| Writing Samples - Short Stories "Larry the Mover" |
| Larry the Mover Short Story by Glenn A. Bruce Larry believed in the “Keep Moving” school of mowing. His basic tenet was: Don’t stop. In his 42 years on the planet, Larry Molken figured he had mowed some 20,000 acres in his lifetime. He had first mounted a riding lawnmower at age four, a lawn tractor at six, and a full-sized farm beast at nine. He was mowing twenty acres a week by the time he was twelve, and his records were 42 acres in one long 16-hour day back in ‘82, and 380 acres in one long, exhausting week in ‘91. These days, he kept things manageable at about 10 acres per week—fifteen in a crunch—and he cut about 40 weeks a year where he lived in upstate South Carolina. The winter months, December thru February, when the grass didn’t grow, he “serviced his equipment,” as he liked to say to his friends Bubba and Leon. The joke was almost as funny to Larry’s wife, Jolena, since it meant Larry was in the barn-garage almost every night for three months “playing with his tools,” as she put it. “Hey, Larry,” she would say, “how about servicing my equipment?” Larry would say, “Sure. Bring it on out here to the garage.” She would. And when she’d say, “Don’t stop!” Larry knew just what she meant. In 38 years of mowing, Larry had learned a lot about grass—how it changed with the seasons; when it grew the fastest; when it was tough or tender, tall or thick. But mainly, he had learned patterns—patterns which kept him from getting bored, and allowed him to Keep Moving. Since Larry mowed with a big John Deere, which could not be spun around at the end of every row like a hand- pushed lawnmower, finding the correct pattern for a field became extra important. A square field was pretty much the same as a rectangular one; just, your rows were longer in one, one way, than the other. A circular field, if a perfect circle, was the easiest to cut, but the hardest to find. (Larry had never found one.) But the round field had inspired one of Larry’s favorite alternate patterns. Larry didn’t use the Inside Out option often—mainly when he was bored with cutting a familiar field in a familiar pattern—because it required fairly accurate prognostication to work properly (and not create more work for himself). But when it worked, it was a thing of beauty he would think to himself—a mowing pattern which left a handsome pattern of mowed grass, and: He could keep moving. No stopping with the Inside Out. First, Larry eyed the field carefully, measuring with his memory the length, width and generally roundish shape of the field. Next, with the mower blades still, he would drive toward the center of the field. At a precise, which he determined as he approached it, Larry stopped, lowered the deck, and started the blades spinning. He would cut a straight swath for as many yards as he deemed appropriate, then turn, stop, back up, turn and cut another swath next to the first one, going in the other direction. (This made a clean center swath with clipping buildup on the sides. When he reached the end where he started, Larry repeated the process. Stop, back up, turn and cut a third swath back to the other end. But this time, Larry kept going—kept moving—in ever-widening concentric circles, blowing the grass into the expanding center, until he reached the outermost extremes of the field. What was left was a wonderful variation on a repeated pattern, this one a series of circles, making the freshly-mowed field look like a giant green pecan twirl. Or, “Crop circles,” as Leon once commented. One problem remained—sometimes four. One at least one corner, a—dreaded!—triangle would remain. Larry would then have to polish it, or them, off. Hopefully, they were small and he could remove them with a few quick reverse maneuvers, but that wasn’t always the case. So, Larry didn’t use the Inside Out often, and only if the field was close to perfect for it. Most fields were far from perfect—bumpy, irregular, or just plain ornery—and each had its own “personality,” as Larry liked to think of them. Some were scenic and pleasant, some were mostly flat and therefore mostly friendly, some were laden with hidden holes—often from groundhogs—and flatly dangerous. But mainly, they just weren’t symmetrical. Ergo, the pattern problem. Some fields explained themselves. Once or twice around with the tractor, mowing six foot swaths and Larry had it; and once he had it, he would stay with that pattern forever more in that field—unless he got bored and tried something else just for the hell of it; but those patterns were never as efficient as the first he settled upon. All patterns had one thing in common, something Larry’s father had taught him in the first field Larry mowed—something his father insisted on in any field of his which Larry mowed—and it was the one thing field- mowing had in common with lawn mowing: Always begin with two rings around the outer edge. The reasons were different. In mowing a lawn—something Larry learned from the Japanese and Mexican gardeners his well-off neighbor hired on a weekly basis (even in winter when the grass didn’t grow!)—you put two rings around the outer edge so that you have a place to spin your mower around, thereby creating nice, straight, alternating rows. In mowing a field, as Larry’s father told him, “You don’t get that mess on the weeds and hafta look at it all damned summer.” What he meant was that, unlike a lawn mower, which keeps the grass underneath the mowing deck, thereby mulching it into fine particles which dry and provide natural mulch for the lawn, large tractor mowing was “non- mulching.” Grass was spat out the side of the deck and accumulated wherever it was ejected. If it was shot out onto the fence or weeds around a field, the grass would stick like it was glued on, dry, and remain there through a monsoon. So, Larry’s first two passes around a field were clockwise, with the deck-vent facing inward, blowing all the freshly cut grass into the center of the field, leaving a nice clean perimeter. From that point on, all mowing was counter-clockwise, throwing the cut grass to the right, neatly forming sheets of neat chaff which looked even and dried uniformly, eventually ending up as natural fertilizer, too, but on a larger basis. Thus was the basic pattern. Run the tractor up to the proper speed, somewhere around 2200 rpms, keeping the blade speed up with the ground speed, then just: Keep moving. And this most-basic of patterns mostly allowed for that—as long as the field was square or rectangular. Perfectly square or rectangular. And there lay the rub. Except for the occasional high-end horse field—which Larry had never owned—every single field Larry had ever seen, certainly all that he had ever mowed, were far from having perfect 90-degree corners. No! The fields Larry mowed, the fields he had mowed for 38 years, were…odd. Some had bulges. Some had “fingers” sticking out at one or more points. Some had trapezoidal (at best). Some were something like octagonal, but with a few extra sides. Some appeared to be uniformly bordered, but were not. (Those were the most cruel.) Some were triangular (the worst!). But for the most part, they were some version of rounded. Augh! Rounded fields and easy mowing just don’t go together (unless, as mentioned before, we find perfect roundness, which we never do); Larry learned this early on. After those first two counterclockwise swaths around the new field, anything can happen! The trick, Larry’s father told him, “is to figure out, by doing, how to make the least number of passes and still get the job done.” And what a trick that turned out to be. There were, as Larry’s father also taught him, “Tricks in the trick.” For instance, he instructed, “Pick out a landmark, say, that big oak over yonder—then aim at it. Keep your hands loose on the wheel, but not so loose as to make your rows wanderin’.” (He meant meandering, really.) “Once you learn a field, that is.” (He meant, figure out the pattern first, then use landmarks to remember it.) “Like sailors or surfers, marking a place on the beach.” (Larry’s father had been to Hawaii once and, wondering how surfers and sailers stayed in the same spot, asked a big Hawaiian as the young man strode up the beach at Haleiwa. “Mok da spot on shah, like dat rock, here. Dat a good kine mok.” Larry’s father then asked a lifeguard what the local boy had said, and the lifeguard, a haole, explained in detail.) For a while, Larry would scope out a field before attacking it. He’d study the perimeter and the lay of the land, sometimes going so far as to walk it, like a NASCAR driver walking a new track. But after a few months of that, Larry realized his pre-mow surveys weren’t really helping that much, so he went back to winging it. After all, he had a pretty good sense of what was going to happen once he threw the power take-off lever and the blades started whooshing and the grass started flying: There would come a point where all his planning was for nil. Every field, every damn field, it seemed, had some quirk to it that produced one of two highly undesirable endings: Either Larry found himself making impossibly tighter 90-degree turns, or he ended up with the Dreaded Triangle. First, the 90s. With the sharp corner, Larry would find himself having to swing out a little wider each time, then curve back in, producing an ever-widening bulge at the turn. This, in turn, totally screwed up his intended pattern. The fix: Stop at that corner, back up, then go forward, then back up, each time taking off a little more of the bulge until the corner was manageable from a turning/mowing/keep-it-neat standpoint. The problem: Stopping! Larry could not Keep Moving, as was his credo. If square corners were a problem, though, the Dreaded Triangle was positively the bane of Larry’s entire mowing existence. The Dreaded Triangle occurred—more often than anyone could imagine, Larry imagined—near the end of the job, when one had mowed most of the field and was getting to whatever was left of the tall grass in the middle. The Mower would find him (or her)self with not a too-sharp 90-degree turn but an impossible-to-navigate (in any way at all) 120-degree turn! Usually, Larry managed to only have one of this unimaginably sickening situations per field. But sometimes, there were two, and on rare, horrifying occasion, three! The Perfect (Dreaded) Triangle. This configuration of course meant stopping. There was no other course! Stop. Back up. Turn. Move again. Horrifying. Well, there was another option: simply drive past the corner, make a large loop, and come back to mow the next side of the shitty thing. Larry had done it. Oh, he had done it! But he hated doing it, because the mower left a series of teardrop loops which totally messed up his orderly rows. For a while, he didn’t mind the extra patterns, as they were patterns in and of themselves. But they were not—not by a long shot—nice, neat, orderly rows. Which, was clearly the point of mowing! The very essence of a well-done mowing job! Larry’s father had made this point perfectly clear, many, many times. So, Larry came up with the alternate lift-the-deck option, in which he raised the mowing deck (without turning it off!), made his loop without mowing a teardrop into the nicely-laid grass clipping, then dropped it the split-second before the lead edge of the deck reached tall, un-cut grass. A compromise Larry could live with until some other, some better, way appeared. And so it was for years. When Larry encountered the Dreaded Triangle, he stopped. He backed up. He moved ahead. Or: He kept going and left loops, then looked at the loops when he was done with the field, shook his head woefully, and went on to the next field, or, hopefully, home. Then one day it hit him! Larry was mowing a particularly mean field, a field he had never, in ten years of mowing it, figured out a way to avoid a Dreaded Triangle in the middle—and usually a Perfect one with all three damned sides. He had stopped and backed and gone ahead again. He had looped. Then, suddenly, he found himself casting all prior training to the light breeze. He didn’t stop. But he didn’t loop. He kept moving. Yes! The solution came to him incrementally with each passing swath. Keep moving! Run a side, mow it down, don’t stop. Don’t stop! Keep moving. Raise the deck, swing out wide, skip the next side altogether (!) in order to get the next-next side. Brilliant! Sure, he had to skip every other side—but he got every other-other side! And he was able to Keep Moving! Mow a side, swing wide, catch the far side. Repeat. The formula was simple, and fit perfectly his original, basic mowing thesis. In seemingly no time at all, Larry had polished off the cursed thing and parked at the bottom of the hill to admire his work. He let go a sigh the size of which had not left his chest in years! (At least not while mowing.) Larry replayed the event in his mind. Okay, sure, he could only do it once the triangle got fairly small. He couldn’t use this on a large triangle; there would simply be too much driving while not mowing. He would be moving—which was better than stopping—but he would not be mowing; and what was the point of driving around in a field with your deck up, not doing what you were here to do: Mow! No, the new plan wasn’t perfect. But it certainly helped. Even though he had one more field to mow that day, Larry slapped the PTO off, the blades stopped whirring, he raised the deck, and drove slowly home, taking in the way the warm afternoon light played off the oaks at the far side of his favorite, almost-perfectly-round field, the one at the far end of his and Jolene’s property, and contemplated just how he was going to tell his favorite person in the world what he had discovered. He only regretted that his father wasn’t still alive to hear. |
