Spikeful
In this episode, we explore some of the more painful aspects of the natural world - and the happier ones too…
Right now, down here in south-east Australia, it’s the height of summer. Warm dry days. Hot, even. Just the right weather to enjoy a barefoot walk out on the cool, cool grass, right?
Uh, no. I made that mistake exactly once. I won’t do it again…
Why not?
Well, these days, every time I go out in the garden, carefully shod in solid footwear, by the time I get back to the house the soles of my boots will be embedded with at least half a dozen of these decidedly-undelightful little things.
Ouch…
Sure, they’re small, but they’re sharp, and those spikes are strong enough and often long enough to punch straight through the soft rubber soles of your beachware flip-flops (known locally as ‘thongs’ - a term open to some unfortunate misinterpretations elsewhere…). And I have to take some care to extract the wretched things from my boots, otherwise they’ll eventually end up elsewhere in the house. Whereupon my bare feet will encounter them, eliciting pain at least as bad as the infamous Lego-piece left lying around on the floor.
Yeah. Ouch.
Definitely ouch.
Nature can be spikeful sometimes…
They’re the seeds of an invasive weed, tribulus terrestris, originally native from Africa and southern Eurasia, and a real problem for people like my sheep-farmer colleague who lives just a few miles down the road from here. I would not be popular with him if I let any of those seeds loose on his land. The common-name for them is caltrop, named after these thoroughly nasty devices that first made their unpleasant appearance on the battlefields of ancient China, a few thousand years ago.
Later, they became the mediaeval equivalent of an anti-tank mine: scattered around in a defensive line, they could bring any cavalry-charge to an instant crashing halt. Anti-personnel, too, in smaller size. And left to rust away on the battlefield, long, long after that war is gone and long forgotten, until some poor innocent peasant puts his foot on it, centuries later, and dies of gangrene from the unwarranted wound. Just like all those left-over-and-lost cluster-munitions and landmines of the present-day, in fact.
Spikeful indeed…
So much of nature is like that, too. Spikes everywhere. Bramble, and gorse, and those strange hard-stemmed thistle-like things that infest the nature-strip between the house and the road. There’s another plant in the garden here, too, long trailing vines with beautiful purple flowers - but with long curved barbs all over those strands that’ll rip your skin off if you get too close. As you can guess, I learnt about that one the hard way…
Other spikes: poison-spikes, in the case of the nettles down at the spoil-heap, or just those plain ordinary long, long spikes all over the towering cacti at the other end of the garden.
And humans are really good at copying the worst of nature, of course. Barbed-wire, everywhere around here, all over the old goldfields and the like, still quietly rusting away a century or so later. Free gift of tetanus, anyone?
Yeah, spikeful. Oh well.
Yes, I know it often seems that all of nature out here is out to get us, if we’re not careful. Terry Pratchett once famously declared that the only creatures on this island continent of ours not actively dangerous were “some of the sheep”. But no, don’t worry, it’s not actually that bad. Not always, anyway.
I have a small, delightful memory from the days when I lived on a large block some fifty miles to the south of here, before I moved back to Britain around twenty years ago. I was up near the northern border of the property, planting trees, when out from under the brush came an echidna. It was about the size and shape of a large-sized rabbit, but moving much slower, its face and long snuffly nose pointed at the ground, hunting for ants to eat. They’re weird, of course, as so many Australian animals are: in this case, a monotreme, like a platypus, a mammal that lays eggs. And they’re usually timid, shy creatures, avoiding any contact with anything else; but for some reason it didn’t notice me at all, in fact slowly wandered its winding way towards me until it literally bumped into my boot. At which point, it looked up at me, in some confusion, and then wandered slowly off again, down the hill, without a care in the world.
It has spines all over its back, for protection against potential predators. But the spines are blunt-ended, not sharp.
Spiky, but not spikeful.
Nice.