“What’s that noise?” Kristie awoke in the middle of the night to hear someone digging close by. Jack got up to look outside.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” he said as he crept back into bed.
“What was it?”
“It’s Salt Man.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, the neighbor is busy digging a fifty pound sack of salt into his yard.”
Sure enough the next day when she looked over the fence, she saw her neighbor’s entire yard covered in salt chunks and crystals. At the edge of where the lawn should have been was some of what Kristie called “Gorilla Grass.” She named it that when she noticed the type of grass the zoo used in the gorilla enclosure.
You just couldn’t kill the damn stuff and it liked to grow tall. It sent runners everywhere and if you tired to dig it up and left even a smidgen of the stuff anywhere, there would be a new patch of healthy grass there in a short time. It grew up to three feet tall in the chain link fence around their yard. It required a weed mower to even make a dent in it.
It was a constant battle and Salt Man was out to win the war. Every night for weeks on end he would get home from his gig playing jazz piano in the city and begin his late night digging. The Gorilla Grass wouldn’t give in. In fact, it seemed to like the nightly applications of salt, and grew even faster and greener.
Bothered by the nightly digging, Jack and Kristie stopped sleeping on the back porch where they had enjoyed waking to bird song and the sounds of the day beginning. Salt Man persisted in his nightly quest digging in at least six bags of salt over the course of several weeks.
Jack decided the cure for the grass attack was to build a very large chicken coop and let them take care of the situation. He enlisted the help of twenty chickens and one rooster. It was a beautiful prize winning flock of Rhode Island Reds, Wyandottes, Leghorns, and Araucanas.
The rooster got his digs in early each morning and all throughout the day and night. The whole neighborhood was treated to his arias. Being new to chicken raising, the constant crowing came as a surprise to the couple. But while they enjoyed the sounds of the Third World encroaching on their city farmette, the neighbors surprisingly did not. The rooster had to go.
Trying to catch it was another matter. Jack and the kids tried everything to trap it, but each time they thought they had him cornered, he let out a big crow and flew to a safer perch somewhere else around the yard.
He let out one more loud crow before they threw a net over him and took him to the local dump where they set him free to wander through the trash heaps. The last they saw of him, he was being chased by a couple of Mexican guys who wanted to catch him to use as a fighting cock.
The chickens did a great job eradicating the Gorilla Grass around their coop, but the rest of the yard was innundated. Salt Man did not have a chance. That grass was going to grow no matter what he did. Kristie approached him one afternoon, “I see that you’ve been trying to eradicate this grass.”
“Yes, the only time I have to work on it is late at night after I get home. You know the life of a musician… work all night, sleep all day.”
“You know that’s the same grass they use at the gorilla enclosure at the zoo… We call it Gorilla Grass.”
“That’s a good name for it. Maybe I should get a couple of gorillas to help me out?” They both laughed.
“I think a flock of chickens would do the trick,” Kristie said and left it at that. He was out digging at 3:00 AM like usual. There was no hope for him. That grass grew faster than he could dig it up.
(First published 7/30/12)
