Chapter 3: Man Triumphant ... I

21.

The hearings of the Committee to Investigate Dangerous Vegetation went on for five days and Mr Le ffaçasé was increasingly delighted as the proceedings went down, properly edited and embellished to excite reader interest, in the columns of the Daily Intelligencer. He even unbent so far as to call me a fool without any adjectival modification, which was for him the height of geniality.

I don’t want to give the impression the committee stole the show, as the saying goes. The show essentially and primarily was still the grass itself. It grew while the honorable body inquired and it grew while the honorable body, tired by its labors, slept. It increased during the speeches of Senator Jones, through the interjections of Judge Robinson, and as Dr Johnson added his wisdom to the deliberations.

While the committee probed, listened and digested, the grass finally pushed its way across Hollywood Boulevard, resisting frantic efforts by the National Guard, the fire and police departments, and a volunteer brigade of local merchants, to stem its course. It defied alike sharpened steel, fire, chemicals and explosives. Even the smallest runner could now be severed only with the greatest difficulty, for in its advance the weed had toughened--some said because of its omnivorous diet, others, its ability to absorb nitrogen from the air--and its rubbery quality caused it to yield to onslaught only to bound back, apparently uninjured, after each blow.

One of the most disquieting aspects of the advance was its variability and unpredictability. To the west, it had hardly gone five blocks from the Dinkman house, while southward it had crossed Santa Monica Boulevard and was nosing toward Melrose. Its growth had been measured and checked, over and over again, but the figures were never constant. Some days it traveled a foot an hour; on others it leapt nearly a city block between sunrise and nightfall.

It is simple to put down “the grass crossed Hollywood Boulevard”; as simple as saying, “our troops advanced” or “the man was hanged at dawn.” But when I write these words less than a generation later, surrounded by rolling hills, gentle brooks, and vast lawns sedate and tame, I can close my eyes and see again the green glacier crawling down the sidestreets and over the low roofs of the shops to pour like a cascade upon the busy artery.

Once more I can feel the crawling of my skin as I looked upon the methodical obliteration of men’s work. I can see the tendrils splaying out over the sidewalks, choking the roadways, climbing walls, finding vulnerable chinks in masonry, bunching themselves inside apertures and bursting out, carrying with them fragments of their momentary prison as they pursued their ruthless course.

Now the uproar and clamor of a disturbed public swelled to giant volume. All the disruption and distress going before had been news; this was disaster. “All same Glauman’s Chinese, all same Pa’thenon,” remarked Gootes, and indeed I have heard far less outcry over the destruction of historic landmarks than was raised when the grass obscured the celebrated footprints.

Recall of the mayor was demanded and councilmen’s official limousines were frequently overturned. Meetings denounced the inaction of the authorities; a gigantic parade bearing placards calling for an end to procrastination marched past the cityhall. Democrats blamed Republicans for inefficiency and Republicans retorted that Miss Francis had done her research during a Democratic administration.

Every means previously tried and found wanting was tried again as though it were impossible for human minds to acknowledge defeat by an insensate plant. The axes, the scythes, weedburners and reapers were brought out again, only to prove their inability to cope with the relentless flow of the grass. Robot tanks loaded with explosives disappeared as had those containing the soldiers, and only the stifled sound of their explosion registered the fact that they had fulfilled their design if not their purpose.

It was difficult for the man on the street to understand how the weapons successful in Normandy and Tarawa could be balked by vegetation. Like the Investigating Committee’s pursuit of the question of the crudeoil’s adulteration, they wanted to know if the tanks were firstline vehicles or some surplus palmed off by the War Department; if the weedburners were properly accredited graminicides or just a bunch of bums taken from the reliefrolls. The necessary reverse of this picture was the jubilant hailing of each new instrument of attack, the brief but hysterical enthusiasm for each in turn as the ultimate savior.

Because of my unique position I witnessed the trial of them all. I saw tanks dragging rotary plows and others equipped with devices like electricfans but with blades of hardened steel sharpened to razor keenness. The only thing this latter gadget did was to scatter more potential nuclei to the accommodating wind.

I saw the Flammenwerfer, the dreadful flamethrowers which had scorched the bodies of men like burnt toast in an instant, direct their concentrated fire upon the advancing runners. I smelled the sweetly sick smell of steaming sap and saw the runners shrivel and curl back as they had done on other occasions, until nothing was presented to the flamethrowers except the tangled mass of interwoven stems denuded of all foliage. Upon this involved wall the fire had no effect, the stems did not wilt, the hard membranes did not collapse, the steely network did not retreat. It seemed a drawn battle in one small sector, yet in that very part where the grass paused on the ground it rose higher into the air like a poising tidalwave. Higher and higher, until its crest, unbalanced, toppled forward to engulf its tormentors.

Then the unruffled advance resumed, again some resource was interposed against it, again it was checked for an instant and again it overcame its adversary, careless of obstacles, impartially taking to itself gouty roominghouses and pimping frenchprovincial (“17 master bedrooms”) chateaus, hotdogstand and Brown Derby, cornergrocery and pyramidal foodmart; undeterred by anything in its path.

When you say a clump of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless boot, much less the entire arsenal of military and agricultural implements. It must have been this deceptive fragility which broke the spirit of so many people.

From an item in the Intelligencer I recalled the existence of one of Mrs Dinkman’s neighbors who had rudely refused the opportunity to have his lawn treated with the Metamorphizer. He had left an incoherent suicidenote: “Pigeons in the grass alas. Too many pigeons, too much grass. Pigeons are doves, but Noah expressed a raven. Contradiction lies. Roses are red, violets are blue. The grass is green and I am thru. Too too too. Darling kiddies.” He then, in full view of the helpless weedfighters, marched on into the grass and was lost to sight.

In the days following, so many selfdestructions succeeded this one that the grass became known in the papers as the Green Horror. Perhaps a peculiar sidelight on human oddity was revealed in most of these suicides choosing to immolate themselves, not in the main body of the grass, but in one of the many smaller nuclei springing up in close proximity.

It was my fortune to witness the confluence of two of these descendant bodies. They had come into being only a few blocks apart; understandably their true character was unrecognized until they were out of control and had enveloped the neighborhoods of their origin. They crept toward each other with a sort of incestuous attraction until mere yards separated them; they paused skittishly, the runners crawled forward speculatively, the green fronds began overlapping like clasping fingers, then with accelerating speed came together much as a pack of cards in the hands of a deft shuffler slides edge under edge to make a compact and indivisible whole. The line of division disappeared, the two became one, and where before there had been left a narrow path for men to tread, now only a serene line of vegetation outlined itself against the unblinking sky.

22. I have said Mr Le ffaçasé had softened his brutality toward me, but his favor did not extend--so pervasive is literary jealousy--to printing my own reports. He continued to subject me to the indignity of being “ghosted,” a thoroughly expressive term, which by a combination of bad conjugation and the suggestion of insubstantiality defines the sort of prose produced, by Jacson Gootes. This arrangement, instead of giving me some freedom, shackled me to the reporter, who dashed from celebrity to celebrity, grass to nuclei, office to point of momentary interest, with unflagging energy and infuriating jocosity. I knew his repertory of tricks and accents down to the last yawn.

Most of all I resented his irregular habits. He never arrived at the Intelligencer office on time or quit after a proper day’s work. He thought nothing of getting me out of bed before I’d had my eight hours’ sleep to accompany him on some ridiculous errand. “Bertie, old dormouse, the grass is knocking at the doors of NBC.”

“All right,” I answered, annoyed. “It started down Vine Street yesterday. It would be more surprising if it obligingly paused before the studios.”

“Cynic,” he said, pulling the bedclothes away from my face. I consider this the lowest form of horseplay I know of. “How quickly your ideals have been tarnished by contact with the vulgar world of newspaperdom. Front and center, Bertie lad, we must catch the grass making its own soundeffects before they jerk out the microphones.”

Protests having no effect I reluctantly went with him, but the scene was merely a repetition of hundreds of previous ones, the grass being no more or less spectacular for NBC than for Watanabe’s Nursery and Cut Flower Shop a halfmile away. Its aftereffects, however, were immediate. The governor declared martial law in Los Angeles County and ordered the evacuation of an area five miles wide on the perimeter of the grass.

Furious cries of anguish went up from those affected by the arbitrary order. What authority had any official to dispossess honest people from their homes in times of peace? The right to hold their property unmolested was a prerogative vested in the humblest American and who was the governor to abrogate the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and manifold decisions of the Supreme Court? In embittered fury Henry Miller resigned from the Investigating Committee, now defunct anyway, its voluminous and inconclusive report buried in the state archives. Injunctions issued from local courts like ashes from a stirring volcano, but the militia were impervious and hustled the freeholders from their homes with callous disregard for the sacred dues of property.

When the reason behind this evacuation order leaked out a still greater lamentation was evoked, for the National Guard was planning nothing less than a saturation incendiary bombing of the entire area. The bludgeon which reduced the cities of Europe to mere shells must surely destroy this new invader. Even the stoutest defenders of property conceded this must be so--but what was the point of annihilating the enemy if their holdings were to be sacrificed in the process? No, no, let the governor take whatever means he pleased to dispatch the weed so long as the method involved left them homes to enjoy when things were--as they inevitably must be--restored to normal. So frantic were their efforts that the Supreme Court actually forced the governor to postpone his proposed bombing, though it did not discontinue the evacuation.

There were few indeed who understood how the weed would digest the very wood, bricks or stucco and who packed up and moved out ahead of the troops. American flags and shotguns recalled the heroic days of the frontier, and defiance of the governor’s edict was the rule instead of the exception. Fierce old ladies dared the militiamen to lay a finger on them or their possessions and apoplectic gentlemen, eyes as glazed as those of the huntingtrophies on their walls, sputtered refusals to stir, no, not for all the brutal force in the world. No one was seriously hurt in this rebellion, the commonest wound being long scratches on the cheeks of the guardsmen, inflicted by feminine nails, as with various degrees of resistance the inhabitants were carried or shooed from their dwellings.

While the wrangling over its destruction went on, the grass continued its progress. Out through Cahuenga Pass it flowed, toward fertile San Fernando Valley. Steadily it climbed to the hilltops, masticating sage, greasewood, oak, sycamore and manzanita with the same ease it bolted houses and pavements. Into Griffith Park it swaggered, mumbling the planetarium, Mount Hollywood and Fern Dell in successive mouthfuls and swarmed down to the concretelined bed of the Los Angeles River. Here ineffectual shallow pools had preserved illusion and given tourists something at which to laugh in the dry season; the weed licked them up like a thirsty cow at a wallow. Up and down and over the river it ran, each day with greater speed.

It broke into the watermains, it tore down the poles bearing electric, telephone and telegraph wires, it forced its way between the threaded joints of gaspipes and turned their lethal vapor loose in the air until all services in the vicinity were hastily discontinued. Short weeks after I’d inoculated Mrs Dinkman’s lawn, that part of Los Angeles known as Hollywood had disappeared from the map of civilization and had become one solid mass of green devilgrass.

No one refused to move for this dispossessor as they had for the governor; thousands of homeless fled from it. Their going clogged the highways with automobiles and produced an artificial gasoline shortage reminiscent of wartime. In downtown Los Angeles freightcars stood unloaded on their sidings, their consignees out of business and the warehouses glutted. The strain on local transportation, already enfeebled by a publicservice system designed for a city one twentieth its size and a complete lack of those facilities mandatory in every other large center of population, increased by the necessary rerouting around the affected area, threatened disruption of the entire organism and the further disintegration of the city’s already weakened coordination. The values of realestate dropped, houses were sold for a song, officebuildings for an aria, hotels for a chorus.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, secure in the knowledge its city suffered from nothing worse than fires, earthquakes, a miserable climate, and an invincible provincialism, invited displaced businessmen to resettle themselves in an area where improbable happenings were less likely; and the state of Oklahoma organized a border patrol to keep out Californians.

I could not blame the realestate men for attempting to unload their holdings before they suffered the fate of one tall building at Hollywood and Highland. The grass closed about its base like a false foundation and surged on to new conquests, leaving the monolith bare and forlorn in its new surroundings. At first the weed satisfied itself with jocular and teasing ventures up the smooth sides; then, as though rasped by the skyscraper’s quiescence, it forced its way into the narrow space between the steel sash, filling the lower floor and bursting out again in a riot of whirling tendrils. Up the sides it climbed like some false ivy; clinging, falling back, building upon its own defeated body until it reached another story--and another and another. At each one the tale was repeated: windows burglariously forced, a floor suffocated, egress effected, and another height of wall scaled. At the end the proud structure was a lonely obelisk furred in a green covering to the very flagpole on its peak, from which waved disappointed yet still aspiring runners.

Upward and outward continuously, empty lot, fillingstation, artistic billboard, all alike to the greedy fingers. Like thumb and index they formed a crescent, a threatening semicircle, reaching forward by indirection. Northward and southeastward, the two aqueducts kept the desert from reclaiming its own; for fifty years the city had scraped up, bought, pilfered or systematically robbed all the water it could get; through the gray, wet lines, siphons, opencuts, pumps, lifts, tunnels, the metropolis sucked life. Now the desert had an ally, the grassy fingers avoided the downtown district, feeling purposefully and dangerously toward the aqueducts.

I spent much of my time, when not actively watching the grass, in the Intelligencer office. I had now agreed to write articles for several weekly magazines, and though they edited my copy with a heavy and unappreciative hand, still they never outraged me as Le ffaçasé did by causing another man to usurp my name. Since I was in both senses nominally a member of the staff, I had no qualms about using the journal’s typewriters and stationery for the construction of little essays on the grass as seen through the eyes of one who had cause to know it better than anyone else.

“The-uh curse of Garry-baldi be upon the head of that ee-veal man who-uh controls this organeye-zation,” rolled out Gootes in pseudoChurchillian tones. “The-uh monster has woven a web; we are-uh summoned, Bertie.”

I got up resignedly and followed him to the managingeditor’s office. We were not greeted directly. Instead, a question was thrown furiously over our heads. “Where is he? What bristling and baseless egomania sways him to affront the Daily Intelligencer with his contumacious and indecent unpunctuality?”

“Who, chief?” asked Gootes.

Le ffaçasé ignored him. “When this great newspaper condescends to shed the light of acceptance, to say nothing of an obese and taxable paycheck, upon the gross corpus of an illiterate moviecameraman, a false Daguerre, a spurious Steichen, a dubious Eisenstein, it has a right to expect a return for the goods showered upon such a deceitful sluggard.”

Still ignoring Gootes, he turned to me, and apparently putting the berated one from his mind, went on with comparative mildness: “Weener, an unparalleled experience is to fall to your lot. You have not achieved this opportunity through any excellence of your own, for I must say, after lengthy contact, no vestige of merit in you is perceptible either to the nude eye or through an ultramicroscope. Nevertheless, by pure unhappy chance you are the property of the Intelligencer, and as such this illustrious organ intends to confer upon you the signal honor of being a Columbus, a Van Diemen, an Amundsen. You, Weener, in your unworthy person, shall be the first man to set foot upon a virgin land.”

This speech being no more comprehensible to me than his excoriation of an unknown individual, I could only stay silent and try to look appreciative.

“Yes, Weener, you; some refugee from the busy newsroom of the Zwingle (Iowa) Weekly Patriot,” a disdainful handwave referred this description to Gootes; “some miserable castoff from a fourthrate quickie studio masquerading as a newscameraman; and a party of sheep--perhaps I could simplify my whole sentence by saying merely a party of bloody sheep--will be landed by parachute on top of the grass this very afternoon.”

He smacked his lips. “I can see tomorrow’s bannerline now: ‘Agent of Destruction Views Handiwork.’ Should you chance to survive, your ghostwritten impressions--for which we pay too high a price, far too high a price--will become doubly valuable. Should you come, as I confidently expect, to a logical conclusion, the Intelligencer will supply a suitable obituary. Now get the bloody hell out of here and either let me see you never again, or as a triumphant Balboa who has sat, if not upon a peak in Darien, at least upon something more important than your own backside.”

23. The inside of the converted armybomber smelled like exactly what it was--a barn. Ten sheep and a solitary goat were tethered to stanchions along the sides. The sheep bleated continuously, the goat looked cynically forbearing, and all gave off an ammoniacal smell which was not absorbed by the bed of hay under their hoofs.

Enthusiasm for this venture was an emotion I found practically impossible to summon up. Even without Le ffaçasé’s sanguinary prophecies, I objected to the trip. I had never been in a plane in my life, and this for no other reason than disinclination. I feared every possible consequence of the parachutejump, from instant annihilation through a broken neck in the jerk of its opening, down to being smothered in its folds on the ground. I distinctly did not want to go.

But caution sometimes defeats itself; I was so afraid of going that I hesitated to admit my timidity and so I found myself herded with my two companions, the pilot and crew, in with the sheep and the goat. I was not resigned, but I was quiescent. Gootes and the animals were not.

While we waited he went through his entire stock of tricks including a few new ones which were not completely successful, before the cameraman, panting, arrived ten minutes after our scheduled departure. His name was Rafe Slafe--which I thought an improbable combination of syllables--and he was so chubby in every part you imagined you saw the smile which ought to have gone with such a face and figure. Before his breath had settled down to a normal routine, Gootes had rushed upon him with an enthusiastic, “Ah, Rafello muchacho, give to me the abrazo; como usted, compañero?”

Slafe scorned reply, pushing Gootes aside with one plump hand while with the other he tidied the sparse black hairs of his mustache, which was trimmed down to an eyebrow shading his lip. After inspecting and rejecting several identical bucketseats he found one less to his distaste than the others and stowed his equipment, which was extensive, requiring several puffing trips backandforth, next to it. Then he lowered his backside onto the unyielding surface with the same anxiety with which he might have deposited a fortune in a dubious bank.

His hands darted in and out of pockets which apparently held a small pharmacopoeia. Pulling out a roll of absorbentcotton from which he plucked two wads, he stuck them thoughtfully in his ears. He withdrew a nasalsyringe and used it vigorously, swallowed gulps of a clearly labeled seasickremedy, and then sucked at pills from various boxes whose purpose was not so obvious. To conclude, he unstopped a glass vial and sniffed at it. All the while Gootes hovered over him, solicitously deluging him with friendly queries in one accent or another.

I lost interest in both fellowpassengers, for the plane, after shaking us violently, started forward, and before I was clearly aware of it had left the ground. Looking from the windows I regretted my first airplane ride hadnt been taken under less trying circumstances, for it was an extraordinarily pleasant experience to see the field dwindle into a miniature of itself and the ground beneath become nothing more than a large and highly colored reliefmap.

To our right was the stagnant river, dammed up behind the blockading arm of grass. Leftward, downtown, the thumb of the cityhall pointed rudely upward and far beyond was the listless Pacific. Ahead, the gridiron of streets was shockingly interrupted and severed by the great green mass plumped in its center.

It grew to enormous bigness and everything else disappeared; we were over and looked down upon it, a pasture hummock magnified beyond belief; retaining its essential identity, but made ominous by its unappropriate situation and size. As we hovered above the very pinnacle, the rounded peak which poked up at us, the pilot spoke over the intercommunication system. “We will circle till the load is disposed of. First the animals will be dropped, then the equipment, finally the passengers. Is that clear?”

Everything was clear to me except how we should escape from that green mountain once we had got upon it. This was apparently in the hands of Le ffaçasé, a realization, remembering his grisly conversation, making me no easier in my mind. Nor did I relish the pilot’s casual description of myself as part of a “load”--to be disposed of.

Slafe suddenly came to life and after peering through a sort of lorgnette hanging round his neck, mumbling unintelligibly to himself all the while, started his camera which went on clicking magically with no apparent help from him. Efficiently and swiftly the crew fastened upon the helpless and bleating sheep their parachutes and onebyone dropped them through the open bombbay. The goat went last and she did not bleat, but dextrously butted two of her persecutors and micturated upon the third before being cast into space.

I would have forgone the dubious honor of being the first to land upon the grass, but the crew apparently had their orders; I was courteously tapped upon the shoulder--I presume the warders are polite when they enter the condemned cell at dawn--my chute was strapped upon me and the instructions I had already read in their printed form at least sixty times were repeated verbally, so much to my confusion that when I was finally in the air I do not know to this day whether I counted six, sixty, six hundred, or six thousand before jerking the ripcord. Whatever the number, it was evidently not too far wrong, for although I received a marrowexploding shock, the parachute opened and I floated down.

But no sooner were my fears of the parachute’s performance relieved than I was for the first time assailed with apprehension at the thought of my destination. The grass, the weed, the destroying body which had devoured so much was immediately below me. I was irrevocably committed to come upon it--not at its edges where other men battled with it heroically--but at its very heart, where there were none to challenge it.

Still tormented and dejected, I landed easily and safely a few feet from the goat and just behind the rearquarters of one of the sheep.

And now I pause in my writing to sit quite still and remember--more than remember, live through again--the sensation of that first physical contact with the heart of the grass. Ecstasy is a pale word to apply to the joy of touching and resting upon that verdure. Soft--yes, it was soft, but the way sand is soft, unyieldingly. Unlike sand, however, it did not suggest a tightlypacked foundation, but rather the firmness of a good mattress resting on a wellmade spring. It was resilient, like carefully tended turf, yet at the same time one thought, not of the solid ground beneath, but of feathers, or even more of buoyant clouds. My parachute having landed me gently on my feet, I sank naturally to my knees, and then, impelled by some other force than gravity, my body fell fully forward in complete relaxation until my face was buried in the thickly growing culms and my arms stretched out to embrace as much of the lush surface as they could encompass.

Far more complex than the mere physical reactions were the psychical ones. When a boy I had, like every other, daydreamed of discovering new continents, of being first to climb a hitherto unscaled peak, to walk before others the shores of strange archipelagoes, to bring back tales of outlandish places and unfrequented isles. Well, I was doing these things now, long after the disillusionment adolescence brought to these childish dreams. But in addition it was in a sense my island, my mountain, my land--for I had caused it to be. A sensation of tremendous vivacity and wellbeing seized upon me; I could not have lain upon the grass more than half a second before I leaped to my feet. With a nimbleness quite foreign to my natural habits I detached the encumbering chute and jumped and danced upon the sward. The goat regarded me speculatively through rectangular pupils, but did not offer, in true capricious fashion, to gambol with me. Her criticism did not stay me, for I felt absolutely free, extraordinarily exhilarated, inordinately stimulated. I believe I even went so far as to shout out loud and break into song.

The descent of Slafe, still solemnly recording the event, camera before him in the position of present arms, did not sober my intoxication, though circumspection caused me to act in a more conventional way. I freed him from his harness, for he was too busy taking views of the grass, the sky, the animals and me to perform this service for himself.

I do not know if he was affected the way I was, for his deceptively genial face showed no emotion as he went on aiming his camera here and there with sour thoroughness. Then, apparently satisfied for the moment, he applied himself once more to the nasalsyringe and the pillboxes.

On Gootes, however, the consequence of the landing must have been much the same as on me. He too capered and sang and his dialect renderings reached a new low, such as even a burlesqueshow comedian would have spurned. “Tis the old sod itself,” he kept repeating, “Erin go bragh. Up Dev!” and he laughed inanely.