Pull on your boots: the Great Meadow is squishy. Rain has saturated the ground. Water pools in the lower sections of the field.

My wet-weather footgear is a pair of calf-high rubber boots which I bought at Orchard Supply Hardware a couple of years ago for about $20.

They’ve enabled me to wade into the wetlands slough to retrieve errant planes. And now they let me navigate the spongy turf and slicks of mud with comfortably dry feet.

Leaky Footgear. The other day, Mike Nadler was wearing his pair of boots, which he says are about 30 years old. Unfortunately they’re splitting open, so when he waded into a puddle the water gooshed into his boots.

“When you get home,” I suggested, “smear petroleum jelly on your feet, then coat them with 20-minute epoxy and stick your feet in the boots to seal the leaks.”

I don’t think he took me seriously.

As Dave North and I walked to the eastern end of the Great Meadow for a small wing combat session, we passed two park maintenance guys who were cutting up fallen eucalyptus branches.

Earlier, I had noticed that the Killer Yuke has a number of dead limbs which haven’t yet fallen.

Falling Limbs. “Blue Gums are dangerous,” says Montaña de Oro State Park ranger Rene Avant, quoted by the Albion Monitor. “Dry branches break off all the time. Campers visiting from Australia told us it’s illegal to camp under eucalypts there because it’s so dangerous.”

The Killer Yuke and its smaller companions are Eucalyptus globulus, the Tasmanian bluegum. They’re messy: bark shreds, branches fall, leaves and litter sprinkle down.

But they’re pretty, they grow fast and they’ve transformed California, for better or for worse.

Seeds of Evil? Browsing the web this morning, I found some fascinating reading in an article written by Robert L. Santos, Librarian/Archivist for California State University, Stanislaus. It’s titled “The Eucalyptus of California: Seeds of Good or Seeds of Evil?”

In the “Seeds of Good” column, Santos quotes California writer Lawrence Clark Powell:

… no tree is more beautiful in the wind or against the sky, and none provides better nesting for the soft-voiced mourning dove. As for firewood, the bittersweet smell of this wood is evidence of a non-sparking blaze almost as slow-burning oak.

Even more fun, though, is this “Absurd Vegetable” quote from a publication called the Argonaut:

There is a craze all over the state about the eucalyptus or Australian blue gum tree… Eucalyptus will frighten away fevers and murder malaria. Its leaves cure asthma. Its roots knocks out ague as cold as jelly. Its bark improves that of a dog. A dead body buried in a coffin made from the wood of the blue gum will enjoy immunity from the exploring mole and the penetrating worm… this absurd vegetable is now growing all over the State. One cannot get out of its sight… crops up everywhere in independent ugliness. It defaces every landscape with botches of blue and embitters every breeze with suggestions of an old woman’s medicine chest. Let us have no more of it.

Novelist Norman Douglas complains:

A single eucalyptus can ruin the faire landscape. No plant on earth rustles such a horribly metallic fashion when the wind blows through these everlasting withered branches; the noise chills on the marrow; it is like the sibilant chant of ghosts. Its oil is called “medicine” only because it happens to smell rather nasty; it is worthless timber, objectionable in form and hue—objectionable above all things, in its perverse and inhuman habits.

Aside from exuming these oratorical exercises, Santos’ article explores the interesting history of the eucalyptus in California and even-handedly discusses the issues posed by this non-native plant that so dominates our landscape.

Tags: Baylands, Trees, Wind.

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