THE JUNGLE

Whitie is standing in front of the picture window gazing out, cussing under his breath and fretting. I know the pose. Spick and span glass ashtray in one hand, lit Pall Mall in the other, sharp-creased khaki pants, immaculate white t-shirt and worn but buffed Florsheim oxfords. Civilian though he may be, clean-shaven and impeccably groomed, he’d pass the inspection of any regimental sergeant major at any hour of the day. He is as obsessive-compulsive about his ashes—every one tipped carefully into the proper recipient, none ever falling elsewhere, the ashtray wiped clean after each smoke—as he is about everything else. And this time it’s the lawn that has come under his unforgiving scrutiny.

“What’s the matter, Dad?” I ask.

“Goddamn weeds,” he mutters. “No matter how hard you try and have a nice lawn, there’s always weeds.”

I stand behind him and peer out over his shoulder. I say, “I think the lawn looks really nice. In fact, I wish we’d leave it a little longer.”

“Oh, Dan,” he says, “it’s long as hell already! I’m gonna finish this cigarette and then go out and mow it.”

“Want me to?”

“No. Thanks anyway, but, honestly, I don’t like how you do it. You never overlap enough and there are always these long blades of grass standing up when you’re done.”

“Suit yourself.”

I look out at the lawn, and what I see is a lovely carpet of deep dense green grass ornamented here and there with sparse patches of bright golden dandelion flowers. Beautiful when they flower, sensuous when they go to seed with their little domes of fuzzy white lace, I find them an artistic accent to an otherwise uniform verdance. I’m thinking that such a lawn could well inspire a pattern for a pretty summer frock. Meanwhile, Whitie is thinking about how, as soon as he takes the last drag on his Pall Mall, he’s going to go out there to gleefully decapitate every single one of those little bastards.

Ours is a rural small-town, white Midwestern society. It’s not a place that rewards diversity. And every person’s lawn is measured by how much it resembles a golf course, not a fallow meadow, so weeds of any sort are anathema to the bulk of the home-owning population. People have been known to petition the municipality to require lackadaisical neighbors to manicure their lawns. A neighbor who allows his or her grass to run wild, they reason, lowers the property value of the surrounding lots, and, worse still, permits weeds to propagate and spread from there to kingdom come.

My mother’s father had a practical view of dandelions. They weren’t weeds, they were greens. He was a country boy and didn’t think spring was spring without dandelion greens. He taught me from an early age how to use my pocketknife to harvest them while they were still tender. Right in the middle, right where their single flower stem emerged, you stabbed them deep in the heart. Then you removed the knife, took hold of the entire plant at its base and pulled. This was best done after a nice rain, so they came out by their roots instead of your ending up with a handful of loose leaves. It killed two birds with one stone, or so he said, since the weeds got pulled up by their roots—which was supposed to be a permanent solution—and you could get a nice bunch of greens into the bargain. Still, it seemed that each year there were always plenty to harvest.

Grandpa used to bring a dishpan full to my mother, Reba Mae, each year, because he not only carried out this meticulous task at his home, but also at the local cemetery, where he was the caretaker. For the twenty years that he held that post after moving to town from the country, Greenlawn Cemetery lived up to its name—always neat and green as a formal garden and each and every grave mown and clipped to perfection.

As a young boy, I was proud of this gardening skill my grandfather had taught me and was always glad to help harvest greens in the dandelion season, but I was no fan of dining on them. Former farm girl that she was, Reba Mae loved them and made them “wilted” with vinegar and a little sugar and stewed with a nice ham-bone. But she was about the only one in the family who ate them. Certainly not Whitie, who, a city boy, said that if supermarkets existed, he didn’t know why the hell he should be eating weeds with his pork chops.

When you drove around a town like mine, the great majority of homes had the sort of lawn Whitie and Reba Mae aspired to—some more, some less perfect. But the effort was in some stage of being made. The most established of lawns were picture perfect, an unbroken carpet of single-shade green, achieved through the combined liberal use of weed-killer and urea. Well, except at my father’s father’s house. At Grandpa Murel’s place, the cure-all for home and garden was manure. He would go out to the speed barns at the County Fairgrounds to collect it and he put it on everything—the vegetable garden, the flowerbeds, the strawberry patch and the lawn. When Murel started spreading manure, you wanted to get out of the way. Because if not, he was sure to find a use for it on you as well.

In those perfect lawns, any trees were carefully pruned and every random leaf or twig raked, flowers all contained in geometrical flower-beds, tulips here, roses there, salvia to make a nice tidy border, geraniums like bookends on either side of the porch,  each species with its own cedar-chip mulch providing a uniform look to the surface of the soil. In the old yards, there might be a picket fence or a set of bordering hedges, fussily trimmed to squared perfection. But in the “new additions” on the outskirts of town, like the one we moved to when I was twelve and where Whitie and Reba Mae would live for forty-two years, lawns blended one into another, preferably in continuous visual sequence. And if that wasn’t the case, the offending neighbor (yard slob) was sure to hear about it from the aggrieved parties next door.

This obsession with uniformity wasn’t hard to understand. Most of us were the descendants of German and Scots-Irish farmers. We came from families that lived on basically flat land and valued straight crop rows and fields with no weeds. I used to get tickled when I was a kid and we would be driving through the countryside and Reba Mae would say sarcastically that a corn or bean crop would “have to be sold for succotash” whenever there was corn coming up in the beans or beans in the corn. For farmers there was nothing quite as beautiful as an impeccable carpet of a single crop.

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

One of my favorite paintings is Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth. Apart from its haunting subject—a young woman in a simple house-dress and country oxfords half-prone with her back to the artist in a fallow meadow, gazing tensely toward a house in the distance—I love how the painter captured the texture of the grass, and the feeling that a light, late-summer breeze is slightly ruffling it, as it is the woman’s long hair, which is tied back but with a few wisps breaking free. As a boy, I wanted grass to be like that, for it to wave in the wind, to bend with the breeze, to tassel and re-seed itself. I wanted country grass, not suburban grass. I wanted grass a cow or a horse would be tempted to graze on. So I was fascinated and would stop a while to drink it in whenever I saw a house where the lawn had been allowed to get a little out of hand.

There was a farmhouse a mile or two outside of town that reminded me of the one in Christina’s World. A rambling old two-story house that hadn’t been painted in decades and was the natural grey of well-weathered wood, crowned by a red-rusted, gabled, sheet metal roof. There was a barn out back, of the same matte-grey lumber as the house.  The only sign that anyone lived there was a very tidy little vegetable garden to one side, which seemed incongruous compared with the rest. The yard had been let go as much as the buildings had, and the grass that grew up to the edge of the wood-plank front porch was knee-high. It waved in the breeze like wheat before the harvest.

More than once as we drove by, I’d heard my mother say, “If somebody held a paintbrush up to that house, it would suck the paint right off of the bristles.” And then she would add, “They’ll need a scythe to cut that grass.” But I found the place enchanting, and all I could think was that it was exactly where I would like to live.

Why couldn’t you just let your yard go crazy? Who said everybody’s place had to be neat and tidy? What was the big deal if the property was yours? Why couldn’t you do whatever you wanted with it if you weren’t hurting anybody with what you did or didn’t do and if that’s what gave you joy? Why conform to common practice?

Imagine my delight, then, when we lived, for the three years before we moved to the house in the “new addition”, in a big old house in town that fronted on the main residential street and the rear of which was on another major thoroughfare, but the yard of which was in the style of a different era, before housing “additions” became a thing.  There was a huge old sugar maple on the one side in front and an enormous cedar on the other. Cedar spreaders ran along the front. In the little door yard at the back there was another centenarian maple and the most wonderful lilac, as tall as the garage. The backyard proper boasted another ancient cedar and another towering maple. Hedges separated the different parts of the property and the previous owner had let them “get out of hand,” according to Whitie. While they lasted that way, I thought they were grand.

Despite the fact that Whitie got my mother’s father to come over with his hedge shears and fashion the hedges into even, waist-high, green blocks, and in spite of his own obsession with mowing the grass to perfection with a hand-mower, it was hard to ruin the natural beauty of a yard with that many trees—which was part of the reason we would shortly move to a place in the new addition where Whitie could start concentrating on turning the uninspiring lawn into a veritable golf green (despite his distaste for golf, and the country club crowd who played it).

But what truly excited my interest when we lived in that big house in town wasn’t our yard as much as one catty-cornered across the street at the back of our place. And the owner of it was as fascinating as was the environment that he had created around him. Everybody tauntingly referred to him as “Jungle George”.

George was, they said, a retired professor of some sort—law, some people said. I still find it hard to imagine a man as retiring and reclusive as he was standing in front of a classroom, but perhaps he had been more outgoing in his youth. But I never saw more of him than glimpses on his porch or in his yard, and we never seemed to run into him anywhere else around town. His hermit-like nature had, for us kids, turned him into something like the Boo Radley of our neighborhood.

The house was set back from the street, a plain enough place with a modified A-frame roof and a long low porch across the front. A narrow cement walk led to the porch from a waist-high wrought-iron gate in a simple wrought-iron fence that ran all along the sidewalk at the front of the property. What was extraordinary was the yard, a big one by town standards, which was plain and unremarkable for its topography, but that had, over many years, been turned into a patch of wild woodland with enormous trees that loomed over the house and a dense undergrowth of flowers, plants, shrubs and vines of every sort imaginable. It was like the overpopulated botanical garden of a mad scientist. So dense was this miniature forest that the house lay in a kind of permanent gloom, only penetrated by random rays of sun that spotlighted this or that tree or plant, or that fell in a dust-mote column across the front porch.

George’s house was on a corner. The west side of his yard bordered on a one-block-long street. My friend Steve’s back and side yards gave onto that street as well. So from that side, Steve and I could observe Jungle George’s property any time we pleased. My mother never worried about me when I was with Steve. He was ten or eleven when I was nine or ten and was a very responsible kid for his age. It was like leaving me with a big brother, especially since my parents knew his to be unquestionably decent people, and Steve’s father was almost always there, since he was a cabinet-maker who had set up his shop in the detached two-car garage at the back of their lot. There were only two properties on that side of the street—Steve’s and that of his neighbor, Forest, whose son Dick had set up a marine motor sales shop in their garage, with the two shops sitting back to back. George’s was the only property on the other side, with a narrow alley running along the back leading to his hidden garage, followed by an abandoned lot that was wilder and woolier than his place and that, for all I know, he may have owned as well, because no one ever bought it and built anything there.

Sometimes when Steve and I would stay out a while after dark to go hunting for the nightcrawlers that we used for fish bait, we would see a light in the low basement windows at George’s place—or, better said, we got a glimpse only, piercing the thicket of shrubs and trees. Once I told Steve that other kids had told me that Jungle George was a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, who had a laboratory in his basement and did god-knows-what down there at night. They also said that he was a widower who had killed his wife and buried her behind a wall down there.

“You gotta stop listening to those dumb-asses, Danny,” Steve told me with a laugh. “They’re full o’ crap. I figure he’s got his gardening stuff down there. He’s always doing something with his plants. Gathering bulbs and seeds, re-potting, whatever it is guys like him do.”

“How would you know?” I asked, preferring to believe the Frankenstein and walled-up wife stories.

“Because I’ve talked to him.”

“Really?”

“Sure. He’s a nice ol’ man, just strange, is all.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. But Steve—whom I already held in high regard just because of how he was, but also because he had built his own bedroom furniture in his dad’s shop, and had given Stan, the neighborhood bully, whom we all feared, such a beating that Stan had run home bawling and holed up in his house for days afterward—had just become even more of a hero in my eyes. He had actually talked to Jungle George...and lived!

“When?” I asked.

“When what?”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Whenever. Last week. Whenever I want.”

“You mean you just go, ‘Hi George,’ and start talking to him?”

“Well, I don’t go over and knock on the door or anything. He doesn’t like being bothered, and Dad makes sure I don’t. But if I’m around and see him out in the yard messing with his plants, I’ll walk over to the fence and say hi, and if he talks to me he talks to me and if he don’t, he don’t.”

My mouth was open as wide as an airplane hangar.

Steve chuckled. “Nothin’ to be scared of. He’s just a lonesome ol’ man.”

“Ever been inside?”

“Not the house. But he invited me into the yard once when he was in a pretty good mood and started showing me every plant and bush and tree in there. He can tell you the name of every one of them in Latin and German too.”

German! That was sinister in itself. World War II had only been over for a decade and a half by then and our dads were vets. Germans were the enemy. The villains in every war movie, storm-troopers, Jew-killers, the ones who had wounded or killed our fathers or the fathers of people we knew. In fact, Steve’s dad had a scar on the front of one shoulder and a bigger one in back at the top of the shoulder blade where a German round had gone through. Mad German scientists had experimented on prisoners. Couldn’t George be one of those?

This “logic” ignored the fact that George was very likely American of German descent, the same as my own grandfather was. Perhaps a first-generation American like Grandpa Vern was. But locally, the language and many of the customs of the old country had been very intentionally lost. Other communities had maintained those Germanic traditions. In nearby New Bremen and New Knoxville, people of my grandfather’s generation still spoke “low German” among themselves. But that wasn’t common in my town, where the people in those places were referred to, in pejorative terms, as “ol’ Dutchmen” (because they spoke Deutsch) and around here, my own grandfather had been brought up being warned not to speak German so he “wouldn’t sound ignorant”. It was a “no dandelion” community and you had to try and avoid being a stand-out weed, especially within the context of the two world wars, in which Germany was a bitter foe.

“He just knows German, is all,” Steve laughed. “No crime in that.”

For the three years that we lived in that neighborhood, Steve continued to be my best friend and protector, and Jungle George and his incredible yard the object of my fascination. I had to work up my courage before, on Steve’s coaxing, I could ride through the twilight of George’s tree-tunnel front sidewalk when he was out in his yard and wave. But I eventually started doing it any time he was out. Sometimes Jungle George gave a perfunctory wave back. Other times he didn’t. But the important thing was that he was now human in my mind—an interesting character, in fact. An eccentric with an incredible environment that we should be glad to have as an integral part of the neighborhood.

As I grew from childhood to pre-adolescence in those three years, there were a lot of times that I wanted to be Steve. A kid whose dad taught him amazing skills and actually talked to him. A little boy with a man’s sense of responsibility and with the empathy and honesty of a gentleman. A small, wiry tough kid who used his grit to defend not only himself but others. A guy who seemed to know no fear.

I learned a lot from Steve and I learned to admire George. He was that little boy who wanted waving grass and a yard gone rogue, and as a man he had the individualism to make his wish come true. Ironically, in the last twenty-five years or so, I’ve turned, not into Steve, but into Jungle George. The neighbor who refuses to cut the grass and lets it wave in the wind, who lives in a piece of the deep, dark forest that still invades what is becoming a suburban neighborhood. The one who thinks dog-rose and Spanish broom are as beautiful as any other flower and lets them run rampant. The curmudgeon who rejected the installation of natural gas and kept on heating with firewood. The rebel who acquired a buffer zone on the edge of the wilds and decided to remain on the margin of the  civilized life around him, because that was always his dream.