Wonder Will Always Get Us There

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

I think I was eleven or twelve years old when one of my younger brothers and I decided that we could fix our broken lawnmower. My recollection is that it was the first gas-powered lawnmower we owned, and it was given to us by someone who had purchased a new one.

I remember the taxing work of using the push-style lawnmower, the kind powered the force of the person pushing it.

Being pre-teen boys, however, our intention wasn’t to fix the lawnmower to spare ourselves the difficult work of returning to the push-style. We’d grown up with that, so going back to doing it that way didn’t require any imagination.

Our plan was ambitious: turn an old lawnmower into a motorized go-cart. For weeks, we worked on building a heavy, sturdy wooden frame that we’d already tested by jumping on it. We repurposed the lawnmower’s wheels, attaching them to the frame, and engineered a steering mechanism that, in theory, was quite clever.

Steering relied on a plastic-covered cable tied to either side of the cart. Pulling the cable one way or the other would cause the front wheels to turn — though not nearly enough to navigate a 90-degree street corner. When faced with tight turns, we had to get off and manually shift the body another 45 degrees to keep going.