The Cutlass

My friend Bryan recently posted a picture of the vast machete selection available at the hardware store near his new work site in Belize. I responded that I tried to cut my finger off with one once, and this is the story.

In Sierra Leone, machetes are called cutlasses, and they are one of the few tools many people have. They are kept as sharp as possible, and used like axes, lawn mowers, paring knives, root axes, and sometimes shovels. Men, women and children use them. Often you encounter people walking in the bush with their cutlass balanced across their heads, leaving their hands free.

They were sharpened on river rocks, and a good river rock for sharpening was rare and valuable. I have a story about a couple of good friends who fell out over such a rock.

Farmers and I often used them in clearing jungle in the swamps, first slashing through the succulent foliage and vines, then chopping down palms and other trees, and finally, using them to cut and dig out stumps if no axe was available.

Their use as lawn mowers, helped to maintain a 3-foot wide perimeter along jungle paths, pushing back the larger foliage and shrubs, and then trimming the grass that continually grew up. A common punishment in the village court for such crimes as thievery or adultery, was to require the perp. to clear and maintain a couple of miles of pathway through the bush. Those pathways connect all tropical Africa. If you were serving that sentence, everybody made sure to pass down that path while your were at it, to rub a little salt in the wound.

Mowing the “lawns” around houses meant cutting the grass down to about 2 inches, and this work was often done by young boys, known as bobos. Boys and girls (teetees) could do remarkable work. Everyone joked about harnessing bobo-power, but a group of small boys could free up a truck buried in mud, or help place an enormous beam high up in a structure.

To mow required getting low to the ground, taking a long-armed swing, and then swiping flat with the cutlass, and keeping your wrist very free at the last second to get additional speed and momentum. Lawns, frankly, looked pretty even and neat when cut that way.

That free wrist was also important when chopping through fields of caladiums, or taking down a palm tree. Maximum impact happened if a very sharp blade was moving fast and struck at just the right time.

One day, I was clearing a swamp with a farmer. We were taking all the soft foliage and grass down, and I was holding together bunches of grass with my left hand, while chopping them off with that swipe at ground level with the cutlass. A lot of people used a crooked stick in their left hand to bunch the grass, for fear of cutting themselves, but I knew what I was doing. I had a leather glove on my free hand. But the cutlass ricocheted off a hard root or something and bounced up, hitting my left hand, right at the base of my index finger. It felt like just a hard bang, but it did cut the glove.

I pulled the glove off, and blood started spurting about 6 inches straight up with each heart beat. The farmer ran into the bush and came back doggedly chewing some fiber. When it was workable, he mashed it into the wound and wrapped my hand tight with a palm frond. I took off walking as rapidly as I could back to my house, a couple of miles away. The blood seemed to be staunched pretty well, so when I got home, I pulled the bush dressing off to see what was going on, and it immediately started spurting in the air again. Really smart move on my part. Blood was everywhere, but I had gauze, and I wrapped and wrapped till I had it staunched once more.

There was a missionary hospital eleven miles away in Mattru Jong. I had a motorcycle, and I managed to get there. Everyone at the hospital already knew me from a malaria incident a few months before. I was a bloody mess, and the doctor saw me quickly. There were internal stitches on the blood vessel and 4 external stitches to close the wound. I was back home in a couple of hours. I walked back out to the swamp to find the farmer and let him know I was okay, but I was out of commission as labor for a couple of weeks.

I brought that cutlass home and used it extensively as a farm tool in Kansas. That continued when Lynn and I started vegetable and cut flower farming. Gradually, it fell out of favor to more specialized tools, though it still feels right in my hand.

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