Mow Better Blues: The Grassman Breaks the Rules!
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Summer, 2018
Reprinted from the Ohio weekly newspaper The Canton News.
Officials called last year “The Year of the Grassman” due to several sightings of the elusive ape-like creature that lives in the wooded areas around Minerva, Ohio, but none can compare to what locals allege occurred during a nighttime event in June of this summer.
“Midnight Mow,” a competition sponsored by local tractor manufacturer Silo, is a simple idea: Entrants bring their modified riding lawn mowers to an undeveloped expanse of uncut grass measuring between 8 and 10 inches in height. Each rider is timed by how quickly he or she can mow a full acre of field, ensuring the grass ends up at a uniform 1-½-inch height. The parameters that make the competition engaging include variable limits on deck width, mowing speed, course obstacles (a predetermined number that necessitate overlap and turns), and lighting—in this case, defined as solely the full moon at midnight. Silo awards the winner a 60-inch, 25 horsepower zero-turn Cruiser model as well as a five-hundred-dollar Silo gift card.
The competition has never included a living, aggressive monster as an obstacle before.
But that changed this year.
Mowing Down the Competition
“I hadn’t hit the first obstacle yet,” said Alex Yoder, a CNC machine operator in Canton, from his hospital bed, “when this big ol’ patch of grass ahead of me suddenly stood up.”
Yoder—who was the odds-on favorite to win this year’s competition and be declared “Mulch Monarch” for 2018—broke the rules by turning on LED headlights mounted on his John Deere mower.
“I had to see! I thought I was about to run someone over,” he said. “I didn’t think for a hot second that I’d get mowjacked.”
Yoder described the large, mossy-like creature as tall, muscular, and covered in dark green hair that blended in with the grass to be cut. He also noted that he could smell the creature before he could see it: “It smelled like a wet dog in an antique store,” he said. As he turned to avoid the sudden appearance of the legendary Ohio Grassman, the creature stepped toward him and, in a flash, knocked him off of his mower.
“Right in my face,” Yoder confirmed. “A soggy fist of lettuce, smack-dab in my nose, and that was when the credits rolled for me. I don’t remember anything else after that.”
Other witnesses, however—some of whom were participants in the “Midnight Mow”—described what followed as a demolition derby if all the drivers were blind. In charge aboard Yoder’s John Deere, the Grassman was alleged to have killed the headlights and proceeded to race across Yoder’s designated acre and into the next in order to smash into Eddie Robbins, operating a modified Husqvarna YTH18542 Lawn Tractor, sending the hardware store owner sprawling from his mower. His Husqvarna drove on, a motorized version of the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman, until it disappeared into the darkness.
After Robbins, the Grassman took out three more contestants in rapid succession, unexpectedly leaping from Yoder’s battered John Deere to a Troy-Bilt with extended horsepower driven by Harley Briscoe, who regrets now having “turbocharged” his ride, which he affectionately named Moana.
“That stinking Bigfoot-wannabe roared Moana out of there like it was the Indy 500 for landscaping,” he said. “It was hooting the whole time, like it was having fun mucking up the Midnight Mow.”
The Ohio Grassman subsequently removed competitor after competitor from the contest, primarily through crashes, including one rollover and a side-swipe, though Ernie Holliday admitted he drove his mower into Brush Hollow Creek instead of risking the collision.
“A man’s got to know his limits,” he said.
And Then There Were No Mow
Every rider was out except one: Jordan Gordon, the Stark State College freshman who entered the competition as a joke, registering his great-grandfather’s Chadborn & Coldwell antique manual push mower under the name Euphemia, after his great-grandmother.
Gordon claimed the Grassman charged him as well, but he managed to escape by dropping his push mower and then hiding himself in the tall grass. The disqualified contestants, Midnight Mow Judge Rupert Cavanaugh, his jury members, and spectators all agreed: After the Grassman intimidated Ernie Holliday to sink his Cub Cadet in the creek, no one saw any more of the mysterious creature, though its odor lingered for long minutes after its disappearance.
Jordan Gordon, who was one of the locals claiming to have encountered the creature in 2018 during the Year of the Grassman (Gordon even went so far as to claim he could find the monster again if he needed to because he supposedly “mapped” it), went on to win this year’s Midnight Mow using that antiquated manual mower with a time of 2: 41, nearly three times as long as the average final time in previous competitions. By the time Gordon finished his acre, attendance had diminished to just Judge Cavanaugh, two jury members, and this reporter from The Canton News.
When asked for a quote as this year’s victor, Gordon was clearly prepared.
“The Grassman is always greener on the other acre,” he said as he brandished his Mulch Monarch trophy like a scepter. “But this year, it’s my green acres that won.”