by David Hirst
I laid down my hammer, and pulled the cord from the Sawzall with which Tony was merrily removing a wall. Silence’s reign was short. Tony, indignant, turned from his efforts and menaced me with the tool.
‘Tony,’ I said, ‘I am in charge. This is my property. If you don’t stop work, I will call the police.’
Debbie looked alarmed.
‘My house! We are stopping work. I will call the police,’ I reiterated.
Lil Debbie didn’t like work, but she apparently didn’t care much for the police. ‘They’ll think we’re on drugs,’ she protested.
That was a point. It would be unusual indeed for a police officer to be called out by a property owner to escort a worker from the employer’s property for refusing to stop work.
‘But I am not,’ was my confident reply.
Tony had dumped his Sawzall and was threatening to leave the site. He headed for the door and his truck, but promised to be back, ready for work, at first light.
11
Not only had Bill built the house around the needs of dogs, but he had fashioned huge runs behind the garages so the Rotts could express themselves by hurling their 100-plus-pound bodies against the hundreds of metres of six-feet-high steel fences. He had also built a small apartment at each end of the garages so that prospective owners could stay near the animals and get to know their individual charge. In fact, Bill so cared for his breeds he made buyers sign contracts that would allow him, at any time, to come to their house to ensure that the dog was being properly trained. If Bill was unhappy with the dogs’ circumstances he could, and would, take the animal home via the courts.
But all this was behind him by the end of the twentieth century. Age may have not caught up with Bill, but time, or the times, had. Although people from all over the US would spend large sums of money on his award-winning Rotts, more and more failed to treat the huge beasts according to Bill’s iron laws. A well-trained Rott is as safe, perhaps safer, than any dog, but a poorly treated one was both an insult to Bill’s Herculean efforts at producing the finest Rottweilers in the land and an extremely unsafe creature to have around the home. Bill cared for both his dogs and his reputation, and had reached the conclusion that he could no longer trust people with his babies. The poor treatment of Rotts and other potentially dangerous dogs had led to so many attacks on people that most insurance companies no longer insured households with Rotts, Dobermans, or pit bulls. Bill had ceased to breed them some years before we met, and had been trying, reluctantly, to sell Boulder House since making that decision.
The problems attendant to buying a house built for dogs that came with hundreds of metres of fenced dog runs, all cemented in place, had clearly deterred wiser men than me.
Neither Boo nor I had the skills or the desire to go into the breeding business, especially if people could not be trusted with the end product.
We had agreed that the runs had to go, and be replaced by a cactus garden. But cactus costs. I had, in an advanced state of delusion, imagined we might grow agave, distil the hearts and make tequila, and had mentioned this in passing to Tony, who preferred the extremely unpleasant task of working with cactus to the merely unpleasant task of laying rock into urine-infested, decomposed granite. A fully grown agave cost more than $100, and I would need acres to go into tequila production.
The next day, Tony was blessedly late, and I lay in the huge waterbed, recalling falling asleep beneath the brilliant stars I could see through the skylight above the bed. I savoured the luxury for more than an hour until I heard the unmistakable deep thudding of Tony’s truck muffler, and rose.
I knew Tony was a cactus freak, but did not know he was familiar with pretty much every cactus within sixty kilometres. He had arrived with a deal.
‘Come on,’ he said, indicating the front seat. ‘We are going to see The Lizard Lady.’
I had heard talk of The Lizard Lady, and knew she was an odd soul (who out here wasn’t?) who lived with iguanas and slept with her favourite. From what I knew of iguanas (almost nothing), they might be related to the Australian goanna, a particularly ferocious lizard, who you would no more sleep with than the Bush twins.
Tony had no interest in lizards, but explained that he had located a considerable amount of agave at the Lizard Lady’s home, positioned atop a nearby mesa. The Lizard Lady, Tony informed me, had a dog problem. Her animals had taken to roaming, and needed to be enclosed before they were hit by cars, joined a pack of wild dogs and got shot, attacked someone who would sue, or a combination of the above. The Lizard Lady needed fencing, and was prepared to swap our dog-run fences for agave.
I was impressed, but wondered if things weren’t moving a little fast. The tequila venture was no more than an idea. Now I was about to be committed to a dramatic, and I knew fantastically difficult, enterprise without thinking it properly through.
Tony had no such reservation, and would not be deterred. We pulled into a yard, and his truck was immediately surrounded by baying hounds of every type. The Lizard Lady came out in her dressing-gown, sporting a huge bandage on her forearm — the result, she explained, of a misunderstanding with her bedfellow, her newest iguana, Elizabeth, a male.
She hadn’t always been so relaxed around lizards. At first, she explained, she was scared to death of them — even tiny, little ones. Her daughter had bought the first of these ghastly reptiles home, and had chased her around the kitchen with it. Then it became ill, and the daughter had to go away, leaving her with a sick iguana. She bonded with it and kept it close until they shared the bed. In these comfortable confines it grew. And grew. Now it was five feet long. Other lizards (all iguanas) found their way to her house out in the windswept flats on the other side of Old Woman’s Springs Road, deposited there by lizard lovers who heard she would care for them. By the time I met her and her flock — what does one call a collection of iguanas? — they had taken to sleeping with her, and her boyfriend had taken to the couch. I would have moved to Italy.
To look mean and ferocious, these huge, scaly primitives puff themselves up, apparently in the belief they are not ugly and frightening enough. That might have been necessary when the giant sloth, the mastodon, and the hairy mammoth walked these lands, but seemed unnecessary in the presence of me — and even Tony. Bubba, her favourite, is about sixty years old. She takes him for walks on a harness. Elizabeth — the male — is the biter. And bite her he did. Hours of microsurgery were needed to get the tendons reattached, followed by six weeks in a cast.
Sean, a Palace regular, recalls waking up in the Lizard Lady’s bed one morning to find Bubba stretched out on him, savouring his warmth. I asked him what lizard breath smelt like.
‘Pretty bad,’ he said. ‘Like rotting vegetables.’
While Tony looked restless, determined to commence work, I inquired after her hand, and she removed the bandage. The bite was horrible and, although a few weeks old, still a sight. The effect was strangely lizard-like. That is, the Lizard Lady’s arm looked like part of a lizard. In fact, in the same way that members of the British royal family have come to resemble horses, the Lizard Lady resembled the prehistoric beasts in her care. Was this what Blake meant when he observed that we ‘become what we perceive’?
But she took us into the house, and offered us beers while introducing us to her large family of lizards. One, the biter, was enjoying the warmth of her bed while his mates were lazing around a house that had accumulated strange objects over many years — the type of things one would expect to find in a Lizard Lady’s home.
The formalities of meeting these four- to five-foot creatures from the age of dinosaurs over, we returned to the yards and the agave.
Perhaps thirty years ago, when the house was built, the owner had planted agave under the windows so that when they grew no one would try to gain entry, as nothing on earth is worth climbing over agave spikes to attain. The plants, perched against the house, enjoyed both direc
t sunlight and light refracted from the white walls, and had prospered. There were five windows and five clumps, and each clump consisted of twenty or so plants. The main plants were all over five foot, and many of the lesser plants above four. I had done a little research, and knew that the plants over four feet tall could be harvested, their pineapple-like hearts cut out and distilled, and, hey presto, ‘tequilas all round’.
A man, woken by our presence, came from the house blinking in the bright light. This was Dan the Lizard Lady’s man, and in his hand rested a beer can. The can was Milwaukee Best, a cheap drop, but not necessarily any worse than Bud or Coors, and certainly preferable to Michelob. The Lizard Lady explained that Dan would be erecting the fence when we brought it over, and he didn’t seem enthused by this development.
Tony was tiring of all this standing around, and looked menacingly at the huge agaves.
‘We had better get started,’ he stated.
‘Now?’ I exclaimed.
Twenty minutes ago, I had been tucked up in bed contemplating my contemplation of the galaxy the previous evening, and now I faced the ferocious spikes of one of the kings of the cactus family.
‘Now!’ Tony scolded. He went to the truck and removed sundry objects, spades, a long machete-like knife, hand saws, and other objects I didn’t feel like holding, let alone using. But Tony threw himself amongst the spikes, and soon the two of us were digging, cutting, and tearing at the plants.
Though winter, the late-morning sun was strong, and would get stronger, especially in this unshaded spot up against the house, which beat the heat back at us. In deference to the spikes and the thousands of insects, spiders, and scorpions that were furiously swarming from their ancient nests, I suggested we obtain gloves at the hardware store. Tony clearly considered this a cowardly piece of time-wasting, and informed me that gloves were useless when dealing with cactus, as the spikes pierced the toughest leather. Good news for my hands, I thought.
Most, but not all, cactus can be removed from the earth without injury by dragging them by their roots. Agave, growing singularly, can be dug up, and when the roots are exposed, picked up and bundled, with great difficulty and care, into a truck bed. But when they have clumped, with twenty growing from the same single plant, their roots intertwined and home to vicious crawling things, the task is decidedly more difficult.
One cuts, digs, drags, claws, and tears, and inevitably is spiked. The first three spikes entered my right arm, the one most used in such endeavours, within ten minutes. The pain was erased by numbness, and soon the arm was both swollen and useless. I was drenched in sweat, and covered in dirt and bites, but we had managed to fill half the truck with smaller agave taken from the outside of the core plants. Tony hacked away at the clinging roots, informing me that there was virtually no way to kill a cactus, especially an agave. This came as a disappointment, as I had already developed a hatred of the things, and was wondering whether all the tequila in Mexico was worth the effort.
Tony, perhaps aware of my misgivings, stood and stared furiously at the mother of all agave that stood before us.
‘You take that side,’ he suggested. Tony apparently intended to start the serious part of our work immediately, regardless of my condition. ‘We will need digging bars,’ he added, heading for the truck.
And need them we did.
By the time my left arm was rendered inoperable, the giant agave was loose but still in situ. Tony suggested that while he prised the thing from the dirt, with which it had coexisted for so long, I use my boots to push it out of its nest.
‘Your legs are stronger that your arms,’ he remarked. We had been hosing the soil as we worked to soften it, and so I sat down in the mud, and we prised and dug and kicked and strained until the agave gave up its hold, and rolled onto its side in defeat.
‘Gotcha!’ I lay panting proudly beside the plant, savouring the victory.
‘We will need a ramp to get it on the truck,’ observed Tony. He went off looking for a suitable plank, leaving me to contemplate that the job was far from done. By the time I got to my muddy feet, Tony had found his plank and positioned it at the back of the truck. Cactus is mostly water, and he rolled this one, which must have weighed in at 160 kilograms, to the base of the plank, coaxing, dragging, and pushing it into place. All that remained was to push the thing up the plank and onto the bed of the elderly Ford and drive it home, dig a hole in the granite, and roll it off the truck and into its new home. We had planted twenty agave by sunset. But the torture, I believed in my folly, had at least passed. Tony looked pleased.
‘Tomorrow we will get some really big ones,’ he exclaimed. ‘I know where there are a lot more. Some of them can be vicious, so we’ll have to be careful.’
12
The desert is so hard, its occupants have to be harder. If it doesn’t scratch, bite, or sting, it should be somewhere else. That’s a fair call when describing the human inhabitants, but was directed by John Edwards at the fauna and flora. Aside from the people, almost everything — plant and animal — can and does kill or inflict pain.
The toughest of all life forms is, of course, the cactus, and the toughest and most unpleasant of the cactus are the various members of the cholla family, a family that is nature’s version of The Mob. The common cholla, or Jumping Cholla, is an ugly plant that produces little but spikes. In the spring it manages a small green flower, but, as cactus flowers go, it lacks lustre. Other cacti, even other members of The Mob, strive to justify their existence by offering beauty for a few weeks in spring, but the Jumping Cholla has its reputation to defend, and does not err on the side of beauty. Even the animals of the desert shun the plant, except goats, which will enter a cholla patch and graze on the blooms. But goats are notoriously stupid animals, prone to stink, and their value is principally their ability to eat things that are spurned by the rest of the food chain.
The cholla has a few uses — all defensive. Humans will climb over walls, no matter how high they might be, ignoring spikes and broken glass. But a cholla, even more than agave, is a barrier that only the most foolhardy will try to negotiate. The desert is full of stories of those who have tested their talents against this terrible, ugly curse.
We live near Anza-Borrego, the largest wilderness area in California, which is probably the cradle of evolution for what we now call the goat. Horses, camels, and llamas definitely evolved in this wasteland, but as the climate changed from temperate to blinding heat, they had the good sense to migrate over the land bridge to the steppes of Russia and parts further abroad. The llama fled to Central and Southern America. Millions of years later, the Spanish reintroduced the horse, to the alarm of the locals.
But the cholla, not being fleet of foot, stayed. As the land grew harsher, so did the plant.
My first experience with it occurred in Anza-Borrego, about eighty kilometres south of where we are located in Pipes Canyon.
Anza-Borrego is terrain that makes Death Valley look like rural England before foot-and-mouth — an arid area of little commercial use, and therefore preserved. It is as it is because the Colorado River once ran through it, and deposited the immense wash from what is known as the Grand Canyon in this dramatic and fearful terrain.
The good folks who tend to our national parks have erected warning signs for those who are foolhardy enough to traverse the place. The first, I noticed, stated in plain English (and in Spanish) that death by dehydration lurked in the arid land we were about to enter. Temperatures on the desert floor, it informed us, could reach 80 degrees Celsius in mid-afternoon, during mid-summer. Which was exactly when we entered this forbidding place.
The other dangers were the usual ones, such as snakes, scorpions, and flash floods. Rain in the nearby mountains can fill the immense network of gullies and tear through the land in minutes. As it is impossible to know that storms have hit the mountains, we were told to be wary of the possibility of nine metres of water a
rriving in a boiling crest. The only warning of the imminent arrival of the wall of water is a white froth seeping from the soil. The racing tide beyond forces moisture from the soil, and the bubbles give the wary a few seconds’ notice and a slim chance of finding high ground before the wave, carrying with it boulders and tree trunks, hits.
Boo and I approached our sojourn into the badlands with caution forewarned, we thought, of the desert’s dangers. One merely had to keep water at hand and stay on high ground.
Before we had traversed a mile in the withering heat, I discovered another danger. It was one that the appropriate department had failed to warn us of: the Jumping Cholla. The creature sprung at me over a foot, and a sizeable portion attached itself to my leg, screwing its way through my jeans, and deep into the inside of my left calf.
Amazement was quickly followed by pain. Pain by a kind of panic. The clump had attached itself firmly and was, I felt, digging in. Digging into my skin.
The first reaction to a cholla attack is to grab the cursed clump as it screws its way deeper into the flesh. It is, as are most first reactions, exactly the wrong thing to do, being just what the cholla expects. The hands of the uninitiated are rendered inoperable as the cactus gives up its outside claws. My fingers were immediately thick with treacherous barbs while the clump on my leg sank its teeth deeper into my calf.
I had somehow left my knife in the car, a way off, so I asked Boo to find me a suitable stick as I tried to pull the barbs from my hand. After a few minutes of prising, I managed to remove the main clump and hurried away from it, fearing that it might strike again. A dog was crying nearby. It, too, had been attacked, and had tried to remove the barbs with its teeth. Its mouth was full of spikes. We tried to give it and its owner comfort, but my leg was swelling fast. I pulled up my jeans, and discovered a psychedelic pattern swirling up my calf.
