Tribulus Terrestris

Correct me if I'm wrong Southern California readers, but bull thorns seem to have all but vanished from the motherland.  About ten years ago I was telling Anna about them and in doing so rekindled my own fascination with this, the most vicious and elegant of thorns.  Besides being a great image for a song, they are emblematic of my youth, way out yonder on the frontier of suburbia.   Because these thorns, born of low growing weeds with deceptively pretty yellow flowers, mostly thrive in the dry ground characteristic of yet-to-be-landscaped yards or vacant lots, I suspect that many of my home town peers who lived in more established parts of town where there were fewer such spaces might not share my visceral association with them. 

     If your bicycle rode over one, you had a flat tire my friend.  If you stepped on one, you were screwed.  They caused a pain which was uniquely intense.  Their puncture was always clean and deep, a pinpoint of blood often all that marked the thorn's ground zero.  There was none of this namby pamby "ouch, I stepped on a thorn".  No no no.  The victim of a bullthorn hit went down like a crack whore.  Sometimes there were tears.  All barefoot walkers (with the exception of leather footed Gary Jordan) were vulnerable, because although these thorn may have originated in an uninhabited lot, they had a way of migrating far and wide, and then waiting with the patience of a predator.  They were multi pronged and virtually indestructible.  The weed could only be safely disposed of by sliding a shovel under it's sole center root, decapitating it, then delicately grasping the middle of the plant and carefully lifting its circular thorny lace, beaded with the still green toritos, as a magician lifts a silk scarf, and placing it in a trash barrel.   

     But they were so cool looking, like long horned steer.  Their aura was redolent with the sound of my father's voice, hounding my brother and I go outside on a perfectly good Saturday morning and "knock down some weeds".  Calling to mind table tennis games in the back yard the players seemingly safe from harm, until a back hand lunge rendered one vulnerable and suddenly stricken.  They evoked memories of sandals packed so solid with embedded thorns that you could tap dance in them.  Now, decades later, they stand as a totem of life in a hometown which hadn't yet been completely stripped of wildness.  

     I resolved that on my next trip to California I would find a bull thorn and bring it back to New England to show Anna.  But to my disappointment, the next time I was out west I was unable to find one.  I drove out to what had been the edge of the new housing developments in search of some vacant bull thorn space.  The first red flag that things had changed was that I had a hard time finding an edge. "The outskirts of town" had become "the old part of town", thoroughly landscaped and emptied of bull thorn potential.  I returned to Massachusetts without a thorn. 

     I Wiki-ed the subject and came up with the following: Bull Thorns, formally known a Tribulus Terrestris, came to California in the early 20th century from Eurasia or Africa, probably attached to the wool of sheep.  The fruit of the "puncture vine" also known Torito, (little bull), when ground into a powder and ingested, is known to act as a preventative for high cholesterol.  They are also thought to stimulate testosterone production and were used by the 1988 Bulgarian Olympic wrestling team to increase muscle mass.  In Indian the powder is known as an aphrodisiac.  

     This was all interesting, but the fact that I found most intriguing stemmed from another moniker for the thorn: the caltrop.  A caltrop is essentially a landmine, an ancient anti-personnel weapon made of two or more sharp nails or spikes arranged in such a manner that one of them  is always facing up, usually in the shape of a tetrahedron (tribulus).  Elegant and brutal in their simplicity they have been used for millenia as an impediment to advancing armies, be they elephants, horses or soldiers.  

     During my teen age years the landscape of my neighborhood teemed with these hazards, booby traps thrown down by mother nature in doomed defiance of a tsunami of suburban sprawl on whose foamy edge my adolescence unfolded.  At the same time that American soldiers were being maimed by poison tipped caltrops planted by the Viet Cong, another war was being waged in my own backyard.  The zeitgeist of that era had all eyes focused on Southeast Asia.  Few seemed to notice that in Southern California, developers were going quietly about the business of squeezing the life out of what was, at least in its downtown quadrant, a history minded town.  The incongruous carpet of vibrant green which bloomed in the hills after winter's first rains was just fresh blood to the sharks of subdivision.  The places where as kids we could go and see that even in the man handled sterility of suburbia there was a natural world, were systematically gutted, buried under instant communities, and irrigated with pirated water.  Voices calling for preservation, which had at another point in history compelled developers to respect a line in the sand short of desiccating other wild places like the Sierra Nevada mountains or the Anza Borrego desert, did not seem to exist in my home town.  

     Now, whenever I visit Riverside I make a point of taking a ride out the avenue to the nooks and crannies of the town which only insiders know still exist, places where knots of palm and eucalyptus hold sway and a few rows of orange trees still stand.  I'm nourished by the natural beauty which has somehow survived there, and every once in a while I'll catch a glimpse of a yellow flower in an open lot and remember Tribulus Terrestris.

The Age Of Obama

My impulse to write often seems to arise in connection with the cold.  Looking back, I've realized that a disproportionate number of these blog entries are ruminations on ice and snow.  This is puzzling to me, not that frigid winter and its corollaries aren’t a worthwhile subject, but that sometimes I feel chained to their inspirational tug. 

In thinking on this I was drawn to memories of a trip I took during the summer before my senior year in high school.  Me and three friends hitch hiked and hopped freight trains across Canada; Vancouver to Montreal.  It was an odyssey rich in subplots and adventures.  So when I serendipitiously unearthed my journal from that trip many years later, I rushed through the scrawled text breathless with expectations of an epic telling.  To my disappointment the entire journal seemed to amount to little more  than a litany of the meals we had eaten during our travels.  We had subsisted, my eighteen year old self reminded me, largely on a diet of canned foods: beans, sardines, two colors of pudding (white and brown), cans of stew and cans of soup.  From a nutritional standpoint it’s a miracle we survived.  One of my fellow travelers, in an attempt to offer support in the face of my embarrassment at having produced such an inane corpus, made the trenchant observation that my perseverance on food was entirely appropriate.  He pointed out that throughout most of that summer, food had been a constant preoccupation.  We could never be sure where we’d be the next time our stomachs called, and much of the trip was spent standing by the Trans-Canadian Highway, miles from grocery stores or restaurants.  We couldn’t afford restaurants, and besides, all of us would rather have been digging into a can of beans on a grassy on-ramp or in the open door of a rolling box car than sitting in a safe and predictable restaurant.  When I wrote in my journal at the end of a day on the road, my thoughts had apparently crystallized around each can of sardines, my yearning to be a great writer and thinker notwithstanding.  Nowadays, it seems, inspiration dawns in the face of navigating an icy sidewalk or bracing against a bitter wind as I walk to work in the morning. 

Last week I made an appointment with my car guy to heed a bothersome warning light and to get a long overdue tune up.  I had procrastinated for many more days than I should have due to the fact that, in scheduling this, I was consigning myself to being car-less.  My erratic and often late night schedule made this a less than enticing prospect, especially in light of the fact that my mechanic has relocated to East Shit Creek, three progressively more remote bus connections from where I work and live.   Add to this the fact that it’s winter and curb time takes on a special bone chilling appeal.  I know I’m a wimp to bemoan this fact, but what can I say, I’m the guy who wrote about baked beans instead of Banff.

Of course on the morning of my appointment there was a snow storm.  Undaunted I arose, looked out the window at the gathering snow, and made the decision to fully accept my plight. This was, and always is, a smart move in that it allowed me to abandon ambivalence about what needed to be done, and therefore, to be prepared.  I dressed for the coldest case scenario with my heaviest gloves and scarf.  I brought an umbrella.  

Upon arriving at the garage I had a perfunctory conversation with Rob the mechanic, who would soon have six hundred of my dollars, handed him the key, and headed out into the storm.  Stepping away from my placental Honda I felt a tug of anxiety, but also the energetic lift which comes from stepping, even slightly, off the grid of routine.  Rob had somewhat guiltily mentioned that buses didn’t run too often on this line and after about 20 minutes of stamping down snow and peering down the road looking for the #33, my enthusiasm began to fade. 

While we were crossing Canada, taking a bus anywhere smacked of giving up.  It was a last ditch option of which we never availed ourselves.  If we’d wanted to take public transportation across the continent we’d have purchased a ticket.  Adventure was the point.  Contact.  Hitch hiking put you at the mercy of which ever lunatic decided to pull over and let you into their car (and often into their thoughts as well) but it was empowering too.  Vast resources of fortune were on tap with a simple flash of one's thumb.  Of course nowadays it’s "too dangerous" to hitch hike.  Back in 1969 it was still considered safe.  Being adolescents we were not exactly reliable  judges of what was or wasn’t safe, but the fact that all of our parents had given this trip, and that mode of transportation, their blessing seemed to make it so. 

Now, as frigidity set in, the fact that I'd narrowed my options to one indeterminate bus began to feel onerous.  Certainly there were other possibilities to get from point A to point B.  People were driving cautiously because of the storm, affording me the opportunity to get a better look at them as they passed, and they at me.  I must have seemed a sympathetic character, standing there with my blue canvas bag over my shoulder and my umbrella over my head, a middle aged Mary Poppins just waiting for a gust of human kindness.  And each of them seemed to have a little Bert in them as well.  Aw hell!  I stuck out my thumb.   Its gotta be OK to hitch hike again; it’s the age of Obama.  Possibilities buried for decades under the ice and snow of stupidity and greed are peeking out from underneath snow banks everywhere.  Decorate the sidewalk and I'm all over it baby!

Call me naive, but I got a ride.