The Last Word On Nothing

The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway.

How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance.

He took off his sunglasses. Well, I’ve been better. Then he handed me the Notice to Vacate.

It was, truthfully, a well-earned eviction. When Elise and I had moved into our rental, a two-bedroom with a capacious back yard, a year earlier, we’d been given just one inviolable command: keep the grass looking sharp. Let the plumbing rust, the shutters slough off, the paint peel, you name it — but the lawn, our landlord instructed, was to remain sacrosanct, as verdant and groomed as the greens at Augusta.

Aesthetically, the request was reasonable: It was only natural our landlord would want his property to match the others on our leafy street. Climatically, though, it was absurd. Spokane gets around 16 inches of precipitation per year, less than half the national average. A lawn, in our semi-arid corner of the Northwest, is an extravagance. Each evening, as I watched the sprinklers vomit water over our pointless, decorative crop, I burned with environmental shame — whatever you call the hydrologic equivalent of flygskam.

And, fine, it also just came to feel like a hell of a lot of work: Who’d voluntarily spend even twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon shoving around a deafening John Deere?

After a few months, we began to let the lawn slide. Skilled self-justifiers, we recast our laziness as civil disobedience. Burn your hoses! Scrap your mowers! We would, we vowed, create an urban jungle through benign neglect.

We were, of course, very late arrivers to the anti-grass rebellion (which, alas, doesn’t appear to be making much progress). “Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly,” lamented Michael Pollan in a 1989 essay. Lawns — “nature under culture’s boot,” as Pollan memorably put it — are America’s largest irrigated crop, guzzling more water than corn, wheat, and orchards combined. You can find equally appalling statistics about chemical inputs, gasoline spillage, habitat loss. At the very least, every wasted square inch of Kentucky bluegrass comes at a steep opportunity cost. When desperate butterflies have to seek sustenance from ragged strips of roadside milkweed, you know you’ve seriously screwed up the landscape.

***

Our laissez-faire subversion began promisingly enough. Nourished by April rains, our backyard grew luxuriant as a pre-colonial Kansas prairie. Each morning our dog vanished into the sumptuous pasture, her whereabouts betrayed only by the canopy’s rustling, as though she were the monster in a horror movie set among cornfields. As the days lengthened we drank beer on the back porch and watched our stems sway in unison, tousled by spring breezes like kelp in the surf. 

As summer wore on, our little patch of tall-grass paradise began to senesce. The lawn brittled, its brown stems snapping at their bases under their seedheads’ weight. Keeled-over stalks somehow knitted together into a dense, reedy mat of dogshit-strewn straw. It looked less like a prairie and more like, well, a vacant and highly flammable lot. 

For all its flagrant unattractiveness, though, it was still ecologically rich, or so we rationalized: picked over by our resident house sparrows, furrowed by rodents, brightened by the occasional cedar waxwing. It was an eyesore, sure, but to our wild neighbors, it was a refuge.

Now, our landlord’s letter rattling in my hand, I begged for clemency. We can fix this, I pleaded. Give us a week.

He shook his head. I don’t even know how you’re going to cut it, he said. You’d need a scythe. He sighed, considered, put his sunglasses back on. I’ll be back next Wednesday for another inspection, he said at last. I want this place completely transformed. Then he was gone. We’d received a stay of execution.

***

Although the prospect of eviction terrified us, we could take solace in the knowledge that we were not alone. As Kevin Kelley griped in High Country News this summer, the care of countless rental homes in the arid West falls to tenants who, for all their love of xeriscaped pollinator gardens, have no landscaping authority themselves. When Kelley quit watering his lawn in Boise, his landlord kept his security deposit and charged him for yardwork. Sighed Kelley:

I drove by the property a few weeks later. Everything but the grass patches and oldest trees was gone. Without shade from the elms or groundcover, sunlight cooked the dirt into dust. The landlord’s mission to bring the land back to a monocultured lot negated any environmental good I thought I had done.

Our own landlord’s ultimatum likewise dispelled any delusion that we were masters of our own domain. The next week passed in a blur of weeding, mowing, seeding, and other gardening gerunds. Neither Elise nor I had ever been yard people, and I shudder to think where we would have been without generous friends and instructional YouTube videos (“how to thread a weed-whacker,” in particular, turned out to be a surprisingly robust subgenre). When this story is optioned for cinema, here’s where we’ll slot the inspirational montage — sweat beading our brows as we lug mulch bags to “Eye of the Tiger.” 

If I’d had any doubts about the lunacy of lawns, our crash course put them to rest. We dumped fertilizer and non-native seed on the bare patches, poured gas can after gas can into a borrowed mower, and turned our sprinklers on 24-7 blast, undoing a year of water conservation in a single binge of flood irrigation. Worst of all was the infernal weed-whacker, whose whirling nylon string, I learned (and, yes, I probably should have known this already) disintegrates as it flays your vegetation, spitting microplastics into the environment like a machine gun. All we were missing was Agent Orange.

The heavy artillery did its brutal work. Over a week, our enclave of habitat vanished, replaced by a tidy square of suburban conformity. Vivid green replaced dust-brown with an almost miraculous alacrity. A week after our spree began, our landlord returned as promised. He sidled up to the fence and peered over, inscrutable as ever. 

What do you think, I asked with trepidation. 

Looks good, he said, and permitted his face to relax into a thin smile. Thanks for taking the bull by the horns. We shook hands, and with that he was back in his SUV, off to wrangle the next cabal of dissidents.

Our largely self-inflicted ordeal was over. I admit it: I felt a twinge of guilty pride at having brought the earth to heel. We’d imposed our will upon nature, beaten back the elements, and learned a few practical domestic skills along the way. Even Pollan had confessed some satisfaction at “the sense of order restored that a new-cut lawn exhales… mowing the lawn is, in both a real and metaphorical sense, how I keep the forest at bay and preserve my place in this landscape.” 

Mostly, though, I felt — what’s the word? — sad. I’d preserved my own place at the expense of everyone else’s. Weed-whacking the base of our garage one day, I’d found a delicate praying mantis the color of dry hay, its famous forelegs folded in what looked, in that moment, like supplication. I’d watched it roam across my palm before placing it in an untended strip of brush next door. Then, with my gas-powered microplastic disperser, I’d flattened its habitat.

The Veteran in a New Field, Winslow Homer