Fixing What's Broke
and knowing you can
When the flail mower runs over wire fence in tall grass, it shows no mercy. It stops, but not before the momentum wraps that 12 gauge all the way around the steel bar, between the Y-shaped flails and tightly against the side of the steel housing of the mower. A flail mower bar swings a dozen heavy steel teeth in a forward circular motion at 3,000 rpms that minces the tallest of grasses and any small tree in its path with the force of 13 horse power. It’s invincible, except in the face of wire.
It’s never just one long strand of wire, either. It has to be welded wire, the kind made into 2-inch by 4-inch squares, 4-foot tall which is what we use to protect planted trees from deer. The wire wraps itself around the flails then around the steel bar that swings them forward, twisting in every which direction, with some flails grabbing at the formerly vertical wire and some at the formerly horizontal. In today’s parlance, it’s a cluster.
The first time this happened to me, I thought it was all over. The horrible grinding sound before the dead stop of a powerful machine made me think I’d broken it for good. This machine was brand new to us, our first season using this implement in front of our new blue 2-wheel walk-behind BCS tractor.
But it was me. I believed I was the cause of every broken thing in my life.
At 17, I left my original family for good, convinced they had broken me and there was no reason to do any less than break them back. I broke my first marriage when I left after 10 years of second-rate treatment. I left my young daughter with her father, believing I was breaking her spirit. I left one city and one job after the next, with broken and torn relationships strewn across every landscape.
So how could I be someone who fixes things? Surely I wasn’t. I’d call out to my husband. He didn’t know any more about this machine than I did. We bought it together. I even used it more than he did. Yet I was convinced he’d be able to fix this mess better and faster than I could. But he was 50 acres and 5 hillsides away, far enough to force me into giving it a try.
I turned off the ignition and found a log to prop up the front of the mower. I lay down on my back and ducked my head under the steel housing, the stiff rubber flaps built to swing along the front of the mower wagging in my face. I assessed the damage. Then I started the slow, meticulous dance that is pulling the flails and steel rod back and forth, wiggling an inch of wire this way and that. I swatted at ants and gnats pestering my ears and bare arms. I sensed a tick crawling up the small of my back where my shirt had pulled out from my jeans. I reached back to brush it off. As sweat dripped into my eyes stinging them, I wished I had some water.
I reached back blindly and pulled the fence tool out of my pocket. I didn’t know I’d need it when I set out that day but there it was. I started cutting away wire I could reach. Slowly I felt progress, the bar swinging more this way, then more that, wire pulling farther and farther out from under the mower. Then finally, I withdrew from under the mower and onto my knees. From there I pulled the last piece out with a hefty yank. The bar rolled free and the flails jingled, free at last!
I stood up and away from the smell of steel, gas and grass. I looked around the sunlit meadow while flexing my aching hands. Bright greens smashed into dark ones, yellows both muted and sharp filled the gaps and bounced off leaves, trunks and grasses of a million different textures and surfaces. Old oaks and cottonwoods clung in ancient group hugs to the hillside, edged by baby oaks and walnuts we’d planted in lines between them and the prairie.
“Everything interesting happens at the edges,” I remembered a permaculturist telling me. I took a deep breath. The cicadas were in full throat and the frogs had just started up, testing their voices for the evening to come, but there’d be no applause for my great accomplishment. I let out a “YES!” into the space and light in front of me.
I could feel the wires loosening inside. I glanced down at the silent, silly-looking machine with long handles, gear shifting rods, a clutch and hand brakes, big fat tires, a battery and magical places inside that only (male) mechanics knew how to fix. Someday I’d have to learn my way around those places, but not today.
What strange shapes some therapists come in. Now that I knew I could fix things, I could take my time. It would be a long process, this believing in me. Someday I might even believe that when things break it isn’t always my fault. I’d need patience, I’d need quiet or the steady hum of a small tractor over acres of ground for hours at a time, which is its own kind of quiet. I’d need the ability to silence the demons at times when they went full throttle in my head. These lessons would come at me randomly. They’d be out of my control, on hills far from home when I had almost no tools with me, forcing me to improvise. I’d be confronted on terms not my own. I’d learn to resist calling for help before I tried fixing it myself.
I had no place to put the malicious fence wire, now bent into some kind of recovered art, so I set it off the trail against a tree, hoping I’d see it as I passed by with empty hands, hoping I wouldn’t forget it again. A field mouse scurried through the mulched grass behind me, making sense of the new chaos. I started the tractor and headed home, letting it pull me up the hill.
A great video on how animals work in a permaculture system.
That was a very nice read!! Gotta say the paragraph about looking around the sunlit meadow caught my attention.....thinking of the people over the years who have also stood there, trying to survive from that land, caught in other dilemmas --and looking over that same "sunlit meadow,... bright greens smashed into dark ones.... " such lovely, calming description. You have calmed a very stressful day with that lovely read.
Thank you Suzan. Believing in one’s self comes hard to some of us.