While there has been much emphasis of late on the ideas of recycling, restoring, and re-using a lot of our "stuff" in the name of sustainability, sometimes it just happens naturally. Especially here in the North Woods of Maine since the mill closures forced a lot of people in the area to use their creativity to sustain a livlihood.
Eight years ago when I bought my "camp" on South Twin Lake I discovered a need for few essential maintenance tools and pieces of equipment including a lawn mower. The new friends I had made area pointed me in the direction of the supermarket bulletin boards and a couple of local guys who liked to fix stuff like mowers. With very little effort I soon found and purchased a rather old mower in good running order for the sum of fifteen dollars cash. I had half expected it to fail on the first or second use but to my surprise it performed well for the whole first summer I used it. At the end of the season I put it away in one of my sheds and forgot about it until the following spring when the lawn needed to be cut. Again, I had my doubts about the mower ever starting again, and again I was surprised when it burst into life on the first pull. This cycle continued for another seven years so this year when for the first time it failed to start I was a little surprised. I had come to depend on it's unfailing reliability.
I pondered my small dilemma - should I pay to have a fifteen dollar mower fixed or just take it to the dump and get a new one. It owed me nothing and paying $160 for a new one after seven years did not seem too bad an idea. But then.... maybe I should give it one last chance before casting it off the the junk metal heap. By now I had my list of "go to guys" for just about everything. I had my plummer, my construction guy, my garage mechanic, and the guy who fixed my boat, all of whom could be depended upon to do whatever it took to get something working again when it failed. My "boat guy" had really surprised me when the transom on my old 1985 Crestliner cracked and began to come adrift from the rest of the boat. I was ready to call it quits with the boat but thought I'd take it to Lou anyway to take a look at it but feeling pretty sure he would tell me that it was beyond repair. He didn't. Instead he said he could fix it for about four hundred bucks which would include a reinforcing the transom with steel plates and caulking all the cracks. I invested in his belief and today the boat is still running serving it's purpose.
So I threw the lawn mower in the back of my truck and took it in to town for Lou to see what he thought. Lou has the reputation of being able to fix just about anything that has an engine, that floats, or that travels on snow. And sure enough, Lou said he could fix the mower. "Just leave it here and come back tomorrow" was about all he had to say. So I did. He cleaned out the carburettor and rebuilt it and put in a new filter and the old mower was back to starting on first pull again. The cost - forty bucks. As I drove home with the mower I couldn't help but smile knowing that I'd clearly done my part to keep equipment working instead of trashing it. The fact is that people around here do it for one simple reason - it makes a lot of economic sense. Not only that it serves the local economy. People like Lou have a purpose and an income. People like me save money and get stuff working again. Its simply economical.
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