Mowing the lawn has always given me a private pleasure. There is the smell of gasoline and the roar of the mower, yet there is also the smell of the cut grass and the sun beating down. The clean, even rows give the illusion of order and accomplishment. There is pattern and regularity, and the feel of the earth beneath my feet—the sense of covering ground, my own ground. Or maybe it’s harvest. Mowing is the closest I come to working the land and bringing in a crop, even though I mow without bagging, leaving the clippings to return their nitrogren.
The roaring of the engine is an element in the pleasure, silencing everything else. It is a shell of sound keeping out external influence. It’s meditative. Going up and down the rows, laying down the pattern, I move into a lawn-mowing trance, my brain waves lengthening.
“The fact is the sweetest dream labor knows,” Frost says in “Mowing,” a poem about (among other things) the scything of a meadow. For Frost it’s the whisper of the scythe that brings this knowledge, not the droning of a four-cycle engine, but I think I know what he means. Working in a field or a yard, repeat- ing the same motions over and over, our thoughts subside and the plain fact of things emerges. The ground is hard. The trees and flowers have a presence, a density.
Mowing is masculine. Mowing is mechanical. Running the mower is the first mechanical skill I learned—put your foot on the rim here, my dad taught me, adjust the choke so—and I remember feeling accomplished and grown-up as I practiced in our backyard, overlapping the wheels just slightly at each new row, smiling with authority.
Mowing is the first way I earned money, too, first at Mrs. Gray’s house next door, then across the street at Mr. Crook’s and Mr. McMullen’s. I charged $2 per lawn the first summer and kept a little ledger to record my earnings. The next year dad co-signed a loan so I could buy a new red Toro and go into business in a bigger way. My brother and I were “Anderson Brothers Enterprises Ltd.” We put up a sign on the maple tree in the front yard and ran an ad in the Northtown Shopper. I was driving by then, an old ‘49 Chevrolet panel truck, and we’d do hauling and general odd jobs, too. There was nothing better than lifting the mower into the truck on those sweet summer mornings and bombing off to the next job.
But now comes Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Environment and a set of different facts. An acre of lawn needs more than twenty-seven thousand gallons of water each week. Americans routinely overwater by 20 to 40 percent. Lawn care increases water use by as much as 30 percent in the summers. Homeowners use up to ten times more toxic chemicals per acre than farmers, up to five to ten pounds per lawn—a national total of 25 to 50 million pounds.
And there’s no mention here of the amount of gas consumed by lawnmowers across the country, and the pollution that causes. Several friends have decided not to mow their lawns at all this summer. The grass dries up anyway in July and August, they argue, so why bother? Greenness and smoothness are bourgeois affectations.
Mowing the lawn again the other day I was thinking that the nineties are complicating all our usual losses of innocence. It’s not just children growing up and discovering their realities are appearances. Grown-ups keep having their rugs pulled out from under them. Taking showers, flushing the toilet, using deodorant, driving to work, eating a hamburger, making a fire in the fireplace—in a time of global warming, oil wars, waste disposal problems, and diminishing resources, everything we do has implications. Caught up in the grand ecology, no single action can be innocent, unreflective.
“There is something about the human mind that keeps it well within the confines of the parish,” E.B. White says. Our habit is to think in “small, conventional terms.” But as the world gets smaller and the atmosphere more fragile, the differences between the parochial and nonparochial also shrink. Everything is parochial in the sense that everything concerns us, affects us, just as we affect everything else.
Frost uses the scything of the meadow as a metaphor of death and mortality, echoing Andrew Marvell and the great scythe of time hurrying near. We have always thought metaphorically, always realized that our private lives are implicated in something larger. But now that habit of metaphorical thinking needs to be literalized. The mowing of our own particular meadows or lawns not only figures the destruction of the rain forest in Brazil but also has a real effect itself, a literal effect, however small. Blake urged us to see the whole world in a grain of sand. In the delicate balance we find ourselves in, grains of sand might make all the difference.
But that ecology can work the other way, giving hope. Interconnectedness means that we have some power. It means that deciding whether or not to mow the lawn and how often is a political act, which is the point of all the recommendations in Fifty Simple Things. If all of us composted grass clippings, we could cut landfill congestion by 18 percent. If one hundred thousand of us avoided overwatering in the summer, 5 million gallons of water would be saved. If even 10 percent of us began using organic pesticides, there would be 2.5 to 5 million fewer pounds of toxic chemicals in the environment every year.
In “The Reactor and the Garden,” Wendell Berry reflects on what has the most political force, getting arrested at a nuclear power plant or going home and planting a garden. Both are necessary, he thinks, but it’s the garden that might make the most difference. If everyone planted a garden the world would be a different place, not only because of the direct environmental impact—the impact on food distribution, the release of all that extra oxygen into the atmosphere—but because of the calming, centering effect of working in the soil. “Gardening is the finest sort of challenge to intelligence,” Berry says, “correcting the cheap energy mind.” There’s a payoff for our personal ecologies, in other words: the smooth functioning of our own individual systems.
I’m starting my first garden now. I put out the peppers too early, but the bush beans and rhubarb are doing fine, and wild asparagus keeps coming up at odd places among the rows. The struggle is with the poison oak snaking through the fence, and with thousands of little sow bugs ravaging the slight cucumber v’s. Pesticide or no?
Berry’s point is that personal health depends on social and environmental health. And vice versa: we can take care of pollution only when we begin taking care of our inner pollutions.
This idea of connection and synergy helps put a book like Habits of the Heart in perspective, too. Robert Bellah and the other sociologists argue there that American culture is dominated by individualism, that our vocabulary for describing commitments to anything larger than ourselves has atrophied. Our values are largely private. “We are concerned that this individualism has become cancerous,” they say, “that it may be destroying those social integuments moderating its destructive tendencies.”
I’ve been taking that statement personally. There’s a forest behind our house where I go walking almost every day, breathing in the smell of the fir trees, losing myself. What I usually think about as I’m walking is not the spotted owl and the problems of the old-growth but the way the light hits the maple or the sound of the stream. I give to environmental action groups but I keep thinking that instead of spending my time walking in the forest I should be attending committee meetings. Maybe my preoccupations are too aesthetic and interior.
In any event, I am adjusting the level of my mower and I am starting to compost. I’m mowing and watering less. It’s not easy. I’m the generation on the cusp, with all these private associations and nostalgias to reverse, and a fatal love of greenness, of the broad green slope. Mowing still centers me. It’s that contradictory love of the sound of the engine, so out of keeping with my usual aversion to noise and machinery. It’s the smell of the gasoline as much as the smell of cut grass. It’s the long hour of the soothing mechanical mindless motion and then coming in for coffee, my grass-stained shoes left on the porch. It’s my dad telling me to put my foot on the rim and then yank up on the cord at a slight angle. It’s the illusion of pattern, the illusion of authority.
But in the ecology of whatever large systems are at work here, there will be some compensations, I expect. For whatever losses there will be gains—if nothing else an awareness of the web itself, an awareness of this unavoidable economy.
