Poisoning the Ivy
Strange Patterns of Brown Grass

An Apology to Sal Calta.

Meeting the Neighbors.

Harriet and I moved into our first house in Poughkeepsie - one of many in a long row of modest houses built along King Drive in the 1960s. The homes were strung along a grassy slope, downhill from the ritzier Clover Hill development where IBM'er Stu Tucker and his cheating wife lived - but that's another story.

In 1970 nearly everyone in Poughkeepsie worked for IBM. Those who didn't worked for one New York State agency another.

There were so many IBM'ers in Poughkeepsie that even though all of our neighbors worked for the same company we never saw one another at work and had no idea just what each of us did in the lab, factory, or data center. When we moved in as the newcomers the neighbors knew that at least one of us probably worked for "the company" (which here meant IBM not the CIA). They waited to see what sort we'd be.

In IBMlandia there were no fences; on weekends kids ran screaming from yard to yard chasing one another or teetering along on their bikes and tricycles.

Soon we had our first kid to add to the melee. In no time at all Michelle was toddling and wobbling around in the grass as, like many a new homeowner, her parents maintained the luscious green playground for their child.

We had barely met our neighbors but knew one another by name and sight. The neighbors, always suspicious of new faces on the street, were reserving judgment about just who and what had moved-in.

They had good reason to pause as with new people came new machines, noises, and behaviors. Would the tranquility of the common lawns be lost?

As a new homeowner, in no time at all I was fooling around with an antique Gravely garden tractor that could mow grass, plow the soil, or push snow. The Gravely had cost just $20. at a local Poughkeepsie used-lawnmower shop because it didn't run.

That turned out to be because some fool had put gear oil into the engine crank-case. Change the oil and clean the spark plug and putt putt there she went. Making a satisfying sound.

Putt putt putt.

In our front yard the grass sloped nicely towards the house.

When snow melted the next spring all of the snow-melt from King Drive and from Clover Hill above would run into our little basement, but we didn't know that yet and instead we focused on the lovely tall trees and the nice green grass. We kept our grass mowed.

In our back yard Harriet tried out my new Honda 250 dirt bike, zooming around in circles without a care in the world. The Honda was quiet as motorcycles go, and if the Caltas noticed this activity they gave no sign.

Zoom zoom zoom.

That tall tree you see behind Harriet could have been a host for a poison ivy vine too but we can't see that detail ... yet.

The neighbor to our right, the Caltas, were, among all of the homeowners, those least inclined to waste their weekends doing yard-care.

Grass went un-mown, and up a tree that stood in their yard and just at the edge of our two lots, poison ivy grew so thick it loomed over us like a cloud of green doom, sending out as well invading creepers along the ground, not unlike the black arm of smoky death featured in "Lost".

Having grown up highly allergic to poison ivy, even hospitalized by it as a kid, the poison ivy vine was to me a harbinger of itching to death.

I had no idea how to approach a neighbor about his poison ivy threatening my peace of mind. So I took matters into my own hands.

Harriet gave me The American Handyman - a book from The Family Handyman magazine that informed American homeowners how to fix anything that needed fixing, including how to get rid of poison ivy or other undesirables in the neighborhood.

Mixing an herbicidal poison into a garden hose sprayer, early on a Sunday morning while the Caltas were still asleep, I stood like a fireman hosing that tree of poison-ivy fire up and down - without actually stepping onto the Calta land I soaked the tree from root to crown, murdering the poison ivy and figuring the tree would survive.

The sprayer made a soft swishing sound. Swish swish swish.

By the time the Caltas were having coffee the poison-ivy-poison had dried and they never suspected my treachery.

Nothing happened ... for three days.

On Wednesday the third day the poison ivy began to wilt a bit.

On morning of Friday the fifth day the poison ivy leaves were brown.

The Caltas, rarely even looking at their yard, never noticed, or at least never said a thing.

Later that afternoon I noticed something worrying: the Calta's tall grass was looking a bit off.

By the seventh day, again a Sunday, the one on which G_d was supposed to be resting, G_d got up before me and and finished my work.
The poison ivy covering the Calta's tree was completely dead and dry. (Not that they'd have cared.)

But there was a bonus - of a sort.

The Calta's previously green lawn had also turned brown and dead but in the exact pattern of a vee whose point aimed right at the spot where I'd stood with my poison-sprayer.

If the Vee wasn't evidence enough, there was a remarkable vertical stripe of dark green extending right behind the tree trunk and across Caltaland. The green was the only area that, blocked by the trunk of the tree, my poison spray had not touched.

I stood staring, transfixed by the evidence.

At that moment, stepping out onto his back porch, Sal blew across his coffee cup and took a sip as he glanced idly down - there was this brown shadow of a tree with a green shadow of a tree trunk, the vee of death pointing unimpeachably towards ... me.

Sal looked up, and turning he saw me standing there pretending to clean my fingernails and looking as innocent as Adam.

"Hey there, Dan" Sal began.

"Do you have any idea why my grass is dying in this odd pattern?" he asked.

"I did it, Sal, spraying to kill all that poison ivy. Sorry."

I confessed the crime, offering my personal history of poison-ivy-phobia in extenuation.

Calta shrugged, sipped his coffee, and without a word, turned and walked back inside.

Now he knew, just the sort who had moved the hell next-door.

I thought I'd better go inside too. Back indoors I gave Michelle a lesson on our new fold-up mini-bike.

We didn't run the mini-bike indoors but sitting on it, Michelle grinned for her photo and then said

Zoom zoom Daddy!

...