Splendor in the Grass

I have lawnbrain. I think, therefore I mow.

I know I have carbrain. That’s the contemptuous word for people who do not feel agonizing guilt about driving an automobile. If you think 75-year-old people with bad knees shouldn’t drive a bike in the middle of winter to get groceries, but should drive in their big nice warm Eldorado, you have carbrain.

There’s a discussion board on Reddit called “f***cars,” with the asterisks substituting for a naughty word. They are so passionate! So genuine! There’s also one called “f***lawns,” castigating the lawnbrained. They hate lawns, particularly if they are Boomer-groomed. You can imagine the usual reasons: chemicals. Lawn mowers that burn the evil ichor and hasten the death of the planet (now scheduled for 10:38 a.m., March 7, 2041). Racist origins. Hierarchical capitalist oppression, inasmuch as someone who has a lawn can tell someone to get off it.

Faced with the opprobrium of basement-pallor lawn-haters, one wonders: Am I as lawnbrained as I could be? After all, I did respect No-Mow May. It’s what it sounds like: let the grass grow. This helps the pollinating insects. Bravo for the bees; everyone wants the bees to do okay, unless they are hovering in front of our faces, in which case you do that distracted nonthreatening wave like an aged archduke wafting away a dowager’s flatulence.

But it turns out that No-Mow May is controversial. Some naturalists believe it does more harm than good. Insects that return to the overgrown expanse may be confused when it’s shorn, like someone who returns to a buffet to find the bins all filled with sawdust. The long grass obscures the burrows of bunnies that will be dramatically revealed when you mow, and in a way that children will be recounting on a therapist’s couch 30 years hence.

An AP article advises you to shrink or eliminate the lawn, “which frankly, has no redeeming value aside from subjective aesthetics.”

The Left in a single sentence, right there. You there, with your beautiful green carpet unmarred by weeds or the decapitated stalks of dandelions — it has no social utility. You might like it, but that’s not enough.

Okay, well, molon labe and all that. You’ll need a truck and lots of shovels.

I am not dogmatic on the matter. Wildflower lawns can be nice, if they are small, and not next to me. A green lawn in a desert city seems a waste and an affectation. But I like a lush lawn that has been tamed — nay, violently subdued — by the swift blade and the internal-combustion engine. I recently bought a new lawn mower, and I have to admit that the electric versions were tempting. The size of my lawn guaranteed I would run out of juice and could take a three-hour break while the battery recharged.

By the way, we still have coal-fired electricity plants in this part of the country. People would be horrified if you shoveled coal into your lawn mower, but if you plug it into the wall, it comes from holy windmills powered by the breath of angels.

I bought a gasoline-powered lawn mower. It does not whir but roars to life with rapacious enthusiasm: Let’s go, boss. I wish it smelled better; it doesn’t have the rich aroma of the two-stroke engines of my youth, but I can always spill a little gas and inhale deeply. Mowing takes about an hour and a half, and I have a lawn striped with neat, evenly spaced green lines.

If I were truly a fiend, I’d stuff the clippings in plastic bags to be buried in the landfill, but even a lawnbrain of my sort balks at that.

After the shave, I use some weed killer, which comes in a big jug, dispensed by a wand with a trigger. You really do feel as if you’re roaming the battlefield, shooting the wounded. You don’t look so bad. Here’s another. How ’bout you? You talkin’ to me? Then the trimmer to perfect the margins. It’s all very imperialistic and Western and regrettable, of course — subduing the world, forcing the great god of Nature to submit to a haircut to conform to an idealized landscape whose precepts I blindly follow without interrogation.

Well, that’s not me. I mow the lawn not because of white supremacy and cultural hegemony. I mow because I am a by-God American Man.

Also, my wife said it needed it.