Our house on Orcas Island sits on the side of a hill, facing southwest and nearby Deer Harbor.
A tidal lagoon, west of Cayou Valley Drive, a narrow oiled gravel road, reflects the afternoon sun to our deck and kitchen window and is particularly welcome in winter. It's a lovely spot. The air, with 6000 miles of the Pacific to scrub it, always smells good and this time of year our days are sunny and dry but not hot.
The problem is the hill and the fecundity of life in the Pacific North- west. Everything wants to grow — from Douglas Fir, Yellow Cedar, and Madrona (Arbutus) to ferns, wild grasses, and the ever-present blackberry (in its carbon rather than silicon form). And, if you take your eyes off the yard for a few minutes, you'll find it covered with an impenetrable green covering about 100 feet deep.
So you have to cut back and attack the green wave regularly or you won't be able to go to Island Market ten miles away in Eastsound or to the nearby Deer Harbor post office to pick up your latest shipment of junk mail.
But how do you do it? In Switzerland years ago I watched three gray-haired men on a steep hillside swing scythes in perfect unison, mowing grass later to be converted into Swiss cheese. Garage sales are the major source of entertainment on Orcas Island and the provenance of virtually all inventory for other garage sales. On seeing an old scythe at a sale last year, I made a major executive decision. How hard could it be? I'd follow in the footsteps of the Swiss masters. My wife, Yvonne, seeing that I was buying another useless thing to store in the boathouse, smiled patiently. I brought the $25 scythe home and hung it on a peg. It hasn't moved since. I've reclassified the scythe from yard tool to collector's item and I'm certain it appreciates in value every day.
Well, with the scythe too precious to use on our hillside, our problem wasn't solved and nature began to exercise its right to eminent domain until Yvonne bought an electric Weed Whacker at another garage sale for $5. And then she went to work, up and down the hillside, demonstrating to all those green critters who was really boss. Just to show her what a sport I was, I got her a new trimmer, a Toro, at Home Depot, for $29.95 for Mother's day this year. She's in heaven.
George Ballas invented the Weed Whacker in 1971. He made the first one out of some fishing line, a tin can, and an electric lawn edger. Within two years the world had caught on and we had Weed Eaters, Weed Crashers, Weed Whips, Weed Wonders, and every other kind of weed thingamajig. Think about it. In 1970 there was no Weed Whacker. Not even the idea of one, though all the parts were readily available. Amazing.
Besides the plant-infested hillside, where only an invention like a Weed Whacker can make a dent, we have about a half acre in grass. Calling it a lawn wouldn't be quite accurate. And it needs mowing every so often. We hired Ed Cocq, but he's busy and shows up only when he has time. And he's expensive. The yard is on a slope, bumpy, and in parts rocky. It's not a good place to run a conventional lawn mower.
Our friend and carpenter/ designer/raconteur, Ken Wood, told me about a new invention, a Weed Whacker on wheels that you can run over anything and it'll cut it right down — high grass, even blackberries. These wheeled machines have gasoline engines and they're called string trimmers. You can use them in place of a rotary mower, more or less. I got an Ariens version on my next trip to the mainland and Home Depot. On sale for $300. They're wonderful. I like to wait until the grass is really high before I mow just to exercise the power of this wheeled wonder.
But what's really interesting is that the Weed Whacker was invented in 1971 and wheeled string trimmer didn't show up until almost 30 years later. Amazing. How do things like that happen — or not happen?
The lesson? Even with mature products there are new ideas waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves. There's always some new way to pull together existing pieces to answer a need in a new way. I recently reviewed a brand new agency management system from XDimensional Technologies and found that it had some clever functionality that could have been part of systems 25 years ago, if only someone had just thought of it. It's a pleasure to see innovation materialize out of the void.
It's an amazing world. Weed Whackers, wheeled string trimmers, and creativity in old software genres — all unexpected and unpredictable ingenuity. You've just got to keep your eyes open. As my father used to say, "Who would have thunk it?"
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