Reflections
on Ellerbe Creek and the Watershed

A place like Ellerbe Creek can inspire the artist in us all.  We may be moved paint, sketch, write, photograph, or otherwise capture some aspect of the creek and its environs.  If you would like to use this page to share your personal vision of Ellerbe Creek just contact us.

Wisteria Blue

by Joe Clark

Last night the wisteria in my back yard sent a runner after me. It slid through a gap in the window screen. When I woke up it had wrapped itself around my arm and its tip was waving all curly at the end of my nose, like it was gonna suck out my brain.

Oh yeah. I'm not kidding.

I know you think wisteria's pretty, those clumps of blue flowers hanging down every spring.

That's just what wisteria wants. It has plans.

It wants you to think it's pretty so you won't eradicate it. Won't practice herbicide. Just leave me be, it says, and ain't I pretty? While all along them runners are knotting themselves into your shoelaces. You not looking. All mesmerized.

Oh man, I got the wisteria hysteria. The weary mysteria. Wisteria gonna come live in my house.

You want to grow some in your front yard, don't you? You think you can keep it under control. You think wisteria looks so nice and tame when somebody's been tending it. Innocent. Kind of moody, with those long trailing clusters of blossoms that look like they'll taste grape if you eat 'em. A milder Bacchus. Baptist-church communion wine. I can see you thinking that. I've seen your house, the manicured lawn and the floral arsenal in your garage, like tanks waiting on the outskirts of Beijing. The chemical weapons. The smart-mowers. The weed-eating secret police. You think you can handle wisteria.

Wisteria gonna like you.

You'll have a pretty plant all upstanding and blossomy. Safely isolated in the middle of your lawn. Exiled to Wisteria Siberia -- the thin limbs droopy like a baby willow. But you'll be wondering about them thick, blunt-ended stubs that keep growing new heads, like Hydra. You'll have to conduct frequent purges. Then one day that wisteria will rise up like an oppressed people and you'll just be another Romanov. A suburban Mussolini. You'll be passing by that wisteria-bush, all smug and happy, and your lawnmower'll get hung up in one of those pasty green runners that's been snaking its way out through the grass roots toward a big juicy oak tree, sending up a tiny leaf now and then like a periscope. Maybe the lawnmower will flip over and chew on you some.

Maybe just a little bit.

Like Thoreau and Walt Whitman and Jim Jones and Ho Chi Minh, I thought the woods might hold the peace I was looking for. So I quit doing yard work. I encouraged wild things to grow. At first they were stunned and hesitant at the invitation, embarrassed like a shabby man invited to a cocktail party. All of them, that is, except wisteria.

It made a beeline for the house. It was halfway up the wall in two days. Sometimes I'd sit real still and watch it, waiting to see if it would move. I think it could tell I was there, and was sizing me up. I don't know how. It can't be doing a whole lot of thinking.

Wisteria in the wild has no backbone, or maybe it's just lazy. Maybe it had a bad upbringing. It resents having to drag itself around on the forest floor in the shade of the fatcat trees hogging the sunlight overhead. It humps around awkward, a sloth on a ground-trek.

A wisterium megatherium. Bordering on delirium.

The big trees have no sympathy for the struggles on the forest floor; they are the corporate giants. The sweetgums manufacturing spiky bombs. The towering longleaf pines all sharp needles and spiny cones, like pain and sleepy feet. The big trees tilt and talk only at the upper reaches, where the sunshine pours into their hungry leaves like warm honey. They become a little tipsy from all this ambrosia, and they get to philosophizing among themselves. They talk of ethics and policy. They drop rotten limbs with an offhand "Heads up!" And all the while wisteria is climbing a spiral staircase around their trunks that are grey as elephant hide.

I'm leery of wisteria. I think it come from Nigeria. Or maybe Iberia. But it ain't the stuff that swallowed that fella in the Stephen King book. It ain't The Colour Out Of Space. It ain't from outer space. It's worse than that, I think:

Ain't no earthbound, H.G. Wells virus gonna set in and save us. No wisteria bacteria.

I think wisteria been here a long time. Longer than folks. I think wisteria had a lot of time to practice.

Once it gets into the branches of a tree, that's all she wrote. Wisteria slithers around a limb and just leans on it. "Come on, baby," it whispers into the knots of the tree, "just lie down, honey. Just lie down here with me." And the tree may have a backbone like a deacon, like the preacher's wife, but there ain't no seducer on this earth like wisteria. It just leans and whispers.

I think the snake been a victim of mistaken identity. I reckon wisteria been in the garden of Eden, saying, "Come on, Eve, honey. Just lie down."

You see a big tree in the summertime and it looks just fine, but you don't know wisteria's intercepting its welfare checks. Then you look up high and see those purple flowers or those sumacky leaves against the sky and you know it. You just know it. It's like coming home and reaching out to give your baby a hug and then seeing that it's not her, that it's some demon, just using her backbone and parts of her skin for a little while.

And the doc says, "She got wisteria diphtheria."

After a while the tree gives out and comes crashing to the ground, wisteria and all. Wisteria don't mind. More sunlight, wisteria says, and the next morning it's sending out runners everywhere. Wisteria don't want to get up. No sirree. Wisteria wants everything else to come down.

I got a theory of wisteria.

I think wisteria is entropy come alive, slinking through the forest, looking for potential energy to turn into kinetic energy. I think it laughs in the nighttime under the full moon, but you and I can't hear it.

Wisteria been choking my 'zayahs and cameyahs. Wisteria been trying to get on my roof. Wisteria been talking on my telephone lines, running up my phone bill.

One day I walked outside and pulled the wisteria and other vines off my house. Some of 'em had little sucker-feet, and they made a sound like a zipper as I yanked 'em off. The wall looked like tree frogs with muddy feet had been walking up it. I pulled the runners up through the grass. They stretched all the way to my property line. It was like unraveling green carpet.

Wisteria was back outside my window the very next day, eyeing the legs on my kitchen table and drooling some.

You can't just yank wisteria out of a tree. Wisteria practices a scorched-earth policy. It strips off everything as it goes. The tree looks like South Dade County. So I took the clippers and crawled in around underneath the bushes, clipping through the wisteria at its roots. I thought about this some and then I clipped 'em again about a foot higher up. I tossed the cut-off pieces out in the grass.

You don't know about wisteria. Wisteria moves fast.

But I figured that way maybe the ends would be all withered up and puckery by the time they found each other and tried to rejoin, and their union would be dry and fruitless, like passion in an old folks' home. Maybe I should have cut off two feet.

Maybe I should have called the folks at the nursery. Maybe I should have moved up north.

But I didn't, and now wisteria has my automobile. It snuck in and wrapped itself around the axle one night, and the next morning I couldn't get the car to move. I had to walk to work, and all along the way the wisteria was nodding at me from telephone poles and streetlights. Grinning. By the time I got home it had crawled through the bumpers and into the engine. Later I peeked out and it had unlocked the doors and was inside, playing with the steering wheel and shifting the gears. Fiddling with the radio.

Getting ideas.

During the night, wisteria rang my doorbell. I went to the door and opened it and a whole mess of greeny vines fell on top of me. They writhed about like snakes, but I cut 'em off by pushing the door shut. The severed ends reminded me of lizard tails, all twitchy-like. I was afraid they'd take root in my carpet, so I boiled 'em for an hour, then baked 'em at 350 for 45 minutes.

Wisteria cafeteria.

Last night when I woke up and the wisteria was there, corkscrew poised, a viny maitre d' ready to unstopper me, I jumped out of bed like a palmetto bug had been rustling on my neck. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I poured Tidy Bowl under the crack. Full strength. I guess that'll hold it for a little while, but it do smell pungent in here. I mean from the Tidy Bowl.

I know that pretty soon I'll have to open the window. I can hear wisteria outside right now, whispering through the framing. "Just lie down, honey," it says, and giggles a little bit.

Yes I got the wisteria hysteria. The feary mysteria. The teary, never hear of ya' again blues.

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