Clipper Carl, the Kudzu Kid
I had a friend call me up the other day. An intruder – ‘a trespasser’, she called him – had wandered onto her property via bicycle. Armed, she said, with a clipper. Her neighbor had confronted him lopping English Ivy off her fir trees and asked him who he was, did he have authorization for this horticultural blitzkrieg, where was he from and why the Anglophobic hostilities??
My friend was sure if anyone had a hand on the pulse of the South End, if anyone was wired into the grapevine without the use of any social media of any sort, old Skeeter would know who this interloper was.
Indeed. I told her his name, gave her is address, website and phone number and approximate height and weight. More that that, I volunteered his M.O., his modus operandi,. “He has a jag about ivy strangling the flora,” I informed her. “Harmless, really, old Clipper Carl. Rides his bike around the South End, usually asks the owner first, but I guess time is running out or the obsession has tightened around his trunk. It’s some kind of botanical fixation. Let’s not call it pathological, just a bit more like a religious calling. NOT that I’m saying Carl hears voices in the night “OUT OUT DAMNED IVY!!” Or that he might mistake a fellow South Ender for a strangler vine. We all have our hobbies. And sometimes we lose ourselves in pursuit of them.
The odd thing is, Carl is very well off, a wealthy retired professional and a big philanthropist. Sure, he could’ve chosen to eliminate poverty or disease on the South End …. but … he chose to eradicate ivy. Not maybe what Bill Gates would’ve chosen, but even Bill gets criticized for not choosing causes WE want most. You can’t really win with a lot of folks.
I was riding my bike by Carl’s property today, the ten acre parcel he bought down the road from his bluff house, the one he has the security camera aimed at the gate he keeps locked, and I noticed all the NO TRESPASSING signs he’d posted for a quarter of a mile on the perimeter. Right where I used to pick cherries and apples before he bought the acreage and warned us off. He doesn’t eat the fruit, I notice, but we can’t either now. I’ve been looking for a new hobby myself in my advancing old age and Carl’s given me something of an idea. Good sharp hatchet, hop on my bike and mosey down to those NO TRESPASSING signs I don’t much care for, I bet they’d come down faster than clipped off ivy vines. Free up those fruit trees to us neighbors.
If anyone would understand, I’m certain Carl would…..
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