Some spend their summers riding fancy show horses. Others saddle up spendy Harleys and head out to see the country.
I ride mowers.
I ride them ten hours a week or more at the height of the growing season. And, as with any statement that begins, “I do [X] for ten hours a week,” the confession can set the confessor up for censure, shame, or suspicion. Woe betide the guy who spends the late summer of his life married to lawn maintenance.
I come from a mowing people. My grandfather rolled into his dotage atop a John Deere lawn tractor, GX series, listening to a custom A.M. radio he’d bolted to the fender. Meanwhile, my feminist gran turned heads cutting grass in her bikini top long before “Hot Girl Summer” became a cultural phenomenon. In the 90s my forward-thinking father salvaged golf course mowers from the local junkyard and pressed them into service in our farmyard.
As a kid growing up in Middle America, I pitied my people’s lawn fetish while envying them their sense of purpose. Every few days the manicurist had a place to be and a job to do. And when they were done mowing their own farmyards, they’d load the lawn tractor on the trailer and go cut someone else’s grass for a glass of lemonade. They’d disappear into the juicy world of grass-and-dandelion mash, broadcast baseball games and market reports, only to return hours later looking strangely at peace with themselves. They’d made order of chaos in a way that pleases most every human and positively delights farmers.
Then too, I sometimes resented the mower’s tunnel vision—all the road trips and summer vacations missed because responsible parties had to stay home to “keep ahead of the grass.” All that wasted time and talent. All those intimate domestic moments and indelicate family dust-ups that transpired inside the house while the mower, blissfully unaware, rolled on into oblivion.
In the current cultural moment, mowing gets a bad rap. It’s Middle American caricature, Heartland schlock and schtick. Poor repressed bastards, wasting away atop their green-and-yellow tractors when they could be checking off a bucket list trip. For some, the hours we Middle Americans spend riding our lawn tractors can look like addiction or a cry for help. To mow for hours on end means land, and land means privilege, and privilege, well, privilege just sucks. Never mind that increasingly the nation’s poor, not its rich, live and mow in Lawn Tractor Land. Never mind that lawn-care-for-hire is as rare as hen’s teeth in much of rural America. Never mind that I spent a good deal of a rural childhood eating free-and-reduced school lunches. We don’t mow because we’re blasé, bored, boorish, or financially blessed. We mow because it’s the responsible thing to do, and if we don’t, who the hell will?
Monstrous grass surrounds us here, dictating our day-to-day. The yards and pastures we cut are generally not constituted of the slow-growing Kentucky bluegrass of shady suburban lawns, grasses that will, like a lazy hound, obligingly lay down for days or weeks until their human returns to provide care. No, the supercharged mix of rye, brome, and timothy we’re left to tame, sowed decades ago for grazing and selected for rapid bounce back, can easily grow half an inch per day. Consequently, we mow more than is good for us.
Corn is a grass, and grows like mad. Cut midsummer corn at your peril.
Urban America may be justified in its condemnation of our addiction, by then again they may not. Even the most judgy Gen Y will, after a good hot yoga sesh, happily concede that everyone needs their own personal meditative practice—that we’re all a little more chill when we’ve found our Zen. When we groom our own garden, the world and our place in it make better sense. In his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” And therein lies the unspoken gospel of the lawncare disciple who devotes the hours necessary to make his or her little microcosmos a bit more paradisiacal. The well-cut swath of turf with its pleasingly parallel lines is no less curative, in theory, than the concentric curves left behind in the white sands of the Zen garden or the perfect snips of the Bonsai tree.
This is what I tell myself, anyway, frittering away a middle age knocking back invasives and cutting down the most noxious weeds before they go to seed. I’m sensitive to the fossil fuels used to wage the battle. Still, the four or five gallons spent to mechanically remove weeds represent a fraction of the gas Urban America, on average, consumes per week, and I’m able to maintain a carbon- and heat-sink that is ecologically preferable to the hardscaping, mulching, and paving that too often replace grass, at least in the cities. Busy as we are judging mowers and mowing, it’s important to note that regular mowing reduces the need for petrochemical-sourced herbicides and pesticides. Sure, the periodic cut becomes a horror flick for the field mice and the meadow voles left to run for their lives, but for the barn swallows and robins and flycatchers that happily follow in the tractor’s wake, it’s an organic dream of worms and a feast of insects more beautiful than any Grecian statuary.
Much as we might like, it can’t all be rainbows and reintroduced prairie. Sometimes the grass must be cut; the weeds whipped. Hay needs made. And, lest we forget, the mower generally emerges from the long mow a better and more circumspect human being, having listened to their own mind during the contemplative hours wherein order was made, or, these days, having absorbed the wisdom of a podcast or audiobook played over noise-canceling headphones. In the ultimate form of mimesis, the well-seasoned mower who comes to know every inch of the property he maintains, also comes, in the end, to know the contours and corners of his own mind, given sufficient time.
The mower cannot practice their craft without acknowledging their mortality. We know we cannot mow forever, nor would we want to. Winter looms. We know our ultimate end likely comes in a place—condo or hospital or care facility—where, if we’re lucky, someone much younger, fairer, and with their whole life in front of them—manicures the lawn to make our waning days on this whirling earth a bit more dignified. Even among the saddle-sore retirees of the lawncare wars, dharma can be achieved at a contemplative distance, watching the timeless back-and-forth of the young mower intent on their mow outside our window, as we ride their windrows straight back to a time when we too were green and carefree among the yards.
“Though still unravish’d bride of quietness,” wrote Keats in praise of his famous urn, though he might as well have been offering up an ode to the Zen of the transcendent mow: “thou foster-child of silence and slow time.”
Image via Flickr.
