We Have Met The Enemy And It Is Mulch
I like to leaf through boxes of old photos. A soft smile comes to my face as I hearken back to a gentler time, a more innocent era.
Let the eye go where it will on these sentimental journeys – to images of all of us in the back yard swinging on the swing set, to multi-generation family picnics at the county lake complete with red-checked tablecloths swooshed out upon the grassy ground, to juvenile ball games and track meets, to outdoor graduation ceremonies – they all tell of one thing missing that has, since these happy times, insinuated itself into the modern culture.
Mulch.
You may take to these polaroids and instamatics with a magnifying glass and not find a single instance of the foul substance.
Its absence speaks to healthier times, when people were more settled in mind, when the old verities were good enough, and a handshake was as good as your word.
I cannot say when I first saw mulch. This is often the way with these items best filed in the E-G drawer of the metal filing cabinet under Encroaching Evil.
When I did see it I cannot say what I thought it did, or purported to do.
I still can’t.
Is its purpose to retain moisture? Divert moisture? Loosen the soil underneath? Harden the soil underneath? Maintain soil integrity?
For all I know it says it does all these things, and more, but to what end?
Was the nation crying out for more moisture retention or moisture diversion or all the rest in the idyllic Pre-Mulch Era? Was our native soil the shame of every international soil ranking?
History has played out upon this continent for eons, but there is no record of the native peoples, early explorers, first settlers, Founding Fathers, great mapmakers and pathfinders turning to their companions as one breathtaking vista after another unfolded before their wondering eyes and saying, “it’s all right, I guess, but there’s just not enough mulch.”
Today you see wonderstruck people stand gazing at the great expanse of The Grand Canyon, so vast that the eye can hardly take it in, and though I cannot swear that it is an actual transcription of the conversation, one seems to be saying to the other, “let’s fill it up with mulch.”
The other might reply, “oh, definitely, that goes without saying, the only question is whether we use cedar, cypress, or black bark mulch. What do you say?” And they go back and forth in this way for some time.
I suppose I might have a little more respect for the substance if someone notable had actually invented it.
If Benjamin Franklin had, between his experiments in electricity and horticulture, gone to the trouble of running a series of tests to see which substance when scattered upon the ground best retained moisture or diverted moisture or maintained soil integrity, or whatever the hell it is that mulch is supposed to do, I might be more able to give it a fair hearing.
But that’s not how it worked out.
At least by my calculations, this stuff just showed up one day and we were all supposed to start using it.
You have to watch out for things that creep into the culture insidiously like that. These situations are what the word ‘insidious’ was invented for.
Illustrated dictionaries are out of fashion these days, but if you ever come across one in a used bookstore, go ahead and take at look under the I’s and see what the editors use to illustrate the word ‘insidious.’ I’d be curious. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’d be an image of a pile of shredded wood waste sitting there, just sitting there, as though smug in the knowledge of its ultimate triumph.
Scholars haven’t yet unearthed the first day or the first hour that mulch cast its shadow upon this grand nation, no more than they have determined when envy or malice or greediness or any of the great character flaws first made an appearance.
All I know is that one day a trip to the hardware or garden store might have revealed to the corner of your eye a sack of some substance or other sitting in a deserted corner of the establishment that had never been there before.
“Hmmm,” you might say to yourself, if you are prompted to say anything at all, “looks like a bag of wood waste.”
And don’t you see, this is the point I keep trying to make: you would be absolutely right.
It is a bag of wood waste!
And the next time you are at the store the single sack has turned into a pile, and then into a pallet full, and then into an entire section of the store.
It is not dissimilar to that scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, when the camera returns casually to a single schoolyard playground over and over again and each time there is one more bird, then ten more, then entire flocks of the evil things.
This is one of the most frightening scenes in all of cinema; of course mulch hadn’t yet been invented, which keeps the sequence from being more terrifying still.
The next thing you know – I am back to the hardware store or garden center now – people are heaving these sacks of timber refuse into baskets and out to their cars.
“So be it,” you might say to yourself, for you are a tolerant and broad-minded individual, “people do crazy things all the time. This seems a harmless mania, and it will no doubt pass in a couple of months.”
That was twenty-five years ago.
The menace has only grown since then.
Now people wheel out multiple stacks of this interesting substance to hump into the back of their pickups, and then, taking things to the next level of disbelief, start having multiple pallets of the stuff delivered to their homes.
A man reaches the age where he actually has something of substance to pass along to young men just starting out and all I can tell you, boy, is to have nothing to do with any product that has to be delivered to your house by forklift. Nothing good will come of it, and your back will never be the same.
I suppose a person of broad sympathies might even allow this to go unchallenged.
“It is a big world and people have all sorts of theories, however lunatic. As long as it hurts no one, what’s the harm?”
Looking back you don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this naive good nature.
What’s the harm?
What’s the harm?
This stuff now has to be hauled sack by sack to various strategic spots in the yard, the sack has to be broken open, this untoward substance has to be spilled out, and then it has to be spread deep under the thorny lower branches of whatever shrub or other low-lying flora you have planted artfully around the yard, let us call it from the genus Hellseed familias, that looks great from above but has evolved on its underside to insert painful spikes into anything that disturbs its repose. Like you.
I know I keep coming back to this point, a bit like those fellows in Edgar Allen Poe stories who get an idea in their head and can’t seem to shake it until at the end of the story some other fellow finds himself walled up in a brick catacomb, but I think any person has the right to ask, “now tell me again, what is this stuff supposed to do? How does it earn its living so to speak?”
I haven’t heard that question asked or answered in the course of a long and varied life.
Big Mulch or The Mulch Cartel or the Infamous Mulch Brothers – I cannot determine who this shadowy group is, only that they now control a full third of the free time of the economy – must rub their bejeweled hands together in the nature of robber barons of an earlier era, and bless the day that one of them looked down upon the ground at the scattered byproduct of some stray timber operation and said, “say, you don’t think people would…no, it just sounds too ridiculous to say it out loud…you can’t possibly think that we could actually market this stuff…do you?”
And as the question hung in the air, a vision of billions of dollars came into their heads.
In an era of integrated operations it would not surprise me to learn that these entrepreneurs also have holdings in back surgery clinics, breweries, and spirits distribution centers.
So is it any wonder that you will often find me these days cracking open this box or that box of old photographs, gazing fondly, ever so fondly, upon an era that will never be ours again, back before there ever was such a thing as mulch?
