WEED ABATEMENT
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| George C. Ballas - inventor of the weed eater (Houston Chronicle) |
On a blistering hot day in 1971, a ballroom dance instructor named George Ballas sat in his car as it was pulled through a Texas car wash. The spinning brushes that were battering the windshield wipers caught his attention. He later claimed this was the inspiration that led to his inventing the weed eater. His first prototype had fishing line poking through holes of a tin can attached to a lawn edger.
The 28 inches of rain that fell on Michael's 4,500 square-foot backyard last winter completely ruled out using George's weed eater. By late April, the 40-degree slope that rises up behind the house was blanketed with a six-foot high impenetrable thatch of shrub-like weeds with stalks the size of a baseball bat.
In early May, the annual weed abatement proclamation arrived in Michael's snail mail. The Los Angeles Fire Department demanded that nothing alive or dead, exceeding three inches in height would be permitted to exist on the property. The letter warned that any household failing to comply by June 1st would face such drastic consequences, they'd wish they lived in Gaza.
In America you have the right to load up on automatic weapons and you can apply to the USDA for a license to have a pet tiger; but God forbid an unruly weed finds its way into your yard and unleashes the full force of local authorities to be brought down on you and your family.
We asked the neighborhood gardener how much he'd want to clear the hill for us. He walked to the base of the slope, tilted his head back as he took in the full length of the steep hill and gave us a price. I am not comfortable sharing the amount with anyone, suffice to say we took it as the gardener's polite but firm way of indicating he wasn't interested.
We settled on the do-it-yourself approach and due to the lack of a bulldozer, barely survived a six-week long struggle that challenged everyone's outlook on life. In the end, we lined up 1,600 lbs. of bags along the curb and called for the city's brush clearance crew to haul it away.
In a straight up trade for a six-pack of that little known yet fabulous Victoria beer from Mexico, we came into possession of enough vinyl plastic to carpet the infield at Santa Anita. The 80-pound rolls of this material ran 3 feet wide and 100 feet in length. The thickness is about the same as the plastic tablecloth that June Cleaver had in her breakfast nook. No, of course it isn't biodegradable, that would defeat the whole purpose. Yes, I know, plastic is destroying the planet but at least this was one time when it isn't going to end up in the ocean.
Not surprisingly, I was so excited to get our hands on this stuff that I never gave a thought to the color. Half of the load was a common inoffensive blue - my guess for the actual shade would be somewhere between azure and ultramarine. It wasn't until I checked the other half of the load that my enthusiasm began to tail off. I would have preferred a green, any green in fact to go with the blue. One could argue that when combined, blues and greens are pretty much interchangeable. The French impressionist painter Claude Monet capitalized on this with myriad greens and blues in creating watery garden scenes that are notably soothing to the eye despite the immense size of many of the canvasses.
Given that Michael's backyard served as a tilt-up billboard the size of a basketball court overlooking East Los Angeles, I was somewhat alarmed to discover the blue would be paired up with a scalding neon yellow.
A few days later a photo on Google
drew my attention. The picture was taken in Chicago showing a group
of Ukrainian Americans unfurling a 1,800 square foot Ukrainian flag purported to be the largest (soon to be the second largest) in the United States.