The first time I visited the Mojave National Preserve I was with Zeke, and Becky, and our friend Mike. Mike knew the country well and was taking a day to show us a few highlights. We got out to take a little walk in one spot near the tallest Mojave yucca in the world. Zeke walked casually around the back side of a large boulder, and then just as casually back around again festooned in cholla stems.
I used a fistful of keys to pull them off of him, the blades splayed between my fingers. We decided we’d better put him on a leash. A hundred yards later, an Audubon’s cottontail burst from beneath a shrub, ran right in front of Zeke and past him and dove for cover into another cholla tangle. That leash had gone on just in time.
Zeke did learn smething from the encounter. He has spent his share of time near chollas since. He keeps a respectable distance between the cacti and his tender skin. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it. A year or so later I planted chollas in our front yard in Oakland. He used to lie under them, never once pulling a joint away with his fur.
You can tell which desert hikers are the Easterners, for they will pronounce the plants’ name as if it rhymed with “cola.”
The upright ones are sometimes called “jumping chollas.” They tend to come undone as you stand near them, attach themselves to your clothing, and then make their presence known a few yards later as they work through your clothing. You find the stem sticking out of your thigh, you look to see the closest cholla ten feet away, and you reach the obvious conclusion. There are chollas whose thin stems recline along the ground, and in my experience they are far more treacherous than the ones that stand up straight.
The jumping is a form of reproduction. A stem breaks off a cholla, rides a mile or two embedded in the hide of a burro or a dog or a Sierra Club member, and then falls to the ground after its chosen beast of burden does enough frantic jumping and gesticulating to dislodge it. After a year, the rain might come. If the stem happens to fall with its broken end touching the ground, or if wind or Teva’d hiker toes orient it thusly to the earth, the wet winter soil will stimulate the growth of roots. A new cholla grows.
Chollas were long referred to as belonging to genus Opuntia, along with their cousins the prickly pears. When I first learned about Opuntia the genus had a huge number of wildly diverse species in it. Some had languid cylindrical stems. Some were stout maces like the Bigelow cholla pictured above. Some were nearly spineless arborescent prickly pears with edible pads and fruit — “tunas.” A Tohono O’odham word for these big edible nopals is, I am told, “opun.” It was nearly inevitable that chollas would latch on to genus-splitting taxonomists and jump into their own new genus. Bigelow chollas are now generally referred to as belonging to genus Cylindropuntia. There are holdouts, the taxonomically conservative Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California among them.
Opuntia or Cylindropuntia, the chollas and the prickly pears share one innovative and regrettable feature. Cactus spines are unpleasant and painful to encounter, to be sure. But all the tribe of Opuntia and its daughter species have an even nastier secret weapon: tiny, hairlike miniature spines called glochids. If you are pierced by a dozen regular cactus spines, a few minutes with a pair of pliers and you are done with the experience, if a bit leakier. Fall into a nice fuzzy looking bed of prickly pear, and the glochids will work their way into your skin without you knowing it. A hundred sharp little fibers perforate you, or a thousand, and then you realize it suddenly. Rubbing drives them in deeper, or pulls them the wrong way against a cutaneous nerve. Scraping them with a knife breaks them off in your skin. A Zen monk on methamphetamine could not summon enough patience to pull them all out with tweezers, even if she could see them all. Out there in the field, your only hope is that you remembered to put a roll of duct tape in your pack. Tear off a section, press it firmly onto the affected area, and pull it off hard and sudden. You may need to repeat this several times to get all the glochids, but trust me: your skin will grow back.
Though I have spent many cumulative months walking through patches of cholla, they have never jumped on me. At times I flatter myself that it’s for the same reason the cactus wren can build her nest in the cholla tangles, a cautious cholla country abandon that can guide you through the worst thickets at speed without a nick. It must be my careful attention, I tell myself, in combination with my natural grace. And then I come to my senses and remember who I am. I don’t know why the chollas have refrained from sinking their teeth into me.
Perhaps they are merely biding their time.
On that day with Zeke in the desert, Becky asked Mike how the canyon we were walking, Wild Horse Canyon, got its name. It looked too dry and barren to support horses, she said. Mike said he didn’t know. Perhaps, he said, there had been a herd found here some decades back. “Or maybe,” he continued without missing a beat, “it’s because of those guys over there.” He gestured at two horses that had just come through the brush. Wild they were not. The big dun was a gelding, I think, with a nearly white mane. Behind him, a dark dappled mare. They saw us, changed direction, and were an arm’s length away in seconds. The dun was very interested in Zeke, though whether it was out of friendliness or desire to stomp coyotes we could not tell. Zeke did not intend to find out, and I walked him a few feet away down a narrow corridor between two large chollas. The dun followed. Becky took Zeke’s leash. I stepped quickly between the dog and horse, brought my palm up and put it flat between the horse’s eyes. He stopped. He nickered softly, turned, and walked away.
I looked at my feet. I was standing in a patch of cholla.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
7 comments on "Chollas"hee hee hee—
“You can tell which desert hikers are the Easterners, for they will pronounce the plants’ name as if it rhymed with ‘cola.’”
I was born and raised in southern California. My parents were both Easterners, but my mother had majored in Spanish in college, so I grew up pronouncing this word “choya.” However, I have now lived in the far northeast for over a decade, and while I was reading this piece, right up until I hit this remark, in my head I was rhyming with “cola.” I laughed, and after that I continued my reading in a different voice, in a voice that used to be mine but which I apparently no longer use, even though I’d been unaware until this moment that I’d even put it away. Reading this line was like having a big piece of cultural plaque chipped out of my brain.
Sometimes people on the west coast I’ve known half my life tell me that they can’t understand me anymore when I speak on the phone, so strong has my accent become. I always thought they were being silly. Now I wonder…
my preferred footgear is thongs, zorries. the hi-tech kind with vibram soles. i have hiked the high sierras in california and the olympics in washington so shod. i love the desert. i wear shoes there. even boots.
I’ve done my share of desert hiking in sandals, and while I’ve witnessed a few casualties, rarely have I been the one attacked. Last fall we went hunting prickly-pear, with a winter full of jelly in mind. We spent a few hours gathering tunas, then a few more skinning them, mashing them, and otherwise turning them to jelly (all gone now, Chris, or I’d send you some). A full day spent with my bare hands in prickly-pear territory, and nary a glochid on me. My jelly-making partner was, suffice to say, not so lucky.
(Fair’s fair, though, and when we hiked the Olympic peninsula, he escaped with precisely three mosquito bites while I was covered head to toe.)
Hiking in thongs is a lot less scary than I’d thought; I did this last summer, and was amazed at how much more aware of the ground I became (to good effect when bouldering). A toe full of spines would not be fun, though!
One of the more amusing parts of my research “Back in the Day” was the various early-century musings on desert vegetation: the Cholla (always capitalized) was a frequent subject of good-natured (and not-so-good-natured) grumbling. This is an excellent addition to the genre. :)
As for the mighty glochids—the technique I’d heard about was to smear the afflicted spot with Elmer’s glue or rubber cement, and peel. They’re nasty little boogers no matter how you slice it.
The worst cactus I know of with regard to jumping onto you is a more or less invisible ground hugging prickly pear, Grusonia grahami (formerly classed as an opuntia), which lives in West Texas and southernmost New Mexico, called by local ranchers “dogshit cactus.” The name explains much. It gets on your shoe like dogshit, but then things go downhill, as you try to get it off.
Kat, just remember me when you make the next batch.
It’s funny. I’d never consider hiking in sandals in the Mojave, but I always do around my usual camp on Cima Dome, and so I might have spent more time in proximity to chollas wearing sandals than wearing boots.
When I used to work in nurseries for a living I almost always had at least one glochid stuck in one of my hands. This was especially fun because I always had “nursery finger,” that painful crakcing up and down the side of your preferred index finger that you get when you work with wet potting soil all day. That’s where the glochids would try to go.
I’m pretty sure at least a couple dozen of them just slowly eroded away inside my skin, adding their biological distinctiveness to my whole.
There are a couple of members of the agave family that are really gnarly. As much as i dislike chollas, and when you head off into Southwestern Arizona you learn very quickly how not to walk around among them, i have had much more difficulty with some agave. There is one species that grows in horizontal columns along the ground (in Baja on the coast for example) creating what appears to be little trails which monsoonal rains erode. If you are foolish (and i have been one all too long) and get off the actual trail, traipsing through some coastal terrain to a primo isolated surfspot, you discover that you have walked down one of these escarpments. You cannot turn back without accepting the pain, as dozens, if not hundreds, of long-sharp-pointed (no not rabbit teeth) spines, one at the end of each leaf, are not pointing directly at you. You must ever so carefully pick the path of least pain, knowing that you must endure some no matter what. Worse on dogs though, as i learned one time.