So now that I have a genuine little lawn–all this rain has been good for something–I have run into the issue of how to cut it. One of my neighbors, Stevie, has a battery charged weedwacker which I have used before, but truthfully, I don’t like the sound of weedwackers in the gardens. And anyway, Steve’s battery charger got nicked from the basement of his building, so the weedwacker’s dead.

Bonnie, another neighbor in the know, told me there was one of those old push-mowers–with just the rotating blade, powered entirely by sweat (they’re called reel mowers, and you can find them at Clean Air Gardening)–in the supplies area, so I went over and had a look yesterday. My garden has gone from a mud-pit to a tropical wonderland, so it was now or never–if I waited I’d have to come back with my whole tribe armed with machetes and inoculated against dengue fever.

I had actually seen the little mower there before, but it looked pretty beat up and all rusted, so I just assumed it was dead, too. But, actually, it takes a lot to kill these things. They’re built simple and tough, like a good man.

It worked like a charm.

Someone had sharpened the blades and oiled it where it needed oiling, and it was just an utter joy to use. What a simple, elegant piece of technology this is, I thought, as it cut the grass with a competent little whirring, clipping sound that was very pleasing to the ear. And not only was there no obnoxious noise and noxious fumey waste, there was the sheer pleasure of something that you can look at and readily grasp how it works–if it broke, even I could fix it with some simple tools. It’s a good feeling using something so handy that you can actually understand, too, especially these days, when you can’t understand even basic technologies that directly impact every aspect of your daily life. Most technologies today cause at least as many problems as the ones they’re developed to solve. The old school push-mower does what it purports to do, simply and silently, and leaves nothing in its wake but a job well done.

I was so satisfied with the mower and the lawn once I had finished it, that I had to recall another clean technology that had similarly impressed me some years ago. Windmills. Of course I had seen windmills before, but I had never actually been inside one until a Hungarian soldier buddy of mine took me to see one in a place called Tés.

This wasn’t one of those great big oversized Dutch jobbies. It was modest, understated, simple, and, I have to say it: elegant. Elegantly functional. Functionally elegant. That’s what we should all strive to be, I think. Its proportions, its bleached walls, its simple wooden machinary–the axel, breakwheel–and the awesome millstones.

Maybe it was because my life at the time was such a tangle that the simplicity and elegance of it struck me with the force of a revelation. But I left Tés a little bit more of a Luddite than I had been when I arrived.

I wrote in my diary at the time:

The highlight of the day for me was seeing the windmills at Tés. How clever people are. I mean, because there was no water to power mills, they used windmills to grind corn. Even the idea of the mills is brilliant. Occam’s Razor applies. Choose simplicity. Windmills are such awesomely plain, elegant devices.

The nice thing about these windmills in Tés is that they’re just basically in somebody’s backyard. You go into their garden, pay them a couple hundred forints, and they give you a big, heavy, iron key. You walk out into the fields a little ways, and there they are. And you’ve got the place all to yourself.

The one mill, called the Held Mill, after the family who owned it, was built in 1840. It’s still got it’s original parts, and works like a charm, although there are no more millers in Tés. The last time it was used was in the early fifties.

They had all sorts of animals there, too. Horses and a mule, and these Japanese chickens (they’re smaller, but the colors of the cock were far more vibrant than its European counterpart). There was a mother hen leading the chicks around. Everyone was minding his own business, basically, following his own nature. I can’t think of a better life.

The problem today is that (a) we live unnecessary lives, and (b) we hunger for unnecessary things—and not only hunger, but strive for them. Eliminate these two factors, and everything will be all right. When I say ‘unnecessary lives,’ I mean lives without a concrete and generative purpose that contributes directly to the welfare of the community. The miller leads a necessary life, but so does the balladeer, the preacher, and the publican.

The innovations that made our current lifestyle possible, while seen in hindsight as inevitable, and looked upon as flawed but undeniable ingredients of the good life, namely electricity and the automobile, have caused at least as much harm as good.

Now I’m a fan of electricity, that’s for sure, but I do think television has had a detrimental effect on the social life of the species. But the individual automobile is probably the worst ongoing catastrophe the planet has ever known. I’m not talking only, or even chiefly, about CO2 in the atmosphere. I’m talking about social organization—the direct impact on the quality of life.

Any day of the week between the hours of seven in the morning to seven at night in any city or midsize town or village on the globe you can see plainly that whatever benefits there may be in the automobile are outweighed by the costs, in money, in time, and in quality of life. You can see that even the chief argument of convenience is a joke.

And yet we have so reorganized our lives around the automobile that it would now be very nearly impossible to turn back. So in America at least, where land is relatively plentiful, we simple build roads longer and wider, hoping that that will do the trick. But we have not only built our communities and our homes to suit them, we have integrated them into our social hierarchy as well.

Look closely and you’ll see that every benefit they bring has a cost that equals or exceeds it. The argument of convenience being moot, the freedom of a life in the suburbs is nearlyu nullified by the isolation of communities. Two hour commutes both ways give suburbanites very little time to enjoy their freedom (this is part of the reason symbols like the flag have prominance over the freedoms they’re supposed to symbolize).

TV, in a way, proposes the antidote to this isolation, but really only increases it, abstracting and perverting peoples’ sense of self and other completely in the process.

And all that from a trip to Tés.

The thing about the old-school reel mower is that it definitely limited the size of your average lawn, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Now that we have ergonomic riding mowers and plenty of Mexicans to man them, the size of a lawn is almost limitless.

We are compelled by new technologies to live beyond our personal means in every conceivable way. I think it would be better to be satisfied with windmills and reel mowers, myself, but then they were also invented for a reason, to increase yield, volume, acreage, and so on.

I guess what I mainly like about these technologies is that they produce no other waste than dead grass and chaff. We have taken many giant steps backwards with our technologies since the Industrial Revolution, when you think about it.

Categories: gardening philosophy