Outlawed by the PGA...

The Mad Mower!

A couple days ago, I mowed my lawn. Or that is, I pretended to mow my lawn. At the beginning of the season, I made my usual lawnmower engine checks, but I thought I'd wait and see how my mower blades performed.

Actually they perform quite awful. I don't mow the grass so much as rather I just beat the grass to death with the mower. The blades are so dull, it's pretty much like attacking the blades of grass with a metal spatula at high speed:

WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP!!!!....

The next morning, most of the dandelions have straightened up and sprung back to life again, only to wait for another beating in two weeks.

"CHOOMPH!!"

That's the sound made by the mower as it runs over a dog-toy/rubber-ball/small mammal hidding in the tall grass. This time it was a tennis ball. At its current velocity exiting the mower, it could have presented a formidable challenge to Anna Kournikova, if she ever took a serve from a lawn care device...

Lawn mowing is fun. I come from a long line of people who beat grass to death.

Long ago, when I was a kid, Mom affectionately referred to Grandpa (Dad's dad) as "The Mad Mower". This was in part because shortly after Grandpa's retirement from the Painter's Union, he had nothing better to do than play cards, smoke big nasty Dutch Master's cigars, and mow... He frequently mowed in places or areas that Mom really didn't want him to mow, such as in the ditch or right across her flower beds.

Ah, but there was a LOT for Grandpa to mow as we had about 6 acres of lawn (both our yard and Grandpa's yard, both next to each other) and 114 acres of cow pasture that needs SOME mowing occasionally. But it's COW PASTURE for Pete's sake, why would you NEED to mow it? Most likely either because (1) it was good maintenance of grassland, (2) Grandpa had nothing better to do or (3) Grandpa loved the sound of ground hogs getting WHAPPED on the head as his BushHog drove over a groundhog burrow.:

WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP!!!!....

Grandpa had multiple tools at his disposal for mowing. He had the riding mower, either the old 30-year-old Simplicity rider which was steered by pushing a large metal "joystick" in the direction you hoped to go, taking care not to get this stick caught too close near a barbed-wire fence, or the newer John Deere riding mower, which was the implement of choice of us grandsons, throwing the shift into 5th, popping the clutch, and doing a 10-foot wheelie as we proceeded to mow over Grandma's violets in the back yard...

The main implement of destruction was the Massey Ferguson 135 farm tractor (or “the MF” as we will repeatedly refer to it as...). Bought in the early 1970's, it attached to a variety of dangerous mowing contraptions such as:

1) The sickle-bar mower. This infernal device was mostly good for mowing tall weeds and grandchildren's fingers. It was a mass of pulleys, belts, and a long bar with 2 dozen blades on a bar that reciprocated side to side as it ran. Mom would try to hide us kids whenever Grandpa attached this monstrosity to the back of the MF because one of the first things Grandpa would have us do is to oil it with an oil can as it was running. No one lost any fingers, but we came pretty dang close. There had to be horror movies out there based on this thing, there just HAD TO....

2) The hammerknife mower. Okay, imagine a 7-foot-long steel rod, about 4 inches in diameter. On this rod, attached with hundreds of metal "ears" are about 200 6-inch-long metal blades, all sharp, and having the rod rotate somewhere about 600 RPM with all 200-some blades rotating as well. Attached to the MF, this was the mower of choice for mowing the large areas of the 6-acre lawn. Unfortunately, with the 200-some rotating blades, it could pick up and fling small rocks and any small hard objects into the next county OR into our living room window.

3) The BushHog. This is also the favored mowing device of most state highway departments and for good reason. It can mow small trees down, as well as grass and any other debris that happens to be lying in the grass such as pop cans in the ditch, the grandchildren's toys in the yard, or small mammals hiding in the cow pasture, whapping them in the head as described before (and now):

WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP!!!!....

The BushHog operates by rotating four half-inch thick large iron bars at great velocity. These bars are not sharp and grass is not mowed as much as they are intimidated to death.

Well, every other day Grandpa was mowing something. If it wasn't his yard, it was our yard. If it wasn't our yard, it was the south 40. If it wasn't the south 40, it was the neighbor's ditches...and so on...

Dad did some mowing as well, and he was briefly known as "Mad Mower, Jr", however, he was a lot more careful than Grandpa. Grandpa would check the gas tank on the MF while still holding a lit Dutch Masters, Dad had better sense than that. But Dad was very busy mostly fixing stuff Grandpa had broken the week before and soon the grandsons got to partake of the great adventures of mowing.

Grandpa actually paid quite well. Well, enough in fact, every Saturday morning, I'd be up on his front porch, "CAN I MOW, CAN I MOW, CAN I, CAN I, CAN I??!?".

I was "Mad Mower, the Fourth". "Mad Mower III" was my older brother, but he was smart and earned his extra money doing much safer things like home construction and using power tools on a 45-degree pitched roof.

No, I never got to drive the MF, which is probably a good thing, as I did enough damage to the riding mower and most of Mom's flowers.

Fast forward to today. Towards the end of my vacation, I'll take the blades off the mower and sharpen them myself. Heck, that's all the more reason to buy a lawn mower, you can justify buying more tools, like a bench grinder (to sharpen blades), wrenches and hammers (to spend all weekend trying to detach/attach blades), and a welder (more fun to try and weld back the half a blade you ground off with the bench grinder, rather than to just do the WIMPY thing and buy a new blade).

Ah yes. Mowing is fun. Always follow safety rules. I try to keep the Ducklings in the house while mowing.

Has anyone seen Spot?

"CHOOMPH!!"