A Daydream in the Desert

A Daydream in the Desert

Death leads to battle against Bermuda grass and AstroTurf in the scrubs of Arizona.

It was a big surprise when I was asked to help write the eulogy for my cousin. I barely knew him. Our childhoods didn’t overlap, so there was nothing to mine there, and in adulthood our few interactions mostly generated aversion. He was an inexpressive man, yet he trailed his noisy opinions behind him like a U-Haul stuffed with the boilerplate of southern Arizona. At family gatherings he would stay on the periphery, usually seated at the table closest to the buffet. Inevitably you would make some polite attempts at conversation, the politeness insubstantial as dew. Politics was a subject you broached only if you were prepared to debate the wisdom of Rush. His spoke in bursts, short sentences encased in scorn.

My co-writer of the eulogy, his sister, claimed she didn’t know him well either, and so she cast a net among the relatives to gather what memories she could. It was another surprise how much stuff rolled in. The anecdotes and occasional tributes refreshed some memories of my own. One cousin recounted the time he showed up at the family reunion packing a pistol. How had I forgotten that?

“What do you do with it?” I asked.

“Shoot snakes,” he said with an appraising eye.

He wanted to, but he didn’t intimidate me or anyone else: It was pretty clear that his bluster was a big scab on a deep hurt. Everyone in his presence wanted to look away.

I also remembered a family reunion at a hot springs in Colorado. At the pool I noticed how he flailed even in water 4-feet deep and I offered to teach him a few things about the water. I told him his thrashing was the thing causing him to inhale water; that if he did nothing but wait, the water would lift him to the surface without fail. I didn’t mention that body fat is buoyant. Apart from bestowing buoyancy, his cherished diet of Mountain Dew and sausages had done him no favors.

He trusted me, and he was a surprisingly capable learner. I showed him how to lift his chin to move easily from front to back, how to navigate. Soon he was lolling in the water peacefully, and even scuttling from place to place with some awkward stroking. He learned how to let out air in the water and inhale it in sips when he surfaced, to keep topping the tank. He understood that metaphor. In an hour he was doing a rudimentary breaststroke across the pool. When stroking was more work than he wanted to do, he turned on his back and floated like an otter.

The next afternoon he was in the pool when I arrived at the clubhouse. I watched from inside. He was in the shallow end thrashing just as he had the day before as if he had not learned a thing. I expected to see him move past the panic, but he didn’t, not in the half hour I watched from the bar. It was baffling. I left the pool, having decided to come back in a few hours when he would be gone. I was fleeing his hopelessness.

With the snippets of memories and gossip that his sister harvested, writing the eulogy was like picking through the salad bar at the Pizza Hut (something my cousin avoided.) We seasoned it with humor—his eccentric driving, his UFO stories, how he’d rush out of church to get to Albertson’s to get the ground beef on sale—and we tenderized it—how he loved his pets, how he helped out at his church, how he took care of his mother-in-law. If I had read it cold, I would have believed here was a man I would have liked to have known.

The memorial service in southern Arizona was in one of those churches with a sign out front like the marquee of a derelict movie theater. After a brief service by a preacher who had known my cousin, we filed out to the little cemetery in desert scrub, the site of his grave, where his sister read the eulogy. I was glad to hear rumbles of mirth. At lunch afterward in the church hall, three different church members told me how fond they were of my cousin, and how when they saw me, they knew immediately I was a relative, maybe a brother. I almost said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“People who openly admired nature—or who even went so far as to use that word, Nature—were often taken to be slightly soft in the head.”
—From Home by Alice Munro

In the opaque way of family decision-making, it was decided that the next day everyone would meet to help clean up his widow’s garden, which had gotten out of hand over the months my cousin was in the hospital. We were glad to do this for her. She had been a faithful, loving mate, putting up with things most people wouldn’t.

The road to their house passed massive slag heaps of copper mines. The scrubby landscape was dense with saguaro and ocotillos and stickery shrubs all unfamiliar. In a turnout a Border Patrol SUV lurked half-hidden, doing who knows what in these backwoods, 50 miles from the border. I wondered what our cousin thought of this kind of governmental folly and waste. Too late to ask. Not that I really wanted to know.

Seeing his garden I remembered something else about him: He was proud of it. More than once he had urged me, “You need to come down and see my garden.” He showed me a picture on his phone, too small to see much, telling me about the deck he built and the pond for goldfish. A goldfish pond in the desert? Wouldn’t they get poached, one way or another? I didn’t ask.

Sure enough, there it was, the pond. With water and goldfish.

The gravel front yard was shabby with weeds. I asked my cousin’s widow what she’d like to see get done. Weeding, as I suspected and feared. Soon my cousins and I—someone joked the Border Patrol should be notified about the invasion of migrant laborers—were all crabbing around on the gravel with trowels, jabbing at weeds with roots that knew how tough it is to emigrate. A horrible job, were it not for the general good cheer, everyone happy to be on the sunny side of the soil line. By lunchtime the gravel was clean as a libertarian’s conscience.

“Won’t these weeds all come back,” my sister asked sensibly.

“Not until after the first rain,” I replied.

“Rain is forecast next week,” my cousin’s widow said.

With a plate of leftovers from yesterday’s lunch, I went out on the back deck to survey that catastrophe. Bermuda grass swamped everything, as high as my waist in the roses. The only patch of relative orderliness was a lawn. The lawn, I realized after puzzling out its bleached green color, was AstroTurf.

Nothing advertises the pitfalls of utopia like AstroTurf. In the 1970s or so, it was everywhere, baseball stadiums, filling stations, doormats, gravesites. The field of dreams, perfect green with no-maintenance. A daydream. Like all plastic it fades and degrades, and sooner or later, weeds pops through it, as they are in my cousin’s fake lawn. Similar to fabric weed barriers, you get a few years out of it, then it’s off to the dump. What’s the problem? We got a big country with lots of room for big dumps. Notice the mine pits, the slag mountains.

Fake lawns are making a comeback. On my neighborhood walks in the hills, I have come across two such patches in the last month. No doubt they are an improvement over their ancestors. At first they had me fooled. My reaction was to marvel at the skill of the gardener, as I do when I see a hedge trimmed so precisely it looks like you could slice your hand on it. Marvel turned to meh to disgust. Maybe these stupidities are ways was of coping with our intractable drought. Perhaps my cousin also considered his desert environment and thought, ‘I am conserving resources by not having a real lawn.’ Maybe. I doubt it. Conservatives aren’t into that kind of conservation. And of course, he could have foresworn the lawn period.

Bermuda grass. The geographical appellate is probably not accurate, and Bermuda should protest. It is one unwelcome migrant. Given a whisper of moisture, its tendrils will go under, around, or through whatever barrier they encounter. The tendrils that had breached the plastic carpet would be only slightly more impossible to deracinate than the rest.

Here in plain view was the archeology of a post-millennial garden disaster: phase one, Bermuda grass; phase two Astroturf; phase three, four gallons of Roundup, visible in the chaos of the garden shed. The final and worst solution.

The migrant laborers, having lunched, descended upon this fiasco. All the smothered rocks that once (theoretically) delineated the rose beds from the lawn were lifted and repositioned. We were alive and energetic, undaunted; my sister and I even tried to get the Bermuda grass out of the fake grass and clean it off. Why why why? In another season or two, the plastic grotesquerie would be submerged in a tangle again, worse than now. I considered ripping out the fake lawn on the spot. When you run low on patience, you run out of common sense.

My cousin’s wife commented how he was probably looking down and laughing at us slaving in the dirt, and I could believe it. Or looking up.

By late afternoon the garden had achieved a veneer of orderliness. My cousin’s wife was moved and grateful. In my eyes we had merely put off the inevitable, but you might say that’s what kindness does.

That evening, back at the Best Western, channel-surfing I happened onto a Weather Channel feature on how Nature was re-conquering derelict Detroit, ripping apart abandoned factories, pulling down houses. The background music suited a horror film, panting woodwinds, hysterical strings. Saplings were terrorists, a drop of water as insidious as plutonium. Detroit was losing the eternal war against the biggest terrorist of all, Nature.

Collaborationists, saboteurs, those AWOL and the pacifists: We all lose the battle if we view it as one.

Flying home, looking outside the plane window at the hills and forests of the Bay Area, I was grateful for the greenness but a nag wouldn’t quit; this greenness is a thin garment, a momentary daydream in a desert.

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R.E. Faro is a poet and essayist, and a longtime contributor to The Monthly. Read his blog at http://berrypicking.wordpress.com.

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