didn’t like it half as much.
As my brother and I grew we became the landscape staff for the family home. We stopped mowing in concentric circles and started making patterns, trying to duplicate the look of big-league ballparks. (We didn’t know we needed a roller attachment that would leave the pretty checkerboard patterns we wanted.) We got pretty good at it and it became less of a chore and more of a pastime, to a certain degree at least.
But as much pride as we took in the appearance of the place, well, they say it’s better to be lucky than good, and we were mostly lucky. My dad didn’t fertilize the grass much, if ever. He didn’t water it much, either – we were along a downhill slope and in the percolation zone of a really large lake so it didn’t need a lot of water. In fact, the back was often unmowable for long stretches of the spring if it had been a wet winter. It was plain, basic grass maintenance – it grows, you cut it, and when it grows again, you cut it again. Easy.
Then I moved away. To college, first, then to apartments since I could not afford a house. And all the while my dad kept collecting mowers, from his dad, from yard sales, from co-workers who were transferring out of town, until there were six of them in the garage, including two riding mowers.
As a newspaper writer I didn’t make the kind of money one needs to save up for and purchase a place to call my own. In those unfortunate situations when I had to write a business story and I was interviewing a real estate agent or someone in the business of owning or developing commercial property, I would seek explanations of how things worked with a self-depreciating wisecrack: “All I know about real estate is that I can’t afford it.”
That fact gnawed at my psyche, a little at first because no one likes to be poor, let alone working poor, but more profoundly after I had a wife and family. I started to actively dislike living near Boston and everything about it, because I could not afford a house there. I started having a hard time sleeping and coping. I applied for jobs I really didn’t want because of where they were, not what they were.
And why? I didn’t want a McMansion or a Victorian or a McVictorian. I didn’t care about a garage or a bonus room or a kitchen with granite counters and a gas stove. What I really wanted was a back yard. A back yard where my daughter could run around and play. A back yard where I could grill steaks and chicken and salmon and throw a Frisbee or a football or horseshoes.
A yard I could mow. Like my dad.
I knew something. My dad wasn’t just some nutty lawn mower collector. He had six lawn mowers in his garage because he was waiting to give his boys mowers when they finally bought houses, just like his dad had done. I wanted that moment and I was willing to trade upward mobility in my chosen field for it. I was willing to trade fields for it. I applied for jobs in out-of-the way locales that paid a fraction of what I was making in greater Boston based on the real estate listings rather than whether it was a job I wanted. Rutland, Vermont. Waterville, Maine. North Adams, Mass. Anywhere there was a patch of green grass I could afford.
But life takes turns, and I actually got myself a good job working for a large media company as an editor. It was less sheer effort and more dumb luck, but I finally was able to afford it: A 1,400 square foot cape in North Stepford Falls, Conn. (Don’t bother looking for it on a map of the Nutmeg State; it’s both everywhere and nowhere.) With a nice front yard and lots of shade in the back.
The day the moving truck came with our stuff, there was my dad, in the pickup truck, not far behind. In the back was the present I had long hoped for: A gently-used Troy-Bilt with adjustable deck height, variable drivetrain speeds and a 4.5 HP Briggs and Stratton.
Sweet.
We loaded it off the truck together and rolled it into the back yard.
“Remember that old Snapper?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s parts now,” he replied. “It’s taking up room in the garage. I ought to get rid of it.”
He walked back to the truck and returned with a resealable plastic bag containing the instruction manual.
“Dad, I think I know how to run a lawn mower,” I said.
"Here's the instruction manual. Put it somewhere you can find it,” he said, back in his Dad element, if only briefly. “I’ve also brought you a spare sharpened blade and some gas-oil mix for the trimmer.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “Guess we’d better get to work on those shrubs in the front.”
I never told him about the rest -- about how I had watched him from the window of my upstairs bedroom, mowing laps around the yard in concentric squares, each smaller than the last, and thinking he was the biggest and most important person I knew to be able to handle such a noisy and dangerous machine. Or that the gift of a lawn mower meant more than any other gift because it was the continuation of a family tradition that must have started when he bought his own first house 30-something years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him. Maybe I supposed he knew all the same.
And then I waited for the grass to get long enough to mow.
The mower sat in the shed for a few weeks after we moved into our little cape in North Stepford Falls. It was a dry summer, the grass was growing slowly and my new editing job and getting the new house in order was keeping me pretty busy.
In the meantime I was noticing a few things about my neighbors and their yards.
“Hey sweetie,” I told my wife after returning from a neighborhood bike ride, “you know, I think I’ve figured out why the yards around here are so green despite the lack of rain. They’re all using the Lawn Wranglers,” I said, referring to the fictional lawn care service from the movie Bottle Rocket. “I noticed while I was bringing Sofia to school. You see the trucks everywhere. Doesn’t anyone here mow their own lawn?”
“Mr. Jensen does,” I replied. “Since we moved here he’s mowed it three times already.”
(Dear reader: I have never had a neighbor named Mr. Jensen. In the interest of maintaining positive relations with neighbors past and present, Mr. Jensen is a composite character. Any similarities to actual neighbors are utterly coincidental.)
Mr. Jensen: The lawn enthusiast next door. Maybe you know him, too, or someone just like him. Growing up, it was the neighbor two houses from our house, and the one three houses from our house, too. They mowed their yards at least weekly, if not more. They were so often seen in their Bermuda shorts and golf hats, watering or fertilizing or raking the grass, that it was presumed they did nothing else with their days.
What makes the lawn enthusiast tick? Is he merely a proud homeowner? Does he just want to get out of the house and away from the wife and kids? Or is it some kind of mania? What makes a man spend hours a day and hundreds of dollars a year on grass? It’s not even a flower, doesn’t give fruit, only smells when you cut it. The water wasted on keeping it growing could meet the clean water needs of the developing world. It's a cash crop that you can't eat unless you have hooves. It’s grass, for crying out loud. Grass!
I never knew, except that my brother and I noticed when the lawn enthusiasts’ yards didn’t do so well – maybe they were overmowed, maybe they were overfed or underwatered, who knows. Sadly we felt superior in a smug sort of way that our minimal-care lawn was greener, despite backyard athletics, minimal care and a dog that didn’t have the common decency to poop on someone else’s property.
“Do you think I should have mowed the yard by now?” I asked Michelle. “I mean, it looks good ... it’s a little long but it seems to do better than the short-mowed lawn down the street. That thing’s brown. Have you seen it? I mean, it’s dead. Funniest thing I ever saw was the guy who lives there mowing it the other day. You could barely see through the cloud of dust. They say insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different...”
“The yard looks fine,” Michelle said. “But if you think you should mow it, mow it.”
It was time.
I pulled the Troy-Bilt out of the shed, wheeled it to the front yard and surveyed the scene. The previous owner had told me he cut the grass high so it wouldn’t get burned in the summer heat, so I set the deck at about two inches.
I poured some gasoline in the tank, checked the oil, set the throttle on choke and made sure the drive was disengaged. Simple enough, right? There was no magic to this. It’s a mower.
Pull. Nothing. Pull. Nothing. Pull. Nothing. Pull. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!
What do I do in situations like this? The same thing my father always did: Call Dad.
“You didn’t read the instructions, did you,” he said. “Why don’t you have a look.”
With him still on the phone, I opened the bag, scanned the manual and came to the section about starting the mower:
“Set the throttle to choke and extend the cord until you meet resistance. Then pull the cord,” it read.
I did.
With one satisfying pull, the Briggs and Stratton engine sparked, coughed and grew to a dull roar, kicking up dust from under the deck from the wash of the steel blade.
"Thanks, Dad!" I shouted over the din.
“Now, read the instructions," he repeated.
I hung up, put the phone down, angled the front wheels downhill and across the yard at a 45 degree angle and engaged the drivetrain, turning my John Deere hat around backwards as I stepped off into a sacred rite of home ownership which I had dreamed of for years.
I was finally mowing my own lawn.
I wonder if Michelle heard my evil laughter over the din of the motor. She’s perfect for me in that she understands my quirks and silliness and shares my bizarre outlook on life. She knew what she was in for when she said “yes” that fall day at Mount Greylock. I'm not sure if that included a silly man who could get excited about piloting a lawn mower across a quarter acre of perennial Kentucky bluegrass and was already daydreaming about where to put the edging, what flowers to plant and when to spread grub killer as the fresh clippings turned his white sneakers green, but what the heck. For richer, for poorer, for grassier.
She must have thought something of the occasion, because when I finished the front and back and came to the kitchen door, she was there with a tall glass of limeade. It felt good cascading down my throat and I wiped the wet, cold glass on my forehead.
“Thanks, Sweetie,” I said, pleased by the nice surprise.
“Thought you could use a drink,” she said. “Man, that thing is loud.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Did you hear me laughing?”
“Can’t say I did,” she replied. “But you sure looked like you were having fun.”
