California banned gas-powered lawnmowers and leaf blowers, but not soon enough for me

Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that phases out the sale of gasoline-powered lawnmowers and leaf blowers by 2024. For my purposes, I would have preferred 1974.

Many of us grew up around lawnmowers, and a significant percentage of us have operated these contraptions. I mowed lawns as one of my many side hustles as a teenager, which was my second-least-favorite job, right behind cleaning out bus tubs at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour.

Proponents of the bill note that running a leaf blower for an hour is the carbon emission equivalent of driving a Toyota Camry 1,100 miles. I think I ran my family lawnmower 1,100 miles per month in Minnesota alone.

Everyone agrees that gas leaf blowers are, in general, completely annoying. And, in 1974, we didn’t have the luxury of using them, either. We had a zero-emission, carbon-neutral, low-noise, manual leaf-moving device called a rake.

While I quietly and politically incorrectly observe that smelling cut grass and gas instantly transports me to my childhood of cutting Mrs. Tyler’s grass at $3 a pop, I would have just as soon engaged in other environmentally friendly pursuits at the time, like scraping slime off of my bass-fishing lures.

I can’t speak to whether Newsom mowed lawns for money, but this bill signing has the faint scent of a boy who may well have had to do that. I know that if I were governor, that’s the first thing I would do, along with banning lawns altogether. My neighbors may even argue that I have banned my lawn entirely, as it is now gravel. Mostly.

By far the worst place I had to mow lawns was during my brief, virtually-unknown-to-my-biographers residency in Malvern, Pa., where our house featured an acre of treeless grass, which was also punctuated by bizarre hybrid rapid-growing crabgrass mixed with dandelions and barbed wire, and some grass apparently imported from Vietnamese jungles.

Napalm was considered and rejected.

I didn’t cut grass there with our rotten little Sears mower. I harvested it. Vast tracts of waving grass were immediately rendered into gloppy emerald chunks of goo, stopping the engine suddenly.

This green grass glop then needed to be pulled out by hand, and sometimes I had to turn the machine upside down, exposing the dull but effective Blades of Death my dad warned me about.

“Don’t slip on wet grass, or you could cut your tennis shoe toe off, or worse.”

My dad was a scientist and therefore a realist who happily described the worst-case scenario for everything. I won’t tell you what he said about Apollo 13 during the crisis.

I can assure you that Sears lawnmowers from 1971 were very difficult to start. If we had been solely reliant on Sears lawnmowers to win World War II, there would have been an unpleasant outcome.

When my dad bought a used lawn tractor for us ($100, back then), it initially seemed like divine intervention from the four-hour Sears chore I had been previously sentenced to. This tractor featured a muffler that was ideally positioned to burn my left foot, but the lawn got done in an hour. My tennis shoe toe was molten.

So have at it, Governor. Ban them. Ban them all as I ponder the potential tragedy that might have befallen my tennis shoe. I salute your political courage in this matter.

If you have any of that $30 million in mitigation money lying around, send some to me. I want a new pair of steel-toed tennis shoes.

This story was originally published October 15, 2021 at 6:00 AM.