What is it?

Some folks do call it a Sling Blade. Not me, but some folks. Kudos to Randy Chaffin for answering on Facebook and picking up on my intent to tie it into the Sling Blade movie. It is also known as a Kaiser blade, a ditch bank blade, a brush ax, or a bush ax. I don’t think I had ever seen one in use growing up around here. Road crews used them to clear out brush in ditches and the road right-of-ways. Having used one since, I’ll say they can do some damage. They are sharp and weigh about as much as a standard ax. When I first saw the movie Sling Blade, I had a completely different tool in mind. The following photo shows what we called a sling blade.

I started cutting the grass when I was just big enough to reach the brake pedal, which wasn’t very old. Daddy would cut the grass on the ditch and make a lap right next to the house. Then he would turn the mower over to me. We shared a Snapper riding mower with the Wesley’s who lived next door. The Weedeater, or the string trimmer as it is known generically, was not invented until the 1970s. So if you wanted to trim grass at the edge of your house, you were stuck with some handheld trimmers, which weren’t much better than a large pair of scissors. It was a tedious job at best. Clearing grass or brush on a large scale where we couldn’t get the riding mower was done with a sling blade.

Now I won’t tell you we worked too hard with a sling blade, but there was one specific time when we used it. If we hit a baseball across the road and into the ditch on the other side, we tried to watch it closely. Nobody cut that grass, and it could be a mess. That’s where the sling blade came in handy. It could clear out a small area reasonably quickly, and we found many baseballs that way. You just had to make sure you didn’t go too far down with the blade because it would cut the cover. With a baseball costing about a week’s allowance, we tried to take care of them.