Saturday, June 08, 2013
Mason Williams was the
poet who wrote a series of poems that are best delivered while clapping on the
beat and stomping a foot on the back-beat.
There is quite a collection including “Them Toad Suckers”, “Them Lunch
Toters”, “Them Moose Goosers”, “Them Dog Kickers” and so on. Today I was pulling out the branches of
barely leafing devil’s club and I happened to remember one of his originals, “Them
Sticker Gitters”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gJQwgLWSjJ0
That particular
ditty is quite appropriate while pulling out devil’s club because, as you might
imagine, it is full of stickers. Devil’s
club, as far as I know, is an uniquely Alaskan weed. It’s branches grow underground and then
shoots arise from them. The underground
sections have few thorns, but the shoots and branches that grow up from them
are covered. The stickers are
particularly nasty because they seem to each have their own drop of poison and
whether they imbed or not, wherever they break the skin, they leave a sore that
swells a bit and irritates for days. If
the thorn is broken off under the skin, then digging it out is the only
cure. I remember spending entire summers
in Phoenix without shoes. There were
several stickers that grew around the neighborhood like mesquite and paloverde
and the occasional tumble weed, but the worst surprise was to step, full-force,
on a bullhead. Named after the fish, I’m
sure, the bullhead is maybe ¼” in diameter, hard, and covered with spines of
various lengths. Stepping barefoot into
a bullhead patch gave little alternative but to sit down as quickly as possible
and pull out the little monster. If the tip
was broken off, then it was Mom’s turn to find a needle and dig it out. We just
loved that, and I decided that I would rather dig out my own thorns than have
someone else do it. Our yard was
surrounded by inhospitable plants. We
had a rose hedge that surrounded the back yard and a pyracantha hedge along one
side of the front yard and Mom’s individual roses on either side of the
driveway on the other side of the front yard.
One might assume that Mom enjoyed picking out stickers, but I think she
was just teaching us to be careful. When
I was old enough to join Dad on hunting trips, we would walk miles in the
desert looking for quail. Cactus grew
everywhere and the large-thorned varieties like saguaro and barrel cactus weren’t
really too much of a problem because they were visible, but rubbing up against
the small thorns of a prickly pear would insinuate tiny spines into your clothes
and your skin that you couldn’t hardly pick out. It was more effective to scrape them off with
the knife edge. The real evil specimen,
however, was the cholla or jumping cactus.
The little balls of thorns were so tenuously attached to the main plant
that bumping it would result in the balls going everywhere. The hundreds spines on each ball were barely
hooked on the tip and were as fine as a hypodermic needle, so if you inadvertently
hit one, you were left with maybe dozens of needles stuck deeply in whatever
part of your body they happen to contact.
It was common to see a steer with jumping cactus stuck on it’s body and
I have spent some time pulling out the spines from our dog while roaming the
desert landscape. The story that still
makes me cringe is of a neighbor as told by her husband. They were not outdoor types and found
themselves out in the desert. The wife
had to relieve herself, and having no rest room for miles around, decided to
squat out of sight in the time-honored tradition. Untraditionally, she squatted over a cholla
and it was a painful learning opportunity that she realized as her husband
pulled the many spines from her tender parts.
And here I sit this evening with the devil’s club spines that penetrated
my leather gloves irritating my fingers.
I am ready for a little exploratory surgery, I guess, so maybe I’ll just
play that Mason Williams clip one more time…..
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