Tumbleweed

Albuquerque

I grew up watching silly western shoot-em-ups on TV (it was black-and-white back then). We saw tumbleweed blowing across the open plains when the winds were blowing. I knew what it was, but never actually saw one in real life.

Then I moved to Albuquerque.

We settled into a nice little two story stucco house with a couple of neat patio decks and amazing views of the Sandia Mountains. Almost Heaven, was your thought watching the sun set and the red glow on the mountains.

The house was great, and had a pretty big back yard fenced in by a stucco fence, very common for the area.

It had not one blade of grass back there, just bare dirt that sprouted ugly weeds all the time. Great.

After we got settled in, we had our first experience with a desert dust storm. The winds blow, the desert mixes in a huge quantity of dirt, and the result is astounding. You can barely see five feet, driving is stupid, and all you really should do is sit and wait until it dies out. Even the cowboys in my old TV shows knew that!

What I found out also got mixed into that dusty wind was tumbleweed. After my first such storm, I looked out in the back yard, and it was full of those dry bush-like things, some of them six feet across. They had hopped the fence and piled up against the house and the fence on the opposite side. Great, what do you do with this stuff.

Garbage

My first thought was simple. This stuff had blown down onto my neighborhood from the mesa just west of our housing development. If that stuff came from the mesa, I would give it back.

So, being a good pick-up truck owner, I decided to pile as much of those evil things as I could onto the truck and take it back.

I got a good load on board, and headed up to the top pf the mesa, along a road I often jogged on. I found a ditch that looked like a nice spot, and stopped the truck. I kicked my load of tumbleweed into the ditch.

I thought I had a pretty good solution there, until I spotted a park ranger truck speeding my way. The area was part of a National Park whose boundaries were not clear at all. They had a station at the bottom of the mesa, and managed a set of trails by old petroglyphs on the rocks lining the mesa walls. The ranger stopped by my truck and came up to me.

"You cannot do that!" There is a $350 fine for littering here."

"Littering? I am just returning tumbleweed to its home! There is no litter here."

"Doesn't matter, that stuff is classified as garbage, and there is a fine for that.

I explained my plight, he offered to let me off with a warning, and I asked him how I was supposed to deal with this pile of c#@%.

"Burn it!" was his advice.

Grumbling, I went back home.

Tumbleweed Raking

I got back to the house, and got out a rake I owned back when I had a house with actual grass and trees. I raked all the tumbleweed into a pile in the middle of the back yard, well away from anything that might burn. I stood there, socked in sweat, admiring my pile. It was about 15 feet high, maybe 20 feet across, and all the tumbleweed in the yard was safely in that pile.

I wadded up a piece of newspaper, set it on fire. I walked up to the edge of the pile and touched off what I thought would be a nice wood fire that would take maybe an hour to burn through.

Boom!

I was not prepared for that happened.

The entire pile exploded into flame like a bomb had gone off. The fireball soared into the sky, I swear 400 feet. Nothing else got burned, but that was definitely NOT the way to do this.

So, I called the local fire department to ask how this was done around here. He told me what I had done was fine, except for that last step. He said:

"Take one of two tumbleweed out of the pile and light them off to the side. Keep doing that until it is all gone."

Duh! Lesson learned. It was entertaining, scary, and unforgettable, and my first introduction to living amongst the tumbleweeds.

Dust Devils

Another interesting phenomena of living in the desert is dust devils. Basically, these are small tornadoes that wander across the desert. Normally, they are full of dirt, and can just walk by you causing no harm, and they were fun to watch.

On one of my jogs up on that same, litter-free mesa, I spotted one wandering down the road toward me. But this one was not normal, it looked like a huge flock of birds had gotten trapped in it. The thing was several hundred feet high, and those "birds" were spinning around the thing as it approached. Only when it got much closer did I realize that the thing had sucked up a bunch of those evil tumbleweeds, and they were what was spinning around in the sky. I remembered later that they used to call these things "trash movers" out in California.

Flying Volkswagens

After living in the area for several years, we got used to living with all of this. I still remember driving home one afternoon, only to get caught in another dust storm. I was driving slowly along the road when Volkswagens went sailing past my front window so fast you hardly had time to spot them. They were huge, maybe 15 feet across. Actually they were just giant tumbleweeds. If they hit the side of the car, they just bounced off and continued on their way. Still, it was exciting to watch all of that.

Tumbleweed is just a big bush that grows in the desert. Lack of water will kill the bush, and all the greenery falls off leaving a single stalk sticking into the ground, and a wad of limbs and branches making a nice round clump. That clump is a nice target for wind, and the wind pushes so hard on the dead bush until that stalk snaps and the bush starts tumbling across the desert in the wind.

Right into my back yard!