A Young Girl's Guide to Power Tools

At age 12, our daughter has discovered that a front yard’s more than a soft, green place to turn cartwheels. It’s also a renewable source of income. I hate to mow, and I’ll gladly pay her since it leaves me free to garden, fish, pick berries and generally indulge the fleeting pleasures of summer.

There’s just one problem: she can’t the start mower without me. It’s a second-hand push model that takes three or four Dad-sized yanks before the engine smokes and sputters to life.

“Dad,” she says, with a girlish, pony tailed sincerity that will soon enough break hearts other than my own. “What’s up with this thing?”

I suppose it could be a rusty spark plug, clogged fuel filter or fractured electron transducer shield for all I know. But there’s another answer that I won’t burden her with just yet. The mower won’t start because it’s a machine – a soulless, unreliable, infuriating and deceptively time-consuming piece of mechanical enslavement.

Own a house, especially in the country, and you’ll feel obligated to own plenty of labor-saving devices. Chainsaws, snow blowers, rototillers, weed-whackers and leaf blowers are the usual suspects. All useful in their own right, yet all encumbered with hidden costs of maintenance, storage and repair. You can quickly end up as a small-engine wet nurse to a fleet of internal combustion ingrates. Here’s three of the biggest offenders:

The Chainsaw: I’ve got a small one that won’t run for any longer than 90 seconds. It cost $120 new, and last week, a mechanic said he’d charge me $100 to fix it. Yet here’s the subversive truth: if all you need is a few cords of wood to burn in a fireplace, then you don’t need a chainsaw. You need to know somebody with a chainsaw and volunteer to help them. That’s because guys who love to cut wood are far less eager to lug and load it onto a truck or trailer. It’s unglamorous work and if you pitch in, they’ll give you some. Especially the crooked pieces.

The Rototiller: The deluxe hydraulic model that I like cost $5,000. So every year, I rent one for $40 to till my garden. And every year, something breaks. This spring, the pull cord snapped off on the first try. It took a 40-minute round trip to the rental store to get a new one. All that aggravation for a single day: can you imagine the headaches if I owned it for the other 364?

The Leaf Blower: I’ve never had a leaf blower, but God does so I use his. He fires it up in late October, when an exuberant, 30 mile an hour gale blows in from the Great Plains. It sweeps the yard clean and deposits 90 percent of our leaves into the vacant field next door. Best of all, the Big Guy handles all the oil changes.

I’ve always assumed that my daughter would share my aversion toward steel creatures with a crank case heart. This summer, I even begged her to try my beloved hand clippers – the ones that make a musical snip-snip when I trim grass from around a tree. But she just asked why we don’t own a weed whacker.

Then, when I returned from a business trip in July, my daughter dropped this bomb: “Dad, guess what? I started the mower without you!”

Like last year’s MP-3 player, my services had been rendered obsolete. Yet isn’t that the whole point of parenthood? We give kids the tools and let them make of the world what they will. They can hardly do worse than we did. Still, I hope that my daughter will always rely more on her own muscle, and the occasional divine wind, than on the over-hyped promises - and treacherous pull cords -- of mechanical salvation.

Turtle Savers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose (Except Maybe a Few Fingers)

Along the highways of Michigan, even an animal lover can get jaded by the sight of road-killed wildlife. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rigor-mortised deer, rancid raccoon or dead opossum that’s no longer just playing possum. Unless you’re the one who hit them, you rarely give their sad, gory remains a second thought.

Not so the noble turtle. Their demise always seems especially tragic and deeply unfair. While road traffic can endanger all wildlife, a hapless turtle can’t dash, hop or reverse direction with point-guard agility the way that a squirrel or even agile deer can. No, once a turtle begins its deliberate slog across hard pavement the trip almost always ends in disaster. There’s either a sickening crunch or a carom shot that makes them spin off the road like a jettisoned hubcap.

Some drivers, as a form of sadistic motor sport, even try to hit turtles rather than avoid them. For literary proof, listen to what John Steinbeck wrote in “The Grapes of Wrath" of all places. In this, the 20th Century’s most epic social commentary, he took most of chapter 3 to describe the following encounter:

“… And now a light truck appeared, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it (emphasis mine). His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway ...”

In Steinbeck's story -- an otherwise unflinching portrayal of the Okie diaspora -- he lets the turtle survive the collision unharmed. Perhaps there's some reptilian symbolism at work here that only a tenured English professor could understand. But from what I've seen, once a turtle gets thus whacked it’s done for. The turtle’s wonderfully adapted shell, a lifelong home and fortress that’s impervious to all natural predators, has not evolved to withstand the 3,000-pound footprint of an automobile.

On three occasions I've damaged or wrecked my car in deer accidents, but it’s just not the same. Nothing wrenches my heart like the sight of a turtle, stoic and suicidal in its quixotic quest to cross a two or even four-lane gauntlet of asphalt.

So in a response that may be equally quixotic, I’ve started an unofficial club to help them. It’s called the Free and Self-Appointed Protectorate of Esteemed Michigan Turtle Savers. Anyone can join. There’s no dues, no newsletter, no meetings, no administrative balderdash of any kind. All members should operate as individual cells, autonomous and self-supporting. From me, their enlightened and enigmatic founder (praise be to His Most Illustrious Name) they can expect some vague ideological guidance, but not much else.

In fact, here’s all that any Turtle Saver in good-standing needs to do: stop, and pick up a turtle whenever they see one about do something fatally boneheaded like cross a busy road.

Then, carefully and safely (no need to make yourself road kill) carry the turtle to the other side. Just be sure to move them in the direction that they were headed. Most likely, they’re driven by a strong biological urge to mate, build a nest or find a critical food source. They follow their own star and you won't convince a stubborn turtle to change its course. For good measure, I usually set them down 20 feet or so beyond the road shoulder, so that they’re concealed by natural habitat.

I’m always extra careful when I move snapping turtles. Pick one up and you’ll see why. With its long neck extended, a snapper’s frightful jaws can reach about anywhere on its body. And fast. So I grab them by the base of their tail, although lightly as to not damage any vertebra. Does this method give them a backache? Possibly, but it sure helps me keep all 10 fingers intact.

And it’s not just big turtles that need to be saved.

This June, my daughter found a baby snapper in a roadside mud puddle. She named him Leonard, and for two weeks he lived in a tub on our front porch where he ate worms and lettuce. But a turtle deserves more from life than a Tupperware holding cell. So we carried Leonard to a pleasantly weedy and buggy irrigation pond about a ½ mile away. With a little luck, he'll revel there in the green scum and black muck for a good 75 years or so.

On our walk back, a farmer drove up in his four-wheeler to investigate. We were, after all, trespassers on his property. These days, along with droughts and insect pests, farmers have to worry about thieves who strip electric cable from their irrigation systems. Or, steal their ammonia fertilizer to make the accursed steet drug, meth.

“How you doin’?” he asked, in a tone that was Midwestern neighborly, yet hinted at caution.

Once we explained our turtle rescue and release mission, his lined, dusty face relaxed a bit. That, and the fact that one of the trespassers was 4 feet 5 inches tall, with blond pony tail and a Snoopy t-shirt.

“Oh yeah, they’re really on the move now,” he said. “This morning we found a big ole snapper in the corn field so we put her back in the pond, too. She must've weighed 25pounds.”

Here he was, a haggard farmer with a 1,000 acres worth of reasons to do something else. True, he seemed to face no hardships of the apocalyptic variety, the way that Steinbeck's Tom Joad did. But I don't doubt that he has chronic hypertension and a pile of six-figure debt riding on this year’s corn harvest. Yet somehow, he’d just added the title of Turtle Saver to his already endless job description.

Why? Well, we modern humans already spend most of our days in shells of our own making. They keep us clean and dry, but their climate control and tinted windows (standard equipment, even on most tractors), can insulate us from the plight of our brother creatures. Maybe that’s why it feels so good to commit a random, if quixotic act of turtle rescue. It helps us protect something within ourselves that’s wild, valuable and equally worth saving.