by Dave Barry
Unfortunately I can’t answer these questions, because I’m busy worrying about being killed by our mango tree. Our new yard has a mango tree, which I bet sounds like exotic fun to those of you who live in normal climates, right? Just think of it! All the mangoes you need, right in your own yard!
The problem is that, mangowise, you don’t need a whole lot. You take one bite, and that takes care of your mango needs until at least the next presidential administration. But the mangoes keep coming. They’re a lot like zucchini, which erupts out of the ground far faster than you could eat it even if you liked it, which nobody does, so you start lugging hundreds of pounds of zucchini to your office in steel-reinforced shopping bags, hoping your co-workers will be stupid enough to take some home, except of course they’re lugging in their zucchini, all summer long, tons of it coming in, until the entire office building collapses in a twisted tangle of girders and telephone message slips and zucchini pulp, out of which new vines start to spring immediately.
Mangoes are even worse, because (a) they grow on trees, and (b) they’re about the size of a ladies’ bowling ball, only denser. They’re the kind of fruit that would be designed by the Defense Department. They hang way up in our tree, monitoring the yard and communicating with each other via photosynthesis, and whenever they see me approaching they fire off a Warning Mango, sending one of their number thundering to Earth, cratering our lawn and alarming seismologists as far away as Texas (“The Silly Hat State”). Even on the ground, the mango remains deadly, because it immediately rots and becomes infested with evil little flies, and if you try to kick it off the lawn, it explodes, a mango grenade, covering your body with a repulsive substance known to botanists as “mango poop” that stays on your sneakers forever, so that when you go out in public, your feet are obscured by a cloud of flies, and the Florida natives snicker and say to each other, “Look! That idiot kicked a mango!”
So I keep a wary eye on the mango tree at all times, which means I am in constant danger of falling into the Scum Vat. This was originally intended to be a small decorative pool with maybe a couple of cute little goldfish in it, but at some point a gang of aggressive meat-eating algae took over. If you tried to put some goldfish in there, you’d never get close. A tentacle of algae would come swooping up and grab them out of your hand, and then you’d hear an algae burp. The only thing that can survive in there is the Giant Arguing Frogs. We’ve never actually seen them, but we hear them at night, when we’re trying to sleep. They have a microphone hooked up to a 50,000-watt amplifier, and all night long they broadcast the following conversation:
FROG ONE: BWAAARRRRPPPP.
FROG TWO (disagreeing): BWAAARRRRPPPP.
You can tell they’re never going to work it out. Some nights, lying in bed and listening to them, I’ve thought about going out there to mediate, but of course the algae would get me. You’d have to be some kind of dumb mango kicker to pull a stunt like that. Better safe than sorry, that’s my motto, which is why I’d like to remind all my readers, especially you impressionable young people, that if you must lick a toad, make sure it’s wearing a condom. Thank you.
A BRUSH WITH GARDENING
It will probably come as no surprise to you that I got the idea of painting my lawn from an agency of the federal government.
When I say “painting my lawn,” I don’t mean my whole lawn. I just mean this one circular spot that suddenly, mysteriously turned brown, as though it had been visited by a small UFO or a large dog. I ignored the spot at first, but it started to grow, and I realized that it was similar to international communism: If you let it get a toehold in, say, Nicaragua, it will start to spread to the other strategic nations down there such as El Labrador and Costa “Ricky” Ricardo, and the next thing you know your entire lawn is brown.
So I was wondering what to do, when fortunately I received a letter from an alert reader named Dick Howard, who enclosed a news article from the Roanoke (Virginia) Times and World News about some National Forest Service rangers who painted a group of federal rocks to make them look more natural. I am not making this up. It happened in the Jefferson National Forest, where the Forest Service had built a mountainside road that was designed, according to the article, “to blend in with the environment.” It had a darkish color scheme, because, as you campers know, the environment consists primarily of dirt.
Unfortunately, there was an unscheduled flood, which exposed some large tacky white quartz rocks that frankly did NOT fit in with the natural road design. You can imagine how this offended the fashion sensibilities of the Forest Service personnel, who decided to do exactly what you would do if you were in charge of a national forest and had accidentally consumed a massive overdose of prescription medication: Paint the rocks. They did a few tests to select just the color they wanted, then they spent two days spraying paint on the rocks, and before you could say “massive federal budget deficit,” the hillside looked just the way God would have created it if He had received the benefits of Forest Service training.
As a professional journalist, I have always been fascinated by people who appear to have even more spare time than I do, so I called up one of the men involved in the rock-painting, District Ranger Bob Boardwine, who turned out to be a friendly individual. He told me that the rangers had taken a fair amount of ribbing over the rock-painting, but as far as he was concerned the project had come out real nice. I told him I was thinking about painting the brown spot on my lawn, and he gave me some fashion tips. “Make sure you use a dark green,” he said. “When we painted the rocks, we went into it thinking in terms of a moss green and a light brown, but they weren’t dark enough.”
Thus advised, I asked my eight-year-old son if he wanted to help me paint the lawn, but he and his friend Erik were deeply involved in an urgent Nintendo game that is not expected to be completed during my lifetime. Fortunately Erik’s six-year-old brother, Tyson, was able to make some room in his schedule, so we got my son’s watercolor set and went out to paint the brown spot. We were working on a blade-by-blade basis, and after a while we got tired of dark green, so at Tyson’s suggestion we switched over to purple, then red, then orange, and when we were done we had converted what had been a dull and unattractive area of the lawn into an area that looked as though somebody had just thrown up several pounds of semi-digested jelly beans. Tyson and I were standing there admiring our work when—this really happened—up drove a pizza deliveryman, apparently sent by the God of Comedy Setup Lines.
“Looks like rain!” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “and wouldn’t you know it, I just painted my darned lawn!”
I added a friendly “Ha ha!” to reassure him I was a normal person unlikely to suddenly chop him into fragments with a machete, but he was already accelerating down the street. Nevertheless the lawn-painting was a critical success, and it got me thinking about other ways I might be able to improve nature around our house, especially the yard crabs. Since we live in South Florida, geologically a giant swamp with shopping centers, we have these crabs who live in holes in our yard, and I do not care for them. Being from the North, I prefer yard critters that are furry and cute, whereas crabs look like body parasites magnified 1,000 times. During mating season, they become outright hostile. I’ll go out in my yard, and there, blocking my path, will be a crab, adopting a karate stance, and waving his pincers menacingly to prevent me from mating with his woman.
“I don’t want to mate with your woman,” I tell him. “Your woman is a crab, for God’s sake.” But this only makes him angrier, because I think he knows, deep inside his slimy little heart that I’m telling the truth.
So anyway, my idea is that the crabs should wear costumes. I’m thinking specifically chipmunk costumes. I could look out the window and watch them scuttling around the lawn in their furry finery, and it would be just like being back up North on a brisk fall day following a nuclear accident that had caused all the chipmunks to develop extra legs and walk sideways. My only question is where I’d get chi
pmunk costumes for crabs, but I’m sure the federal government can help me out. Assuming it’s not too busy touching up federal rocks.
CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS
The reason we bought a motorboat is, we needed a new kitchen. Our current kitchen has a lot of problems, such as a built-in Colonial-era microwave that we think might not be totally safe because it can cook food that is sitting as far as 15 feet away. We had spent months striding around our current kitchen, making sweeping gestures and saying things like, “We’ll move the sink over there!”
What a pair of goobers. As you experienced renovators know, it’s easier to construct a major suspension bridge than to move a residential sink. Thousands of homeowners who embarked on sink-relocation projects during the Eisenhower administration are still washing their dishes in the bathtub. My wife and I kept running into people like this, people with plaster dust in their hair and hollow eyes from spending their wretched nights sleeping in the garage and their bleak days waiting desperately for workmen who inevitably made things worse. “We have no telephone or electricity or water,” the Renovation People would say, “and on Monday a man is supposed to come and take all our oxygen.”
This was discouraging, but we really needed a new kitchen. Finally we said, “OK, if we don’t do it now, we’re never going to do it,” so we decided to bite the bullet and: Buy a motorboat. Our reasoning was, “Hey, if we have a motorboat, we’ll have Family Outings where we can experience Togetherness and possibly crash into a reef and sink, and then it won’t matter about our kitchen.”
But reefs were not our immediate problem. Our immediate problem was something much worse, a daunting nautical challenge that has tested the courage of mariners since ancient times, namely: backing the boat into the carport. The trick to remember here is, if you turn your car wheels to the right (“starboard”), the boat trailer will actually go to the LEFT (“forecastle”) until your wife (“Beth”) announces that you ran over a sprinkler head (“$12.95”). Using this procedure I was able to get the boat into the carport in no more time than it took for Magellan to reach Guam.
We kept the boat moored in the carport for several weeks, after which we decided—call us bold adventurers—to try it on actual water. We met at the marina with our salesperson, Dale, who showed us how to launch the boat via a terrifying procedure wherein I had to back the trailer down a scary ramp right into the bay. I have since learned that, here in Miami, on weekends, amusement-seekers will come to the marina, set up folding chairs, and spend a highly entertaining day watching boat owners perform comical maneuvers such as forgetting to set their parking brakes and having their cars roll down the ramp and disappear, burbling gaily, below the surface. In the generous nautical tradition of rendering assistance to those in need, Miami boat owners sometimes—this is all true—get into gunfights over whose turn it is to use the ramp.
Fortunately we had Dale with us, so we had no trouble getting out on the water, where he taught me the basics of seamanship. Here’s how it went:
DALE: OK, you see that shoal over there?
ME: No.
DALE: OK, you see that marker over there?
ME: No.
DALE: Do you want to take the wheel for a while?
ME: No.
Finally, when I was fully confident that, if necessary, I could take the boat out myself and get everyone killed, we returned home to spend a carefree evening washing our hull. You have to do this because it turns out that—get ready for a fascinating nautical fact—seawater is very bad for boats. I’m serious. Ask any boat owner. Seawater contains large quantities of barnacles and corrosives, which will rapidly turn your boat into a giant piece of maritime crud.
So while I was scrubbing my hull, I had this blinding insight: The smart thing to do, clearly, is never put the boat into the water. I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boat into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.
A group of us boat owners were discussing this one evening at a party featuring beer, which is how we decided to hold a Driveway Regatta. Really. I have the whole thing on videotape. We had it on our driveway, and we had four boats, on trailers, secured via anchors in the lawn, trees, etc. The judges awarded First Prize to a dentist named Olin, whose boat not only contained golf clubs and a croquet set, but also had a spider web containing a certified spider that had apparently died of old age. It was a fine afternoon, and nobody got seasick, and we even—try this at sea—had pizza delivered. I would have cooked, but we really need a new kitchen.
SHIP OF FOOLS
We wanted to have a relaxing family vacation, so we got together with two other families and rented a sailboat in the Virgin Islands. There is nothing as relaxing as being out on the open sea, listening to the waves and the wind and the sails and voices downstairs yelling “HOW DO YOU FLUSH THESE TOILETS?”
It takes a minimum of six people, working in close harmony, to successfully flush a nautical toilet. That’s why those old ships carried such large crews. The captain would shout the traditional command—“All hands belay the starboard commode!”—and dozens of men would scurry around pulling ropes, turning giant winches, etc., working desperately to avoid the dreaded Backup At Sea, which is exactly the problem that the captain of the Titanic was downstairs working on, which is why he didn’t notice the iceberg.
We had a competent captain in our cruise group, but just to be on the safe side we hired a local captain for the first afternoon to demonstrate the finer points of seamanship. He was on our boat for a total of three hours, during which he demonstrated that he could drink six of our beers and two large, direct-from-the-bottle swigs of our rum and still not fall headfirst into the Caribbean. He was definitely the most relaxed person on the boat. His major piece of nautical advice was: “No problem.” We’d say: “Which Virgin Island is that over there?” And he’d squint at it knowledgeably and say, “No problem.” Then he’d go get another beer.
So this was pretty much how we handled it, and the cruise was problem-free, unless you count my Brush With Death. For this I blame the children. We started the cruise with only five children, but after several days on the boat there appeared to be several hundred of them, all of whom always wanted to sit in exactly the same place, and no two of whom ever wanted to eat the same thing for lunch.
So one afternoon a group of them were playing an incredibly complex card game they had invented, wherein everyone had a different number of cards and anyone could change the rules at any time and punching was allowed and there was no possible way to end the game but everybody appeared to be winning, and suddenly a card blew overboard.
Until this kind of emergency arises, you never know how you’re going to react. I happened to be nearby with a group of grown-ups who had smeared their bodies with powerful sun-blocking agents and then, inexplicably, gone out to lie in the sun, and when I heard the chilling cry (“Card overboard!”) I leaped to my feet and, without thinking, in fact without any brain wave activity whatsoever, jumped into the water, dove beneath the surface, and saw: a barracuda the size of a nuclear submarine. The other people claimed it was only about three feet long, but I was right there, and this barracuda had actual torpedo tubes. It was examining the card closely, as if thinking, “Huh! A two of hearts, here in the Caribbean!” I used this opportunity to exit from the water by clawing violently at air molecules and ascending vertically, Warner Bros.-cartoon style, back into the boat.
Fortunately that was my only Brush With Death on the relaxation cruise, except for the other one, which occurred when I attempted to pull up the anchor. You have to pull up the anchor from time to time on a sailboat so that you can put up the sails, which causes the boat to lean over, which allows water to splash in and get all the clothes wet. It’s a basic rule of seamanship that everybody’s clothes have to be wet all the time. If there’s no wind, you are required by maritime
law to throw your clothes overboard a couple of times a day.
So I was standing on the deck, hauling up the anchor. You have to be careful on the deck, because of the “hatches,” which are holes placed around a sailboat at random to increase the insurance rates. From the moment we got on the boat, I had been warning the children about the danger of falling into the hatches. “Don’t fall into those hatches!” I’d say, in the stern voice that we wise old parents use to tell our children the ludicrously obvious. And so, as you have already guessed, when I was pulling on the anchor rope, walking backward, poof, I suddenly became the Incredible Disappearing Man. It was a moment of high relaxation, a moment that would definitely win the grand prize on the popular TV show “Boneheaded Americans Injure Themselves On Home Video,” and I’m sure I’ll have a good laugh about it once I’m out of surgery.
No, seriously, all I got was a bruise that is actually larger than my skin surface area, so that parts of it extend into the atmosphere around me. But other than that it was a swell cruise, and I strongly recommend that you take one. Make sure you go to the bathroom first.
DEATH WORMED OVER
The key to a successful Summer Vacation Adventure is: preparation. For example, if you’re planning a trip to Europe to visit historic sites such as the Hunchback of Notre Dame Cathedral, you should prepare right now by setting fire to your airline tickets. I’m advising against vacationing in Europe this year because Europe contains England, which is currently being invaded by the Alien Flatworms of Death.