In the average American homeowner’s garage, there are all sorts of tools and machines. Some are pretty simple, like shovels or rakes (one step up from a stick, actually); others are more complex and usually run on some sort of motor or engine. They many times are used to cut something – grass, brush, weeds.
Most of them are merely powered versions of that thing in the picture at the top of the page, in pieces, awaiting the DH’s ministrations with glue and a screwdriver: A scythe.
Invented before the birth of Christ, this more advanced (and advantaged) version of a sickle allowed mowers and reapers to work standing up. Using a sickle is real ‘stoop labor’ and you can’t really get any speed with it as the motion is: Bend down, grasp a bunch of grain plants in one hand, cut it with the sickle and lay it down. With a scythe, a mower or reaper can walk and swing the scythe with every step. The advance of putting a long handle and a blade at one end enabled workers to literally cover far more ground. It also enabled workers to organize the work so that mowers and reapers would line up in a field with space in between them and work their way down the field and the whole field would be finished at pretty much the same time. OH – just as a note: Mowing refers to cutting grass; cutting grain is referred to as reaping – so “The Grim Reaper”, that is, Death represented as carrying a scythe, is obviously meant as a being associated with harvesting grains. I guess he can’t be bothered mowing the lawn.
Now, in 2012, why would anyone want to use a scythe – other than for some sense of curiosity or some sort of historic re-enactment? Well, to be blunt (well, hopefully, the blade is not blunt), there are some conformations of property which are actually pretty dangerous to mow with a powered mower or a tractor. How many times do we hear or read every summer of someone who is injured or killed when the tractor or mower they are riding on turns over on a slope? A person with a scythe can safely mow those areas of lawn or pasture. There are also areas where you can’t or don’t want to use a mower – such as a ditch. Scythe work is superb in tight spots because the mower can change their swing to accommodate the space.
“Oh,” you say, “Aunt Toby; I have a “weed-wacker” for that.”
Mmhmmm. And you have to mix up that funky two-cycle engine oil and gas and constantly stop to refill the cartridge with the plastic fish line, which breaks in little odd pieces which can be eaten by birds and animals.
Scythe? No engine. No engine oil. No gasoline. No little odd bits of plastic line. Just you, the wood snath (that’s the long piece of wood that the handles are attached to), and the blade. And the very pleasant ‘swoosh’ sound of cutting the grass in one…smooth…stroke.
Now, the DH and our son have used our scythe (the one in the photo is a brand new one – that’s another story for another time) for years to do everything from cutting grass for our livestock to keeping the weeds down at the edges of the pasture, to cleaning out the ditch in front of our house. If we had a separate brush blade (you can get blades for cutting almost everything, except perhaps small trees), we could go up to the top pasture and hack down a lot of the small brush up there, too. Perhaps some day. The one thing they have not gotten into is ‘competitive mowing’.
Yep – this is an event in Europe and Canada, which has not really caught on in the US, but literally every contestant is given the same size area to mow and the winner is the mower who does the neatest and most consistent job within the least amount of time. It’s not size or brute strength or necessarily speed – I’ve read of women mowers winning contests. Some contests (as in this video) are team events – sort of like relay races. Get through the first couple of minutes of the video and you will see just how efficient these mowers are with a scythe. Now, they are working in bare feet – I think that is a personal choice; I can tell you that the DH and my son never work in bare feet when they are mowing but that has more to do with snakes or other creatures at foot level than any fear of harm from a scythe.
Working with a scythe puts you right in line with agriculture over thousands of years – literally until horse-drawn mowing equipment in the last third of the 19th century. And along with using the scythe itself, you have to learn and experience other skills that we associate with past times. One of them is ‘peening’ which is literally hammering the edge of the blade out on a little anvil to straighten out the blade (you tend to get little cuts and wavy bits from hitting rocks when you mow). You literally do smithing out there, and you also will be using a stone to sharpen the blade itself. All of these are activities which thousands of agricultural workers have done for thousands of years – it really puts you into contact with that long chain of grain growing and domestication going back to Greek and Roman times.
Now, the DH frankly learned to scythe from a book; he did not have a mowing mentor. Today, you have available all sorts of videos out there and we do have a supplier, so all you have to do is search on ‘scythe’. Who knows? Perhaps you have a competitive mower in you!
This post makes me so happy! I will soon be the owner of a small house with a small yard and an even smaller patch of grass. I have no desire to buy a lawn mower or another piece of equipment that will be loud and will use fuel; I am glad to hear one can still find old school tools that only use human power!
I have a particularly vivid memory of the youngest of my uncles using a scythe to cut the chest-high grassy weeds at the back of my grandparents’ property. 50 years ago, and I can still hear the whooosh and the summer bugs, see the slight sheen of sweat on Steve’s back, and smell the newly cut grass.
Did you see the cool front-page article on scythes/scything in the Wall Street Journal on 06/29/12? Or is your essay a staggering case of serendipity? Way cool, either way.
Here is some of the most fun content from WSJ:
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At Marugg Co., which has been selling scythes out of Tracy City, Tenn., since 1873, the typical scythe buyer used to be an Amish farmer or a horror-movie prop master, according to Amy Wilson, the current owner. Now, it’s “anybody and everybody,” she says. “It makes it difficult for advertising, but still…”
“I get emails from people who just want to mow the lawn,” says Botan Anderson, a Wisconsin scythe promoter. Carol Bryan, owner of Scythe Supply, in Maine, says: “We have backyarders who say, ‘My WeedWacker just threw a rock through the window. I want a…how do you pronounce that thing? A sith?’ ”
Ruth Callard, 58, a personal trainer, got a scythe (rhymes with writhe) to cut the grass around six apple trees that she and a few neighbors have planted on the I-5 freeway embankment in Seattle. The city let them plant but refused to mow. “It’s the budget,” says Ms. Callard, “so we bought the scythe. The hips do most of the work.”
Larry Cooper, a scything expert, has set up shop near Raleigh, N.C.
Patrick Crouch, 35, bought his to tend a community garden on central Detroit’s “urban prairie.” He likes it because it’s “totally brutal.” As he blogged: “What could be more badass than walking the streets of the Motor City with a scythe slung over one’s shoulder?”
In Detroit, maybe, but to cut a wide swath through the Great American Lawn, scythers have longer rows to hoe. Scythes are poetic. (“My long scythe whispered,” wrote Robert Frost; not, “My lawn mower whispered.”) Yet scythes may be better known now to videogamers as the Dark Knight’s favored weapon in “Final Fantasy XIV.”
The early-American scythe (a British import) was, in fact, a back-aching tool with a humpy snath (the handle) and heavy blade. It was quickly superseded by mechanical mowers. Scythe sellers still make snaths, but an American hasn’t forged a blade since 1958.
Germany’s last scythe factory died with communism. Spain and France soon lost theirs. The favored source now is the Schröckenfux factory in Austria, a maker of quality ergonomic blades since 1540.
Schröckenfux produces 200,000 blades a year and sells 60,000 to Iran, having assured sanctions authorities of their peaceful intent. But in developing countries, it battles low-cost scythes from Turkey and Kyrgyzstan. Russia exports scythes, too (and hammers and sickles).
The situation raises a fear for the quality scythe’s future. Peter Vido, a homesteader who subsists in New Brunswick, Canada, with one light bulb and a website devoted to scythes, worries that scythe production at Schröckenfux “may just roll over and die.”
To keep it alive, he argues, “demand for quality blades in the wealthy countries must increase dramatically.” It’s happening, but a vital element is absent: qualified scythe instructors.
Duffers can pick up tips on the Web: Never scythe downhill; if you trip you might fall on the blade. Casualties are few, unless you’re like British novelist Marcel Theroux. He scythes in the London suburb of Tooting, and committed the error of honing a blade while chatting with a neighbor. “I almost cut my thumb off,” he says.
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It is a real pleasure to watch an expert at scything. As a dumb snooty kid, I didn’t understand the artistry employed by my father, who took care of an acre or two with efficiency. He did not enjoy it very much — bad associations with “work or starve” in post-war Germany. At least they did have a garden patch and an un-bombed house.
Yes, someone else pointed that out to me after I’d published – I did this because the box from the scythe suppliers showed up at the house and I wanted to get the photo before the DH put the whole thing together. Remarkable coincidence.