With the sputtering roar of a 1968 Johnson outboard, the "Right to Repair" movement might finally have met its match

Last month, I briefly achieved that elusive state of property-ownership nirvana in which every piece of equipment was working at the same time. For one glorious Saturday, not only the cars and the farm truck, but also my tractor, four-wheeler, side-by-side, lawn mowers, chainsaws, weed eater, backup generator, chipper, and outboard motor, were operating more or less as advertised. Anyone who has tried to impose order on a largeish rural property during a Louisiana summertime with anything besides an unlimited budget knows that this platonic ideal is rarely achieved. That Saturday morning, when my plans would normally be dictated by which bits of equipment happened to be working, no yard-maintenance project was off-limits. Ride-on-mower: check. Tractor: purring like a kitten. Chainsaw: yep. Weed-eater: likewise. Time to get to work.

This state of affairs was made more surprising by the fact that most of my equipment is of a vintage that should long since have consigned it to the junkyard. Much of it has been resurrected from whichever barn, field, or roadside ditch it happened to be in when it breathed its last. Our twenty-five-year-old farm truck was salvaged from a friend’s field, where it had sat abandoned since grinding to a halt five years previously, suffering electrical problems that I eventually traced to the activities of some mice living in the dashboard. Ditto the four-wheeler, which a neighbor was hauling to the dump when our son—at the time a bored fifteen-year-old stuck at home during early COVID—begged to try and resurrect it. The same neighbor was the source of the outboard motor, a 1968 Johnson which hadn’t run since the Reagan administration when we rescued it from the jaws of the garbage truck. With a little luck and a lot of YouTube videos, all these machines have been returned to, if not perfect, then at least sporadic working order. I’m not saying I’d set out to cross the Bering Strait with my Johnson outboard, but for an afternoon’s fishing on Lake Mary it does the trick. 

Being a "Man of a Certain Age"—which is to say, one whose confidence outstrips his ability—I find it hard to pass up any piece of defunct machinery without feeling a conviction that with enough care, attention and WD-40, it can be resurrected. What this fails to take into account is that sensible people don’t abandon expensive power equipment without good reason. So, much of the stuff I’ve inherited has idiosyncrasies that make operating it a delicate proposition. I was reminded of this when my sister-in-law asked to use our elderly side-by-side to ride down to Thompson Creek. “Of course!” I said, then launched into a lengthy description of how to (a) start it, (b) put it in gear, (c) get it out of gear when it inevitably gets stuck in reverse, and (d) stop it, since the brakes don’t work very well. “Easy once you get the hang of it,” I assured her. Becky regarded me dubiously, and decided to walk instead.

 Corporate America takes a dim view of do-it-yourselferism. Try taking your salvaged tractor, car, or lawnmower to a dealership for parts and see how long it takes before someone insists you’d be better off with a new one. Admit that you’re planning any DIY maintenance beyond refilling the gas tank and you’re likely to be met with dark mutterings about voided warranties, electric shocks, or grievous bodily harm. Against this stands Stewart Brand, the eighty-seven-year-old counterculture icon and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. For decades, Brand has been a standard bearer for the “Right to Repair” movement, which asserts that ownership of a thing is not merely a question of having paid for it. Brand maintains that our ownership of things is only fully manifested when we also meet the challenge of learning how they work, how to maintain them, and how to keep them going, long after the warranty expires. It’s an idea that unites tinkerers, how-to video creators, and cheapskates everywhere. Six states have passed Right to Repair laws allowing consumers access to the parts, tools, and information required to fix the stuff they own, with legislation pending in many more. 

Of course, having the right to repair one’s tractor isn’t the same as doing so successfully. At the time of writing, my tractor is inexplicably moribund in the half-cut field where I parked it on Saturday night with intentions of resuming bushhogging activities come Sunday. Now it won’t start; I suspect mice have been at the wiring again. So next weekend, I’ll be out there with a toolbox, exercising my right to repair until the tractor sings again … or I give up and call a real mechanic—whichever comes first.