Category Archives: Snack Sack

Egyptiana II: The Smell of Fear

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The Second Part in which Steve’s supper is Rudely Interrupted

Bright and early on our first full day in Egypt, we moved to the elusive Rose Hotel. The cab ride took us by Tahrir Square at least twice, and possibly as many as four times. After checking in we discovered that it wasn’t the Rose Hotel at all. In our defense, Egyptian hotels rarely hang signs out front, possibly as a service to enterprising  cab drivers. Determined to redeem ourselves, we walked maybe 25 blocks to the genuine Rose Hotel and asked for a simple cold-water walk-up, no view, please. “No,” said the pretty young clerk, apologetically. “Has bugs.” Turns out the only room at the Rose Hotel that didn’t have bugs was a sinfully expensive cold-water walk-up with a view. For what it’s worth, it was a pretty good view.

A room 'with view'

Splurging on supper al fresco at an outdoor café in Tahrir Square, we were surprised when a stranger shuffled out of the crowd and sat down, uninvited, next to Sweet Apricot. He introduced himself as Mr. Magdhi and immediately launched into a soaring soliloquy about Egypt’s wondrous perfumes. Sweet Apricot, whose peerless alabaster skin naturally exhales an aroma of lilac and cinnamon, told Mr. Magdhi that she didn’t wear perfume, which, though perfectly true, made no perceptible impression on him. When she mentioned we’d be returning to Greece in a few days, he nearly jumped out of his chair for sheer excitement. “You very lucky!,” Mr. Magdhi beamed. “You buy perfume in Egypt, you sell in Greece three, four times price!”

It’s like this: The last thing you want is to blow precious reserves on cheap eau de cologne that’s going to wind up soaking everything in your pack and spend the rest of the trip walking around among strangers reeking like the 20-minute room of a working-class Turkish bordello. On the other hand – and maybe this is an American thing, or maybe it’s just this American’s thing – you’re loathe to give offense. So you fidge and fiddle and hedge and shuffle and offer up too-gentle apologies and wait for the smiling con-artist before you to simply give up. Only he doesn’t give up. He never gives up. He’s like the whole Zulu Nation bearing down, and it’s only a matter of time before your ammunition is gone and your camp is over-run. Despite endlessly repeated assurances that we weren’t interested in taking on any sure-fire money-making ventures, Mr. Magdhi wouldn’t be appeased until we agreed to accompany him to a perfume shop he knew of just around the corner. The owner was a friend, he explained, and the only honest perfume merchant in downtown Cairo. “You just look,” he urged. “You don’t like, you don’t buy. No problem.”

 We followed a suddenly impatient Mr. Magdhi through the teeming streets for about half a mile at something approaching a gallop, passing along the way at least a dozen likely perfume shops until he at last waved us into a small, unpromising establishment in a less-trafficked quarter of the city. The proprietor, a round man wearing a fez and a thin robe trimmed in gold brocade, sidled up with a studiously disinterested look on his face. “Like Cleopatra,” he said, motioning to no perfume in particular. We looked, as promised, and said we saw nothing to our liking. How he did it I’d love to know, but somehow Mr. Magdhi, who’d never been out of arm’s reach, had tipped the perfume-seller to our itinerary.

“You buy perfume in Egypt, you sell in Greece five, ten times price,” said the proprietor, managing to sound eager and bored at the same time. Feeling an invisible vise creeping shut, we proposed we be allowed to sleep on it overnight and come back the next day to take advantage of that profitable opportunity. “Tomorrow no good,” he clucked, and waved his hand to take in every bottle in the shop. “Only today. All be no good tomorrow.”

Now, I happened to know that 3,000-year-old perfume extracted from Egyptian tombs still retains its fragrance, and Sweet Apricot asked him point-blank how he expected us to interest the Greeks in a product that would be “no good” by the time it reached the point of sale. He didn’t even blink. “You buy today, okay,” he said, making an apathetic attempt at a thumbs-up. “Buy now, perfume okay.”

Oddly perishable Egyptian perfume

We bought two jars that, so far as I know, Sweet Apricot has never even opened. The perfumer didn’t seem especially glad for the sale, and the moment the money changed hands Mr. Magdhi lost all interest in his great new friends and disappeared into the night with LE5 baksheesh. On the long walk back to the Rose Hotel we were forced to admit we were losing ground.

But we were learning.

Next Time: A scheming woman!

 

Egyptiana: Khepera Rises

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The First Part in which Steve travels to Egypt and is confounded by Local Customs

 

Egypt can be tough on the tourist.

At least it was tough on this tourist.

But don’t misunderstand me – with a few notable exceptions, every Egyptian I met was friendly, welcoming, hospitable. The ruins and relics, great and small, exceeded my most unrealistic expectations.  And, from Nubia to the sea, the ancient atmosphere that shrouds the Valley of the Nile like mummy-wrap seems to infuse even the commonplace with a deep breath of mystery and magic.

But it was tough, just the same.

Looking back, I suppose I was the problem, really. Anybody who knows me will tell you that I’m a swell fellow. Nice. Polite. Generally generous. I like to accommodate. Thing is, Egypt doesn’t reward the obliging tourist, but rather harvests that species like extra long staple cotton.

Boarding an airplane in Athens for the easy 75-minute flight to Cairo, Sweet Apricot and I had no idea what we were flying into. Then again, it might not have made any difference if we had. Some things you have to learn by hard experience.

We got our first lesson about 20 minutes after touching down at the Cairo airport, where we were approached by one of a small herd of blue-jacketed official greeters. “Welcome to Egypt!” he said, smiling warmly. “Egypt is great friends with America!” It was an encouraging start, and we gratefully accepted his offer to change $200 worth of our travelers checks into 400 Egyptian pounds (LE400), cash money. “If you do it yourself, he may try to cheat you,” our benefactor warned. “He will not try to cheat me.”

Our official greeter tried to cheat us out of LE125. If Sweet Apricot hadn’t immediately counted the tight packet he handed back to us, he would have succeeded, because one of my very, very few faults is a commendably  trusting nature. The greeter chose that moment to lose his smooth English fluency, and it took almost a half-hour for him to regain it, along with our missing funds. After once more expressing his boundless personal joy over the great friendship uniting our respective nations, he thrust forth an expectant hand.

We’d read up on baksheesh, the casual and omni-present form of social extortion practiced in that part of the world. Sometimes baksheesh is a charitable gift. More often it’s a tip for services rendered. We thought it the height of gall for that faithless greeter to even suggest a gratuity. Still unsure of our ground, we gave him LE5 and parted great friends. It was a discouraging start, and as we gathered ourselves at the dark and nearly deserted cab stand outside, Sweet Apricot and I resolved to stay sharp for the next two weeks. We were lucky, we agreed, to have been given fair warning at the outset. If we were taken again, it would be nobody’s fault but our own.

“American?”, the cab driver asked. “Egypt is great friends with America!” He was so happy, like whoever passes for Santa Claus in that neighborhood just climbed into his back seat. Flattered despite ourselves, we directed him to the Rose Hotel, near Tahrir Square, described in the guide book as clean and inexpensive. “No, no,” he said, dismissively. “Has bugs.” Sancho flipped through the guide book and showed him the page. He just shook his head and wrinkled his nose. “Has bugs.” Ever one to have her own way, Sweet Apricot insisted, and kept insisting until the cabbie agreed to take us to our infested preference. The Rose Hotel was reputedly near downtown Cairo, and about 30 minutes from the airport. After not more than 15 minutes on the road our driver pulled up in front of a gloomy brick building, deposited our backpacks on the sidewalk, collected the fare and received his baksheesh. “Fifth floor,” he said, and drove away. It wasn’t the Rose, of course, and cost twice what we’d planned for, but it was the middle of the night and the street was desolate and we were suddenly very, very tired. Before turning in, we renewed our little pact, only this time we meant it. We would never again be played for suckers in Egypt.

Next Time: Steve smells a rat!

Quack Narcissist: self-styled ‘street medic’ practices radical medicine

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To serve and object

If you’re anything like me, and how fortunate for you if you are, you think that words like “brilliant” and “genius” are tossed around entirely too much.

The popular media tend to describe anybody who can wangle a guest spot on The Daily Show, or who gets really, really mad about social injustice, as brilliant. And anybody with a new reason to hate Western culture or a song on Billboard’s Top 40 is automatically labeled a genius. Indeed, it seems to be a point of faith that any mook who can horn their way into the national dialogue must by default have something of towering importance to say, and the rest of us slow-witted gum-snappers must accept the Gospel as it is handed down to us or risk being branded bumpkins.  Alas, the facts do not support those perceptions.

Facts are, truly brilliant people are typically duller than ditchwater concerning matters not directly associated with their specific area of brilliance, and those geniuses who don’t simply give themselves the title are generally awarded it by virtue of a single flash thereof. Put another way, strong opinions don’t automatically make you smart, and access to a bully pulpit doesn’t automatically make you right.

And yet, in the infinite and poorly organized parade that is human progress, there emerge at long intervals people who display authentic brilliance,  and ideas that are genuinely ingenious, and if those words are to ever regain their fundamental meaning it is essential that we recognize those people and those ideas, and hold them up as glittering examples of the soaring intellectual heights to which each of us, if we don’t slouch, and faithfully listen to NPR, and have our teeth professionally whitened, may aspire.

It is my strong opinion that Zoe Williams is a truly brilliant person, and that the idea behind “street medics” is pure genious.

I tumbled to the under-appreciated street medic phenomenon in the pages of Denver’s funky free weekly, Westword, which contained a thoroughly over-blown feature article starring Zoe Williams on the tiresome occasion of Occupy Denver’s protracted 15 minutes of ill fame. Turns out Zoe is really, really mad about social injustice. She’s also really, really mad about Western culture ,and abhors the very sight of anything symbolic of American patriotism or the nation’s White, Anglo-European roots.

Zoe is a devoted anarchist who manages an alternative-press outlet dedicated to “radical politics”. And although you wouldn’t know it to look at her, Zoe’s not actually a woman, but rather a “female-bodied person” who wears her political correctness the way an 8-year-old, er, female-bodied person wears her mom’s makeup, because last, but by no means least, Zoe is a card-carrying member of that common class of self-dramatizing 20-something that simply can’t be happy unless everyone they meet knows exactly how much they despise just about everything  others admire, and why.

Now you’d think that a female-bodied person equipped with Zoe’s strong opinions and formidable counter-cultural arsenal would exist in a constant state of scolding bliss, and lately that does seems to be her enviable situation. But in times past, and for far too long, poor Zoe found her sharp corrective tongue and desperate need for perpetual validation stifled by a shameful personal history. It seems the spiky-haired firebrand is, sadly, the product of middle-class suburban plenty, raised by White capitalist exploiters and afforded all the intolerable advantages unjustly deriving therefrom. It was a serious handicap for someone of her stern passions, but one that she courageously overcame by hitching her wagon to a self-glorifying band of all-purpose revolutionaries calling themselves “street medics.”

In theory, street medics are guardian angels (an unfortunate symbol of Christian cultural tyranny) who shadow the righteous wherever they rally in protest of whichever political/social/cultural/economic/taxonomic/bionomic injustice is most likely to attract television cameras. Armed with cautious zeal and formal emergency medical training ranging from slim-ish to none-ish, they hover on the wings of the fray, ready at any moment to swoop in and address the carnage wrought by The Man and his vicious pack of jack-booted attack-dogs. To her credit, Zoe has actually undergone nurse training, giving her useful real-world skills she uses to train other street medics and which, alas, are not much use on the protest trail.

Westword was on hand as Zoe suited up for an Occupy Denver march in Civic Center Park. A borrowed camo belt held up her black EMS pants, deep pockets stuffed with stuff like glucose tablets, white flower oil and an aromatic selection of soothing herbs. Her black shoulder bag bulged with a poncho, a heating blanket and bottled water. No fewer than three hip-bags were needed to tote her lifesaving freight of Band-Aids, gauze and Sharpies. Topped off with a black ballcap hand-stenciled with one of the few symbols Zoe can tolerate – the black cross of the street-medic support organization, Denver Anarchists Black Cross – she was the very picture of sober purpose, a sort of Value Village warrior sauntering out to watch others wage war.

As usual, the war was pretty tame, and Zoe and her compatriots tended about 45 boo-booed marchers on that not-so-terrible day, ranking it among their most glorious encounters. Fact is, not counting the temporary irritation caused by police pepper spray, most of the protesters’ injuries were self-inflicted, the predictable results of over-stimulation, poor hygiene and an excess of institutional disapproval.

But lest anyone think the selfless street medic does nothing more than dispense aspirin and Kleenex, consider that their borrowed code, “first do no harm”, encompasses potential emotional injuries that may result from inadvertantly giving affront to those you’re helping. When racing to aid a stricken protester not fluent in the language of oppression, for example, Zoe follows a strict, feelings-saving protocol. Reported Westword, “…Williams introduces herself and first gives the patient permission to use female gender pronouns before asking his or her own preference.”

And if the street medic’s expedient code of conduct forbids actually mixing it up with government thugs, dire dangers still lurk in unexpected places. At the Denver event, some aberrant marcher had the effrontery to string an American flag above the motley stream of protesters. Zoe was, naturally, aghast. “There is no way I’m marching underneath that,” she pronounced.

Now, there may be bodied people of whatever type who deem street medics nothing more than a yipping litter of self-aggrandizing cowards who build their own radical credentials upon the unwashed backs of others. After all, having conveniently prohibited themselves from personally engaging the enemy, and being prudently uniformed as non-participating participants, their danger of assault or arrest is virtually non-existant. What’s more, having cast themselves as benevolent protectors, they effectively assume – at least in their own minds – roles of even greater honor and nobility than those who actually face down the thuggish regime du jour. Perhaps most egregiously, because litigation-leery governments provide ample professional emergency resources to incidents of public disquiet, street medics are not saddled with actual distracting and potentially distasteful medical responsibilities. They claim their acclaim by the simple act of showing up.

And that’s the genius of it.

Street medics have created for themselves the perfect way to live out their self-indulgent paramilitary fantasies without risk, to drape themselves in the rainbow-hued mantles of public champions without sacrifice, and to seize what they deem the highest moral ground without committing anything of substance to its defense.

Genius.

Best of all, the street medic needn’t confine his/her/itself to a particular source of outrage. From Wall Street to The Whales, and from reparations to the rain forests, the beef is where they can find it. From coast to coast and beyond the seas, wherever the disgruntled assemble, there is Zoe’s bully pulpit, a bottle of Bactine in her hand and hyper-judgemental activism in her heart, basking in the admiration – real or imagined – of the Little People who do the yeoman’s work of protest.

Brilliant.

I’d salute her, but I don’t think she’d like it.

Smiling through the tears – Camp Comfort helps kids grow from grief to gladness

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On the zipline

Last weekend, as on most summer days, the Rocky Mountain Village Easter Seals Camp at Empire Junction was alive with children’s shouts and laughter.

Dozens of kids between the ages of 6 and 12 spent two glorious days hiking Clear Creek Canyon’s green heights, singing time-tested campfire songs, eating hearty camp chow and bunking down with new friends on rustic camp beds. To grown-up eyes, it all looked wonderfully innocent, carefree and life-affirming – a Norman Rockwell picture of idyllic childhood memories.

But there was plenty on last weekend’s camp schedule besides horseback riding and watercolors. For instance, each camper was asked to describe how they felt when their secure little worlds exploded.

“In my shoulders I felt afraid,” said a pony-tailed angel named Emily, who lost her dad to cancer last year. Maybe 8 years old, Emily wore pink socks and an over-sized pink sweatshirt. Like the eight others in her “Chipmunks” group, she’d tried to plot the course of her personal tsunami on an outline of her thin 4-foot frame traced on an Emily-sized piece of paper. She spoke clearly, but seemed unsure of whether she wanted to giggle or to cry.

“In my arms I felt sleepy,” Emily continued. “In my mouth I wanted to yell.”

One at a time, the other children in Rocky Mountain Village’s picturesque Genesee Hall took their turn, sometimes confidently, sometimes quietly, sometimes tearfully, reliving the darkest hour of their darkest day. The small audience listened with sincere interest. It was ground they knew well.

“In my stomach I felt worried.”

“I felt cold in my legs.”

“My heart is where I felt lonely.”

After half an hour of intense personal revelation, the Chipmunks packed up their tracings, put on their shoes and ran chattering out the door. It was time to try the camp’s zip-line, and serious matters blew instantly away in the clean mountain breeze. That’s how it goes at Camp Comfort.

“Probably the most striking thing about kids is that, unlike adults, they can alternate their grief,” explained Camp Comfort co-director Wendy Snow, a social worker with the Mount Evans Hospice. “They can spend an hour talking and crying about the death of a parent or sibling, then turn right around and go fishing, and really have fun doing it. They’re amazing.”

For that matter, Camp Comfort is amazing. Now in its 13th year, the Mount Evans Hospice program is one of precious few in the country specifically designed to help children deal with grief. Today, the program runs two weekends a summer and is attracting favorable notice from coast to coast. In theory, the camp costs $150 per weekend per child but, in practice, virtually no one is ever turned away.

“Sally Wandling is the person who really got Camp Comfort started, and she used to say that children are the forgotten grievers,” Snow said. “It’s true. When a parent’s spouse dies, they’re often overwhelmed by their own grief and all the other stuff that comes after a death, and the child’s grief gets forgotten. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just what happens.”

To supplement the natural restorative powers of fresh air, lush forests and soaring vistas, each camper is issued a short workbook to fill out. Called “Healing My Heart,” it not only gives surviving parents a crucial road-map to what’s on their child’s mind, it’s often a grieving child’s first opportunity to assess their own situation.

“It makes them think about what’s happened, and how it’s affected them,” said Snow’s co-director, Barb Lamperski. “Kids don’t really know how to talk about their grief, and in schools they don’t have anyone to talk to who will ask the questions and listen to the answers. At Camp Comfort, they get to talk to other kids who’re going through what they’re going through. It makes losing a loved one seem more normal and less scary.”

Down at the fishing dock, where a handful of volunteers from Evergreen Trout Unlimited were hosting their customary and decidedly low-impact fishing clinic, Littleton twins Jeff and Joe, who lost their mom rather suddenly to illness, looked perfectly normal and didn’t seem scared at all. Tall, red-haired and 13, the brothers took turns casting into a well-stocked trout pond. After only a few throws, Joe hooked a spirited 10-inch rainbow, proudly admired it for a moment or two, and then released it back into the water.

“I like all the activities, and I really liked the zip-line,” said Joe, his soft smile at once genuine and tentative. “You get to do a lot of stuff you don’t normally do. It’s fun.”

“It was pretty tough at first,” admitted Jeff. “When you have to tell your story, it’s really tough to talk about. But once you get through it and you hear everybody else’s stories, it’s nice to know that other kids have gone through the same thing.”

At Camp Comfort, that willingness to speak frankly about tragic loss and suffocating grief can be disconcerting, even shocking, to the uninitiated. But if the campers are candid about their broken hearts, they don’t dwell on them. Pain is merely an overfull piece of baggage they share in common, and sharing its weight between them lightens the load for all. But it could be hard to hear, just the same.

“The rules all changed, and everything was different. I just didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I was sad, but it kind of felt nice that people who didn’t used to like me were nicer to me.”

“It’s nice when people say you look just like them.”

One of the most important amenities Camp Comfort offers its guests is a ready-made buddy. At check-in on Friday evening, each child was assigned a dedicated guide and companion to help orient them to camp life, listen to whatever needed listening to, and generally behave as a good buddy should.

“Leaving home after a parent dies can be scary, and we want the kids to feel safe and secure and to know that we’re going to take good care of them,” Snow explained. “The buddies are theirs for the weekend, and their only job is to devote all of their attention to the child and do whatever they want to do. Buddies are all volunteers, and they aren’t counselors, per se. They’re here to be the child’s friend.”

And that’s exactly what they looked like. Walking side-by-side and sometimes hand-in-hand, little people and their big people were everywhere seen smiling and chatting like old chums. Jeff’s old chum happened to be Golden resident Pat O’Connell, who’s finishing up his 6th year as a Camp Comfort buddy. While O’Connell freely admitted that a free weekend at camp is its own reward, he wasn’t in it for the s’mores.

“I had a friend who passed away many years ago, and another friend said I should do Camp Comfort,” explained Pat, standing just out of range of Jeff’s flailing hook. “It’s a good perspective re-set. It really makes you re-focus on what’s important.”

Across the way, the Owls assembled in the art cabin to paint colorful pictures of everyone in their lives who still loved and cared for them. With just two days to reach diverse wounded psyches, Camp Comfort takes a layered approach that seeks as much to engage as to educate. Once the markers come out, kids who could hardly utter a sound in the feelings workshop become eloquent in bright blues and reds and yellows.

“Children express themselves in different ways,” Snow said, “so we reach out to them in different ways.”

Somewhere down the valley, beyond the aspen groves to the east, a sudden eruption of squeals and hollering down the valley indicated where the “Eagle” group was trying out Rocky Mountain Village’s combination climbing tower and zip-line platform. One by one, the fledglings climbed about 25 feet to that high aerie, hooked onto a stout metal cable and took wing. Within the space of 100 yards, screams of utter terror became screams of ecstatic triumph and ended as the kind of joyous, non-specific screams that nobody over 18 can truly comprehend. But is pure exhilaration and childish delight really pertinent to Camp Comfort’s worthy mission? Absolutely.

“If this was just a grief camp where everybody sat around and cried, nobody would come, and it wouldn’t do the kids any good,” said Snow, as another shrieking meteor zzzinged overhead. “Fun is a great way to deal with grief, because it gets you out of your down-and-out mood. And it’s a good lesson for the kids that it’s okay to have fun even if you’re sad. It’s okay to feel happy.”

If smiles and good cheer are anything to go by, Camp Comfort works. Nearly 50 young children, each with a very good reason to feel angry, depressed and bitter, went home after last weekend’s adventure far stronger and healthier than when they arrived.

“The other day a mom called me,” Snow said. “She told me her son hadn’t cried since his father had died, but when she picked him up from camp he started talking about his dad and crying as soon as he got in the car. They talked about him and cried the whole way home. She was just so glad and relieved. What happens here is so important, and so wonderful.”

If Snow has a filing cabinet full of success stories to warm her during the winter months, the story that most closely concerns Evergreen resident Bill Lathrop is his buddy Trevor’s. Trevor was just 10 years old when his big brother, Tyler, was struck and killed by a motorist while riding his bicycle near his Arvada home two years ago.

“It happened on the last day of school,” Trevor said.

Last weekend was Trevor’s second tour at Camp Comfort, the same as Bill.

“The first year was really hard, but it’s easier this year,” said Trevor, softly but steadily. “I like having a buddy, and because I was here before I can help the new kids. It’s a little scary, at first.

“I wasn’t really sure I wanted to come here the first time, but now I’m glad I did. It really helped. I feel a lot better.”

The scourge of spurge – Naturalists battling for future of Idledale Lake

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A Work of Purest Bushwah

Since 2011, hampered by flagging public interest and too few willing hands, the Idledale Naturalists Audubon Society (TINAS) has been locked in a losing battle against an aggressive enemy. Now, 16 years later, the group is marshalling a last-ditch, do-or-die campaign to reclaim Idledale’s natural places from determined and resilient invaders.

“We’re calling it ‘Weed-Free in ‘23,’ and it’s long overdue,” says Hilltop resident Herb Grassley, who took over as the society’s noxious weed coordinator in 2021. “We’ve already lost Idledale Lake, Marmot Meadow is on the brink, and we’re losing hundreds more acres of open space every year.”

For more than five decades, TINAS has been leading the charge against the tide of noxious weed species flooding the mountain area. A mere 20 years ago, the group could count on up to 100 volunteers a year to participate in its annual Community Weed Day at Idledale Lake. Many hands make light work, and one morning each summer generally sufficed to control such noisome trespassers as diffuse knapweed and musk thistle, thus preserving the lakeshores for beneficial, wildlife-friendly native grasses and flowering shrubs. That all started to change in 2011.

“That’s the year we got a double-whammy,” Grassley says. “First, leafy spurge found its way up here from somewhere and started popping up all over the place, and then Dalmatian toadflax got a toehold on the hillside above the warming hut.”

Fighting the same fire on hundreds of fronts, the Humboldt County Weed and Pest Department could provide only minimal assistance, the forest service lacked the funding necessary to mount the all-out assault required to combat the threat, and the Idledale Parks and Recreation District lacked the infrastructure needed for effective action. That left TINAS standing on the front lines, virtually alone.

“We jumped right on it, but toadflax is a perennial that can grow back quickly from root fragments, and leafy spurge roots go down 15 feet, making them almost impossible to eradicate,” Grassley recalls. “Within two years, we were fighting them from the dam to Greystone Manor. It was disheartening for everybody, and I think people just gave up.”

 

The weed-choked shores of Idledale Lake

 

Over the next several years, various efforts to stem the toxic onslaught quickly dissolved amid institutional turf wars, funding controversies and bitter methodological controversies. Public interest in weed control reached its lowest ebb in 2011, the same year tamarisk first reared its ugly head in Idledale Lake’s western shallows.

Remarkably rugged and aggressive, the tamarisk’s habit of leaching salt into its surroundings quickly decimated the thick stands of cattails north of Idledale Lake Lodge. Within 5 years tamarisk had supplanted nearly all of the wetland plant species, leaving the broad expanse of water from the lodge to the warming house the thick, green algae soup it is today, and costing Idledale Water customers up to $50 a year in increased purification costs. Deprived of their accustomed fare, ducks and geese all but abandoned the lake, as anyone who’s visited those weed-choked shores recently will attest.

With increasingly fewer hands to tackle a rapidly growing problem, field bindweed daisy soon established itself around the Lake Lodge parking lot. A relentless opportunist, the invader required just two years to erase the native grasses and, by 2014, covered the lake’s picnic area in dense, unbroken mats. While not unattractive, the fast-growing weed is inedible to birds, hastening the area’s feathery exodus.

“I think newcomers to Idledale would probably be surprised to learn that Idledale Lake used to be popular with birdwatchers,” Grassley says. “These days, you might see a half-dozen kinds of birds there, on a good day.”

Perhaps most troubling, field bindweed offers both palatable food and excellent cover for rodents. Relatively safe beneath the plant’s pretty pink and white flowers, mouse and vole populations boomed. County authorities blame the surge for at least 8 documented cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome traced back to Idledale between 2017 and last year, as well as for the 2020 tularemia outbreak that sent four members of one local family to the hospital.

The end of Idledale Lake’s usefulness as a public amenity came two years ago, in 2021, when inoffensive-looking myrtle spurge completed its conquest of the lake’s southern shore. Crowding the trail and once-grassy peninsulas, myrtle spurge’s milky sap causes human skin to blister on contact and can be lethal to those with allergic sensitivities.

“When I was in high school, the track team used to train by running around the lake,” Grassley says. “Back then, the only thing you had to worry about was getting caught in somebody’s fishing line. Anymore, you’d almost have to be crazy to want to walk or fish at Idledale Lake.”

While hikers, joggers and mountain-bikers can still safely stretch their legs on Marmot Meadow’s extensive trail system, even that wild haven is succumbing to noxious invaders. At about the same time that field bindweed was crowning itself King of Idledale Lake, oxeye daisy was ascending the throne along Idledale Parkway. Despite dogged control efforts by Humboldt County Open Space, including yearly burnings, the durable perennial dominates approximately 75 percent of Marmot Meadow and adjacent Elk Glen.

A former ornamental that slipped the leash and is gaining ground throughout the foothill counties, oxeye daisy’s expansive root system and stunning reproductive capacities make it a formidable opponent. While pretty, however, the plant doesn’t appeal to deer and elk, which long ago moved on to greener pastures.

“The other day, my son asked me why they call it Marmot Meadow,” says Grassley, shaking his head, sadly. “I told him there used to be marmots in it all the time, but I don’t think he believed me.”

If the situation is dire, Grassley says it isn’t hopeless. Restoring Idledale Lake to its former splendor won’t be easy, but it can be done.

“If we’d had the support to deal with these threats while they were still small, the problems would have been manageable,” Grassley explains. “Now, we’re facing a huge challenge that can only be overcome by a serious commitment from the entire community.

“It might be years before the lake is back to what it was 20 years ago, but, if we do nothing, then one of the best parts of living in Idledale will really be gone for good.”

Used by permission of Evergreen Newspapers