The Joy of Weeding

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There was a really annoying feature in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, headlined “Backyard to the Future,” about the author’s joy in bathing his backyard with wifi and layering it with networked gadgets—riding mowers with streaming television, surround speakers, yard work robots, and of course the “smart grill.” The image that illustrated the story showed an entire neighborhood of 8-bit sims experiencing the outdoors through a digital frame. It reminded me of the ad campaign the National Park Service did a few years back that used cartoon computer animals to try to encourage kids to check out the parks.

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The American lawn is the enemy of nature, and reprogramming our obsession with it is maybe the easiest possible way we could begin bringing back the American wild—in part by reframing the way we each experience our daily relationship with nature, from holding it at bay to letting it thrive.

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I spent my youth, and a decent chunk of my adulthood, as a servant of the American lawn—that emerald expanse of invasive ornamental turf cut to the length of Dobie Gillis’s hair, an idea we acquired from our earlier Americans who wanted to emulate the pretentious gardens of European nobility (without remembering that what the nobles really loved were their private primeval forests). I paid for my first illegally procured six-packs with money from mowing lawns, as a young slacker drafted into the war against grass ever being allowed to grow tall enough to actually propagate seeds. This job also involved pulling weeds, which in the case of my Midwestern boyhood were probably the remaining native plants trying to survive the ecopocalypse of the tilling of the plains. And in my first houses in Texas as a young dad myself, I kept mowing, and raking leaves—even complying with the ridiculous mandate to put the leaves in big brown bags for municipal haul-off.

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It’s now been ten years since I mowed a lawn. When we moved here to the house we built at the edge of the urban woods, behind some factories, we let the yard go wild. Not quite as laissez-faire as that sounds. The lot was a brownfield and a dump site. It was bisected by a petroleum transmission pipeline that had been abandoned in place fifteen years earlier, and littered with massive quantities of construction debris—piles of concrete and rebar dumped at what used to be the edge of town. It was already wild and unmowed, but mostly conquered by invasive grasses. So after we got the oil company to take its pipeline out, and a built a little house in the trench from that excavation, we put a green roof on the house and reseeded the yard with the plants of the Blackland prairie—the native grassland that once ran in a wide band from north of Dallas to north of San Antonio, 99% of which has been destroyed by agriculture and development. And words cannot really express how immediately this undertaking filled our world up with new life.

Fuck backyard wifi.

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Maybe it’s not for everyone. There are a lot of snakes. As in, coral snakes at the door when you come home from the movies. A big green snake wrapped around the mesquite tree by the path from the car. Occasional biblical infestations of millipedes. Enough mammalian wildlife for the dogs to regularly show up for breakfast with blood on their snouts (sorry, nature). Once in a while a hawk will chase its prey right into the living room window, because it doesn’t even recognize the house—the roof of which looks like a wild field—as a human habitat. Our yard is full of life. Real life, life that is indigenous to this place, mostly, as we actively cultivate an ever-increasing biodiversity in our own backyard. A spring filled with butterflies, baby birds, a menagerie of weird bugs. A human dwelling where wild nature is invited to grow right up to the door, and does.

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This approach to the outdoor garden involves a lot less work than a conventional lawn. There is no mowing. Once in a while I might break out the personal flamethrower and burn a patch. But mostly, come spring, we have to do a brief but intense season of weeding. Because the invasive species are all around us, destructive imports just like us, their seeds on the wind and the bottoms of our shoes and the tires of our cars, and maintaining a healthy balance a mere decade into our effort at developing a self-sustaining successional prairie restoration takes some active intervention. The weeds come in early, before winter is over—the cheat grasses that grow in big clumps, crowding out the native flowers; the beggars lice and mutant dandelions and imitation winecup that, if allowed to propagate, will fill the yard with burrs and thistles and extinguish most of the habitat.

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Weeding is an outdoor activity that gets little respect. As a kid, it is pretty much the most sucky thing you can be ordered to spend your Saturday doing. As an adult, it is generally framed as the most demeaning of labors. Real landscapers wield chainsaws, axes, or sharp clippers. They move dirt, and train trees. They don’t get down on their knees and pull baby plants from the earth for long hours under the hot sun.

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I do, and I love it. Maybe I love it because of the rewards it brings. Because of the way it gets me out there, free from active thought under the blue spring sky. It’s close-up work that lets you get a much deeper understanding of the ecology of your yard, of what’s really going on, how the species interact, compete, cooperate, kind of like the way detailing your car or taking it apart and putting it back together is the only way you will understand what it really is. It is a Sisyphean task, one that will never really be finished. But when you do it, and see the results of letting the species that belong here come back, you understand that it’s the path to a healthy future, more so than any quant-driven efforts to reengineer the house’s patterns of consumption. Wild landscaping generates energy, rather than consuming it. You only need to apply a little labor.

At least around here, more and more people are trying to do similar projects. I hope it spreads. It’s one way to begin to remedy the problem that we are the principal invasive species.  

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Sunday morning field notes from an airport hotel

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The view from the fifteenth floor of the airport hotel looks out through a frame of pebbled concrete bolted to the structure. The pebbles are shades of pink and grey, harvested from local rock to make the brutalist sun-shading of the 1970s. I wonder how long the rock was there in the earth before they harvested it to create a place for business travelers to sleep between flights and meetings.

The window looks out onto a wide ancient plain between the forks of the Trinity River which has been almost entirely converted into a platform for launching hairless apes into the sky. Sixty-five million of them a year on more than two-thousand flights a day. They start coming at dawn and never really let up, making their own tunnels of wind just over the hotel, lined up in air traffic controlled constellations of avionic light threaded out across the eastern sky.  Wide freeways lead to the airport from every direction, and to the parking lots of the seemingly infinite number of corporate hotels, identical office parks and shitty chain restaurants that append the complex, terrestrial mirrors of the network of hundreds of other airports that send the planes here and accept its departures.

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I brought my trail running shoes for my weird weekend in this zone, and as I look out the window I imagine lines through the green space allowed by this Anthropocene overlay that straddles two counties and four muncipalities. There is an empty field right down there, a triangle of maybe four or five acres. In the field are twenty-seven bales of hay faded to grey, left there a long time ago, hidden at ground level behind the towering sunflowers of late summer. On Friday as I arrived men were laying a new road next to the field, preparing to pave it with every square foot of impervious cover the municipal development code of this particular suburb allows.

The water towers of Irving, of which there are many, each feature an image of wild horses running across these plains. And as I jog over the fresh-mowed Bermuda grass that grows in the rights of way, I imagine when it was like that here, with herds of fast mustangs roaming free, ready to be harvested like found money by enterprising pioneers. I am old enough now to realize how recently in time that was, and maybe even how brief a period a time of this place between the rivers was, because really the horses were as invasive as the imported grasses under my feet, an accidental gift of the Spaniards to the people who had walked here from the other side of the world.

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Running along the grassy median of the road that follows the southwestern fenceline of the massive airport, you can see the people driving out of the brand-new subdivision of custom homes opposite the outer edges of the tarmac, and you can see that many of them are people who just got here from the other side of the world, or from the other class realities of this country. The sort of people who are not deterred by the signs in the lawns warning of the avigation easements encumbering the houses, agreements in advance to endure the noise of low-flying aircraft. They will not be here long, in these way stations on the way to American affluence.

Go mustangs, say the ball caps of the preppy old white people riding their BMWs to the SMU game.

On the other side of the George W. Bush Presidential Freeway, I noticed another wide field. As I stepped off the turf to cut through to it, I found native grasses coming up in a spot along the edge that evaded the bulldozers. The gentle grade of the field beyond that led up to an old billboard painted over black, accidental abstraction in a zone given over entirely to the self-expression of corporate persons. As I stopped to take a picture, a big hawk lifted off from the light armatures at the base, headed for a stand of exotic trees over there by the office park.

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I came here for a weekend conference I thought was about imagining better futures, or at least other futures, but turned out to mostly be just another celebration of the repeat consumption of juvenile narratives of wonder by adults seeking escape from lives in the cubicles of those climate-controlled buildings. And on the last morning when I look out the window at the terminal to the sky, I realize this is that future that our predecessors imagined. I also remember the creek I saw flowing under the airport perimeter fence, and the prairie grasses I saw there holding out in a few square feet that the spreadsheets missed. I wonder how long ago it was that this plain was made by water, and whether these concrete creeks will overflow and drown the office parks sooner than the engineers think.

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