Sometimes I live on a plateau ringed by mountains. The winds can blow with teeth-baring force and the sun can blaze with a thousand footcandles. The nights are indigo satin, the constellations slipping by as the hours pass.
In this place of natural magnificence, an invader has gone on the offense: the tumbleweed, known by its collective species name. Unusually heavy summer rains combined with the wind to scatter tumbleweed seeds in unlikely places where they flourished.
I watched in horror as young, green tumbleweeds took over our highway-grade gravel driveway, spreading beyond the drive to cluster about and strangle any native species they could get to. The smell of their teenage fecundity as I attempted to rip them from the ground made my eyes water and nose run. My husband entered the fray with a weed wacker as I continued to pull, resuscitating native plants as I pried tumbleweeds away from the base of the natives.
Multiple paper garden bags of young tumbleweeds were carted off to the dump as we cleared ground. Many hours later, I scanned the plateau, my eyes trained to spot green tumbleweeds. There they were, clustered across the land. We had won a battle for the driveway, but not the war.
Over many months, the fully mature tumbleweeds dry out, die, and depart the soil to form the rolling tumbleweeds you may have seen in Westerns or cartoons. These dead tumbleweeds are thorny and behave as if they are made of velcro. They will blow about, rolling across roads and landscapes until they latch onto something and hold. Other rolling tumbleweeds sense that a hold-out is forming and manage to roll into the growing tumbleweed collective. In this way I have witnessed the dead tumbleweeds attempt to choke pine trees, the tumbleweeds stacking upon themselves as if scaling a castle wall, blocking sunlight from the pine tree.
I commandeered my sister and together we pulled dead tumbleweeds down from their perches in the trees, from their clusters about the trunks of the trees, and then stomped the dried tumbleweeds into small twigs.
Even when dead, tumbleweeds are driven to invade. A zombie species.
Such a beautifully written explanation of a troublesome and nasty invasive. You forgot to mention how exhausting, but addictive, wrestling with these pests is. Once you start, it is hard to stop going after them...which is its own problem given that there seems to be an endless supply.