The Week We Mowed Every Yard by Hand

Burl’s bench

Standing in that Smithville yard with the filter in my hand, I knew who had done it.

I had no proof yet, but I knew it the way you know weather is coming by the color of the sky over a bean field.

I called Burl at the small-engine shop on the edge of Orrville. He has kept my machines running for eight years.

He picked up on the second ring, the way he always does, with an air compressor chugging somewhere behind him.

“Sand in the tanks,” I said. “Two machines quit on me at the same yard, five minutes apart. The fuel filters are packed full of grit. It looks like play sand.”

He was quiet for a second. “How long did you run them?”

“Ten minutes mowing. Maybe fifteen more loading up and driving over here.”

“Then you probably caught it before it got into the cylinders,” he said.

“But the carburetors will be full of it. Bring all three in. Bring the third one even if it seems fine, and do not start it. Not once.”

A zero-turn will not roll on its own with the engine off.

You have to reach under the back and pull the bypass levers on the hydraulic pumps so the drive wheels will freewheel. Even then a commercial machine weighs close to a thousand pounds.

We pulled the levers on both. I hooked the come-along to the front rail of the trailer and cranked while Jarrell leaned his whole skinny weight into the back of each mower, and inch by inch we got them up the ramp and strapped down.

Then we drove home, got the third machine out of the shed the same way, and hauled all three to Burl’s.

It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning, and I was already soaked through my shirt.

Burl is somewhere in his sixties, with forearms like stove wood and reading glasses he keeps on a string.

He drained the tank on the sixty-inch into a white bucket and let it sit, and in a minute the sand settled into a pale line on the bottom.

He ran his finger through it and rubbed it against his thumb. “That’s not road dust,” he said.

“That’s bagged sand. The kind you buy for a child’s sandbox. Somebody poured this in with a funnel. There’s too much of it to be an accident.”

He checked the third machine’s tank with a flashlight and found the same pale layer settled on the bottom.

That one had never been started, so the sand was all still sitting in the tank.

“Here’s what it is,” he said, and wrote on a pad.

“Drain and flush all three tanks. New fuel filters and lines on all three. Tear down and rebuild both carburetors that ran. Check the fuel pumps. Call it eleven hundred and forty dollars with parts.”

“When?” I asked.

He took his glasses off and let them hang. “It’s June, Cami. I have forty machines ahead of you, and every one of them belongs to somebody who is as behind as you are. If I order the carburetor kits this afternoon, I can have yours back a week from today.”

“A week,” I said.

“And I need the kits paid for up front. I’m sorry. I got stuck with a pile of parts last year from a fellow who never came back.”

I had about six hundred dollars in the checking account. The insurance on the trailer and the truck had come out the Friday before.

I stood in Burl’s doorway and did the arithmetic, and none of it came out in my favor.

I thought about renting. The rental place in Wooster wanted a hundred and seventy-five dollars a day for a zero-turn, plus a deposit I did not have.

For one machine, for five days, that was more than the repair.

I could have spent that week making phone calls and filling out reports and waiting on people.

But grass does not stop growing for a court date, and in June it does not stop growing for anything.

If one yard on my route went a week uncut, it would be up to the customer’s ankles by Saturday, and by Monday that customer would be calling the next guy.

There were three other outfits in the county who would have been glad to have my people.

“What are you going to do?” Burl asked.

I looked out at Jarrell, who was sitting on the tailgate in the sun drinking a bottle of water and looking at nothing.

“I’m going to mow,” I said. “I’ll get you the money for the kits by Wednesday.”