One of the first things one notices about the Berkshires, like much of New England, is the landscape ”“ how old and tall and green are the wooded areas, how serious and manicured are the man-made ones. Inn after inn has the distinctively cropped lawn, rounded hedges, and lush gardens that suggest a level of maintenance that never ends. If a property is large and complicated enough, with sufficient acreage and imagination, there’s no way around it. Not surprisingly, one of the dominant sounds in this setting is that of competing power mowers. If one listens carefully, there is always a lawn mower to be heard, if not seen, during daytime.
At the inn where I was staying recently, I sat on the patio reading one afternoon as the grounds were being kept up ”“ a succession of chores that went on for hours. First came the lawn mower, then the seated power mower, then a tractor with a separate wagon attached.
Ted, the owner of the inn, served as groundskeeper, manning all of the machinery himself. He had obviously gone through this routine hundreds of times before, rounding the property with each machine, riding in smaller concentric circles, nearing the edges of a grove of trees, or rose bushes, then fanning out to another part of the estate. He drove the tractor slightly too fast, as if the added speed might give an edge to an activity that had all but lost interest.
As I watched the procession of machinery circling the landscape, I noticed that nothing changed. After two rounds of mowing, the grass was cut. It didn’t get shorter, or cleaner, or more finished-looking with each successive round ”“ it was simply more mowed.
But Ted was undeterred. After power mowing, he would mount the tractor and trace the same stretch of land three, four, five times ”“ I lost count. At some point, I simply marveled at the odd mechanics of this groundskeeping operation, the over and over of it, for no apparent reason.
Perhaps the machinery picked up clippings that would otherwise mar the landscape; but the shape and height of the lawn ”“ coddled, cropped, and shaved as it was ”“ remained the same. If there was some improvement to be gained from all this repetition, it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
When, two days later, the entire exercise was repeated on the identical swath of land, I began to wonder just what it was I was witnessing. Was this a case of dull blades causing an amazing display of inefficiency? Or perhaps it was wishful, preventive lawn care, whereby one could mow more now in hopes of mowing less later.
Then I saw Ted circling a pear tree with his rig, ducking under a branch, and turning to watch the wagon follow his lead. It was the perfect metaphor: He looked like a dog chasing its tail, going round and round.
Had I simply passed by and seen a man using a lawn mower or tractor, I would have known what I was seeing. They are the common tools of lawn care, and straightforward ones, at that. But as the process thickened and grew dense with repetition, I became less certain of what this was.
At some stage, of course, Ted was indeed mowing the lawn. But by the end of the day, the concentric circles he drew in the grass were as much his own as those he created with the machines.
”“ Joan Silverman is a writer in Kennebunk. This article appeared earlier in Boston’s MetroWest Daily News.
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