I fought the lawn and the lawn won

My lawnmower died right before we moved to Maryland. It was among a long list of items that either didn’t make the move, didn’t survive the move, or had to be replaced shortly after the move because they don’t work in the new house.

Before I tell you the intricate story of the new lawnmower, I should say a word or two about the lawn it is tasked with cutting.

Our old house in Georgia had a decent sized yard, but it was one of those types that has a tiny front yard with a bigger back yard and the whole thing is measured in feet, not fractions of an acre. The new house is 1/3 of an acre, with a beautiful back yard and a sizable front yard.

The old yard, bless it, was Bermuda grass. If you didn’t grow up in the South, let me explain Bermuda grass to you the way it was explained to me by my own sinuses: it is a plant that exists purely to ruin your afternoon. It has the texture of a Brillo pad, the hospitality of a porcupine, and it made me sneeze so violently and so often that my own children learned to duck on reflex whenever I walked toward the yard holding a rake. Sitting on Bermuda grass isn’t relaxing. It’s an act of aggression, and the grass always wins.

The grass at our new house is a thick-bladed variety I don’t know the official name of, but I know the feel of it, because it’s the grass I grew up rolling around in as a kid before somebody, somewhere, decided Bermuda grass was a better business decision. It’s cool under bare feet. It has a pleasant smell to it that doesn’t cause a sneezing fit. You can lie down on it and not require medical attention afterward. I have genuinely stood in my own backyard just running my hand across it like a man petting a Labrador, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write, but here we are.

So — bigger yard, nicer grass, and an old lawnmower that chose the week of our move to Maryland to give up entirely, like it knew its work was done and wanted out before the new territory. This left us with a decision. Hire somebody. Buy a regular mower. Buy a riding mower and become the kind of man who waves at people from atop a small tractor. Or — and this is where I went wrong — buy a robot.

I should mention that I am not one of those guys that spends hours each week cultivating a perfect lawn. I can respect the folks who are like that, but it has never been me. However, for someone who dabbles in yard work, I am unusually picky about lawnmowers.

Got a Minute? Got a Story.

Years ago, back when I was cutting my teeth at the Alpharetta Neighbor, a weekly newspaper in Georgia, one of my very first assignments was interviewing a man who had, by his account, brought the robotic lawnmower to the masses. I never did fully establish whether he invented the thing or just got there early and claimed the flag, but to hear him talk, you’d have thought he’d personally solved cold fusion and then, in his spare time, knocked out the lawnmower as a hobby.

That mower, if memory serves, ran on gas, needed a buried wire around the whole yard like it was under house arrest, and moved around the grass in the same confident, purposeful pattern as a Roomba that’s had too much coffee. My conclusion at the time, written by a much younger and much more idealistic version of me, was that the technology wasn’t ready.

Prior to our move, I’d been noticing that robotic mowers had dropped down to about the same price as a decent self-propelled push mower, and something in my brain lit up like a Vegas casino. No pushing. No pulling a cord fifteen times while sweating through a shirt. Just a little machine that goes out there and handles business while I sit on the porch, sipping an ice cold Coca-Cola, living my best KITT-from-Knight-Rider life. I turned the idea over for a few weeks before we closed on the house, and eventually I pulled the trigger.

The new mower showed up a few days after we settled in, promising no boundary wires, GPS, and AI navigation. Setup, the box assured me, would be simple.

It was not simple.

The mower itself runs on a battery, fine, no complaints, that part worked exactly as advertised. It sits in a little docking station that has to be plugged into an outlet, also fine, also advertised. What was not advertised — what was buried somewhere in the fine print between “revolutionary” and “effortless” — is that the whole operation depends on something called an RTK unit, which, for those of you unfamiliar with farming, is a fancy little GPS receiver that has to talk to roughly twenty-eight satellites at once, and it will not do so if there is a tree, a cloud, a low-flying bird, or, I suspect, an unkind thought anywhere in its vicinity.

I spent two full days trying to find a home for this thing. Front yard. Back yard. A little clearing by the neighbor’s fence. Every time I found a spot with a clean shot to the heavens, I discovered the fatal flaw in the whole design: the unit needs a cord running to it, and once you run a cord out into open yard, you’ve created a boundary the mower can’t cross without cutting into its own lifeline. So no boundary wires, technically true, replaced instead by two extension cords inconveniently running through the yard.

Then there were the lights. The RTK unit blinks in patterns that mean something, apparently, though nothing in the instructions bothered to say what. I had five separate conversations with an AI chatbot and watched three YouTube videos made by men who seemed far too calm about the whole thing before I cracked the code. I have spent less time deciphering messages from corporate meetings that were devoted to synergy, Q3 goals, and determining whether the juice was worth the squeeze.

Once the unit was placed and finally talking to the mower, I had to walk the perimeter of my yard using a controller on my phone like a remote-control car, tracing every inch of the property to build a map. By the time I finished, I could have mowed the entire yard with a pair of scissors and had time left over for a nap.

Finally — finally — I told it to go. It rolled out of its station with real purpose, and I stood there like a proud father watching his boy take his first steps. It drove a few feet toward the RTK unit and began spinning in a circle. It informed me, cheerfully, that it was initiating “spiral mowing.” It completed two spirals, about the size of a hula hoop, and then stopped cold in the middle of the yard, sitting there like a duck settled in on a nest of eggs it had no intention of hatching.

I went inside for the evening, defeated but not yet broken.

That night, I discovered the RTK unit’s blinking light was pointed directly at my neighbor’s bedroom window, flashing away in the dark like a tiny, deeply confused lighthouse. Nothing says “nice to meet you, neighbor” quite like a strange man’s robot equipment strobing through your window at 2 a.m. And here’s the cruelest part of the whole design: you cannot move the unit. You cannot unplug it. Do either, and the mower forgets the map entirely, and you get to relive the whole ordeal from scratch. So there it sat, this delicate little pole, sensitive to wind, clouds, satellites, and possibly my neighbor’s opinion of me, and I couldn’t touch it without starting over.

The Woman Who Shares My Name watched this entire saga unfold from the kitchen window with the expression of someone observing a science fair project she had strong doubts about from the beginning.

I gave it one more day. It spun. It spiraled. It quit. I kicked it twice — gently, journalistically, in the name of research — boxed the whole rig back up, shipped it home to wherever robots go to be reprogrammed, and and bought a regular push mower with an engine, a lever, and absolutely no opinions about satellite coverage.

Twenty years ago I wrote that robotic lawnmowers weren’t ready for primetime. This week, I had an experience that confirmed it. As for having to mow my lawn, well, I suppose it won’t be so bad. The Wild Things are growing up, and the eldest Wild Thing might be learning how to use a lawnmower in a year or so.

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