Bent Blade

July 8, 2019

My track record has actually been pretty good. Other than the sumac that nearly knocked me off the tractor when I snagged it with the rollbar a couple years ago, I’ve had pretty good luck with mowing the lawn. Of course, Linda would tell you the reason for that is that she usually mows the lawn, a merely incidental tidbit to the overall picture. To his dying day, my father swore that I deliberately mowed down the red twig dogwood in his back yard when I was about twelve. He even had the audacity to claim it took me three passes to do it, none of which I remember. Neither do I recall his assertion that I stuck the branches back in the ground to cover up the crime. But I digress.

The last time anything like this happened to me was nearly fifty years ago. I was mowing the lawn of our first home, a small parsonage in the little hamlet of Alma, NY, not much more than a wide spot in the road, but a wonderful place to begin married life. Alma was at one time a booming little settlement boasting a hotel as well as the gas station/general store/post office, and tiny EUB church where I served. The hotel had long since vanished when we lived there, but the general store, church, and a one-bay fire department remained. Alma was located on the northern edge of the Pennsylvania oil fields; ancient one-lung engines with their sucker lines snaking through the woods to the wells dotted the landscape. Old oil pipe could turn up anywhere. One particular piece turned up at the edge of our property, rearing its ugly self just in time for me to hit it so hard with the mower that I bent the crank. I can still hear the “Thwang!” of the blade cutting a chunk out of that pipe as the engine coughed and died. 

For nearly fifty years, that incident stood as the sole time I hit anything substantial with the mower. Until today. Being the generous man that I am, I decided to mow my son’s lawn as a surprise for him when he returned from vacation. The first few passes around the yard went fine, and I have to admit I saw the cover for the water valve; it just didn’t seem to sit that high off the ground. My tractor is pretty big for a mower; it’s 26 horse with a 60 inch deck driven by the PTO, but when I hit that valve casing, it stalled the tractor. I started it, backed up, and began to mow again, but looking at the path behind me, I could see one side of the swath hacked nearly to the ground, sure sign of a bent blade. Sure enough, when I took it home and removed the deck, one end of the left blade hung about two inches lower than the other end. Fortunately, I hadn’t thrown out the old blades when I changed them this past spring, so I didn’t have to wait for my son Matt to fire up his forge and heat it up so we could bend it back in place. 

So why do I relate this story? Well, for one, to have done something stupid with a mower only three times in my life I think is pretty good. Also, to be able to fix the damage is a blessing. Last time, I had to junk the entire mower. I was able to get the new old blade on and finish mowing before dark. Compared to the what so many of my friends are facing, this doesn’t even rate as a a blip on the problem radar screen. It even brought back memories of when I was younger and much dumber than today, if you can believe that!