The Joy of Bush-Hogging

Okay, so this week’s column isn’t about “talking Southern,” your compiler will grant you.  Instead, it’s about “living Southern,” about being Southern, about owning and caring for land, about solving all the world’s problems in a single weekend (if only one could be made king), and about performing an activity virtually every landed Southerner (and that term is nearly oxymoronic) engages in at least annually.   Bush-Hogging – it just sounds fun, doesn’t it?

For those from the city or another planet (and there’s not much difference, it sometimes seems to your compiler and other bucolic types), a note on terminology might be in order.  A Bush Hog is not the kind of hog that needs a mud hole, a slop bucket, or a fence; rather, it’s the large, tractor-towed rotary cutting machine made since 1951 by the eponymous Selma, Alabama-based manufacturer of heavy equipment. 

If you mow your pastures and farm roads two to three times per year, a Bush Hog is indispensable.  If you want to clear taller-than-head-high brush from an overgrown tract, a Bush Hog is a must – so much so that the name has basically become generic, like getting something from the Frigidaire, or using a Xerox machine or a Q-Tip.

Not running laterally across any slope, avoiding such hazards as large stones, stumps, fallen logs, and similar debris, and hoping to stay far from stinging insects are about one’s biggest  worries on a Bush Hog.  For example:

• Your compiler once accidentally knocked a hornet nest out of a tree while Bush-Hogging, which was not one of his life’s richer experiences.  
• His brother-in-law once, while blissfully mowing a pasture with the family’s Bush Hog, struck a buried rock in just such a way that a spark was thrown.  It lit the dry field afire, and he had made nearly a full round of the pasture before he noticed that about a fourth of it had already burned up.  
• And one time ten years or so ago, your compiler was Bush-Hogging fire breaks on the family timber farm in Brooks, when his cellphone pinged a text message as he was making the 180°-turn from one firebreak to another.   In the second during which he looked down to retrieve it from his overall bib pocket and read the text, the bucket on the tractor clipped a mature pine at about twenty miles per hour, which threw your compiler hard against the steering wheel and cracked a rib.   Ever since, he has considered himself the Poster Child Against Texting While Bush-Hogging.

But if one can manage to avoid such mishaps, Bush-Hogging is one of the most therapeutic things a fellow can do.   It’s relaxing, it’s productive, and it allows one to enjoy the beauty of God’s Creation while being a steward over his own portion of it.   Your compiler has often said that his psychiatrist is Dr. John Deere, which is pretty spot-on.

Your compiler doesn’t know about you, but he’s ready to do some serious Bush-Hogging;  he did not get the farm properly laid- by for winter last October, so a good, leisurely  Bush-Hogging in the mild warmth of April will be high on his agenda this month.

Bush-Hogging – very few things in life are more satisfying.