Sunday, February 22, 2009

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.

6 comments:

Billy Canary said...

If I can find one, I'll mail it to you. xo

Billy Canary said...

My sources say that in Sunnymead they were called Goatheads.

Bull Thorn said...

Yes, that's right. Goathead, Punturevine, Yellow Vine, Caltrop, Ci Ji Li. But that information is too late for my hard drive. They'll always be bull thorns to me.
Who's you're Sunnymeade source? Dispatch him thither!

Unknown said...

My off-road cycling buddies call 'em goatheads too, and they're rampant along the trails, at least around here in north L.A. county. These guys tell tales of literally dozens of flat tires over the course of a two hour ride sometimes.

And I STILL got holes in my feet from the "chasing the ping pong ball off the patio" excusions at Argyle Way.

Annie said...

We have them around here still.

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