Spring has come, which means it's time to spend a lot of money on manure. There's chicken manure, sheep manure, cow (but apparently never bull) manure, human manure mixed in with peat, bark, and vegetable matter in various stages of decay. This weekend, my wife Debbie and I spread such stuff on what passes for our garden, located as it is in clay soil well on its way to achieving its destiny as one vast deposit of sedimentary rock.
Back in Seattle, Debbie once got wind, so to speak, of a program run by the city zoo whereby gardeners like herself could sign up for a chance to haul away what it called Zoo-Doo: heaps of droppings from an enormous range of caged and penned animals lured to Seattle from every corner of the Earth with promises of kayaking and lattes.
Debbie won the draw, and the following Saturday, during what was billed as Fecal Fest, we drove around to the back of Woodland Park Zoo, where we were greeted by Jeff Gage, the man in charge of the program. Seattle is populated by people who make the best of things, even their jobs, even jobs that entail the management of steaming mountains of animal dung. Dubbing himself the "Prince of Poop," the "Emperor of Excrement," the "GM of BM," the "Duke of Dung," Mr. Gage was well on his way to converting an annual $60,000 in landfill costs into a composting enterprise that would earn the zoo some $15,000 a year. A handsome young man with a relentless line of patter, he was not only a darling of environmentalists and zoologists, but of Seattle's horticulturalists as well.
As we shoveled dung into garbage bags and heaved them into the back of our car, it seemed to me that the Khalif of Kaka should have been paying us for hauling away an increment of his zoo's manure. But no, it was our privilege, and for every privilege you must pay.
So Debbie went off to settle with him and, mid-transaction, noticed that he was also peddling plastic bottles full of Zoo-Doo effluent which he recommended applying to house plants. I could see the effluent creeping out from under a nearby mountain of exotic animal excreta and wondered how he went about bottling same, or why. Nevertheless, Debbie bought a bottle, and we drove home in a fetid miasma of decay.
After we hauled our bags of manure around to the back yard, Debbie toted her bottle into the house. At the time we were the property and charges of two excellent dogs: a sister act of black retriever mixes we had picked up from a shelter in Bremerton and presented to our daughter on her birthday. Susie was the somewhat more autonomous and retriever-ish of the two; Ida, with her foreshortened snout and somewhat jittery manner, was a far more clingy and needy beast. But they were equally devoted to each other, and did everything in tandem.
In our living room we had installed a large ficus tree in a capacious pot. It had done pretty well for a few years after it turned up at our door, a gift from a distant friend. But the tree had lately shown signs of dwindling. So Debbie headed right to it with her bottle of Zoo-Doo effluent. As instructed by the Duke of Dung, she poured about a cup of it around the base of the ficus, and then we both sat down to rest from our execrable toil.
What neither of us had anticipated was what this would do to the dogs. Suddenly Ida and Suzy were standing by the pot, shivering as if in a freezing wind, hackles up, teeth chattering, each with a forefoot raised and a quivering tail pointing straight as an assegai.
At last it occurred to us that, for all they knew, the entire Serengeti had broken into the house and urinated on our tree. One glance at their upright ears and you could almost hear what they were hearing: the roaring of lions and leopards, the trumpeting of elephants, the whinnying of zebras, the snickering of hyenas, the bellows and rumblings of charging rhinos and stampeding wildebeests: a thundering, blaring, Jumanji invasion.
It was Ida who finally left her sister's side and came over to me with a look and a whimper that seemed to say, "There are creatures lurking in this house: enormous, fanged and great-horned beasts ready to trample and devour us all. I know I've cried wolf before, but if you only listen to me once, if you ever loved me or trusted me at all, listen to me now! We must get out of the house!"
I had to put leashes on them and drag them from room to room before they concluded that, like the automobile and the doorbell and the postman's tread, whatever it was that had emanated from the soil of the ficus was just another of the alarming imponderables with which we seemed determined to keep them on their toes.
By the way, the ficus must have been equally alarmed or maybe just affronted, for it never did thrive. After the dogs passed away, we carted it off to the dump, where I suspect some Sultan of Slop, or Bard of Discard, or Mikado of Muck has long since turned it into mulch and sold it to a matron back in town.
Back in Seattle, Debbie once got wind, so to speak, of a program run by the city zoo whereby gardeners like herself could sign up for a chance to haul away what it called Zoo-Doo: heaps of droppings from an enormous range of caged and penned animals lured to Seattle from every corner of the Earth with promises of kayaking and lattes.
Debbie won the draw, and the following Saturday, during what was billed as Fecal Fest, we drove around to the back of Woodland Park Zoo, where we were greeted by Jeff Gage, the man in charge of the program. Seattle is populated by people who make the best of things, even their jobs, even jobs that entail the management of steaming mountains of animal dung. Dubbing himself the "Prince of Poop," the "Emperor of Excrement," the "GM of BM," the "Duke of Dung," Mr. Gage was well on his way to converting an annual $60,000 in landfill costs into a composting enterprise that would earn the zoo some $15,000 a year. A handsome young man with a relentless line of patter, he was not only a darling of environmentalists and zoologists, but of Seattle's horticulturalists as well.
As we shoveled dung into garbage bags and heaved them into the back of our car, it seemed to me that the Khalif of Kaka should have been paying us for hauling away an increment of his zoo's manure. But no, it was our privilege, and for every privilege you must pay.
So Debbie went off to settle with him and, mid-transaction, noticed that he was also peddling plastic bottles full of Zoo-Doo effluent which he recommended applying to house plants. I could see the effluent creeping out from under a nearby mountain of exotic animal excreta and wondered how he went about bottling same, or why. Nevertheless, Debbie bought a bottle, and we drove home in a fetid miasma of decay.
After we hauled our bags of manure around to the back yard, Debbie toted her bottle into the house. At the time we were the property and charges of two excellent dogs: a sister act of black retriever mixes we had picked up from a shelter in Bremerton and presented to our daughter on her birthday. Susie was the somewhat more autonomous and retriever-ish of the two; Ida, with her foreshortened snout and somewhat jittery manner, was a far more clingy and needy beast. But they were equally devoted to each other, and did everything in tandem.
In our living room we had installed a large ficus tree in a capacious pot. It had done pretty well for a few years after it turned up at our door, a gift from a distant friend. But the tree had lately shown signs of dwindling. So Debbie headed right to it with her bottle of Zoo-Doo effluent. As instructed by the Duke of Dung, she poured about a cup of it around the base of the ficus, and then we both sat down to rest from our execrable toil.
What neither of us had anticipated was what this would do to the dogs. Suddenly Ida and Suzy were standing by the pot, shivering as if in a freezing wind, hackles up, teeth chattering, each with a forefoot raised and a quivering tail pointing straight as an assegai.
At last it occurred to us that, for all they knew, the entire Serengeti had broken into the house and urinated on our tree. One glance at their upright ears and you could almost hear what they were hearing: the roaring of lions and leopards, the trumpeting of elephants, the whinnying of zebras, the snickering of hyenas, the bellows and rumblings of charging rhinos and stampeding wildebeests: a thundering, blaring, Jumanji invasion.
It was Ida who finally left her sister's side and came over to me with a look and a whimper that seemed to say, "There are creatures lurking in this house: enormous, fanged and great-horned beasts ready to trample and devour us all. I know I've cried wolf before, but if you only listen to me once, if you ever loved me or trusted me at all, listen to me now! We must get out of the house!"
I had to put leashes on them and drag them from room to room before they concluded that, like the automobile and the doorbell and the postman's tread, whatever it was that had emanated from the soil of the ficus was just another of the alarming imponderables with which we seemed determined to keep them on their toes.
By the way, the ficus must have been equally alarmed or maybe just affronted, for it never did thrive. After the dogs passed away, we carted it off to the dump, where I suspect some Sultan of Slop, or Bard of Discard, or Mikado of Muck has long since turned it into mulch and sold it to a matron back in town.
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