"Whoever spends the early hours of one summer day, while the dew spangles in the grass, in pushing these grass cutters over a velvety lawn, breathing the fresh sweetness of the morning air and the perfume of new-mown hay, will never rest contented in the city."
- Frank J. Scott, The Art of Beautifying the Home Grounds, 1879

"Do you smell something dead? "

Dan Lere throttles his Exmark Lazer Z riding mower, a thousand-pound vehicle capable of razing a five-foot-wide swath of your velvety lawn in one pass and of generating noise about 10 decibels below what experts label deafening. I count 13 warning, caution and danger stickers plastered across the Exmark. Even after the machine is shut down, the roar of its engine and cutting blades lingers, reverberating almost as long as it takes the green hash of grass cuttings and dust to float to the ground. Lere removes his Gun Muffler ear-protection headgear, wipes the sweat from his brow with a sun-reddened forearm, and sniffs.

Lere's assistant, Larry James, quiets his rotary string trimmer, which in action sounds like a loud beehive. "Yeah, I smell it," he says.

There are few circumstances more unnerving than the whiff of death emanating from a house on a desolate street. For an exciting moment, the phrase "discovered Thursday morning by a lawn-care worker" plays in my head in the voice of news anchor Jim Gardner. Mercifully, the odor doesn't intensify as we approach the house. We inspect our equipment for telltale signs - I'm carrying the (aptly named) Echo Power Blower-4600, a supersonic air tube that, with the slight pull of an index finger, attacks stray blades of grass with a 180-mile-an-hour force.

The smell, it becomes apparent, is originating from the newly mown yard of the house next door in this modest Levittown neighborhood. If we had nothing better to do, we would investigate further. But Thursday is a 16-lawn day. We've gotta move.

"The other lawn guy must have hit a rabbit," Lere concludes.

Ahh . . . summertime!

The other lawn guy. Does everybody have a lawn guy now?

Even before the Easter decorations are down, the lawn guys start staking out turf in the subdivisions of suburbia. They quickly become the primary daytime traffic in these home-studded grasslands, outnumbering even the sport-utility vehicles. The configuration of their trucks is so standard, you would think it was state-regulated. Three guys sit jammed across the front seat of a pickup. Rattling in the truck's bed are blowers and weed whackers, rakes and hoes, a few bags of topsoil. Attached to this is a flatbed trailer with the heavy gear: the super-wide mowers, the kind nobody but a pro drives.

The lawn guys come every week - every two if you're living on the edge - and in 20 minutes they blitzkrieg your lawn. They cut, trim and blow in an earsplitting symphony. When the dust clears, you have a manicured yard and a bill for $25 (your rate may vary).

When exactly was it that middle-class and even working-class suburbanites stopped mowing their own lawns? Lawn men once were the province of the rich, whose properties were rightly labeled "grounds. " Now the guy down my street who installs heating and air conditioning systems has his quarter-acre done. The business of cutting America's yards has become pervasive enough to have a nickname: Mow, Blow and Go.

In 1997, 22 million U.S. households - about one in five - spent $14.6 billion on lawn and landscape services, a million-household increase over 1996, according to the Professional Lawn Care Association of America. The PLCAA buzz is that two million more homes will make the leap to hired lawn help this year.

The PLCAA credits this boom to a robust economy and to the growing number of people who are eager to trade back a little money for one less weekend obligation.

One other factor lawn guys decline to mention: Mowing your lawn is mind-numbingly boring.

"It's hard work," says Lere, 43. "Especially if all you have is a push mower. So, hey, here's a guy who'll do it for 25 bucks. Give him 25 bucks! "

I decide that, to truly probe the modern America psyche, I need to ride along with a lawn team and experience this trend from the truck. The first couple of lawn-lowerers I contact - networking through my own (occasional) lawn man - prefer not to be in the newspaper because, let's say, of peculiarities in their payroll process. But Lere is game.

"Sure," he says, "if you don't mind sitting in the middle. "

I could even make myself useful, he adds, as his leaf-blower man. In the holy trinity of Mow, Blow and Go, I will be Blow.

We meet at Lere's house in Levittown. Like many Levittown kids, Lere hustled to cut lawns around here when he was younger, Levittown having been built specifically to let working stiffs own yards. And like most Levittowners, Lere went to work at the steel plant, but (like most Levittowners) he was laid off. So 15 years ago he got a truck and returned to cutting.

"I got into it when it was first starting to take off," he says as we start down the street in his Ford pickup, a flatbed trailer jouncing behind us. "When I started, there were only six ads in the Piggybank Shopper for lawn work. The last time I looked, there were 40. "

For Lere and other lawn men, cutting grass is a way to be your own boss. "I guess there are some guys who make enough that they don't have to work in the winter. But not many. " You can conceivably make a couple grand per week in season "if you work six days. But I don't." In the winter, he says, a lot of lawn guys drive oil trucks; his pickup has a snowplow hitch. "But you can't count on plowing snow. " And Lere loathes leaves. "A yard that takes 15 minutes to do the lawn takes three hours to do the leaves. "

So in the fall and winter Lere shifts to another seasonal job: He's a taxidermist.

Our first stop is to pick up Larry James, 42, Lere's assistant. For years Lere had the traditional three-man team, "but Larry's real good. He and I have been managing. We don't need a third guy. "

In truth, with unemployment at a record low, reliable third guys are hard to find. "It's the biggest problem. No one wants to do this job," he says. "It's hot, dirty, sweaty, noisy - everything that they told you in church that hell would be. "

At that moment, as if for impact, we stop in front of Christ the King Church. From out of a little house behind the churchyard comes James, a barrel-chested, sunburn-pink guy with strings of wavy blond hair worn long in back, in what might be called the Darren Daulton style. He and Lere have been spending summer days together for four years.

James hands Lere a copy of the Trentonian. They take a moment to assess the Page Six girl. "We buy this newspaper every day. And we don't care about Trenton," Lere says. I slide into the middle. The ball of the truck's stick shift hovers dangerously between my legs.

We quickly buzz the lawn of a pizzeria plaza and then a Gulf station, where Lere refuels his equipment. We gaze at passing cars and talk business. "There's another one," Lere says, pointing to the Texaco across the street, where a pickup, complete with the requisite flatbed trailer, is getting its morning fill-up.

"Over there, that's Mr. Lawn," Lere says.

And it is. On the side of the other guy's truck, it says "Mr. Lawn. "

"He's big. He's got, like, four trucks," Lere says. Is consolidation besetting the grass-cutting business? Any franchises moving in? "Nah," he answers. "I don't think there's enough money. 'Cause good people, they're gonna want to make 30, 40, 50 thousand a year with benefits. You just can't pay someone like that. "

Yet another lawn guy pulls up to the pump. "Well, we got some nice days, anyway," he says.

We do a couple of quickie jobs in Levittown before hitting an upper-crust neighborhood in Lower Makefield. This will be the first job on which I, Blow, get to blow. If you've ever seen a professional-caliber leaf blower, you know you don't really carry it; you wear it. It goes over your shoulders like a gas-powered backpack and resembles the ectoplasm-disintegrating rig Bill Murray wore in Ghostbusters. I suit up and wait (blowing comes at the end), while James starts mowing and Lere revs up the weed whacker. And then the house's screen door swings open, and the homeowner, a lawyer type, pokes out his head.

"Would it be too early to offer you guys a beer? "

Now, he seems like a nice guy, but it's about quarter to 10 in the morning.

"Nah, no thanks," Lere says.

"Well, ginger ale, whatever. It's going to get hot out here, so if your boys get thirsty, just knock on the door. "

I wonder what he really wants. Also, since he referred to working up a thirst, I'm kind of embarrassed watching the guys do the work. If the lawyer asks, I'll tell him I'm a specialist. A pure blower-man. The best.

"You guys have been doing a great job," the homeowner continues. He gazes at a small strip of grass between his driveway and his neighbor's. "Listen," he says, getting to the point. "You can do the whole median. That'll be great. "

Aha! The touchy border politics of suburban property lines.

"All right," Lere says. "I think the other guy did it last time. "

"Yeah, they're really nice people there, an older couple," the lawyer says. "I think they're on the verge of asking for your number. "

James rolls the Lazer Z over the median, which requires only one pass of the mower. Then it's time for me to blow. Lere shows me how to start the motor, and the thing comes on, and it's hellfire-loud. A World War I fighter plane is on my back. My technique is terrible. I'm pushing cuttings over areas I've already cleared. I'm burning gasoline to chase individual blades of grass five feet down the driveway. It's frustrating.

In Los Angeles, they outlawed gas-powered leaf blowers. Concerned homeowners, including TV celebrities Meredith Baxter and Peter Graves, testified at the hearings that led to the ban. "It's not the way to treat Mother Earth," said Julie Newmar (a.k.a. Cat Woman), who called leaf blowers "a three-foot extension of a gardener's masculinity. " (As if I need such a thing. ) Not ones to take this assault lying down, the Association of Latin American Gardeners in L.A. staged a hunger strike on the steps of City Hall. Without leaf blowers, they said, their jobs would take twice as long, they would have to charge more, and as one gardener observed, "people don't like to pay more, especially the rich people. "

Lere sympathizes. "You've seen how much blowing off I've got to do. How much longer would it take if I had to sweep that? That's the whole thing right there. I have the equipment and they don't. I've got a mower that costs $7,000. If I don't have that mower, I would have to charge 50 bucks. "

At last I figure it out, why we pay people to do our lawns. It's what economists call the law of relative advantage. It's why nations import goods from other nations. It's why we buy hamburger meat at the Acme instead of raising and slaughtering our own livestock. Someone else is set up to do it better.

The economy of lawn care mirrors the American economy. You strive, you succeed, you get a lawn, you watch out your window as a hired hand mows it for you - and you've arrived. And the guy sweating in your yard strives to get a lawn guy himself.

The lawn is America's contribution to world garden design, writes Michael Pollan in Second Nature: "Like the interstate highway system, like fast-food chains, like television, the lawn has served to unify the American landscape. " And so Lere and Mr. Lawn and the rest keep getting business, from rich people, working people, everybody.

"One customer," Lere recounts, "was an older lady, a senior citizen, and her daughter cleaned my house. Her husband's a mailman. He just doesn't want to do it on weekends, you know? So I started doing her lawn. It just goes like that, it keeps going. "

Lawns form our communities. They establish our status and put it on display, front and center. Most important of all, they create a need for some particularly cool heavy machinery. Think that's not important? Want to make something of it? Just try. I'll blow you away.