"The Riding Mower" - Another True Story

Fair warning to the reader. This story is none too short. But like anything in life, sometimes the best things turn out to be those for which we wait the longest. The Riding Mower is such a tale. The twists, turns, and even the straight lines lead to a rich harvest well worth the time spent sowing by the author and reaping by the reader. I promise, and I can make that promise because I am the one to whom it happened. And this is the it that happened:

Quite possibly it was because my mind was on something other than what it should have been focused. Quite possibly it was because, under the circumstance, I should have been nowhere near a piece of machinery, heavy or otherwise, but the way the day started gave no hint of what was yet to come.

On a warm and sunny Florida morning in August 2008, I decided to mow my parents' lawn.

Since it is a small town with only one blinking light, and because I had little to do otherwise, I had spent a great portion of that summer's visit mowing. I started slowly at first, working on my folks' several acres. Then I branched over to my Uncle Anthony and Aunt Brenda's adjacent property. Later, I began cutting swaths to several neighbors' adjoining land and mowing the property they only habitated on weekends.

The drone of the mower's engine as the whirr of the blades spit shavings out of the side exit, the smell of freshly cut grass, the feel of the hot sun beating on my neck and back only added to my enjoyment. While some people might relish a nice swim in the cool, refreshing water of the lake, I could hardly wait to sit in the saddle and let the monotonous drone of the task drain the worries from my mind.

I am not the only woman in the family who would rather crank an engine than don a swimsuit. My mother, all of five feet tall, will gladly tell anyone who asks that her favorite present ever was a chainsaw my father bought for her while we were still children. (They've been married 49 years.) I still remember the look on her face when she wielded an electric hedge trimmer and told me she had "purchased" it with S&H green stamps. (I know, there are many who will not know what these are, but in their day, they were better than cash. They were what we considered "free money." But I digress.)

As I was saying, mom would rather work than clothes shop, and it's a trait my older sister, my younger brother, and myself have also inherited. Unfortunately, mom has had no fewer than six back surgeries, mostly due to her lifetime of hard, manual labor, probably including wood chopping with that chainsaw.

So, it wasn't long after I started mowing, that I noticed my mom, emerging from the lake, with a huge length of rusting chain. I'm not talking about a bike chain or anything that lightweight. I'm talking about a chain so thick it takes one and a half hands to encircle it and is a quarter-of-a-football-field long. Struggling mightily, she proceeded to tug it, wrenching and twisting her back as she did so, out of the lake.

I raced toward her with the mower in the highest gear, and when I got to her, I said something to the effect of, "What in the world do you think you are doing?" Only, it definitely wasn't that nice, and the tone could probably melt parts of this computer as I type if I rewrote it exactly. "Somebody put this in the lake, and I need to get it out," she said, without a trace of the guilt I believe she should have been experiencing. Remember, I was old enough for the bulk of her back surgeries to have to have provided medical assistance for which I believe only a trained nurse should be privy.

"Give me that!" I hollered, driving close enough that I could grab the chain from her. "If I catch you doing anything else like this (and this is the part where I obviously angered a power greater than myself), I'm going to run you over with this mower." Yes, I said it. I didn't mean it. It was too late.

I tore off across the property and commenced mowing, thrilled as my rounded-corners circle got smaller and smaller.

I know how parents of small children feel when they tell their child not to do something, then witness the child doing exactly as they've been told not to do. I know because that's exactly how I felt when I looked up to see my mom, you know, the one with the six back surgeries, toting a wagon, laden with water-logged lake vegetation she had been raking from the lake bottom. Many people understand that lakes are living entities, with fish and even gators, and all sorts of flora and fauna. My mom can abide the fish and sometimes small gators, but if anything green happens to grow within 25 feet of her beach, which she envisions as pristine white sand, it's going to see the business end of her hoe.

The wagon must have weighed 25 pounds of more. Water dripped from every available crevice from which it could leak. Even so, circumventing the concrete wall dividing the beach from the property, mom struggled to maintain her footing while navigating a 30-degree incline. With the mowing blade still engaged, I clutched into fifth gear, and once again, raced toward mom.

No, gentle reader, despite the threat, I was not intending to run over my mom with the mower. Rest assured, I did not. Instead, I got to her just before she cleared the farthest lamp post on the concrete wall.

"Mom!" I said. "What did I tell you?" I asked rhetorically. "Give me that!" I demanded. I put my foot on the clutch and brake and temporarily halted the riding mower as I reached behind me with my left hand to grab the handle of the wagon.

Lifting my foot off of the clutch, I intended to haul the wagon to the front of the property. The mower had other ideas. Instead of moving forward, I realized I was staying in place. I looked at the gear shift, which was still in gear. Then I noticed the right rear tire was spinning wildly, trying to gain traction.

"I must be in a hole," I thought to myself. I lifted a little in the seat and rocked my weight to the right to try to dig the tire into the ground. I wasn't sure if it was helping, but I wasn't moving, so I lifted a little higher and pushed down even more on the right rear tire. Nothing happened.

At this point, reasonable minds might decide between several options, including letting go of the wagon handle and/or putting the mower into neutral to better determine the problem. Suffice it to say, mine was not a reasonable mind.

It was at this point that the mower's front end began to lift off the ground. And it was at this point that quality control, despite its best efforts, reached its pinnacle, as evidenced by the wagon handle, having exceeded its pulling capacity, snapping from the base of the wagon. With the pressure relieved, the front end of the riding mower, mimicking a bucking bronco, proceeded to slam several times into the earth as the mower, in its highest gear, raced forward. I tried to hang on for dear life, but as the mower's front rubber tires hit earth for about the third time, I was kicked up and into the air.

Now, if there's anything a good Southerner knows, it's this: We can jerry rig any piece of equipment to make it deadly. That is precisely what my father had done to this particular mower. Most riding mowers, if younger than 50 years old, will shut off once a person's bottom is removed from the seat. Ours, on the other hand, had been modified so that a person could jump off the seat, remove a limb from in front of a tire, and hop back on without missing a beat. I think the intention is two-fold: 1) So that work is not delayed and 2) To add a little reckless abandon to an otherwise mundane job. Either way, the point is, the mower did not stop. In fact, it not only did not stop, but upon my own exit from the mower, in an attempt to stay aboard, I had pulled the steering wheel to the right. Like the Stephen King novel, Christine, in which a vintage car is possessed by supernatural forces, the mower began to stalk me.

Now, in the midst of telling this, I forgot to add that the first thing to hit the ground when I was thrown from the mower, quite unaffectionately known as El Diablo, was my left leg. When all of my weight, compounded by having been first thrown up and into the air, landed on that one leg, I heard a crunch at my knee. I collapsed on the ground. I knew I was in trouble. I just didn't know how much...until I saw the mower heading in my direction.

"Sammy, get up!" my mother screamed. "It's going to run you over!" She did not realize I had no left knee and no knee left. I tried to crawl, but realized the mower was fast overtaking my position. "Get up!" she screamed over what had once been the comforting whirr of the engine but now seemed like a death drone.

I prayed, and I prayed mightily. The Good Book says to pray without ceasing, but I don't think I've ever read anywhere about praying so hard your eyeballs might pop out of your head. That's what I did. I asked God to help me stand and to do it mighty fast. He did. It worked. I stood.

Somehow, I managed to get enough strength to rise on my right leg. I was still in the path of Christine Jr. I was still about to die, and I knew it.

At this point, I had one of two options, and death being one of them, I chose the latter. I attempted to take a step on a knee I knew no longer existed. When it gave out, I toppled over the retaining wall dividing the yard from the beach, and fell four feet onto the shore. I swear the blades from the mower shaved the hair off my legs as I fell.

I heard a snap in the same left knee as I landed on my back in the soft muckiness of the shore. The pain was so intense, I was certain I would lose consciousness. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of green and yellow and witnessed my mother trying to corral the rider-less mower, which was running in wider and wider circles.

Nothing is quite as impossible as trying to stop an object going in circles. Just ask my mom.

"Watch out!" she yelled. "It's going over the wall!" and with that, I saw the mower fly off the wall, arc into the air, and land, within inches of where I lay. Despite the blinding brightness of the sun, everything went black.

When I awoke, all was quiet. I could hear the waves lapping at the water's edge. I was sunk in muck several inches deep, and the sun was burning my eyes. I attempted to roll on my side, but the pain was too intense. I could not move.

"I saw it all!" a neighbor came running over to me. "The wagon got caught on the lamp post."

Indeed, that was precisely what had happened. The tire had not been stuck. The wagon had caught the corner of the lamp post. That's why the mower couldn't move. Because I was not about to let loose of the wagon's handle, the only way the riding mower would have been freed was if the solid concrete lamp post had miraculously disintegrated, which it didn't, or if the wagon handle had not-so-miraculously cracked, which it did.

Now, as I lay at the water's edge, I had plenty of time to imagine what I should have done.

I waited for my mom to call 9-1-1. I waited for the volunteer fire department to arrive. I waited for them to decide the best way to extricate me from the lake's edge and over a four-foot wall. I waited to be carried to the ambulance.

Just before the doors to the transport shut, I heard my dad, who is not one of the five in our family who would rather crank an engine than crank up the air conditioning, say, "Open the doors! Open the doors!"

The paramedic cracked open the door, and my dad peeked in to look at me. I waited for him to console me. I waited for him to tell me it didn't matter if the mower never cranked again. It did. Instead, he looked in and said, simply, "Sammy, just remember, nature doesn't forgive stupid."

Thanks, dad.

At the end of 2010, I will undergo major knee surgery for a torn ACL, MCL, and meniscus. The mower still runs. I don't.