You are not alone in believing that life is not fair.
Here in Kansas, we suffer drought from time to time. There is some phenomenon of annual rainfall that dictates that those of us in central and eastern Kansas get about 32 inches a year.
The old timers used to say that we could expect a half-inch rain every Saturday night. It was God’s blessing on the wheat and the corn.
In western Kansas, the rainfall is half that, about 18 inches every year. This explains why there is so much crop irrigation in the southwest corner of the state… Dodge City, Liberal, Syracuse.. Center-pivot irrigation systems turn unproductive fields into verdant disks of green profit. They depend on the water level in the Ogallala Aquifer.
Which is a different story.
The dividing line between the plenty-of-rain and the dry country, for some reason, seems to run through Great Bend, Kansas. The town is so named for the giant curve made by the Arkansas River as it winds its way from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River.
Great Bend is one-third of the way across Kansas, from Colorado to Missouri.
The lawn that became the beauty…
After an extremely dry summer in 2022, many residents of a small town in the central portion of the state lost their lawns. Those who depended on rainfall were out of luck that year.
Most of us are partial to Tall Fescue, that beautiful, green broad-bladed grass that turns what is basically Kansas prairieland into Connecticut. But only when there is enough rain.
One particular fellow — I’ll call him Vanderbilt — lost his yard to the drought. After the hot season was over, and the yard began to resemble a neglected, scraggly sandlot, Vanderbilt took action.
He called a lawn services contractor and hired them to renovate his front yard. They dispatched their trucks and rototillers. Cheerful, energetic young men churned up the yard into raw dirt, smoothed it out and inserted thousands of tiny fescue seeds.
Vanderbilt, following directions, set up a watering system and dumped tons of fresh water on what quickly became mud. Each square foot got water for 15 minutes 3 times a day. It cost a small fortune in city water.
Sure enough, after about 10 days a slight green fuzz could be discerned across the muddy flat. In three weeks there was what could be called the beginnings of a lawn.
Vanderbilt continued to dump water, as instructed, for the next two months. Eventually he could cut the grass and remove the clippings — no small feat. Today he has a beautiful stand of grass that delights passers-by as much as it probably frustrates neighbors.
…And the one that became the beast
Directly across the street from Vanderbilt, a man I shall call Gruber put in a fescue yard at his new house. Like Vanderbilt, he churned up the dirt, packed and smoothed it, and seeded the lawn heavily. Gruber, too, laid out a watering system and began to dump great quantities.
A week after Gruber put in the yard, before the seeds had germinated and put down roots, the heavens broke forth with rain.
Beautiful timing. Horrible results.
There was so much rain so quickly, that tiny rivulets appeared in Gruber’s still-bare yard, running down the gentle slope from the front porch to the street. As the water volume increased, the force of running water washed seeds away.
As water will do, the erosion was not uniform.
Today, two years on, the front yard is scarred with strpes of bare dirt, each maybe 4-6 inches wide. The strpes are of course irregular, jigging irregularly down through the yard toward the low ground.
Strips of bare dirt are perhaps a foot or two apart.
Through no fault of his own, Gruber’s front yard is a disaster.
As disasters go, however, it is not unrecoverable. My guess is he will overseed and water, once summer is past, and in a year or two all will be well.
Meanwhile, Vanderbilt will continue to use city water, mow his grass every few days and bag the clippings.
Takeaway
“You pays your money and you takes your choice,” says the 19th-century British idiom, referring to a game of dice. (Best if it’s spoke with a Cockney accent.)
No one can predict the weather in Kansas, or anywhere else, with the specificity required for timing a new crop of grass. Generally, we do not expect frog-strangling rains in October; those are for April and May. But as our real-life story illustrates, sometimes it happens.
Jesus weighed in on this one: “…Your Father in heaven… causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Matthew 5.45
The seasons and the weather do not discriminate. Nature is completely indifferent as to whether the sun and rain come at the right time or not.
If you never plant the grass, you’ll never have a yard. There is always risk, and importantly, there is always a choice in how to respond when it goes badly.
As you have gathered, this is not really a story about grass.
Gravity demands
A young man whom I counted as a friend became a quadriplegic through a farm accident. Something of a rascal as a teenager (before I knew him) he was known to have taken ungodly risks with his dirt bike. Predictably, he had broken bones and badly mistreated internal organs.
Later, married and respectably employed, he settled down. Men will do that.
One day he surveyed a pond on a farm, operating a utility vehicle the size of a golf cart. He drove sensibly and gently as he climbed the slope of the dam. A low tire and an unseen badger hole in the soft earth conspired to tip the cart slowly and gently over on top of him.
As the weight of the machine caught him awkwardly underneath, he heard a distinct SNAP in his neck.
He never walked again.
When I knew him, a few years after the accident, we engaged in many long discussions about bitterness, coincidence, low tire pressure, random acts of gravity, and eternal life.
He gave his heart to Jesus, confessing Him as Lord and Savior, about a year before he succumbed to yet another round of pneumonia.
He was a fine man, flawed like each of us, who had come to terms with his God. I wish I had known him longer.
Choice rules
Whether seeding a yard, selecting a career, being caught by COVID or suffering the unforgiving combination of weight and leverage, our only real choice is our response.
We do not always get to choose the trials we face, only how we face them.
Thanks for joining The Alligator Podcast. Podcasters are always looking for juicy stories for interviews. If you know someone who hosts a podcast, put them in touch we me, curt@alligatorpublishing.com. I’d be glad to be on their show and share my story.
As always, share this with someone who needs to hear the message. Which is most people that you know.
A Tale of Two Front Yards