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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, June 28, 1999
Urban jungle holds a host of mysteries
A naturalist I am not. From my Cub Scout days, I have demonstrated a genuinely impressive resistance to learning all matter of nature lore.
As a lad, I was especially successful in remaining oblivious to such stuff as ways and means of determining which chunk of undergrowth was poison ivy and which wasn't. The calamine lotion industry owes me, big time.
However, I have of late given a little more thought to this big blue ball of ours and to our relationship with the other life forms, sentient and otherwise, that share it with us.
This is due in part, I suspect, to our trip to New England last year, in the course of which we paid a visit to Walden Pond - yes, that Walden Pond - where Hank Thoreau hung out for a few seasons and took the amateur-naturalist thing to heights never attained before or since.
Now, of course, Walden Pond and environs represent the perfect setting for philosophical musings on the really heavy-duty issues; your average pad in suburbia is nowhere near as conducive to such meditations.
Still, you go with what you've got . . . and as the last few weekends have found me puttering in the yard (OK: jungle) and fumbling around the garage, I have had occasion to ponder some issues that at one time or another may have crossed your mind, too, gentle reader.
Such as? Well, to begin with, how about the abiding mystery of grass? Yes, just plain old common-as-dirt grass.
Now unless you're a seriously fixated master gardener, you probably don't give a whole lot of thought to your grass . . . except, perhaps, when it's turning brown under the pressure of one of our celebrated dry spells.
These days, however, the stuff is flourishing, thanks to the occasional downpour. So, like you, I put it out of my mind . . . until . . .
See, there I was, attacking the weeds that had pretty much taken over the flower beds out front (I do this every year or so, whether it needs it or not), and I noticed that I was pulling up about as much grass as weeds.
And there's the mystery: Why is it that grass, so reluctant sometimes to flourish where you want it to (I've got a big stand of clover in one quadrant to which I've simply become resigned: it's green, it doesn't bother anybody; live and let live), insists on pushing its way in precisely where you don't want it? That bare patch along the curb remains defiantly resistant to (desultory) attempts to persuade the St. Augustine to establish a beachhead - but the flower beds? Whoa, mama: That's another story altogether.
And then there's the matter of our toads. (I assume they're toads, at any rate; again, my abysmally incomplete command of nature lore does not permit me to tell your average toad from your average frog, but since we don't have any big bodies of water nearby, I assume they're toads. Got a problem with that?)
I have written previously of our toads' propensity for partying all night in our dogs' water dish - and leaving thoroughly disgusting evidence of the festivities behind them.
But now it's getting seriously weird: Our toads have developed some kind of bizarre, lemming-like urge to do away with themselves. And it centers, of all things, on our garage.
Seems that every time I open the garage door, two or three of them immediately hop into action, frantic to gain access to the garage and heedless of the dangers of car tires and descending garage doors. Inevitably, some have been squashed in the process: not a pretty sight at all.
But . . . why? Our garage is hot, inelegant and full chiefly of tools that I can't find when I need them. What's the attraction?
You tell me. Could it be the toad community is just despondent, depressed about the recently-defeated county bond issue? Or . . . are our local amphibians caught up in some kind of systemic malaise? Input from any budding Thoreaus out there would be most welcome. Just hop to it, OK?
(Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)
Brooks Peterson
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