Helter Shelter
My oldest memory goes back to when I was nine months old and just learning to walk. When the memory comes, I can see my pudgy little baby feet and feel what it was like to be in my wobbly little baby body. I see my left arm bracing against the white metal kitchen cabinets as I toddle across the cool, green-and-black linoleum floor toward my daddy, Jabo Jowers. He's squatting in front of the screen door of our house in South Carolina, saying, “Come on, boy. Come on.”
My second-oldest memory got stuck in my head two or three years later. In this scene, I'm in our backyard, watching Jabo and my half-brother Geames trying to get a lawn mower started. Jabo is holding a piece of paper, wadded up in a cigar shape. The end of the paper is on fire, and Geames is yanking on the lawn mower's starter rope. Jabo holds the paper up to what I now know to be the mower's spark-plug hole. The machine spits and coughs, but never starts.
My head is full of memories of Jabo fighting lawn mowers. I can close my eyes and run a quick-cut montage of Jabo hurling spark plugs, starter ropes and mower blades into the swamp behind our house. There’s another scene, in which Jabo takes a lawn mower by the handle, spins it around and slings it across the yard, Olympic-hammer-throw style. This highlight reel closes with a Viking funeral, in which Jabo douses a lawn mower with gasoline, and then flips a match onto it.
In the summer of 1971, just weeks before he died, Jabo searched the back-alley pawn shops of Augusta, Ga., until he found the cheapest machine that had blades, a motor and a seat. I know what sold him: The machine had a battery and a pushbutton starter. And it was red.
A week after Jabo was buried, I had to cut the grass. I pushed the start button on the new red riding mower, and sure enough, the engine caught and ran. Then I pulled up on the lever that engaged the blades. I heard a mighty flapping sound under me, then the drive belt flew off to my left like some scalded airborne snake. Just then, the whole blade assembly came loose and spun into the ground.
I spent the rest of that day calling every mower shop in three towns, looking for belts and blade-holding parts for Jabo’s black-market mower. Nobody had heard of such a machine, and nobody had any parts for it. Apparently, Jabo bought the one sorry-ass mower ever made by that particular company. So, instead of a grass-cutting machine, I had a very slow go-cart.
I abandoned the phone search, walked out to the crippled machine and pushed the start button one last time. When the mower fired up, I pointed it toward the swamp, and put a brick on the gas pedal. When it got to the soft mud, it sank to its axles. Then, inch by inch, over that summer, it disappeared into the mud.
The sinking of the red riding mower started my decade of mowing hell. There I was, a teenager with my very own house next to a swamp and not much else. I surely didn’t have any tool or machine that would cut down swamp grass.
My brother-in-law, Vann, did his best to help me. For his hobby, Vann went to yard sales and bought broken-down lawn mowers. Vann was, and still is, a Briggs-and-Stratton man. Vann would buy six Briggs-and-Stratton lawn mowers and come up with enough parts to make three of them run. He'd sell two and bring the third one to me. The one I got might be missing a muffler, or the throttle control might be a coat hanger. One of Vann’s gift mowers would cut the tall, wet grass in my yard once, maybe twice. Then it would die. Vann came back and claimed the carcass, and stripped it for parts. Before a week had passed, he'd bring me another lawn mower.
One thing all these Vann-mowers had on common: They would not start without at least 15 minutes of yanking on the starter rope. Cranking one of these things was like being in a heavyweight fight. I'd yank full-out for three minutes, sit, rest, cuss and spit for a minute, then get back up and start all over again.
In 1975, wife Brenda (then girlfriend Brenda) started helping with the grass-cutting duties. One day Vann came by after Brenda had put in 15 minutes with the starter rope, and the sight of her all sweaty and out of breath was too much for him. The next week, he delivered a mower with a wind-up starter. To make this one go, all you had to do was unfold a handle on top of the engine, wind it up about 12 times, then push a button to release the wound-up energy. This cranking method worked exactly once, during Vann's demonstration. The mower never started again.
As that summer passed, Brenda and I came to know that we'd stay together. During one of our hopes-and-dreams talks, I told her, “If I ever get flush, I'm going to promise myself one thing: a lawn mower that'll by-God start up every time.”
The next spring, Brenda went to Augusta and bought us a new Lawn Boy. It was her way of saying to me, “Here’s that startable lawn mower you’ve been wanting.” And, it was her way of saying to Vann, “Thanks for all the Briggs-and-Strattons, but I think we can take it from here.”
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