Sawtooth edged bamboo leaves like a
rose and its thorns. I know: bamboo may not have the soft petals, the sweet
aroma lingering in the air, the burst of bright pink and red popping out of
deep green leaves and stems; nor does bamboo have the jutting thorns, sharp
needle-point protrusions so easily spied. The rose and its thorns reach toward
opposite extremes in a single plant: luxurious beauty and sharp, stinging
wrath. The bamboo plant and its leaves appear far more innocuous, with its
smooth, paper-like matte blades of grass dangling down from thin branches which
extend out of a single long stalk. There are no extremes with bamboo. It’s
green, it predictably grows in clumps or spreads as runners, where the only
obvious surprise is how far a runner can grow away from its mother. The mature
stalks can be several inches round in diameter and are sturdy. The weight of
their broad leaves bend the tops down toward the ground, particularly in the
rain as the leaves catch water on their smooth surfaces. The leaves are where they hide their
bristles. Along each leaf’s edge are nearly imperceptible sharp teeth like a
tiny saw that can cut into flesh like a papercut. The bamboo’s defense is not
as flashy or demonstrative as the rose’s, and instead its defense lies in the
unexpected pain it causes, for the bamboo’s laceration is simply not
anticipated from such a seemingly harmless clump of greenery. Discovering
bamboo’s defense of minute razor-edged leaves was nearly as surprising to me as
my neighbor’s house being caught on fire by the local fire department, who
subsequently burned down part of the forest by my house, Wolf Hollow. The fire
department did not mean to catch the forest on fire but things just got out of
hand I guess.
When I first bought Wolf Hollow, I
only had one visible neighbor, a family of renters, and a single other
neighbor, a family with two young boys who lived farther up the mountain but
whom I could not see nor hear. The three of us shared a driveway. The neighbors
in the white house, whom I could see, were loud, not like party loud, but had
four-wheelers constantly running up and down the drive, churning up gravel. My
idyllic quiet forest home was constantly ruptured by loud engines. A teenage
boy perched on his off-road vehicle would speed past my house, turn around, zip
back down, heedless of my startled cats who would tear away with tails flagged
in the air. I yearned for them to not be there, to be all by myself tucked into
my little hollowed-out enclosure of a mountain. I thought perhaps a visual
barrier like a fence would aid in pretending they didn’t exist—even though I
could hear them, maybe I could at least not have to stare out my living room
windows at them, at the peeling white paint on the old house’s façade. But I
didn’t know how to build a privacy fence and I couldn’t pay someone to do it.
One day while driving home from
work, I happened across a pile of cut bamboo, left by someone who likely had an
unwieldy grove of it they were trying to contain. I pulled over to the side of
the road and piled my Jeep Cherokee full of the tall woody grass and hauled it
home. One time I had seen a privacy fence made out of bamboo and imagined I
could do it myself. I sawed the pieces, drilled holes for wire, and then
abandoned the project and used it for kindling instead. The bamboo gave me an
idea—why not grow it as my fence? I had visions of deep shaded groves of the
stuff. I thought of tubing down the Green River that runs along the edge of the
border between North and South Carolina, where I would lie on my back, legs
lazily slung across the rubber inflatable donut, sipping on warmed lager out of
an aluminum can, and twirling my fingers in the rippling, brown water.
Suddenly, after sliding past oaks and maples, of brown bark and broad-leafed trees
growing along the edge of the water, the landscape would transform to a deep
shady forest of bamboo that would weep and bend over the water, the stalks’
feathered leaves reaching out to brush my hair. I would forget where I was. I
would look out over the tops of my sunglasses into the green tinged air and
spot a huge orange and black striped feline on the bank, stalking in between
the green stalks, its stripes camouflaged, melding and melting with the bamboo
leaves. My heart would beat a little faster and I would hold my breath, not
wanting the wildness to end. Then the tiger dissolved into the forest and the
bamboo faded back into poplar, rhododendron, elm.
How thrilling it might be to have
my very own grove of bamboo and mirage-tigers creeping about. I decided to
plant some. It would most certainly block the neighbors, and just about
everything else. When I moved to North Carolina I was given a single piece of
advice by my real estate agent, James: “Don’t plant bamboo.” “Why not?” I asked
him. “It likes it here too much,” he said. Intrigued but not dissuaded, I
planted bamboo. I purchased my baby bamboo from the internet, for which plant
nursery around here would be dumb enough to sell such a thing? I shoveled and
iron-barred into hard, rocky clay next to my gravel drive, struggling to make
holes deep enough to keep my bamboo happy. Finally, I had it, the beginnings of
no longer seeing my neighbors, of being able to pretend I was the only person
on this mountain. I watered it, I crooned to it, I petted it (carefully).
Then, one day, after a year or so,
the neighbors left. They moved out. They were gone. Then the man who owned the
house, a dentist who kept the town council busy with housing development plans
for the field below his old white structure, donated the house to the fire
department for a burning exercise. The fire department came and caught the
house on fire. As they were busy with their fast-food burgers and sodas, the
whole forest caught on fire. Fire departments from all around came. A helicopter
flew overhead and dumped water on the fire, something I had only ever seen in a
computer game I played when I was a kid where the object was to extinguish
jungle fires with a helicopter. My little Wolf Hollow cabin was safe, they
assured me. The fire wasn’t going to jump the driveway they said. They created
a fire line in the woods to protect my other neighbor, the one above me, hidden
by the mountain. And they were right. My Wolf Hollow cabin was fine.
Gradually, after the great blazes
were extinguished, after the backup departments retreated home, and the ones
who had begun the whole thing had gone, I was left by myself with the littered
remains of plastic bottles, fluttering burger wrappers, and stale cigarette
butts, and the forest around me was singed and smoking, bleakly black and ash
grey. The once-white house was in blackened ruins with nothing left but a
charred rock frame and a stone chimney protruding out from an ashy hole like an
obelisk to what once was.
Alone. I was all alone now. I dug
up my bamboo and wept.