Summer Saturday, and my neighbors are at it again. From my porch, I watch them do battle with the local plant life using the latest advances in garden weaponry. Occasionally they look over, casually noting that I still don't own a Turbo WeedWhacker 3000 or a LaserWeasel™, and I wave from across my shaggy lawn, happily practicing my own method of lawn care: zeroscaping. In a nutshell, zeroscaping is a rigorous "let-grow" policy; the natural cultivation of any damn plant that cares to live in my yard. The practice respects the native ecosystem and goes a step further than vegetarianism -- any plant that sprouts inside my fence can do as it pleases. For me, it means zero maintenance: no mowing, no watering, no weeding. No problem.
Most folks -- especially my neighbors -- mistake zeroscaping for simple laziness, but it's actually an advanced leisure therapy and my personal attempt to make up for Saturday mornings past. Every day not spent behind a chugging mower is a day reclaimed from years of indentured servitude in the name of ornamental agriculture. It's my belief that if the ancient Greeks believed in routine lawn maintenance, the mythical Sisyphus would be strapped to a half-ton push mower instead of his uphill boulder. On the off chance that a classical Hell exists, I'm pretty sure my tenure there will involve eternally circling the same forty-acre patch during a humid summer, perpetually mowing with sun directly overhead. However, in this life, I've done my time.
During my child- and young adulthoods, lawn mowing was both a mandatory summer occupation and a remarkably effective form of psychic punishment. Between early grade school and leaving home, my father decreed that our three-acre yard would stay clean cut as long as school was out of session. For me and my brothers, this meant months of breathing grass clippings and gasoline fumes, pushing a tubercular, cast-iron Yazoo through bogs and around trees, and intentionally dulling the demon machine's blades with fallen branches. For my father, it meant directing a repertory theater troupe that could recreate his favorite movie moments -- the chain gang sequences from Cool Hand Luke.
My father (whom we called "Boss") is a man born in the wrong century. Having missed both the building of the pyramids and the westward expansion of the railroads, he bought a house with a spare lot in obscenely fertile south Louisiana. He espoused a work ethic and agrarian philosophy that forever changed the lives of his sons -- the ones who did all the work. His single-minded dedication to maintaining a tidy grassland would drive us all to live in urban areas, despise domesticated foliage, and religiously sleep late whenever possible. Years later, the five sons live surrounded by concrete and flatly refuse to tend anyone's land.
Boss was mysteriously driven to make us appreciate the value of land and hard, honest labor. Having spent his formative summers driving in an unventilated knife-sharpener's truck in Birmingham, Boss reasoned that we should be grateful to work in the open air despite 99[[ordmasculine]] temperatures and matching humidity percentages. He grew up working in a sauna; we worked in a steam room.
My father's role was to oversee our days of labor without actually doing any of it. During commercial breaks from ABC's Wide World of Sports, he stormed out to check our progress. His approaches were soundless since all the brothers were rendered legally deaf from the Yazoo's monotone roar. Every 15 minutes he'd storm out and bellow terse instructions from behind mirror-glazed RayBans ("Don't forget the ditch! Watch those tree roots!"). We'd give the traditional answer ("Sir, yes, Sir!") and he'd stomp into the house to catch the next Aqua Velva commercial. We then continued our square circles and Boss would return to the Great Reclining PowerSeat before Heat #2 of the Superstars obstacle course.
During the six months of grass season our crew worked every Saturday and Sunday, starting promptly at 6:45am ("Go on now, so you can beat the heat"). Our communal, semi-tropical hell included mowing the lawns (front, sides, and back), trimming sidewalks with chipped machetes, and, if Boss felt particularly sadistic or retentive, raking and piling cut grass into little Himalayas beside the trash cans. Neighborhood gas attendants could spot Boss's boys from blocks away -- empty five-gallon cans, green tennis shoes, and near-broken spirits. Sweating almost to death and coated with dirt and grass dust, we filled the cans and shuffled back to the compulsory "character building experience" which ended in late October, just as the autumn leaves fell.
At the end of the day we were allowed to ground out the single spark plug and the Yazoo clunked to a halt. After a day of hearing the small engine's tortured howls at close range, silence came as a welcome shock. We ended the day exhausted, sitting in front of a wheezing window AC unit and practicing our long-form sweating. There was no beating the heat, but we always had a chance the next day.
Members of the crew were granted parole only when they moved off for college, leaving the younger members to plot elaborate escape schemes. Every winter, before the first spring blooms, we tried the best plan but were usually stopped before reaching the state line. In 1978, my older brother Pete made a heroic rush for Texas in a makeshift airboat, only to be treed by Boss' hounds five miles shy of the Sabine. We'd return to the fields cursing the names "Briggs & Stratton" and dreaming of freedom. Working the lawn crew gave us added incentive to finish school quickly and move to college towns with shorter growing seasons.
It's years later now, and the policy has changed with time. My youngest brother Tony is the only crew member left and Boss has decided that one-person chain gangs lack the magic of a full crew. A few years back, Boss took up golf and now prowls the fairways, thinking about the glory days while toting his trusty five iron. Every golfcart approach to a close-cropped putting green makes him a little misty behind the shiny shades. His once-pristine yard now covers a single acre and continues to shrink as undergrowth and small trees creep toward the house. In a few more years even Tony will be gone, and the yard will reclaim the remaining open space and eventually eat the back shed, mower and all.
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Back in Austin, I sit back and listen to the grass grow -- another benefit of my personal zeroscape. Relaxing over my coffee, I get to thinking about the good, clean smell of a freshly cut front lawn and the satisfaction of hard labor under a Saturday sun. Then I look over at my neighbors and realize, as my father did, that I can live vicariously through their work any weekend, starting at sunrise, from the safety of my front porch. n Bayou boy Pableaux Johnson writes about food and technology for The Austin Chronicle. Check out his Website: http://www.realtime.net/~pableaux