Drunk men don't cut grass

June 1, 2006

America should pray that lawn-cutting will become an Olympic sport. No country is more in training. Barely a mile passes without the sound of yet another portly man in long shorts (it's always a man and always long shorts) driving a little garden tractor as the cuttings shoot everywhere.

It helps that, as I've said before, that Americans have huge and unobstructed lawns. In that they are wise. As any European could tell them, it is tricky to let rip with a mower when there are tulips and fish ponds in the way. And American houses have neither tulips nor fish ponds.

What they do have, round here and in throat-irritating proportions, is fake animals. No states are better provided than Kentucky and Illinois (into which we passed the other day thanks to a ferry across the Ohio) when it comes to models of deer, small bears and anything else the owner fancies. If it's not a cuddly animal, it is a miniature jockey in racing colours. Why? It's beyond me.

The garden animals are fairly realistic. Or they would be if the plastic base that supports the legs were buried in soil. That way, the paws or hooves would stand on the ground. As it is, most people just drop them on the grass, where they look like giant versions of the model sheep and cows you probably had as a child.

Buried or not, they provide a lawn-cutting obstacle and it would be best to be sober when whipping round them with your mower.

And sobriety is a feature of this part of the world. There are runs of counties that are Dry, where alcohol can't be bought.

In some counties it's the strongest drink you'll get

Why? Well according to the man who runs the crossroads store near Harrodsburg, the immediate reason was religion but the actual reason was the soldiers at Fort Knox. I don't know why soldiers guarding America's gold reserves 50 miles away should have chosen Harrodsburg for a night on the razz but that, it seems, is what they did.

And according to Donald: "They created such Cain back in 1943 that the town decided it wasn't going to happen again and they banned alcohol there and then."

Donald is 74 and he started the shop 45 years ago. "Sold it to my son right over there two years ago an' I jus' help out here now."

"Helping out" didn't go so far as putting on fresh coffee for us but ther sight of hanging, yellow and parched tongues eventually gave him the hint.

He'd been a farmer back then, he said, and he'd had a corner of land he couldn't use and he built the shop.

"And there's enough traffic on this road to run a store?"

"Is when you're right nexx to a dry county. Jus' up there, tha's dry. And folks, they come here, first store over the border an' they stock up on what they can't get at home." He waved at the floor-straining stocks of beer cans and spirit bottles and admitted that somewhere among them there was probably also a tube of toothpaste or a can of soup that non-drinkers could find useful.

"In the next county," I asked, "do they look down on you as sinners?"

"Some sure do. Some. But there's plenty more, they're all religious when they're at home but they're real happy to come over here and be sinners on the other side of the border."

About half the counties in Kentucky were dry, he said.

"Religion, mainly. They've been dry over there since 1943. The mil'try from over Fort Knox use to come over and raise hell, so they went ahead and banned alcohol.

I asked what there was to see at Fort Knox. "Not rightly much," he said. "Can't get real close to it. Moment you turn on to the road, there's soldiers out to stop you. Can't get closer to it than that house over there," and he pointed to a corner of a window visible through the beer crates and a building that stood several hundred metres further on,

"Now that's all changed. They're in a dry county over there but they can drink, see, because that's Federal."

Some states have gone back to being wet, Donald said. "And once they go wet, they don't go dry again. They realise the taxation they're missing. That can count higher than religion even in these here parts."

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