Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something perhaps about the lack of sound –

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf.

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows.

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Robert Frost

A Scythe of Contentment

Réjean has lived in the 18th century cape on the edge of town for the past 15 years, maybe longer. He and his partner carefully landscaped the property so daffodils and narcissus bloom in concentric rings around silver maples that line a manicured lawn. I use the term manicured because professional lawn guys show up at least once a week and unload riding mowers that are worth more than my rusty pickup — mowers representing the height of technology, that turn on a dime at the wiggle of the joystick that looks like it belongs in a video game. The broad expanse of grass leads to the front door of the house on one side. On the other, a low-slung bluegrass carpet beckons the casual visitor to the door of the attached barn. Réjean emerged through that very barn doorway early this spring, his $200 running shoes neatly laced up, adding a finishing touch to a black nylon coordinated exercise outfit. I don’t know where he ran, or exactly how far he went. What I do know is that as he got close to home on that fateful spring day, the Grim Reaper met him with scythe in hand and the seemingly healthy 42 year-old dropped dead in his door yard from coronary artery disease. Prior to the funeral, the lawn guys came back with their high tech mowers – just a quick touch up –to make sure the property was ready for visitors. After all, Réjean would have liked that. We’ve come a long way since Robert Frost faced the grass on the edge of his woods with a scythe in hand and wondered what it was whispering to him.

Réjean’s death woke me up. You see, I’m a seemingly healthy 42 year-old, too and while nobody mows my grass for me, I have no certainty that I could have averted the call of the Reaper. Unfortunately, sudden heart attack or stroke is all too common an end as we collectively slurp at the trough of modernity. After all, we’ve arrived, haven’t we? We’ve gone from being medieval serfs barely scraping by on our parcel of land, to quasi-idle moderns organized by the caste system of blue or white collars. Yup, we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps alright, only to graduate to The Clapper™, robotic vacuums, and self-propelled lawn mowers swilling gas, belching smoke and blanketing our byways in noise from dawn to dusk. Along with labor-saving toys, cardiovascular disease and obesity have accompanied our meteoric arrival into the 21st century.

In 1976, at the height of America’s bicentennial independence celebration, I went on a field trip to the Betsy Ross house in Philadelphia. The low ceiling of Betsy’s sitting room grazed against the top of my 70’s hairdo and I remember thinking that the American colonists were midgets by then “modern” standards. That same year, the old Yankee Stadium swathed in red, white and blue was being renovated with new seats that were 3 inches wider – all the better to accommodate the ever broader rear ends of ticket holders. Allow me to speak plainly: thirty-three years ago, our asses stopped fitting into the fold-up seats that had once served our parents and grand parents. As a result, 9,000 fewer ticketholders could take a load off as they watched the game and an additional 27,000 linear inches of butt were thereby comfortably accommodated. As they tear out those 3-inch wider seats, there’s no time like the present to buy one for your living-room.

The legendary blue seats from the original Yankee Stadium, pried from within baseball’s cathedral in the Bronx, are now available for fans to take a seat in history, within the comfort of their own home – a $749.99 value.

If you do decide to install one in your living room, I wonder whether your grandchildren will marvel at the small or large size of our posteriors at the dawn of the 21st century in much the same way that I once marveled at Betsy Ross’s stature.

We like to think of our civilization as advanced, but that very advancement has led us directly down the path of inactivity. After all, we no longer have the time. In the throes of the current recession, grocery stores report that the fastest growing segment is prepared foods – as if we no longer have time for real food, real meals or real family. The aisles of excess in our shopping malls take longer than ever to navigate. We have cellular calling plans to evaluate and rollover minutes to manage, spam to erase, voice mail to check, and text messages to answer. Somehow, progress has come to mean an increase in leisure and leisure has become synonymous with idleness. In high school and college, we may play football, wrestle or swim. But in adulthood, far too many of us languish in front of the biggest flat screen TV we can afford in XX large sports jerseys, only to unwind in the whirlpool after a hard game. Brother (or sister), it ain’t easy being modern. Cautionary tales like Réjean’s and hard-core health statistics seem to suggest that if we don’t start getting off our butts, they may well be stuck in those stadium seats forever.

Wendell Berry has been in the news recently (and well-deserved it is) for saying “Take me to prison” if NAIS passes. But twenty-eight years ago, in a much quieter essay called “The Good Scythe”, he recounted giving up a gas-powered scythe for a human-powered one. The combination of Réjean’s carefully tended lawn, Mr. Berry’s good scythe, and the nagging whisper of my own – hanging idly on the wall of the barn – got me to thinking about fitness and health. When I raised the issue with my farming neighbors, they replied with a resounding, “No Sir, I get plenty of exercise. I’m plenty fit!” There is a certain rural ethic which says that if you feel compelled to exercise at the end of the day, you haven’t worked hard enough. This may have been true enough in the pre-mechanized era of farming, but as Dr. Peter Dorsen writes in his Handbook for Men Over 40, “Farmers need sensible, coherent exercise, just as much as anyone else, and possibly more.”2 After all, whether we farm with tractors or horse-drawn equipment, or both, farming is a mentally demanding profession that does not make us immune to stress or tension.

Instead, we should be asking ourselves how to best define our level of fitness. Am I fit enough to climb Mt. Everest? Fit enough for a hike to the pond? Fit enough to run a mile? In today’s world, there is a tendency to define fitness as something separate from work, instead of framing it in terms that apply to our station in life. How about: fit enough to sling and stack 20,000 bales in the hay mow over the season. Or, fit enough to mow an acre a day with a scythe. After all, before GPS and aerial photos, before overpopulation and the global economic crisis, the practical measure of an acre was the amount of land a man and his scythe could mow in a day. From all accounts, this averaged out to about 1.48 modern acres – 1.48 acres that my seemingly fit body probably couldn’t cut with a scythe.

With Réjean’s passing on my mind, I took stock of my options. I could join the local health club at a cost of hundreds of dollars a month for family access to “state of the art indoor recreation.” INDOOR? I live in an OUTDOOR wonderland with the highest natural snowfall of anywhere in the U.S. – a place to which tourists, fishermen, skiers and bikers flock in every season. Why would I want to sweat in a building with no windows? And why would I want to do “shadow” exercise for the sake of exercise alone? No, I felt called to find an appropriate technology that not only proved sustainable, but got the job done and conferred good health in the process. As so often happens in life, as I over-thought my fitness dilemma, fate and circumstance stepped in to fill the breach.

When the price of oil reached unprecedented highs last summer and quality hay started fetching 7$US per bale, we culled the flock hard. We reasoned that an early lambing would right any imbalance on the pastures and get us to an appropriate stocking density. Despite the best laid plans and reassuring raddle marks suggesting the ram was doing his job, we started grazing with too few head and neither team nor tractor to clip it. André Voisin, the father of managed intensive grazing, smiled down upon us as we made smaller paddocks for the flock, rotating the sheep for less and less time as we tried to keep up with the spring explosion of forage. When spring frosts finally gave way to warm days and nights, the pasture headed out. On the heels of Réjean’s death, I was suddenly faced with the need to clip my pasture AND to get myself into shape. That’s how I found myself following the sheep from pad to pad, listening to the whispers of my scythe as it breathed strains of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s great agrarian poet: around us, sprouts the grass of an ancient place anew.3

A linguist by training, it didn’t escape me that my scythe whispered in distinctly Austrian tones. My tool of choice is a European scythe, with a light, thin, strong, hammered blade fitted to a wooden handle called a snath. The length of the snath is sized to conform to my size and height; the grips are positioned for an upright stance. By comparison, my American or Anglo style scythe is one-size-fits-all, the blade is stamped and heavier than its European counterpart, and the whole contraption requires me to bend over the work, making it much harder than necessary. By comparison, the blade on a European scythe is lighter and adjusted so that it runs parallel to the ground cutting with minimal effort. I’m partial to an 18″ grass blade from the Marugg Company in Tennessee whose blades are manufactured to exacting specifications by an Austrian company that has been in operation since 1560.

A scythe takes a certain amount of practice and skill to learn, but the payoff is substantial and the learning curve is short. This single tool lives up to the promise of Wendell Berry’s good scythe, allowing me to accomplish multiple jobs on my homestead. Sure I clip the pastures after my sheep have grazed them, but in skilled hands, a scythe can trim with surgical precision, around the edges of a border in the garden or around the base of fruit trees in an orchard. My hands not being that skilled, I’ve neatly sliced electronet fencing with the ease of cutting a stick of butter while trying to “trim” right up to the edge. More often than not, the blade takes the brunt of my lack of skill – a blade that can be hammered (or “peened”) back into shape with a simple jig or anvil. I mow the weeds that grow along the stone fence at the edge of my property and trim the brush that grows in the road ditch. A single good scythe does all that for me and also literally puts the means of harvesting small grains into my hands.

A scythe works by harnessing the potential energy contained in the twisting motion of your muscles and tendons as you draw the blade from right to left in a smooth arc. If you divide the blade into equal thirds, the first third enters the crop, cutting with a shearing action. The falling “crop” gets caught by the blade and is neatly deposited into a pile at the edge of a swath that can run from five to seven feet wide. A bit like riding a bike, once you learn the motion, scything requires only a moderate effort allowing you to set a pace that can be maintained easily, interrupted only by the need to briefly hone the blade with a wet scythe stone as you progress. The marriage of deep, steady breathing and the ballet of drawing the blade through the grass in a sweeping arc prove meditative in nature. It’s a great stress reducer and I’m always surprised by how much gets done in a short amount of time, sometimes seemingly effortlessly. Tolstoy clearly had firsthand experience of this, for what he describes in “Anna Karenina” mirrors my own experience on a good day:

The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself.

With a push mower, four hours of noise and gasoline will guarantee that the entire lawn is mowed to the exact same height all in one day. The paradigm shift that has accompanied my transition to scything is that mowing becomes a continual process of cutting and regrowth. Rather than simply enjoying the destination – cut grass – I enjoy the journey. At the same time, it guarantees a wilder kind of beauty that is less contained.

From a practical standpoint, scything is appropriate, green technology for any homestead. From a health standpoint, I get a gentle workout every time I pick up the snath. From an aesthetic perspective, the scythe helps maintain my pastures at the peak of palatability and production. And should the Grim Reaper show up in my dooryard, I may be able to show him a trick or two, hoping to convince him that my time has not yet come. But the honest to goodness truth is that sometimes, when nobody is looking, I give in to the compulsion to grab my scythe and cull the burdocks, or cut down the switch grass that grows near the pond, just for the thrill of hearing what it will whisper to me that day.