Battle of the Bamboo

By

Russell Frank

–

May 20, 2015

Columns, Local News, State College, StateCollege.com

What I need is a giant panda, though a troop of lemurs would do.

But until the borough of State College relaxes its ban on the keeping of large exotic animals, it’s going to just be me and my loppers, waging a lonely battle against the yummy bamboo along my back fence.

Now I have nothing against bamboo. I like the way the word bamboo sounds like the music made by a bamboo flute. I can play the Dave Van Ronk song (“You take a stick of bamboo, you take a stick of bamboo…) on guitar (only two chords!).

And now that I have my very own bamboo grove, I appreciate the way it screens our house from our neighbors on the next block, whom I have never seen.

But remember how you barely survived the frigid winter of 2014-15? My bamboo didn’t fare so well either.

At first, I was going to leave it alone and see if it came back to my life. Then I noticed that those folks at the Hosbog (the H.O. Smith Botanic Gardens), who gave us a glorious explosion of tulips this spring (gone now, alas), had razed their bamboo grove. And then, a week or two later I saw that the baby bamboo shoots were already two or three feet high.

You always hear about how fast bamboo grows, but it’s astonishing to see it actually happening. In the growth-friendly month of May at least, it seems possible to stare at bamboo for an hour and watch it get taller, as if you were watching time-elapsed photography.

Indeed, if the Wikipedia entry is to be trusted, bamboo has been known to grow as fast as 98 inches in 24 hours. That’s a little scary. I can imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when what began as a little clump of bamboo in my yard becomes the Great Bamboo Forest that covers the area of Central Pennsylvania where a town and a university once stood.

Or as a friend warned me, if you don’t trim it back, don’t be surprised if you come downstairs some morning and see your bamboo in your kitchen, pouring itself a cup of coffee.

Thus reassured, sort of, that my bamboo curtain would quickly reestablish itself, I asked one of the Hosboggers how to go about thinning the grove. Her recommendation: Go at it with a small chainsaw.

This was not the response I expected or was hoping for. I’ll be frank (so to speak): I don’t like chainsaws. It mostly has to do with the fact that I am morbidly noise averse, though I also find it entirely too easy to picture a chainsaw separating me from various important body parts as easily as a knife goes through room-temperature butter.

And I’ve never even seen any of the installments of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise.

(Lest you think all of us professorial types are wimpy noodles, I’ll have you know that I once read a book about cutting firewood. No, no, I’m kidding. I actually went out in the woods with a chainsaw back in my Northern California Mountain Man days. And yes, it did warm me twice. Maybe better the first time, which is the problem with heating with wood.)

Ignoring the advice of the professionals (as is my wont), I decided to see what would happen if I brought a nasty pair of loppers to bear on the task at hand. At the hardware store I picked out the ones that looked most like a snapping turtle on steroids.

I noticed, as I made my way to the check stand, that the nice people who were purchasing petunias, pansies and peonies were eyeballing me warily, glancing first at the fearsome bamboo slayer in my hands and then up at my face, as if to gauge whether I was the sort of person who would commit mayhem in a small-town hardware store.

They gave me a wide berth. Call me Lopperface.

When I got home, I dove into the grove and commenced to lop. At first I felt vindicated. My loppers worked great on bamboo – like butter.

But I grossly underestimated the Sisypheanicity of the job. All day Saturday I lopped ’til I dropped, and as I sit here gazing upon my handiwork I can’t see as I’ve even made a dent.

This is not, by the way, an as-you-soweth-even-so-shall-ye-reapeth situation. I sowethed not. The bamboo has lived here longer than I have — just so my neighbors know before the bamboo starts inviting itself into their kitchens for coffee.

Clearly, I should have rented a chainsaw. Better still, I should have hired someone – which is the conclusion I usually come to when I’m in over my head on a home maintenance project.

Or perhaps I should invite a panda over for lunch.

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