Lawnmower Man: Kenneth Page Followed His Peculiar Dream from Texas to Florida.

Squatting by the roadside just inside the Pensacola city limits at the end of the trip, he grew more reflective than I had seen him before. "It's a hard time in our country right now. We're in a depression and it's worse than that—our people are in a depressed state," he said. "I don't care if people dub me Forrest Gump or Mow Dirt or whatever, if somebody may have been fixin' to jump off one of them big bridges and saw me, and then thought, 'Well who is this nut?' and then decided not to, then it was worth it.

"Or maybe somebody would see me when they were on the way to a job interview. They would see me with my feet kicked up on the hood of the mower ridin' down the highway, and that would put a smile on their face, and then they'd walk into that interview happy and get that job."

Jeff Blake

Kenneth Page

Jeff Blake

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Web Extra: Interview with the Lawnmower Man.


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Like Frontier Scouts, We Picked Up His Trail

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• Kenneth Page
• Kenny Page
• Mow Murray
• Ricky Collins
• Gary Hatter

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Pensacola sure needed a smile. The gracious old Spanish-tinged Southern city's other prestigious visitor that very day was Joe Biden, in town to allay concerns about the oil slick, which was then only just beginning to despoil the city's wedding-cake sand beaches and turquoise waters. Dead dolphins were washing up along with tar blobs and oiled pelicans. A restaurant offered "Oil-free crawfish" as a special, but humor, even black humor, was rare. The mood of the city was mutedly apocalyptic.

Page and I talked a little more. Page speaks in run-on paragraphs and tends to forget what he's told you already and at a pace much greater than Mow Murray's top speed. In other words, Page can be hard to follow, but there was one more thing that came through loud and clear: "This thing"—Mow Murray and the trailer—"is my reality and my life right now."

And then it was time for us to part. I had a plane to catch back home to Houston. Page was the better part of a thousand miles from a home that wasn't even a home anymore.

"Where are you headed now?" I asked him.

"A guy in Alabama said he might have a job for me," Page said. He said BP was offering free HazMat classes. "A friend of mine back in Texas told me he'd get me on the list," Page said. He switched on the engine, turned his rattling Murray around and roared back across Bayou Chico and toward the state line.