Page 21 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

The word “lawn” didn’t even exist until the 1500s. Back then, “lawns” referred to expanses of grass shared by communities to feed grazing livestock, as opposed to “fields,” which denoted land used to grow plants for human consumption. But by the eighteenth century in England, ornamental lawns similar to the ones we know now had emerged—back then, lawns were maintained by handheld scythes and shears, and so keeping a lawn without the help of grazing animals was a sign you were rich enough to hire lots of gardeners, and also to own land that did nothing but look good.

The ornamental lawn fad spread throughout Europe, and also to the United States, where people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson maintained a closely mown lawn at Jefferson’s estate, Monticello.

Over time, the quality of lawns in a neighborhood began to be seen as a proxy for the quality of the neighborhood itself. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby pays for his gardeners to mow his neighbor’s lawn before Daisy Buchanan visits. Or, to cite an example closer to home, when I first moved to Indianapolis in 2007, I suddenly found myself the owner of a lawn, which I struggled mightily to maintain. Although we lived on only a third of an acre, it took my little electric lawn mower and me two hours to cut all the grass. One Sunday afternoon, my next-door neighbor interrupted me mid-mow and offered me a beer. As we stood in my half-mown yard, he said, “You know, when the Kaufmanns lived here, this was the nicest lawn in the neighborhood.”

“Well,” I answered after a while, “the Kaufmanns don’t live here anymore.”

It is truly staggering how much of our shared resources we devote to Kentucky bluegrass and its cousins. To minimize weeds and make our lawns as thickly monocultured as possible, Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields. To keep all the lawns in the U.S. green year-round requires, according to a NASA study, around two hundred gallons of water per person per day, and almost all of the water shooting from sprinklers is treated drinking water. Grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills. And then there is the direct financial outlay: We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on lawn maintenance.

We do get something in exchange, of course. Kentucky bluegrass provides a good surface for soccer and games of tag. Lawn grass cools the ground, and offers some protection from wind and water erosion. But there are better, if less conventionally beautiful, alternatives. One could, for instance, devote a front yard to growing plants that humans can eat.

I know all of this, and yet I still have a lawn. I still mow it, or pay someone else to. I don’t use pesticides and welcome clover and wild strawberries as part of the lawn, but still, there’s a lot of lawn bluegrass in our yard, even though Poa pratensis has no business being in Indianapolis.

It strikes me as interesting that in contrast to proper gardening, lawn maintenance doesn’t involve much physical contact with nature. You’re mostly touching the machines that mow or edge the grass, not the plant matter itself. And if you’ve got the kind of Gatsby lawn we’re all told to reach for, you can’t even see the dirt beneath the thick mat of grass. And so mowing Kentucky bluegrass is an encounter with nature, but the kind where you don’t get your hands dirty.

I give Poa pratensis two stars.

THE INDIANAPOLIS 500

EVERY YEAR, near the end of May, between 250,000 and 350,000 people gather in the tiny enclave of Speedway, Indiana, to watch the Indianapolis 500. It is the largest annual nonreligious gathering of human beings on Earth.

Speedway is surrounded by, but technically independent from, Indianapolis. Basically, Speedway is to Indianapolis as the Vatican is to Rome. The Vatican comparisons don’t end there. Both Speedway and the Vatican are cultural centers that draw visitors from around the world; both contain a museum; and Speedway’s racetrack, while commonly called “The Brickyard,” is also sometimes known as “The Cathedral of Speed.” Of course, the Vatican analogy falls apart if you dig deeply enough. In my admittedly few trips to the Vatican, I have never been offered an ice-cold Miller Lite by a stranger, whereas that happens often when I visit Speedway.

At first blush, the Indianapolis 500 seems tailor-made for ridicule. I mean, it’s just cars driving in circles. The drivers literally go nowhere. The race is crowded, and usually hot. One year, my phone case partially melted in my pocket while I sat in the Turn 2 grandstand. It’s also loud. Every May, I can hear the cars practicing when I am working in my garden—even though the Speedway is five miles from my house.

As a spectator sport, the 500 leaves much to be desired. No matter where you sit or stand, you can’t see the entire track, so important events take place that you cannot follow. Because some cars are laps ahead of others, it’s almost impossible to know who’s winning the race unless you bring oversized headphones to listen to the radio broadcast of the event you are watching. The largest crowd to watch a sporting event every year cannot see most of the sporting event.

But it’s been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention. The Indy 500 features open-wheel racing, which is to say that the wheels of the cars are not covered by fenders, and the driver’s cockpit is open to the elements. Some truly amazing engineering is involved in getting these cars to travel more than 220 miles per hour around the two-and-a-half-mile course. The cars have to be fast, but not so fast that the g-forces in the corners cause drivers to lose consciousness. The cars have to be responsive, and predictable, and reliable, because while driving at 220 miles per hour, these open-wheeled vehicles are often inches away from one another. For more than a hundred years, the Indianapolis 500 has been examining a question that is of serious concern to people in the Anthropocene: What is the proper relationship between human and machine?

Today, the track is entirely asphalt except for a single yard of red bricks at the finish line, but when the first Indianapolis 500 took place on May 30, 1911, the track was paved entirely with bricks—3.2 million of them. The winner of that first five-hundred-mile race was Ray Harroun, who was driving a car that featured his own invention, the rearview mirror. In fact, many early automotive innovators were involved with the Indianapolis 500. Louis Chevrolet, who founded the car company, owned a racing team. His brother Gaston won the Indianapolis 500 in 1920 only to die later that year in a race at the Beverly Hills Speedway.

Indeed, racing cars is an exceptionally dangerous sport—forty-two drivers have died at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the track’s history. Many more have been injured, some seriously. In 2015, IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe nearly died after a crash at the Speedway severed a femoral artery. There’s no escaping the uncomfortable fact that one of the thrills of racing is how close drivers get to the edge of disaster. As the legendary driver Mario Andretti put it, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

But I do think car racing accomplishes something—it takes both the person and the machine to the edge of possibility, and in the process, we get faster as a species. It took Ray Harroun six hours and forty-two minutes to drive the first five hundred miles at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; it took 2018 winner Will Power just under three hours.

That’s his real name, by the way. Will Power. Nice guy. Once I was standing by a valet stand next to Will Power, and when the valet showed up with my 2011 Chevrolet Volt, Will Power said to me, “You know, I am also a Chevrolet driver.”

But the Indy 500 isn’t really about going fast; it’s about going faster than everyone else, which reflects one of my top-level concerns about humanity: We cannot seem to resist the urge to win. Whether it’s climbing El Capitan or going to space, we want to do it, but we also want to do it before anyone else, or faster than anyone else. This drive has pushed us forward as a species—but I worry it has also pushed us in other directions.

On the day of the Indy 500, though, I don’t think about what the race means. I’m not considering the ever-diminishing distinction between humans and their machines, or the Anthropocene’s accelerating rate of change. Instead, I am merely happy.

My best friend Chris Waters calls it Christmas for Grown-Ups. My race day starts at 5:30 in the morning. I make a cup of coffee, check the weather, and fill my backpack cooler with ice, water, beer, and sandwiches. By six, I’m checking my bike to make sure the tires are properly inflated and my patch kit is ready. Then I bike down to Bob’s Food Mart, where I meet up with friends and begin the beautiful early morning bicycle trip down Indianapolis’s Central Canal Towpath. Some years, it’s raining and cold; other years, the heat is overwhelming. But it is always beautiful, riding and joking with my friends and their friends, many of whom I see only once a year.

We bike down to Butler University’s track, where every year two of our friends engage in a one-mile footrace at seven in the morning. The IndyCars get faster decade over decade, but the footrace slows down. We place bets, and one or the other of them wins, and then we get back on our bikes for a couple of miles before stopping again outside the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where we meet up with more people, until we are a traveling band of a hundred or so bicycles. Everyone waves as we bike by. “Have a good race,” we say to one another, or else, “Safe race!”

We’re together, you see. We bike until the trail dead-ends at Sixteenth Street and then begin the long trip west, merging with the cars that are already stuck in traffic even though the race won’t begin for five more hours. We bike single-file for a nervous-making ten blocks before turning into the town of Speedway. People are sitting out on their porches. Occasionally, a cheer will erupt from seemingly nowhere. Everyone is selling their front yards as parking spots, shouting out prices. The noise level is rising now. I don’t like crowds, but I like this crowd, because I’m in an us that doesn’t require a them.

We make it to the Speedway, chain our bikes to a fence near Turn 2 and then head our separate ways. Some of us like to watch the race from Turn 2; others at the start/finish line. There are more traditions to come: the singing of “Back Home Again in Indiana,” some second-tier celebrity saying, “Drivers, start your engines,” the parade laps, and the race itself. Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you’re observing the traditions with now, but also all those who’ve ever observed them.

I’m able to write all of this in the present tense because these traditions function as a kind of continuity—they happened, yes, but they are still happening, and will go on happening. The rupture of that continuity was part of what made May of 2020 so difficult for me. As the pandemic took hold, I felt as if I was being unmoored from what I thought was reality. So much that had recently been extraordinary—wearing a mask, being conscious of every surface I touched or every human I walked past—was in the process of becoming mundane. And so much that had recently been mundane was becoming extraordinary.

The Sunday before Memorial Day of 2020, I packed my backpack as usual, and Sarah and I got on our bikes as usual. Near Bob’s Food Mart, we met up with our friends Ann-Marie and Stuart Hyatt. We wore masks as we biked down to the Speedway, where the gates were locked shut. It was so quiet, so impossibly quiet as we sat in a vast and empty parking lot. When the race finally did happen, in August, it was held without fans for the first time. I watched it on TV, and found it interminably boring.

But I’m thinking back to 2018. Dozens of us are locking our bikes to the chain-link fence and scattering about to our various seats in the crowded grandstands. In four or five hours, we will meet back at the fence, unlock our bikes, and repeat the rituals on the way home. We will talk about how this happened or that happened, how we are happy for Will Power, who is such a good guy and finally got his Indy 500 victory. I’ll tell my Will Power story, only to learn that many of my friends also have Will Power stories. Speedway is a small town after all, even on this day, and we are in it together.

I give the Indianapolis 500 four stars.

MONOPOLY