the lawn

We bought our first house in 1989. It was an exciting moment and brought with it a lot of surprises. The biggest and most important surprise is that houses are not simply forms of shelter. No. They’re machines designed to convert you into consumers. Figure: for years I lived as a carefree bachelor in a variety of apartments around Toronto. My worldly possessions were a futon and bed clothes; books; a pot and a pan; a dish and a cup; one chair and a very small table; clothes; a toothbrush. I could move everything I owned in a wheelbarrow. I was portable. I was free.

Then we bought a house. And as soon as we bought that house, we had to buy a million other things. Now, I’m not talking about fancy furniture or wall hanging to fill up the space. No sir. I’m talking about necessities: things I had to have to keep the house going. For instance, I needed a step ladder to be able to change various light bulbs and to fix cracks in the ceiling, and I needed an extension ladder so I could clean the gutters of the house. Got it? We’re in our new house for fifteen minutes and suddenly I need TWO ladders. So off I go to buy the ladders. But wait! How do you get an extension ladder home? On the roof of your car. But that means you need a) a car b) roof racks. So, fifteen minutes in my house and I need two ladders, a car, and roof racks. I haven’t even unpacked yet and I need another bank loan.

But my focus today is not on the hell that is home repair and maintenance. No. It is on the hell that is lawn and garden maintenance. Now, as an apartment dweller, lawns and gardens are an abstraction. They’re tourist attractions. You make trips to go see them; you have picnics in them; you forget them when you get home. But if you have a house, then you have to deal with the lawn and garden every day. You can’t ignore them. You can’t walk away. They’re there, waiting for your labour, sweat, blood, and money, twenty-four seven.

What are the minimum equipment requirements that a lawn and garden demand? A hose, a sprinkler, a rake, shovel, a lawnmower. That, I figure, is BARE minimum. Realistically, you also need various pruning shears, a weedeater, a seedspreader, trowels, pots, seeding trays, a wheelbarrow, a hoe, a Garden Weasel, a pick-axe, a composter, and a partridge in a pear tree. Then, if you should decide to reconfigure your garden in anyway and make it a pleasant environment, you can find yourself buying not only millions of plants (many of them designed to die at the end of the each year), but landscaping ties, fountains, arches, arbours, tomato cages, weed-suppressing fabric, decorative wood chips, tiki torches, lawn furniture, croquet sets, and fountains in the shape of little boys peeing. Why not save time and just have a money bonfire once a week?

Anyway, our first house had a very small front and backyard. Karen took over much of this lawn with flower beds, and left me in charge of the grass. Great. No probs. I’ve got the grass. But wait! Why not, I suggested, put in MORE garden beds? Like 90% of the outside surface of the lot? And the rest we can cover with concrete that I would be happy to paint green?
Karen didn’t buy it, so I was left in charge of two small lawns, the one in the front about the size of a pool table, the one in the back the size of the average living room.

Fine. But even those small lawns meant I needed a lawnmower. So, off to the store to look at them and, after noticing how stupidly expensive they are, I opted for the yuppie-approved, environmentally friendly, quiet, maintenance-free push mower. This was, essentially, a new version of the old push mowers that everyone used to have, only this was done up in high-tech colours by some German company that specializes in selling yuppies new versions of the old crap their parents had used and hated.

I quickly learned why my father had been so quick to replace his push mower with a power machine many years ago. The push mower worked brilliantly when, and only when, the grass was bone dry and when there were nothing in the lawn that was thicker or tougher than, well, the average blade of grass. But if the grass was even a teeny-weeny bit damp, from week-old rain, from dew, from humidity, from the kids playing with a squirt gun, from a dog licking it, from a humming bird flying over it and taking a leak, the mower got huge clumps of matted grass caught in its blades that would take several hours to clean out. If the mower ran over a twig or even an unusually thick blade of grass, it came to a bone-jarring halt and the offending material had to be extricated from the blades at great risk to human fingers. Now, since Vancouver is perpetually sopping wet and because my grass sometimes produced slightly tougher than normal specimens, it would often cost me four hours and several bloody fingers to mow a lawn about the size of the average bathtub.

So, on my next birthday, Karen gave me an electric mower.

Thanks honey. I didn’t really want that subscription to Guitar Player magazine. No, I didn’t want that bottle of fine wine or the new Iggy Pop CD. No, I really wanted something that was tied to my household chores. A lawn mower. Thanks again.

The electric mower worked fine. It was sleek, quiet, and much more forgiving than the push mower. It did, however, require that you run around with an extension cord. No matter how you organize that cord, you will, at some point, be in danger of running it over with the mower and electrocuting yourself. I came close many times.

Then we moved. Now, our first house was a beautifully restored heritage home. It was, however, in a war zone. The guy who lived across the back alley from me was a poster child for fetal alcohol syndrome. He used to invite gangs of mutants over for urination contests off the back of his porch. I’ll never forget the time the evening’s grand prize was won by his wife. Our neighbours to the north were a nice Italian couple who became profoundly indignant whenever the police came by to explain that their teenage boys were in a gang. “They’re not a gang,” the mother would shout, “They’re just a bunch of friends who commit crimes together.” The house to the south of us was a rental property owned by a guy (I do not make this up) called Guido. A profoundly bad judge of character, Guido managed to rent the house only to hippies and drug addicts. One group of such renters, after they had received their eviction notices, actually put signs up all over the city telling people to come over and trash the place on their last night of occupation. What a pleasant thing it is to be walking downtown and see, taped to a hydro pole, a sign that says “Wreck everything! Party till you die! Come to the house right beside Paul’s tonight!”

The final straw was the robbery. We had gone away for the weekend to come back and find our house cleared out. Now, anyone can be robbed. Happens all over the place, in the nicest neighbourhoods. But here’s the kicker: our house was tall, well-lit, and on a busy street. There was no way you could move anything in or out of that house without being seen by four or five neighbours. I figure that the people who robbed us must have pulled up a large moving van and then systematically loaded it with our possessions over the course of three or four hours, probably stopping to take breaks and smoke cigarets on our lawn. But when I went to talk to the neighbours about what they might have seen, they all wiped the drool from their mouths long enough to grunt, “Nope. Dinna see a thing,” before shuffling back into their lairs to sniff solvents.

So, we moved. We took the mortgage from hell to move to West Vancouver. We moved from a beautiful house on a terrible block, to a terrible house on a beautiful block. The new house was, actually, originally a summer cottage that had been used as a rental house by a negligent landlord for seven years. The place was a wreck: filthy shag carpet, water pipes that didn’t work, painted over windows, a leaky roof. But what a neighbourhood. And the property is fairly large: 122 ft. by 166 ft.

But wait! Small house + big lot = lawn and garden hell. But you know, that didn’t dawn on me at first. You see, the back yard was almost entirely overtaken with a huge laurel hedge that had not been clipped since the Cretaceous period, while the front yard was a grass-free stretch of dirt decorated with a plaster burro. I actually offered to go higher on my bid on the house to get that burro, but the seller was a weasel. Anyway, I was so smitten with the burro that it didn’t register that this property, once cleaned up, would have the biggest lawn in the world.
But Karen knew. Oh yes, she knew.

Karen was, in fact, over the moon: finally she had the chance to build a mega-garden. But not just a mega-garden. No sir. She also envisioned large expanses of lawn to punctuate the myriad flower beds that were to adorn the property. Huge, swooping lawns that would have to be meticulously tended.

By me.

And so she got to work. First, she bought me a shovel and told me to turn over all the dead sod on the property. Then she rented me a chainsaw and told me to hack the hedge back thirty feet. Then she phoned to have 10 yards of top soil delivered and she directed me as I moved it (in the pouring rain) around the property. Then she pointed to the rocks that she thought would best suit the retaining wall that I was to build. I finally had to convince her to take it easy and let me handle some of the hard work.

What we ended up with was beautiful, but, well, designed to destroy me. Let me explain: Karen really is quite the gardener. Our front garden is so full of a variety of cunningly arranged plants that it has become part of the garden tour run by the local recreation centre. Frequently in the spring and summer people will stop and ask Karen questions about things in the garden. They never ask me even if I’m the only one around. They assume, because I’m usually covered in dirt, bleeding, and swearing at some piece of equipment, that I’m some guy the home owners hired from a work farm for clumsy Tourette Syndrome sufferers. They hurry past and try not to make eye contact with me as they cover the ears of their small children.

You see, K. cunningly designed the garden as a sort of obstacle course for a lawn mower. None of this big, flat, square expanse of grass nonsense. No sir. Much better to break that yard up into a series of cantilevered mini-yards, each bordered with river rock and thorn bushes, each on a different level, each equally inaccessible and awkward to mow, so that cutting the grass means starting and stopping the mower some fifteen times so that you can haul the thing, sometimes over your head, through a hedge of “fire-thorn” to the next mini-patch of grass.

I was still using the electric mower. To use it on this property, however, I had to buy the world’s longest extension cord. This is the same type of cord that the Russians use to run power from Moscow to the Mir space station. But even then, it was never quite long enough: it snagged on rocks, on plants, it wrapped around trees, it got run over by the lawnmower. It made my life miserable. I would end up lengthening it by plugging in four other extension cords, all of which would become unplugged as I progressed around the labyrinth that is our property. What should have been a one-hour job became a four-hour job as I struggled with the cords.

So I can’t say I was upset when the thing finally burned out. In fact, truth be told, I helped it along. I waited until the thickest patch of grass on the property was a good length and sopping wet, I hid a bunch of big sticks in the grass, then I took the electric mower in there set to the closest cutting height possible. The mower put up a good fight, but finally it started to slow down as the wet grass strained the engine. Within a few minutes, the machine was belching smoke and emitting that peculiar smell we associate with electrical fires. Karen came running out of the house concerned. I explained that this sort of thing happened regularly, at least every second time I cut the grass, but that it was okay: I didn’t mind risking electrocution or immolation as long as she was happy with the yard.

She suggested I go buy a new lawnmower. A gas mower.

Reluctantly, I agreed.

Now, there is a shop that I had been driving by for years that only sells lawnmowers. I think it’s called “Only Lawnmowers.” They have hundreds of machines, new and used, lined up in front of the store. I’d always wanted to go in there, and now I had a chance.

The store was no Canadian Tire. There were no flourescent lights, clean tiled floors, or smiling teenage sales clerks. No sir. The inside of this store looked like something from the set of Mad Max. It was dark; it smelled of oil and gas and metal filings; lawnmowers and pieces of lawnmowers were scattered everywhere, hung from the ceiling, piled in heaps. The walls were adorned with old pictures of lawnmowers, the great, classic lawnmowers of days gone by. The people who ran the store were an old couple, of some European peasant stock, who spoke in thick, but unrecognizable accent.

When I walked in, the woman looked at me with suspicious eyes and asked, “You want lawnmower?”

“Yes,” I said. “I want a lawnmower.”

“You want gas?” she asked, “Or electric.” She spit on the floor to clear the taste of that word out of her mouth.

“I want gas. And I want one that mulches.” I wanted a lawnmower that mulched because mulching mowers chop the cut grass into, well, juice, which then fertilizes the lawn as a whole. The advantage here is no clippings, therefore no raking. Brilliant.

This pleased the old woman. “New, or second hand?” she asked.

“Which is better?” I asked.

She considered the question. “Some new one, okay,” she said, “But not strong, like old one.”

“Then let’s look at the second-hand ones.”

This, too, pleased her. She led me outside into the lot. She looked around to make sure that no one was watching, then she took me into corner and pulled a tarp off a mower. The thing was huge. It looked like a zamboni with a push handle. It looked like it had fought in a war and had won. I had a religious epiphany and knew that I must have that mower, damn the cost. My kids could go without food and clothes for a year; I had to have it.

I didn’t have to say anything. I just looked at the old woman and nodded.

She had me push the mower inside the shop so that her husband could give me a lesson on how to run it. It was pretty easy: fill it with gas and oil, turn the switch to “high,” prime the fuel bulb, and yank the cord.

“How will I know when it needs more oil?” I asked.

The old man squinted at me. “You will not KNOW,” he said. “You will feel. Here.” He tapped his chest over his heart to indicate where.

I nodded my understanding and went to pay his wife. I wrote out a check and then reached for some I.D. She stopped me before I could produce my driver’s licence. “Not need,” she said.

Then she put her hand on mine and said, “Go. Mow like the wind.”

I brought it home, and revelled in it. It was so loud that I had to wear ear protectors when I used it. Teenagers in cars rigged with massive stereo systems would bashfully approach me and say, “Gee, mister, could you turn that down a bit? We can’t hear our stereos.” I’d laugh in their faces and goose the throttle. The airport used to phone me to complain that I was drowning out the sound of their jets.

It also made huge puffs of noxious smoke when you started it up. I even found that charming. What is it about internal combustion engines that get a man’s heart pounding? That makes you want to shout, “What’s the ozone layer done for me lately?”

And power? Baby, ain’t no blade of grass thick enough to stop this monster. Grass? Hell, I gleefully mowed over fallen tree branches, wine bottles, car batteries. And NO raking. I’m mulching. I became a connoisseur of mulch; I experimented mowing different things just to enjoy new mulch experiences:

fibreglass insulation = itchy mulch
fashion magazine = colourful mulch
dead squirrel = gooey mulch
wine bottle = crunchy mulch
car battery = tingly mulch

True, Karen sometimes complained that the mulch looked like hunks of dead grass all over the lawn and she would even hint that maybe I should rake it up because it was unsightly, but I would sigh gently and patiently explain the myriad benefits of the mulching process. Sure, some of that mulch DID look like a styrofoam cup that had been put in a blender, but only to the untrained eye.

I was a happy man. I looked forward to cutting the grass.

But pride goeth before a fall. All it took was an oversized hunk of ice to sink the Titanic, the unsinkable ship, on its maiden voyage. All it took to dash my dreams, suck hope and joy from my life, was a rock.

Now, understand, we live at the foot of a mountain. What this means is that our soil is full of rocks. And we’re not talking little stones you could use to skip across a pond on a summer’s night. We’re talking rocks the size of Volkswagons; we’re talking rocks that should have their own names, like Big George, Widowmaker, or The Devil’s Scrotum. Most of these stone behemoths are under the soil, but with rain, erosion, gardening, they are sometimes exposed, pushing their evil heads out of the earth like, well, big evil pushy things.

As I was out one day for a happy mow in the sun, the blade of the mower hit one such monster and the machine came to a jarring halt.

For a second, I couldn’t understand what had happened. How could the machine just stop? What object in the universe could oppose it? What substance was mulching-proof? Surely nothing yet listed on the Periodic Table of Elements. But it was undeniable: the mower had stopped.

I tipped the mower over expecting to see something huge wrapped around the blade, a piece of transatlantic cable for example, that had momentarily discomfited my machine. But no. It wasn’t working because the spindle of the machine, the rod of metal that the blade is attached to and which runs up into the motor itself, was bent like a Crazy Straw so that the blade could no longer turn freely. Instead it jammed against underside of mower.

The blade would not spin. The mower was broken.

I fell screaming to my knees; I tore at my clothes and bit at my flesh; I poured ashes on my head; I ran to the local church, grabbed the minister by the collar, and shouted in his face, “How can you believe in a God who allows such things to happen?!”; I drove to the lower east side, sold my car to a drug dealer, cultivated a heroin addiction which I supported through prostitution, and lived on the streets for six months; I had a huge tattoo of the lawn mower done on my chest with the motto “Mow hard, die young.”

When the grieving was over, I came home and prayed for winter. You don’t have to cut the grass in winter. Even if it doesn’t die back in Vancouver, it does slow down, and no one expects you to cut the grass in November anyway. But every night I lay awake, at once dreading the return of the growing season and mourning for my mower. Karen said I should just replace it, but I laughed at the idea: “Replace it? Sure. And while I’m at it I’ll just cut off my arm and replace it. I’m sure I won’t notice the difference. Or how about my head?”

In those months, I suspect that I was not the best of company.

Then I had an idea. It came to me at four in morning after another sleepless night: what if I took my blow torch, heated the spindle until it was red hot, then banged it straight with a hammer? The idea was like a religious revelation. I lay panting and sweating in bed, waiting for the sun to rise so I could try it out.

At about 5 that morning I was out in the back yard with the mower, a hammer, and a blowtorch.

Now, I suppose that most men have moments in their lives where they do something so profoundly stupid it almost gets them killed. Indeed, the word “masculine” is from the Latin word meaning “almost killing yourself stupidly.” REAL men, macho men, are men who repeatedly and consciously almost kill themselves stupidly. Think about it. Who are the macho heroes of western civilization? Soldiers, athletes in brutal sports, movie action heroes. Stupid people. Case closed.

Well, this was my moment to be fully masculine: I was about to apply a blowtorch to a machine full of gasoline. Let’s think about that for a minute. Flame + gasoline. Good idea, or not? Masculine idea, or not? A fireman I know told me about an arson that he was called to once. The arsonist (a very masculine man) had tried to set fire to the inside of a warehouse by using gasoline. Figuring that gasoline burns, he filled a tub with the stuff and ran a line of the liquid over near the door which he intended to escape through once the fire got going. One little problem: gasoline does not burn; it explodes. Mr. Arsonist lit the line of gasoline and was blown against the metal door that he was going to escape through so hard that his body left an imprint in it.

I emptied out the gasoline.

Fine. I put the blowtorch to the spindle. It started to heat up. I held the torch longer. The end of the spindle began to glow. I started tapping it with the hammer. Nothing. No movement. I kept the torch on longer and hit harder. Nothing. I sat there on my haunches for twenty minutes heating and hitting.

Nothing. I might as well have been tapping at Everest.

Gentlemen, to describe what happened next will require a small diversion. Let me begin this way: biology is destiny. That is to say, genetic make-up is a profound component of human predisposition. Now, I know that some thinkers argue that human being are entirely formed by their environments. Some people, however, know that is not true. These people are called parents. They know, from experience, that children are BORN with personalities. Those personalities can be moulded and warped, but they are there at birth.

So, my genetic background: Lithuanian. Now, what do we know about the Lithuanians? Well, they occupy Lithuania, the largest and most southerly of the Baltic states. It was also the last of the Baltic states to be Christianized. Why is that? Well, if you’ve ever attended a Lithuanian social event, you may guess at one reason: religious conversion requires the convertee to be sober for at least a few hours in a row. That puts most Lithuanians on the “just stay pagan” list right away. But eventually, when the Lithuanians noticed that everyone else in Europe was worshipping this Christ fella while they were still painting their bodies blue and offering sacrifices to oak trees (this would be around 1950), they joined the crowd and converted. But when their neighbours converted again, this time to Protestantism, the Lithuanians stuck with Catholicism. The reasons for this seem obvious: free glass of wine and a cookie at every mass; weekly confessions that allow you to clear the slate for another week of sinning — why switch? But there’s something more profound at work here: Lithuanians are genetically predisposed to be stubborn.

Let me bring this home by talking about my immediate genetic inheritance. My father is very talented with his hands. He can woodwork, plumb, do wiring, build structures large and small, perform car repairs, program a VCR. But he is also, like all Lithuanians, stubborn. And when his stubbornness meets an obstacle that is equally intractable, watch out. A favourite story that I like to tell about my father involves the time he was trying to drive a nail into a wall with a hammer. The nail wouldn’t go, and the hammer eventually broke; the head came right off. Stubbornness + intractable problem = violence. Father dropped the hammer and started whacking at the offending nail with the open palm of his hand. He managed to get in three or four good whacks, too, before he realized that he was tearing the palm of his hand to strips on the nail.

So, confronted with the unrelenting lawn mower spindle, my genetic heritage kicked in. I entered a different space, an alternate reality, a place where terms like “common sense,” “cause and effect,” “consequences,” were less than meaningless; they were petty annoyances, mosquitos of mediocrity to be swatted out of the way. This was not a rush of egomania; it was a rush of superego. I saw the world clearly and fully for the first time in my life, with a terrible diamond-hard clarity, a clarity brought about by a focus, by an unprecedented ability to see the supreme priorities of the instant. I think this is the experience that some people who have survived near-death events talk about: a profound stripping away of the inconsequential, an utterly unique opportunity to grasp the essential truths of existence.

I knew in that moment, I saw written on the surface of reality, the truth: the lawnmower must die.

I turned the blowtorch off and put the hammer down. I stared at the machine, and maybe even smiled a little. “Fine,” I said. “Fine.” Then I got up, went into the basement, and got my 10-lb. sledgehammer. I came back, and started wailing on the lawnmower with the sledgehammer. Screaming like a Viking berserker on crack, I aimed my blows at the offending spindle, but my goal was to obliterate, to reduce to its atoms, this machine that had betrayed me. I wanted to not only destroy it, but to destroy any trace, any memory of it. I wanted to make it an un-thing.
I don’t know how long I attacked the machine. I really don’t. Time had ceased to have meaning. It might have been seconds, it might have been months. I’ll never know. But at some point, a miraculous thing happened. The blade spun around. All the way around. I reluctantly stopped my assault to study this phenomenon. The blade was spinning. I had hit the spindle so hard with the sledge hammer that I had bent it back the other way enough that the blade could now turn.
I hadn’t straightened the spindle; I had just put a compensating bend in it.

I dropped the sledge. I was still in full Lithuanian brain-dead mode at this point. I had regressed to the point that I was not actually using my brain, just whatever parts of the upper-spine control functions like breathing. I guess I was, briefly, an evolutionary throw-back, still in a pre-verbal stage of human evolution. So I bent down and tried poking at the blade with my finger, like a Neanderthal poking at a Gameboy, not comprehending it, but fascinated by its oddity. I’m sure that I grunted in confusion and scratched myself as I stared at this phenomenon: a turning blade.

As my full brain began to reassert itself, as the neural receptors began to fire again (imagine a city at night in a power black-out; now imagine the power coming back on, block by block -- that’s what was happening in my brain) I began to feel something I had not felt in six months. An unfamiliar feeling, one I had assumed was lost to me forever.

I felt hope.

I turned the mower upright and, with trembling hands, filled it with gas. I set the switch to “on,” pumped the primer bulb, then took hold of the starter cord, ready to yank it. I paused for a minute before I did so. My life was riding on a yank of the cord. If I yanked it and nothing happened, then I was not only back where I started, I was in worse shape for having been offered this sliver of hope. On the other hand, if I yanked it and the motor started, well, I would be reborn.

I yanked. The machine coughed, sputtered, and died. A teasing sound. The fact that it had sputtered was a small miracle.

I yanked again. The machine sputtered, coughed, belched smoke, and ran.

The sun burst through the clouds. A rainbow arced across the sky. A chorus of birds began to sing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Flowers exploded into bloom. Mice, cats, and dogs held paws with each other and danced in circles on the lawn. World leaders phoned each other to offer promises of peace and co-operation. Aliens, who had seconds before trained their planet-destroying ray on Earth, decided the planet was too pretty to obliterate and flew off to vaporize Mars instead. God suspended all human suffering.

Was the mower as good as new? No. The bend in the spindle meant that the thing shook like rodeo bull and the angle of the blade meant that it barely cut the grass on one side while it dug a trough into the earth on the other. But it didn’t matter. It was back.

And so was I.