But Enough About You: Essays by Christopher Buckley Read Free Book Online

heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.
    — Forbes FYI , June 2005

THE DIRT ON DIRT
    I seem to have taken up gardening.
    I realize that this is not a declaration to cause goose bumps. I stipulate that, rhetorically speaking, it is not up there with “Once more unto the breach” or “Sic semper tyrannis.” It’s more on a par with “Checkout time is eleven a.m.” or “Where did I put the car keys?”
    How did this happen, I wonder? As a child, my summer chores included weeding my mother’s marigold bed. She called it a “bed,” but at the time it seemed as vast as the entire state of Connecticut. It did not instill in me a love of gardening. To this day, I cannot hear the word marigold without breaking out in hives.
    If you yourself have not yet been ensorcelled by Horta, Goddess of the Garden, and turned into a haunter of the local nursery, let me report that as hobbies go, it’s less expensive than collecting antique biplanes or Andy Warhol soup cans, but dirt, though dirt, does not necessarily come cheap.
    When the landscape architect Le Nôtre presented the bill for the gardens of Versailles to Louis XIV, a shadow is said to have eclipsed the features of the Sun King. My own little patch of earth is as Dogpatch, comparatively speaking, but like le Roi Soleil , I went ashen when presented with a bill for sixty bags of cedar nuggets.
    “Nuggets,” I quipped to the fellow behind the counter. “I must say, that’s apt.” As you can see, I’m something of a wag.
    He did not riposte, but then he was busy on the phone with the Fraud Alert Department of American Express, which was no doubt demanding zip codes, blood types, social numbers, and maternal birth dates. Once home, I placed each “nugget” individually about the garden with care befitting Murano glass mosaic tiles.
    We of Hibernian persuasion have internalized the adage that to be Irish is to know that sooner or later the world will break your heart. But I have made a corollary discovery: The gardener, too, knows that Nature—and all the gods—is in conspiracy against him.
    Squirrels, I am now aware, devote every waking hour between October and May to rooting out the bulbs that you laboriously interred in October. The bulbs, that is, that you ordered from exotic mail-order houses; that you soaked overnight in a homemade atomic elixir containing the most potent capsaicin-laden peppers known to science. While I prepare this fiendish brew, I wear latex gloves, face mask, and eye goggles. Saddam Hussein would have paid good money for my formula.
    That sound you hear in my garden? That would be the squirrels, expressing gastronomic satisfaction as they dine, chittering, “Cayenne and habañeros! Sublime! Magnifique! ”
    I wonder: What countermeasures did the burghers of Amsterdam deploy against their squirrels during the seventeenth-century Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania? Did grown men weep on discovering that a squirrel had noshed on a tulip bulb worth more than the value of their house? It is not impossible that the arquebus- and sword-wielding soldiers in Rembrandt’s celebrated painting The Night Watch were protecting tulip bulbs from seventeenth-century tree rodents. How gardening widens one’s intellectual horizons.
    Gardening is said to be a calming pursuit, yet there you find yourself, reaching for a pencil with which to scribble down the 800 number in the infomercial with the guy injecting compressed gas into gopher holes and then igniting it, causing thousands of divots to shoot violently into the sky, along with the remains of the very unpleasantly surprised gophers. How does the poem go? “One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.” Right.
    In my next dispatch from my backyard Eden, I will discuss strategies and options after Hurricane Sandy has deposited fourteen cubic tons of sea salt on your perennials and fifty-year-old ornamental cedars. Hint: You’re going