POTTER: Surviving nightmarish Cholla cactus
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I promise that all of my columns won’t be about Arizona, but I just moved here and it’s kind of freaking me out … so you get a few Arizona columns before I get back to columns about the normal stuff (everyday life and surviving zombies).
You see, on a recent hike, the devil reared his spiny head in the form of a jumping cholla cactus (see the strangely beautiful yet terrifying picture above).
My 9-year-old son was first to discover the horrific death cactus … by falling on one. And I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that it was me who led him across the steep rocky cliff that made him fall butt-first on the jumping cholla, or that my first thought was, “Can I get a picture of this for my column before I pull the hundreds of needles out of his butt?”
I don’t have a picture … regrettably.
So I started to pay attention to the chollas … and they scared me. First off, they basically rain death. Whole chunks of perfectly oval spiky freakishness fall right off the mother-plant like pinecones from an evergreen — or fighters from an alien mothership.
Second, if anything from skin to clothing gets within an inch of a spike, it will quite literally leap out and attach with painful fervor. Most often I got stuck by the cholla that secretly attached to my bag or pants, or I’m trying to pull needles out of my shoe, because trying to kick these things out of the way is a fool’s errand.
The point is that I thought surviving cacti meant not getting pricked, which seemed like a pretty simple task. The truth is that, to survive these stealthy, hunting cacti, I have to watch every single step, every placement of my hand, every swing of my bag and turn of my body, and then I’ll probably only get speared a couple of times instead of a hundred.
Oh yeah, and as for the spearing part, no one told me how much a tiny needle (and the freaking cholla has hundreds) hurts.
But that’s the topic for next week and my video column, where I stupidly intentionally demonstrate what it feels like to be the victim of a jumping cholla.