This weed is my obsession. There are some things in life I can’t control. This one I can. I can try.
There’s this thing I do. Though “thing” doesn’t quite describe it adequately. Especially in consideration of my wife’s opinion on the matter. I’ll start over.
There’s this obsession I have. I walk the wild places of my property and pull the puncture weeds from the ground.
I don’t have a lot of wild places on the acre of land we live on. But there is enough. There is a fallow pasture on a sloping hill to the west and a steeper hillside on the north with weeds and shrubs and ivy climbing in the loose gravely dirt. There’s a chicken run that takes up some square footage, but the scraggly hens and sometime rooster keep all the weeds down in there. I also walk the strip that isn’t mine between the sidewalk and the county road with my head down.
Puncture weeds. Call them what you will. Puncture vine, goatheads, bullheads, devil’s weed, tackheads, bindii, catheads, tribulus terrestris. That last is the Latin term. It means spiky land weapon. I’ve been known, though, to call them by the most technical of term: “son of a bitch that bastard weed.”
I’ve been walking the wild places on the acre we live on since we’ve owned the property. More than nine years now. My head down, pacing, scanning, stooping, burying my fingertips into the soft dirt, pinching around the top of the plant directly above the taproot, gently extracting the weed.
If the weed is small and has no flowers I just discard it to dry up, wither back into the general weed detritus on the ground. If the weed is more mature and flowering or worse, I put it in a bucket. Then I look all around for any nutlets that separated from the vine. These nutlets—such a benign word—are the menacing part of the weed, the pokey fruit, the impetus of my obsession. The puncture.
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I’ve not moved too far from where I was raised in the borderlands of rural and over-subdivided Utah. I’ve ranged little more than three or four miles out to various places, apartments, family homes for rent. This place I’ve settled in is smack in the middle of where I grew up. Here there are good folks and families that don’t let go of their land.
Somehow I lucked out, and nine years ago I married a fine, patient woman from the big city to the north and lured her down here to this acre where she can watch me pace the pasture for a specific weed. She grew up in Immigration Canyon above the elevation that the weed can grow. She tolerates my obsession. Barely.
I learned to ride a bike when I was six. I learned to fix a flat tire on that bike when I was eight. I learned because I couldn’t wait for my father or an older brother to fix the flats I always came pushing back home with. I imagine I might have cried sometimes pushing the big, wounded bike along, the limp rubber tire folded over on the rim, walking that slow arduous mile back home.
Yeah, I probably cried. Makes me want to cry right now thinking about it. Here’s what I’m awful sure about: I learned to mutter my first curse words pushing my little gold bike with a banana seat and hi-rise handlebars. Don’t know what the curse might have been. Might have had an off-rhyme or some assonance with the sound that came out of the tube when I pulled the puncture weed, the nutlet, out of my tire.
Hiss-s-s-s-s-s.
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In the early years I paced the pasture without a hat. In the early years there were a lot more weeds to stoop for, stoop for and pull, and put in the bucket and empty in the big garbage by the garage. I roll the big garbage bin out to the street side on Tuesday nights. I don’t know if it’s the responsible thing to do, dumping the goatheads at the landfill. Last time I was at the landfill though it was crawling with puncture vine, a fence-to-fence trim carpeting of tribulus terrestris.
In the early years I had a little more hair on my scalp. I could stoop a little easier, more often. How quick the decline in joints and tendon and hair follicle nine-years can bring.
I’ve done some research on the weed. It’s considered noxious here in Utah. The entire country really. Those who know say the nutlet, or the seed, of the vine stays viable on average for seven-years. Seven-years. On average. It’s that average, the variable, that I am struggling with. I’ve been out there for nine.
I feel like I’ve made a dent. There’s a dent in my right ear now. Up high on it but not too high, along the rim, aimed straight at the noonday sun when I have my head down, scanning, stooping, pulling. Eradicating.
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I’ve owned a lot of bicycles since that first gold banana-seated hi-rise that was propped with a bow on it beside the Christmas tree. Best gift a boy can get. Or a girl for that matter. That patient lady I married and shunted out of the city, out of her canyon, has two girls. Twins. And a boy. They all got bikes, gifted to them on their birthdays. Two days later I was flipping those bikes on their seats and handlebars and cracking back the nuts on the hub axles and separating tire and tube from rim.
I have fixed a lot of flat bicycle tires. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.
I worked a brief nine-month stint at a bike shop when I was in high school. My boss was a sadist. He made me clean up guard-dog shit in the fenced off back space behind the shop where he stored used bikes. He made me do inventory on ball-bearings and spokes in the 120-degree attic space. He blared country music through the stereo speakers in the greasy workshop.
He was a horrible boss, but he taught me a few tricks to fixing flat tires, because that was what I spent most of my time doing at the bike shop. The kids’ bikes with flats were lined up in the dozens around the corner. I used to wonder, pushing a tube down into the tepid water of that little tub looking for bubbles to rise, how could so many fathers never have learned to fix something so simple as a flat?
When I was a kid I learned where I could ride my bike in the neighborhood without rolling up the punctures in the tread of my tires. I learned early on that the sidewalk in front of the house I live in now was a devil’s thorn gauntlet.
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Old memories. Learned behavior. Instinct. I walk the quiet strip between the sidewalk and the county road in front of my home. Neighbors drive by. I’m sure they wonder. Some honk and wave. Some stop, and I explain. They all drive by, and I stoop and pull and kill.
I wear an old straw beach hat now, something I picked up in Mexico for 100 pesos. It’s got a little rusted Mexican beer logo on the crown. The hat’s lost its cocky cowboy shape over the years. Like me, it sags and curls in places it’s not supposed to. But it shades my ears and the back of my neck.
I remember the phone call from the dermatologist. It had only been a few days after he cut off the little surface mole and said, No news is good news.
From the Latin: Cancer, meaning crab. Crab meaning creeping creature with an exoskeleton distinctive with sharp spines.
I have a friend who ran over a duck on his bicycle. I don’t believe either one of us or anyone else I know has ever ran over a crab.
I pace the pasture with my old cerveza hat on. I stoop. Pull. It gives me time to think.
My wife and kids in the house. Bikes propped against the garage wall. Sun in the sky. Neighbors watching over their own. I worry over my job, my writing, repairs on the house. I look forward to fall and the snows after that. Less sun. No weeds.
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Stoop and pull. Last summer we had no rains, and I thought that average, that confounded variable of years was broken finally. This summer the rains have come up steady from the south though, and the weed pokes through the warm soil in the old pasture here, there. The usual places. Along the strip. I pace and think. I work out plots in my fiction, character traits, conflict, back-story. Motivations. Violence.
I spot one. This one is flowering with five or six runners spreading low, creeping through the other lesser weeds. So I stoop, slide my fingertips under the horizontal shoots, locate the center of the plant, like the specialist with the malignancy in my ear, and pull the long taproot from my acre where I don’t want it, but where it has no other judgment or need but to grow.
Photo courtesy of the author