Time and Scything

When I was a child in the 1960s my father and his brother inherited a house in central New Hampshire. Their great-aunt Alice had married a lumberyard owner years before and relocated from northern New Jersey to Danbury, New Hampshire. I remembered my great-great aunt from the few visits we made up there from our distant home on Long Island. She seemed to personify the word “crotchety” and had strong, fixed opinions about seemingly everything.

ScythingIn one part of the property was a boulder field. My brother and I loved to jump from one to the next, and eventually I began to wonder how they got there. It was impossible to mow between them with a lawnmower. Aunt Alice employed a local man called “Sharkey” to scythe the tall grass and forbs that grew between the boulders.

Sharkey seemed very old to me and perhaps he was. His hair was a yellowish-white and matted beneath a perpetual engineer’s cap. He wore overalls and long johns in all weather and was rail thin. Like my great-great aunt he had probably been born in the 19th century. I was fascinated by the fact that he used something as archaic as a scythe as routinely as most other people used a ballpoint pen. Although I was vaguely afraid of him – between his lack of teeth, his thick accent and his eccentricity I could barely understand a word he said – I watched him cut down the tall grass and learned the rudiments of scything.

When we stopped mowing the lawn in the side yard three years ago and began our meadow garden, my wife and I decided that at the end of the growing season we would have to cut it down to keep it from succeeding to the next seral stage. In the autumn, when the three- to four-foot high stands of goldenrod and Joe-pye weed made it obvious that we would need one, I went out and bought a scythe.
    My parents divorced in 1969 and Aunt Alice’s house was sold. We moved away from Long Island and by 1971 had ended up in an old house on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. Two lots of frontage had been sold off, and the remaining nearly two acres had been neglected for several years. My mother set us to reclaiming the landscape. Among the many tools that we bought for the purpose was a used scythe.

Before scythingThe scythe was (according to Wikipedia) invented in about 500 B.C. and its name is derived from the Scythians, a people who lived along the Black Sea and occasionally made trouble for the Greeks. Like anything that has been used for that long, each piece of the implement has a specific name. In English, the long winding handle is called the “snaith” and its two handles are referred to as “grips.” The blade is the “chine,” and the point of attachment between the snaith and the chine is called the “tang.” I don’t think I knew any of this when I started using one as a teenager.

Our used scythe had a wooden snaith and grips. The grips were attached to the snaith by rusted iron bands, and the grips were loose. We never really tightened the grips in any organized fashion; we just shoved shims between the iron and the wood to keep them in place through most of a particular task. We were not harvesting agricultural fields, the historical use of the scythe, but simply cutting down areas that could not be mowed any other way, much as Sharkey had done for my Aunt Alice and, later on, my mother.

It is possible that I saw Sharkey using a scythe before I ever saw an image of the shrouded personification of Death gliding over a landscape holding the self-same implement. I say that because even now when I see various versions of that iconic image I still feel vaguely puzzled and think of Sharkey instead of the harvesting of souls.

Half scythedI have established a habit that may become a tradition of scything the meadow during the first week of November. By that time nearly all the goldenrod and aster have finished flowering, and their seeds are loose in the dried remnants of the blossoms. The cutting scatters them and promotes the spread of these forbs at the expense of the grass. That’s the idea anyway. It seems to be working.

Our scythe is entirely made of steel. I bought it brand new at the Agway. One grip moves slightly when I use it, but I haven’t done anything about it, out of nostalgia. A label on the chine tells me that it was manufactured in Austria. That steel is still made into anything in Austria in the 21st century is a surprise to me.

It takes less than an hour to scythe the meadow garden to the ground. It is a satisfying job. You use a whole host of muscles in your arms, torso and legs, all in concert. It feels unusual to be using all of them at once and I think, “Sharkey used these muscles all the time.” In a certain sense I am just getting warmed up about the time I am finishing and feel a little regretful that there isn’t more to cut down.

Fully mownSome time around 1970 we heard that after being missed for a few days around town, someone went looking for Sharkey and found him in his shack desperately ill. He had lived alone for years, reportedly living largely on beer and beans and never bathing. He was taken to the hospital, cleaned up, and had seemingly recovered his health when he suddenly died. The person who told my mother the story said that everyone was stunned by the snow-white color of his hair and the dignity and humor of the man once he was cleaned up and sober. My mother speculated that the hygienic change had been too much of a shock to his system.

After I finish scything the meadow garden I set the lawnmower on its highest level and go over all the fallen goldenrod, Joe-pye weed, asters, and grass, cutting the stalks to pieces and further scattering the seeds. After it has been mowed from a distance it looks almost like a normal lawn, just a little thatchy and bumpy in places. I keep thinking that I should build some cairns to punctuate the space, but maybe what it really needs is boulders.