|
|
I live in a tiny apartment above a garage, but I’m not the Fonz, and my life isn’t exactly Happy Days. I’m a greensman at the swank Savannah Harbor Golf Resort & Spa in Georgia, and I walk behind a mower for a living.
I used to sit eight hours a day in front of a computer console. Before that, I spent years in windowless rooms pipetting germs in medical labs. Now, I get up before dawn and walk-mow four to six greens every morning. I’ve lost gobs of fat from years of sit-down work, and sometimes I catch the stares of women I don’t know. At 45, though, I know better and don’t bother.
Recently, I went to Target and bought a $25 pedometer – $25 is the equivalent of about three hours of walk-mowing after taxes, but I wanted to know how much I was busting my butt. So I dropped it inside the front pocket of my dirty khakis and took off. The results are shown in this table.
I intended to do all 18 greens several times over the course of a week or two, but this is all I got done before crushing the pedometer in an unfortunate accident. The data includes steps taken while doing two cleanup laps. At 3,690 square feet, No. 5 is our smallest green and requires only 0.4 miles of walking. At 19,196 square feet, No. 12 is our biggest ballbuster, requiring 2.1 miles.
Using linear regression, the data can be fitted to an equation that can be used at any golf course: miles = 0.0001155 x (square feet of green). We have 168,282 square feet of greens in total. So that means we walk about 19.4 miles altogether to mow them (i.e., 19.4 = 0.0001155 x 168,282). Savannah Harbor is a high-class joint, and it’s mowed 365 days a year barring an apocalypse of some sort. That means 63,729 miles of walking since the course’s inception in 1999. That’s one fourth the distance to the moon. Holy smokes!
People will quibble. My stride doesn’t match yours. Our greens aren’t shaped like yours. Miles walked will vary depending on the direction mowed and the amount of turning required. My reply: yadda, yadda, yadda.
More intriguing is the fact I don’t get tired of it. The exercise, the striping, the smell of grass and gas … I love walk-mowing. I’m not alone. A man with terminal cancer once mowed at Savannah Harbor, I’m told. He said the exercise and the daily dose of discipline kept him from wasting away with cachexia. I suspect, too, the meditative aspect of the job had something with why he did it. When it finally came time to stop, he did so without fanfare. He hosed off his mower, got in his car and drove away – all without a word, never to be heard from again.
We’re all terminal in one way or another. Unlike the stricken greensmower, however, most of us are blessed with ignorance of the when, where and how. Nonetheless, it’s just a matter of time, and it begs the question: Am I wasting my life walk-mowing? If I could cure cancer or end world hunger, maybe so. But I can’t. So you’ll find me mowing greens instead, walking my life away at a golf course near you. GCI