Rock the House

The heat has let up for now, but fall is on its way with heat and that famous Mediterranean light. Matilijas mostly done blooming and ready to be cut down (as soon as there’s room in our Green Trimmings Only trash can), the fennel the same, having been cut down by Ryan last week. The California fuchsia are in full bloom along with the lion’s tail, lantana, and the fortnight lilies. The Acer tomato still continues to need water three times a week, compared with the century old heirloom Brandywine, which merely needs it once every Saturday. Another nod to the expression, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (Tomatoes like Brandywine were pushed out of production because they couldn’t be picked green and “ripened” in shipping like other more modern, tasteless varieties. Oh, and they can be incredibly ugly. But the taste! Oh, my god, once you’ve had one, it’s hard to ever return.)

Wendy’s and my backs are feeling the effects of putting in tons of pebbles in the back yard, those tiny pebbles sometimes referred to as gravel.

And when I say tons, I mean tons. Or tonnes. Depending on where you’re from.

We’ve been struggling with our small and mostly shady back yard for the 12 years we’ve lived here. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There was pea gravel in the back yard when we moved in and a driveway up to a garage. We had the driveway was replaced by a flagstone path and we converted the two-car space into a studio (which then turned into a kids’ playroom, then our niece’s room, and now back to a studio) and a storage area. The gravel was nice for a while, but once Ryan was born I wanted grass.

You know, grass? You can almost see the picture of baby trying to catch the bubbles that you’re blowing while sitting on a carpet of green. Man’s biggest gardening project, the endless fight for a green, leafy lawn. You probably don’t have to go far in your imagination to see the dads yelling at the kids to stay off the work of art they’ve created. “Stop walking on it! Someone tell that dog to defecate somewhere else!”

The Japanese have their bonsai, our American control of the environment is shown in our slavish love for the shorn pasture of endless verdant green.

You probably don’t want to know the facts and figures about the water wasted (probably more so here in the Southwest than the rest of the country, we’ll take full blame), not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, and herbicides/pesticides that kill all the intended and not-intended violators of our personal yard space (then wash down the sewer and get into our streams and oceans). Over the years of gardening I did come to recognize what a hypocrisy it is to work so closely with nature in my yard to the detriment of nature outside of the confines of my property.

But all that comes later.

I had to have grass for that baby. And if you can believe it (if you’re a gardener I’m sure you can), I spend the last 8 years trying to grow it. Does anyone spend 8 years doing anything? If you spend 8 years in college, you’d be broke and probably declared insane. Wait, I think my friend who is getting his PhD in Mythology has been going for 15 years. Still, it’s a long time to do anything.

When I first looked at our back yard and many people suggested grass I replied, “It’s just too shady.” Turned out I was right. Just took 8+ years to prove my point.

First I bought the Marathon shady mix of grass and spent days preparing the space, putting in sprinklers, laying down the topsoil, and watering three times a day. The grass came up wonderfully. It was magic. For about a month. Then it seemed the grass wasn’t getting enough of the sun it needed. It turned spindly and when you walked on it and never popped back up. It was like a lawn full of sullen teens. I mowed it, watered, fertilized, and continued to be disappointed. Over the next several summer months, it disappeared back into the dirt. Leaving it its path, well, dirt. Which was worse than the gravel I was dealing with in the first place.

Next I tried St. Augustine grass, which you may or may not know is not available in seed. I’m not sure if this is a gimmick or if it’s just too hard to have sprout, but I have to buy flats upon flats of it from my local nursery. I got the full skinny from Don at the store, bought all the right stuff (again) and was on my way.

The St. Augustine never took at all. It sat there and instead of spreading its magical tendrils across the 700 square feet it curled up and died. I don’t know much about the actual St. Augustine, but perhaps this is what he did, too. Maybe the Romans didn’t give him water and he perished. Regardless, it was sad. And my manhood was becoming serious damaged. There are a few things men in America need to know how to do and a big one of those things is to know how to grow a decent lawn. (Some others are how to make a fire and then barbecue over it and at least look like you know what the mechanic is talking about when he’s discussing the problems with your car. “It’s the manifold, it’s all gunked up.” “Uh huh, I see. Damn Chevy manifolds” must be your reply.)

I decided to bring in the big guns. I called Javier, my gardener, and had him access the problem. “It’s too dark,” he said wisely. “We’ll need to take out that tree,” he advised with little dollar signs lighting up his eyes.

So not only did I tell him to take out the tree, but to bring in sod, too.

For the unfamiliar, sod is what you get when you have more money than time. If you want someone out in Central California to grow your grass in the desert by sowing seeds, then pounding the ground with water 4 times a day, and finally scraping it and a ½ inch of soil up with some kind of industrial spatula, loading it onto a truck, and delivering it to your house, then this is the option for you. Did I say it was expensive? Like almost everything made easier, it comes at a price.

The sod looked wonderful when Javier was done. We celebrated. Sat on it. Bought a nice little table and chairs. Basked in its grassy glory. For a month or two. Then the familiar scenario played out again: the grass not getting up after being stepped on, kind of withering, then went away completely. Luckily this was after our largest party of the year, when 70 or so of our closest friends for an early Thanksgiving pot luck. (It’s all about impressing other people, isn’t it?) Javier was nice enough to come back with some more after several weeks of living with the dirt. I began to suspect he hadn’t used the brand I’d told him to, Marathon, which is some sort of patented Wunder Grass, guaranteed to grow in a cave alongside mosses. That grass also lasted exactly two months, then became mud when the winter rains blustered in.

Insert heavy sigh here.

I want to say this whole grass shindig ended around January of this year. Which would put that newborn boy I so wanted to impress with my manly grass know-how at a ripe old age of 6 and a half.

Wendy tried to explain it this way, “The kids don’t give a damn about grass. They don’t play out there.” True enough. We tried to play ball a few times back there, but 15 feet between catcher and pitcher, surrounded by 7 or so very breakable antique windows didn’t seem like the best idea. Oh yeah, and there were all the plants that kept getting pummeled by our ball, feet, or hands as we dove for to make the play.

Do you ever get the feeling you’ve watched too many movies, seen too many commercials, been subjected to so many advertisements that you’ve been convinced that’s reality? I think that’s what I had a case of here. Altered reality. But not the good kind.

We discussed everything from patios to decks to dichondera (a type of invasive “grass alternative,” whatever that means), but nothing seemed to fit the bill. Until we were on vacation and walked into a Japanese store that had a tiny little traditional house in it and outside were these beautiful black pebbles which went crunch, crunch, crunch when you walked over them. I called Wendy over and asked what she thought of them. “Perfect,” she said. And it was. I asked the woman if they sold them, she said no. She did tell me where they’d gotten them. Sort of. She was nice, anyway, as she told me in very broken English how to get to the place in Torrance which she did not know the name of. I decided I should probably wait until our next visit there before making any journeys with two kids and a wife in tow. A month later we were back and got proper directions from the owner and even the name of the company. That next Saturday Ryan, Abby, and I were smack dab in the middle of the busiest little rock shop you’ve ever seen. Dust flying everywhere, no real parking, and forklifts zooming by your car door at NASCAR speeds. I told the kids to stay close and follow me inside. Inside, by comparison, was a little oasis. The relaxed guy who helped me showed me where to look for the rocks we wanted. We went out and crunched around a bit on them. I saw another color, sort of a sandy beachy shade I liked, so I took down the names of both and went back inside.

The guy gave me an estimate for 500 square feet.

$856.

Wow.

Seemed an awful lot for a bunch of rocks. But he suggested the whole thing be 2 inches deep and it was $150 for delivery alone. We were talking 4,000 pounds of rock. Obviously not going to fit in the back of the Jetta with two kids.

I took the numbers home to Wendy, fully ready for her to tell me that’s too damn much for rocks, but I got the opposite. “Sounds great,” she said. “Let’s do it next weekend.” I realize that sometimes when I answer for Wendy in my head, I just sort of put a wig on myself and answer. Of course she said yes. She always says yes.

We discussed color. Though I was originally drawn to the black color, I believe it was due to our back yard already having a major Japanese theme. We have a stand of 45-foot giant bamboo, a running stand of bamboo, golden bamboo, and heavenly bamboo. In other words, a lot of bamboo. The problem with black rock, I figured, was twofold: one, you can see every leaf that falls on it. If you know anything about bamboo, you probably know for 365 days out of the year they drop their leaves to the ground to smother weeds and provide silica (?) as a sort of fertilizer to their roots. 366 days during a leap year. The Japanese people have a reputation of being pretty neat, and I couldn’t imagine myself out back every morning with a wooden broom, clogs, and a Vietnamese hat sweeping before going to work. I’m just not that Zen. Reason number two, black doesn’t seem to me to be the coolest surface on earth. In fact, I remember just the opposite when playing on the blacktop at school when I was young. Sometimes it would be so hot that when your feet hit it after jumping from the swings and you’d make a dent into it. These were two things I didn’t want in my back yard. So we decided on the lighter color.

(I did make the mistake of asking my fastidious neighbor, Mark, his opinion on color. He voted on the black. Mark is one of those people who has lawn furniture that he moves out of the way every morning before watering his lawn. Mark, obviously, has no children and belongs to that other traditionally neat culture: gay men.)

We decided to fill in a little more alongside the side of the house where the grass just seemed to be taking (by “taking” I mean the way hair seems to be taking on a man’s comb-over. Not exactly what everyone wants to look at). The new total for the rocks came to just over $1,000. After I ordered I thought, “Man, do I hope I didn’t make the biggest $1,000 mistake of my life.” Which is ridiculous, as I have made many, many $1,000 mistakes in my life and will probably continue to do so in the far-flung future.

Wendy and I had both taken two weeks off for summer vacation and, as usual, we’d make some plans for home improvement so we wouldn’t get bored.

We do this a lot, in fact. I remember many a Labor and Memorial Day filled with painting projects while we listened to Flashback Weekends on the alternative rock station.

Already on this “vacation” we’d hired someone to paint Wendy’s Pilates studio and hang mirrors, while Wendy and I hooked up another phone line, cleaned all the incredibly dusty (not to mention high) windows, replaced lighting fixtures, and moved the machinery back and forth. Also on the list was to move our computer out to the studio now that our niece had vacated it. And, of course, the back yard.

They said to expect the pebbles at 9:30, to which I told Wendy, “They’ll be here earlier.” Sure enough, a semi pulled up at 7 o’clock, with two 3,000 pound bags of pebbles. And yes, a 3,000 pound bag of pebbles looks about as big as you’d expect. Six feet around and 4 feet high. Let’s put it this way, two children could comfortably sit on the pebbles in the bag with sand toys and play while I took wheelbarrow full after wheelbarrow full of pebbles to the back yard. Oh yes, and the first bag had an opening just large enough to put a shovel in but not quite pull it out. I remembered my breathing techniques while trying not to curse. Remember that the children were in the other bag. I was a quarter way through when I started to think we’d made a mistake with the color. Could I return it? Could I say I was terribly, terribly wrong and would they deliver the black pebbles instead? About halfway through landscaping I realized it felt like walking through them was harder than walking on the sand at the beach. You had to slog to get that crunch crunch noise. But slogging wasn’t really what I wanted. Three-quarters of the way through, I realized it not only felt like sand, it looked a hell of a lot like sand. In fact, it started to look like one of those fake beaches they create in Nebraska so the kids won’t realize they’re thousands of miles away from the ocean. All I needed was a seagull ripping his way through a trashcan and lifeguards ripping through on ATVs to complete the scene.

But I kept working. I mean, what else was I going to do? Anyway, I know my own neuroses well enough to realize that many times in the midst of a creative project I will up and lose it. (I remember a documentary I’d watched about someone directing the Emmys and seconds before they went live he yelled, “It’ll never work! Call it off! Oh my god, what were we thinking!” took a moment, then called into his headset, “Okay, everyone, in five, four, three…” So obviously I’m not the only one who experiences such a thing.)

We filled in the spaces between our flagstones. The spaces that were supposed to grow a variety of different plants I’d purchased over the years which had become dirt spotted with the occasional moss.

I stood back and tried to enjoy my work.

Nope. Not taking.

My mind was still screaming, “You idiot!”, “Here you go, $1,000 worth of rocks!”, “Congratulations, sucker!” and the like. My mind can be very kind when it wants to be. Now was not one of those times. I kept trying to convince Wendy we should go out for a break and get some afternoon coffee. She, unlike me, was having a good time, seeing the bright side of things. “It does look beachy. Maybe we should put an umbrella over there and a bucket of sand toys.” Oh my god, woman, NO! We don’t want a beach scene here!
She was not helping quiet my mind. But then again, she wasn’t calling me an idiot as my own mind was doing. She said it’d look much better after moving the table back. We went out for a coffee break and I sat there and tried not to look forlorn. I really don’t know how some married couples manage to run a business together. As a couple Wendy and I have difficulty setting up the Christmas tree every year. I know couples who don’t even bother going with each other to the grocery store. I guess we’re ahead of some and behind a few.

I sat at the coffee shop trying to have a smile. “Yes, look,” my face was trying to say, “I’m a happy fellow! A dirty, yet happy fellow who just spent over $1,000 of his own money on rocks! See how it doesn’t bother me? I just spent $12 on coffee drinks for the family! Look at us, we’re rich, stupid people who blow money on stupid rocks!” I’m not sure I was fooling anyone except the kids.

Wasn’t it George Bush who said it takes a village to set up a back yard? Or was it Mark Twain?

Regardless, we came home and it did look a bit better. Not great mind you. But not The Worst Mistake of My Life that it looked like much earlier.

After we put the kids to bed Wendy and I slogged with our glasses of wine out to the table, lit some candles, and tried to relax. It was okay, but not great. I still had that smile of “this is not bothering me” on my face, kind of like that guy in the 1920’s who said, “Ah, what’s a little stock market crash?” right before stepping out the window.

Was this something I should have done? Absolutely. Will I get used to it. Most assuredly. Am I going to be a pain in the ass until I do?

Well, the jury is still out on that one.

I’ll let you know.