The Kind of Human Wreckage That You Love

title and figure: The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance, 2006

X-Men Vol. 143...he brought it on himself

I'd rather not argue with myself; it's about as pleasant and civilized as a Tarantino film. I worry about whether or not to salvage rotten logs from the woodsy, leafy mulch areas between our neighborhoods and it's an issue that really riles me up against my general dogma, even though I end up doing it anyway. These bullies--Guilt, Doubt, and Treehuggery... no amount of rationalizing or loud singing shuts them out. And, under certain physically compromised conditions these skirmishes toss my brain around like a seal pup at an orca fest. Naturally, I always get my way in the end because I'm determined to have whatever I want, even if my conscience continues to prick and pout. I know once the rotten wood is transformed into Garden Art, both sides will be satisfied, my means justifying the ends, but man-- those demon bullies know just how to twist the shank.

Joshua Tree: Take only photos, leave only footprints

I can hear some of my friends slamming their minds closed as we speak. "Don't you dare take anything from the woods, Sheila Shedd!! Yes, yes, I totally understanding fragile environments. For you who have never crossed the Rockies, the entire West is one unique ecosystem after another and developers and ignorant tourists are true-life basterd-demons. God! The sight of one Juicy Fruit wrapper on a park trail makes me froth with indignation. Like, I could just run screaming for the Park Ranger.

 NEVER take driftwood from the Olympic Peninsula, a pumice pebble from the billions of tons surrounding Mt. St. Helen's. Lift not a single chip of petrified wood from the thousands of acres of Arizona desert, even pine cones, though they grow a meter long, must be left where they fall in San Jacinto, because, friends, these areas are environmentally sensitive, delicately balanced, and finite. They just don't recuperate from humans. And humans can certainly wreak amazing havoc for their size.

see the blue t-shirt way back there? that's not bigfoot. it's a guy dumping his yard waste

But my neighborhood, Subdivision X, is not Mono Lake, ok? Behind the lovely, pesticide coated, mowed-within-an-inch-of-its-life landscaped verge, Subdivision X has tree breaks. These "community spaces" average 50 feet wide and mostly they separate culdesacs. They are used by humans to collect yard waste, dog poop, clay scraped from tennis courts, teenage droppings, utility boxes, and beer bottles. True, some of them have smooth, blacktop paths, not skating surfaces, unfortunately, but great for walks. If you confine your gaze to 10 feet on either side, or look to the tree tops, these are pretty, forested areas, especially in summer, when all the flora blooms up. The true colors of these unfortunate spaces become exposed in winter when they look like a stretch of highway reserved for mandatory community service weekends. They're a tangled mess, and all that indiscriminate dumping forces untimely decay

It's an awkward, filthy, cumbersome job to take rotting logs out of the ground. To begin with, they're so heavy. The stuff underneath is scary, but you MUST face it all, touch it, check it for life, transplant sensitive creatures--even icky ones (well, frankly they're all icky), scrape as much soft mulch as you can free from the dry areas with your fingers, if you're a finger user, maybe you might use a tool or a stick, but still...and if any sizable colony of any life-form, no matter how inferior-seeming is using this one... you have to replant it.

8"Tiger Slug...lives in my backyard; plenty of nice food there, tons of rotting leaves, no empty beer bottles

a baby gecko dragon!! (just kidding, it's a root but
it's still attached so of course I wouldn't take it.

You can't just assimilate every species you come across and plop it into your collective, because then you end up like Kurt Cobain:

                  Underneath the bridge

                  The tarp has sprung a leak

                  And the animals I've trapped 

                  Have all become my pets

Despite this rationale, I'm west coast liberal treehugging indoctrinated and I really struggle with this.

It's not stupid. Plus, it costs every shred of my dignity and peace of mind. 

Bella hunts squirrel and rot

It's 9am, 87 degrees, 60% humidity, the air is whining with mosquitos. I don elbow length gloves, sweats, tall rubber boots; carry a camera, a small shovel and a bent-to-shreds disposable turkey roasting pan. Oh yeah, I have a badly sprained foot. All this self-inflicted misery is bait for those Demons. I bring Bella. She weighs 72% what I do and pulls me merrily along with twice as many legs working and carries only a poop sack. She has eaten. I've not even had a banana yet. 

I park at the school. The teachers are having a pre-year thing; their hair is freshly coiffed, they've been to the beach, they wear sneakers and shorts. I've been unable to shower recently due to severe ennui. I stride past them into the woods as if I am not a freak. I do not make eye contact, because--and this is good general advice--you MUST believe that if you close your eyes and cover your ears, you are completely invisible.

I wedge up the log. Nothing is living under it; it's just a rotting piece of wood. Despite that fact, I lug the nasty, crumbling 25 pound limb to my car, totting all my stuff and being tugged by a leash. I grunt right past the nice, clean ladies who decorate their yards with rainbow metal twirly things, and probably never have to tell themselves to please, shut up already and   just            keep           climbing.

I'm dirty, exhausted, starving, under attack by my conscience, and pissed off at my dog.

i have showered and justified myself, that's why I'm happy

I'm keeping this dead thing.



And, besides, no one here gives a flip. I have to point out every gnome, monster, weathered cliff face, and dancer that IS this rot. If I wrench these creatures free and set them a lovely environment with all the bugs, weeds, birds, and appreciation they can handle, then I am Freeman Lowell.

Bruce Dern in Silent Running, he took off into space with the last of Earth's completely unappreciated trees and 2 pre-R2 drones

Herbert West, Miskatonic University:
founding father of  preservation

Wait...maybe I'm Mr. West! These dead things become reanimated as living garden art. I MUST be allowed to continue! I will give the wood a second chance to contribute to the living world and I alone will defeat rot!

I'm finally clean and home, everything's quiet inside the psycho pit, then Alex says,"You got another piece of wood? Don't you have enough stuff back there?" Dammit. Now, I'm forced to examine my motives, the reality of my space limitations, my responsibility to Nature, and my sanity. Can't I  just go la-dee-da along with my whims and toss back into the woods whatever doesn't work? 

Hitchcock 1960, waste not, want not

I know it's unseemly, but consider taxidermy. My first job after UCI was at an eccentric Laguna Beach art gallery.  For months, we kept a courageously stuffed 6 foot tall peacock in the window. The indignation we fended!!  Come on, people!  OBVIOUSLY it is rude and sinful to kill something and stuff it merely for decor. But that gorgeous bird lived its full life in a beautiful park, bred several times (probably with different hens), was treated like the king he was, and just like you and I and every tree will, he inevitably died. OH MY GOD,WE DISPLAYED HIS LOVELY PURPLE CORPSE.  Ok, maybe a coyote missed a meal, but I think they prefer left-over KFC anyway.

(On the other hand, my classmate had a purse made from her cat's pelt, and she used the exact same logic. That takes too much philosophizing just now, but I'm happy to discuss this topic or any other Norman Bates related stuff.)

Here's something really cool...we lived in Oregon for a summer, and the Fish and Game patrol are obligated to collect every skeleton and feather that falls to keep idiots from poaching animals for their skins. Yep. people do that, apparently.  One of the rangers toured us through a warehouse full of bones, disembodied wings, unhatched eggs, eagle feathers, and the like. He gave me this bobcat skull as a parting gift, and I treasure it.

what difference does it make if the Oregon soil had 2 fewer ounces of calcium that year? stuff disinegrates every day

graciously bowing gnome or
pig's head emerging?

....But not on my watch, baby.

Cthulhu climbs over a rock wall

dancing creature looks gracefully backwards

scary ghost stick

venerable root; the birds love this one

a flame installed and beautiful

What confuses me is that no one I've met seems to care, and it rather offends me, even though I skulk around about it.  Everyone that forces me by convention to speak to them on the trail, retired officers, Florida hippie transplants, pet walkers, teenagers, all think it's unremarkable, and are really hard pressed to see the beauty in the booty. Some even offer to help me carry stuff back to my car.

So, are my neighbors insensitive destroyers and usurpers, or am I just a goofball? Think about it. If they don't struggle with this issue on my level of conscience, even if I'm slightly overboard, what happens if they end up in Yellowstone? My god there's some awesome rot there.

"I am not a weed!" Cried Alice. Well, I am. Welcome, ninja gardeners, lost souls, fans of moss and rot.

Sunny Dawn Simms, Circa 1955

When my mom, Sunny, died suddenly last March she left a huge hole in our family. You might say she left us in shadow. I didn't know quite what to do with myself. My mom believed every choice I made was right, each decision the wisest, and most astounding solution. To Sunny, my every page, poem, or quip was the deepest, well spoken philosophy.  I depended more than I realized on that buoyant encouragement, and now, I have to access what she planted from within my own cluttered mind. It's not always a walk in the park in there. At any rate, it's a busy, busy place in terrific need of an engrossing project. So I decided to build a memorial garden. The guff!! Teach me, learn something, laugh at it, relate to it, use it.

Alex and Gramma Sunny June, 2012

Mel & Me with Donald, circa 1973

I moved from Disneyland to Richmond, Virginia 14 years ago this fall. I miss bouldering in Joshua Tree, 75 degree Februarys, vast redwoods and sequoias and the timpani thump of boots on mulch a thousand years thick. I miss making Las Vegas in under 3 hours, lemon trees, sunsets crimson with L.A. haze, walking across the Mexican border with nothing but a simple ID and 20 bucks, returning with amazing stained glass and hand made pottery.

It hasn't been an easy transition. We live in a flat, wooded community south of the city and the leaves are insidious. Yeah, they're pretty when they first fall, so you think about Charlie Brown pile jumping and musical underfoot crunching. Why not just leave them there? At first I assumed they'd just blow away.  Well, they don't. They dump from the trees, soak up rain, get really ugly, very heavy, and kill everything underneath.  I saw more leaves on the ground in one month than I'd seen up in trees in all my years put together. Daunted, and rather insulted, I just left them there to rot for three years. It turns out they start to stink; you began to experience neighbor-glare and mosquitos breed like....yeah.  Finally I realized I had to make them go away with a tool.  I bought a rake, (a long, wooden-handled fork-thing) and worked for weeks clearing it all away. I was so proud! The ground was fresh and smooth! I'll be damned if it didn't happen again just a few months later.

And, it's not just leaves. Our home, as most of our neighbors', exists in perpetual dappled shade. Ours boasts nearly total shade all day (we're having to replace the roof from mildew). All the sun-loving perennials I'd known in California, beds of petunias and impatiens, walls of bougainvillea, scads of giant pepper-scented geraniums and Jurassic begonias that bloomed like mad all year suddenly appeared here in Zone 7 as "full sun annuals."  I hate spending money on annuals, even if I had the sun for them. We also have seriously dense clay just inches below our topsoil. (In fact, I'm pretty sure this climate killed 3 sets of colonists, but of course it wasn't just the leaf clutter and clay.)  I tried to plant; grass was a total no-go. Listen, digging is really hard work, and everything I planted died. I let our entire yard disintegrate into a few hostas, azaleas, and...well, I guess that's about all I had for a while...and miles- deep rotting leaf-matter steadily encroached even those half-attempts at greening up the place.

I started out with a space very much like this one:

 We grabbed an unused circular area  approximately ten feet across. There was a 7 year buildup of leaf litter between 2 large sweetgums, but underneath lay a couple of mature boxwoods, a few established azaleas, and a pretty dogwood tree, all struggling for light and air. I am always working with a limited budget, and I'll admit I (and Mel) went a bit overboard at first, but it turns out that suburban RVA offered me a few cool freebies I'd never have found in the desert: a plethora of flowering natives, (we mostly call them weeds) and acres of wild moss living unappreciated and often destroyed by spoiled run-off and mulch-collecting areas around my neighborhood. And the rot, the decay, the trunks and roots turning to soil...lovely, soft death slowed by drying... offers changing sculptural elements like sandstone cliffs. 

And here I am now.

We'll talk about the border, propagation, ornament, composting, and ninja gardening...Creeping Jenny rocks!!

So when I say I built a garden, I mean I changed everything and grew a new me, too. Its significance has spread well beyond a nice place to sit. I've come to equate our suburban 1/4 acre with a proper attitude towards life, I wonder at its brevity, reluctantly accept  its apathy, and enjoy the benefits of seeing a weed as a flower. My gardens are spaces of order, fantasy, and serenity that I create and maintain safe from the inevitable chaos and constant disruption and encroachment of the rest of the world, and just like the wild area of my yard, that world becomes more beautiful and tolerable the less I struggle to control it.  

Bella, Sunny, Alex, and Papa Pete, 2011

Before we begin, I need to thank my family for their unfailing love, encouragement, and tolerance. My steady, adorable husband, Carlos, is the love of my life. My gentle, hilarious sister, Mel and her awesome-cool husband, Peter, foot most of the considerable bills for plants and furnishings and there's no one I'd rather visit.  My beautiful, witty, and gifted teenage son, Alex, keeps me current in music and film, and allows me almost complete access to his fascinating life. My courageous brother, Dave, best dad in the world, annoyingly keeps me grounded, the company of Bella wards off squirrels and monsters and makes friends for us on the trail, while my tough old Dad tells his weird, unbelievable stories, and holds steadily on in the shade.