Pack Of What The Hell

It's called pachysandra (that is the correct spelling). I've known it my entire conscious life, though up until a few years ago (long, unnecessary story; suffice it to say a bizarre bar bet, a lunar eclipse, and a month of listening to nothing but Deep Purple all conspired to set me off on an autodidactic botanical binge, the end result of which involved EMT guys liberating me from a greenhouse via the jaws of life and a chronic case of cacti-induced hives) I thought it was pack'o'sandra, as if some Johnny Appleseed wannabe named Sandra had dumped packs of her seeds all over the front lawns of Midwestern homes. We had a strange revolver/Florida-shaped expanse of it on our front yard when I was growing up. Right about where the trigger/Alligator Alley would be, was a natural cut-through to our front door. "Don't walk through the pack'o'sandra!" was one of the earliest admonitions of my life. It left a mark. I've never liked the stuff.

It doesn't look very pretty to my eyes and it doesn't ever seem to grow; it's just there, always. It's like the parsley of landscaping. Garnish, only. Little surprise, then, when I discovered that it is classified as a subshrub. That's like being called a so-so mediocrity or receiving a Rube's (as opposed to a Gentleman's) C. Has Jerry Baker ever done more than a one-minute spot on pachysandra? Has Martha Stewart ever sung its praises and fashioned it into a wreath or skirt or tea cozy? I doubt it. But do I care that the stuff never gets any respect? Hell no. And I'll tell you why: Beneath its blah surface, underneath, pachysandra just might be the roof of hell. "Gnarly thicket" does not do justice to the entanglement of stems, roots, branches, tendrils, tentacles, Satan's greedy digits--whatever it all is. Looking to get rid of an unruly guest? Throw his cellphone in the pachysandra; you'll most likely never see the guy again. I believe I personally kept the Spalding company a going concern in the 1970s with the amount of whiffle baseballs, whiffle golfballs, real baseballs, real golfballs, tennis balls, mini footballs, etc. I somehow lost in the really not too expansive expanse of pack'o'sandra in our front yard. Sure I found some guy named Jmmy Hoffa's driver's license in there once, but never a ball of any sort.

I thought I had put my hatred of pachysandra behind me a while ago, but there I was today, trying to yank out yard-long prickly weeds from the pachysandra surrounding the front of the house where I now live. This time I had to "walk in the pack'o'sandra" in order to reach some of the weeds. Twice I lost all contact with my right foot for five minute stretches. The stuff was so thick once I even looked closely to track the origin of a particularly long weed and lost my eyesight for a few seconds. I never saw dirt until I managed to uproot the weeds and they came up with mud clinging to them. I must have pulled out a hundred weeds, but in all that blind foraging and tugging through the packysandra's underbelly, I never once felt anything resembling a ball. Pachysandra: gobbler of sports balls, fertile bed for weeds, absolutely no redeeming value. A subshrub in every possible way. I'm thinking if pachysandra was growing in the Garden of Eden, the apple story is just a myth-making piece of misinformation. Maybe Eve did offer an apple to Adam, but she dropped it in some pachysandra, the pair spent hours looking for it and finally gave up. "Let's get the hell away from this stupid stuff."