nk
A rural survivor tale
They say the grass is always greener on the other side, at my place, it’s just taller. So tall, in fact, that my visiting grandkids were playing hide and seek in it — at night they dared each other to run into my lawn like it was Children of the Corn or something. I figure when I do finally get it mowed, I’ll find my missing garden hose and maybe MaryLee’s sports car.
It’s been too wet to mow for the past few weeks, or so my wife and I decided, but this past weekend, conditions relented and we went after it.
It was a scorcher — so hot the squirrels were wearing flip-flops so they didn’t burn their little squirrel dogs on the smoldering power lines. The robins were using spatulas to pick up worms. The only thing thriving in this heat is the lawn, which has been daring me to mow it since Keystone crested at 27 feet above normal and we were all considering our own design for an ark.
This brings us to the protagonists (or antagonists) of our story: my three lawnmowers.
The first is Smokey Joe, a Briggs and Stratton-powered die hard we’ve had for years. Joe fought in the Lawn Wars of 2009 (lost a piece of his muffler and his right front wheel sticks sometimes). The second mower is Newton, a cantankerous Toro-powered newbie who’s carburetor hates me. We acquired Newton from my daughter, who bought a batterypowered mower after she heard Morgan Freeman, or someone who sounded like him say, “Every choice we make matters,” and suddenly she was the proud owner of a two-horse-power salad spinner named E-Lawn.
The third mower, Chopacabra, is a monstrous zero-turn powered by a V-twin Japanese motorcycle engine with a cutting deck as wide as a battleship and three blades in dire need of sharpening.
They hang out together now in a little red shed my wife and I built. I imagine the two pushers spend their days in opposite corners, glaring at Chopacabra like two grumpy old men forced to share a retirement condo with a Gen Z personal trainer. Joe smells like burnt oil and regret. Newton stutters and over-revs passiveaggressively.
Joe’s loud, smokes when he starts, and occasionally backfires to remind me who’s boss. He eats sticks, pebbles, copperheads and frogs — no negotiation.
Newton is like an entitled teen who wants to stay indoors and scroll TikTok. Seriously, this weekend he required a full eight minutes of pulling to start because “it’s too humid.”
Let me tell you, mowing the yard with these two is like co-hosting a cooking show with Gordon Ramsay and a vegan blogger named Aspen.
On Saturday, I made the mistake of starting out with Smokey Joe, figuring I’d do the trim work — edges, trees, corners, flower beds — while MaryLee and Chopacabra took on the six-foot jungle. It took a couple pulls and a couple shots of starter fluid to wake Joe from his slumber, but he went to work… for exactly 10 minutes.
So… like just about every mower (but not all of them) Joe’s got a little cone-shaped washer that goes between the cutting blade and the bolt that holds the blade to the shaft at the bottom of the engine. It’s a thick and wide washer and it keeps the blade from slipping off over the bolt head, which is smaller than the hole in the blade it’s supposed to hold down — go figure. Well, that washer vanished. Literally, it just beamed out of existence. Unfortunately, it chose to do so while Smokey Joe and I were churning at full throttle through a section of thick Bermuda. I heard a, clunk, then saw a spray of sparks come out of the discharge chute - ‘er hole (the little plastic chute thingy’s been missing since the Lawn Wars of 2009), then Joe’s blade went spinning out from under the opposite side of his deck, coming to rest a couple feet away.
“Sheesh.. that could’ve been bad,” said my toes.
I mean it was bad enough because without that washer, Joe was done for the day.
Enter Newton. Since Newton’s carburetor and I never ever saw eye-to-eye, I figured, I’d cannibalize Newton for his little blade holderon- er-washer and install it on to Joe so we could get that blade on and get back to work. Mind you, I live a good 20 minutes from the nearest hardware store.
So… the clever people at Toro have a different system altogether to keep the blade from going helicopter, so my parts swap scheme was off the table.
It was going to have to be me and Newton against the lawn. I rolled him out of the shed into the blistering stifling volcanic heat of Saturday noon. I grabbed the starter rope and pulled, pulled, pulled; checked the gas; pulled, pulled; pumped the little gas bubble; pulled, pulled, pulled; removed the air filter and sprayed in some starter fluid; pulled, pulled, pop! Sprayed some more and pulled. Newton coughed like he’d just smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes, then caught and started running — too good.
Newton went into over-rev mode, buzzing at 10,000+ rpms, sucking anything not tied down in a threefoot radius in toward its death blades like a giant Kirby vacuum.
I went for it. Newton and I attacked the remaining edges. It was hot and miserable, Newton was screaming like a banshee and I had to make sure he had something to eat at all times, or he would over rev and overheat, or worse.
In the end, it was me who overheated. The sun was showing all the subtlety of a liquid-fueled rocket engine in test-mode. Sweat ran down my back and I’m pretty sure I heard someone say, “Hell called, they want their AC back.”
I didn’t finish mowing, I made it almost to the home stretch, but did not finish. I’ve got a lot of lawn, like a pair of two-acre patches and between those two rolling hills of greenness, there’s a lot… A LOT… of edges to cut in.
I was done. Newton was over heated and smoking like a Baby-Boomer at a Snoop Dog concert.
The old warhorse, Joe, was missing critical parts. I put them both away just as MaryLee and Chopacabra rolled up, they were done too.
“We’re all to old to mow in this heat,” she said.
As we put the mowers up, I swear I could hear them already going at each other.
I shut the shed door quietly. Let them fight. We were done.
I stood in the yard — shirt soaked, arms tired, legs itchy from chigger attacks — and surveyed the yard. The grass was shorter. It was a start. There were still a ton of foot-high clipping furrows that we’d clean up tomorrow. Not HOA approved yard work by any means — good thing we don’t live in an HOA.
As a bonus, we found MaryLee’s sports car, a couple frisbees, a baseball and a pool noodle. No garden hose though… Still, we called it a win.
And the next time the grass gets that tall? I’m gonna call it natural habitat and apply for a wildlife conservation grant. That way the federal government will ban me from mowing it as a matter of environmental protection.
Let that grass grow. Let Smokey Joe, Newton and Chopacabra live out their last days in peace, mowing someone’s cute urban front yard.
This summer heat has taught us one thing: It’s better to be on the porch, wishing you were mowing the lawn than to be mowing the lawn, wishing you were on the porch.
Thanks for reading. Shop local. Stay cool