The Cocklebur Phenomenon

I received a phone call one day that demanded my attention. The speaker was a hysterical woman on her cell phone, and she continued yelling about little creatures that appeared out of nowhere and started wreaking havoc all along the side of the road. After several minutes of listening to her complaints, she calmed herself enough to tell me where she was. Her location was in Wyoming, just outside Yellowstone National Park, and she was the hostess of a cross-country race through the wilderness. All the runners were upset, she said, and they threatened to never run a race hosted by her again unless someone came to exterminate the pests.

I did not promise to exterminate anything, but I did say I would help. So I hopped into my Honda Element and headed out to Yellowstone National Park. The weather had been dry for the past couple weeks, and my vehicle kicked dust high in the air as I made my way along a dirt trail, following the directions the woman had lent me. Evidence of empty, crumpled paper cups told me the race was over, and as I pulled up to the apparent finish line, some of the last people drove away, angry at what happened as the race came to a close.

“I am so happy you’re here!” the woman blurted as she ran up to my side. “But I am embarrassed to say the little critters are nowhere to be found! We’ve searched everywhere, and we are baffled that such a large number of strange animal-things could disappear so easily. I’m afraid you’ve come for nothing!”

I told her to kindly step aside as I scoped the landscape. Her statement about the number of creatures just vanishing as they had was enough information to confirm my suspicions of Mandagora, considering they change their shape to blend with the surroundings. Senses pricking to any questionable rustle or noise, I stepped lightly into a nearby meadow, taking in the scent of grass and dirt as I fiercely scrutinized the foliage. Long grass rubbed against my bare calves, tickling them.

At first I thought the Mandagora had changed into some Indian rice, a common weed in the meadow, so I sneaked up as stealthily as I could. When I was convinced they had not perceived my approach, I rushed and jumped, screaming and waving my arms, sure the noise and motion would startle them into a natural shape. When the Indian rice moved only with the wind, and not with fright, I decided to try a different plant.

I wandered onward, questioning what else the creatures could have become, blundering further into the meadow. Something scraped against my legs, digging into the flesh and drawing lines of red. I winced and looked down at my legs, cursing my luck. I had wandered into a cocklebur patch, and they were thick enough to render my meandering most unpleasant. I looked and found handfuls of them tangled in my socks, so I reached down to free up some, tearing them from the fabric. But as I foolishly bent down, I had not previously noticed the plants rose above my waist, meaning my shirt was now fair game for the prickles and barbs. I jolted upright at the realization and toppled sideways, completely overcorrecting myself to end up falling into the thicket of burrs.

The woman bent in hysterical laughter as she saw my pitiful situation when I pulled myself from the patch and returned to the car. Burrs were all over my shirt, gripping at the sleeves and hems. My socks bulged around the ankles in lumps of seed casings, and even one or two were tangled in my hair. I was completely defeated.

Crestfallen, I lowered my tailgate and sat. The woman laughed in disbelief and handed me an empty cardboard box that was once full of glucose drinks before pulling away, no longer interested in the situation. I sat on my tailgate and watched the puff of smoke rise behind her car as she left me to my loneliness. I reached in my satchel and removed a pair of pliers and started working at liberating my clothing, plunking the cockleburs one by one into the cardboard box. When the last stubborn husk tore free from the back of my head, I closed the cardboard box and dumped it to the side of the road. With my keys in hand I went to unlock my car door, but then I heard a conversation coming from the abandoned box. There were several tiny voices, all arguing with each other, and from what I could hear, the conversation was similar to what follows:

“Well that was a bright idea!”

“Yeah, look at where it got us! In a box!”

“It was better than anything you could think of!”

“And it would have worked, too, if you hadn’t decided to hold on so tightly to his sock! He tore a hole in it when he pried you off!”

“Well that was nothing, considering the chunk of his hair that is still stuck to your back after he tore you from the back of his head!”

I crouched and opened the box to find many Mandagora all changed back to their natural shape. “You sneaky little beasts! You were the cockleburs all this time!” I said.

“Yeah,” one replied.

“Well, if you guys would have just morphed back to this shape before I started tearing you from my clothes, perhaps some of you wouldn’t be missing so many appendages.”

“We’re sorry. We just need a ride.”

“To where?” I asked.

They looked at each other, all trying to find an answer to the simple question. “Wherever you’re going!” said one.

I rolled my eyes and loaded them into my Element and brought them the several-hour drive to my lab. “Do you really not remember your destination?” I asked as I brought the box in and set it and the herbal cargo on a bench.

“Here,” one said.

“Here?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow. “But you don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”

“That doesn’t matter,” another said. “We’ve never been here before. And we’re trying to see as much of the US as possible.”

After a long and disappointing conversation with these Mandagora, I came to realize they were nothing but freeloaders. They had assumed the shape of the cocklebur mainly to get free rides from people so they could hit as many of the 50 states as possible—free of charge, and free of effort.

One had the most outrageous story of them all. He had ridden on a runner’s jersey during a transcontinental race that started in South America and stretched clear to the United States. He said he found room and board with many different people, all giving him the liberty of not being tied down to a contract so he could float from place to place on the backs of dogs, animals, hitchhikers, runners, bike riders, and any other unfortunate individual that may pass a questionable cocklebur weed. Anything was fine as long as he did not have to pay for it. And after sharing this story with me, he asked if I would take them all in, if only for the night.

“No!” I told them. “I have no place to keep weeds in my house!” They blurted complaints, tried to tug at my heart’s strings with their lamentable situation, and many burst into tears at my lack of magnanimity. I would not budge. “I just can’t understand how you can all live with no security in your lives. Doesn’t it bother you that you have no place to call your home, and nothing to fall back on in hard times?”

The response came far too easily. “No.”

“But what if you need someone’s help, and no one is around? What if no one will take you in so you can have a place to stay?”

They all turned to the Mandagorum from South America. He stood a little taller, and he wore an incredulous look on his face, unable to believe that I could not accept the theory of their lifestyle. “But we’ve been living like this for four years. Something always works out.”

Though I refused to lend my house to the vagabond Mandagora, I did promise to mail them to Gap, France, where bicyclists from the Tour de France would be passing through. They said it had always been their dream to see the Tour de France, and they promised to send me a check to pay the expensive postage right when they stopped by a bank in Europe, so I packaged them up in the cardboard glucose drinks box and prepared to mail them off to the French Alpes.

I bid them all farewell when I dropped them in the large parcel chute at the post office, whispering that they owed me 40 dollars in postage. An unsettling chuckle pushed from the walls of the box as a postage worker came to collect the large parcels, and it was then that I realized it! There would be no check in the mail, no reimbursement for my efforts! These Mandagora had played me for a free flight to Europe!

The Marijuana/Mushroom Phenomenon

My most recent discovery of Mandagora led me to downtown Salt Lake City. It had rained the previous evening, and along the side of the streets was fine mud that had washed away from the road during the downpour. It was there I found the telltale footprints of root-feet, a path appearing as normal erosion marks to the untrained eye, but as unmistakable tracks of the Mandagora to a person as experienced as myself. I trailed the lines up a hillside to an old house that appeared to be abandoned, unfit to keep anything or anyone. As I circled around to the back, the pathway led to a cellar door. I opened it and climbed down the chipped cement stairs, turned on my flashlight, and found a bundle of mushrooms growing in the soil of rotting stuff between the ground and crawlspace of the old building.

I removed a metal spatula from my satchel to separate a mushroom from the rest, and as I moved the instrument nearer, a mushroom’s eyes opened, and the Mandagorum backed away timidly, scared of the apparent weapon I wielded. At the movement of the first, the others followed suit, squealing as they fled along the crawlspace.

Sacrificing my tidy demeanor to the slew, I leapt into the crawlspace, groping around to nab the critters. I caught three and placed them in a Tupperware I carried with me, but the remaining four were more difficult to seize. With the use of a butterfly net, I attained the remaining four and brought them into a lab to be scrutinized.

It required several hours for the Mandagora to calm down, their behavior uncharacteristic of what I had previously encountered with others. These seven kept yelling how I was a monster, maintaining the shape of mushrooms as they dashed aimlessly about the inside of the plastic box. After a few hours, the fit of hysteria subsided, and the Mandagora recomposed themselves to the complacent creatures I was familiar with. Many rubbed their heads as they resumed a more natural, leafy stage, blearily blinking as they peered up at the ceiling while lying on their backs, wondering what had happened. Others appeared to remember everything and exploded into giggles.

I immediately started asking questions, and I discovered the age of this collection to range from late teens to late twenties, all male. Each had a distracted mindset, losing focus and interest after two or three questions and making random remarks like, “But you’re not green anymore!” or, “You have skin again!” Each unwelcome outburst pushed cries of admiration and more childish giggles from the creatures, many showing their awe by giving others high-fives with their leafy hands.

Had they been hallucinating when I happened upon them? Had they somehow been drugged? So many questions ran through my head as I left the imbecile Mandagora in the box and approached my computer, logging on to Wikipedia. “That’s it!” I said as I followed a hunch and researched mushrooms. The shapes the Mandagora has assumed matched perfectly to psilocybin mushrooms, known more commonly as “magic mushrooms,” or simply, “’shrooms;” fungi that produce chemicals that act as a psychoactive drug in humans, causing them to hallucinate and experience other sensory abnormalities. Is it possible that upon assuming the shape of these fungi, the Mandagora were able to produce these toxins that in turn yielded similar ramifications on their own herbal nervous system?

My suspicions were confirmed when I returned to the Tupperware and saw one in the early stages of changing into a marijuana leaf. His eyes were already bloodshot and glossy due to the new THC in his fluid stream, and he kept trying to eat his vegetable-based friends. “What are you doing?” I demanded, picking up the marijuana Mandagorum to give him a proper scolding. “This is a laboratory owned by the University; I could lose my job if people found me with illegal substances here!” I gathered up the group of friends, released six back onto the grounds of the abandoned house in downtown Salt Lake City, and escorted the marijuana Mandagorum to his parents.

“We are so sorry!” said his mother, a plump Mandagorum shaped similarly to a brussel sprout. She had her hand clutched at her chest, her pained look showing this was not the first time. “We are so ashamed that he’s done it again!” She invited me in to the rock-pile home, and the boy staggered in with a groan as he made his way to the living room. “We’ve tried everything,” said the exasperated mother. “Just can’t seem to admit that he’s addicted to the marijuana shape.”

“I’m not… ad-ad-addicted!” the boy managed to say. “I can stop anytime! Plus… marijuana isn’t addictive!”

The mother proceeded to tell me that even when Mandagora change from marijuana to another plant, the THC stays in their fluid systems for months. “He’s failed two random drug screens at his job at Harmon’s as a dummy vegetable in the produce department, and they fired him for it!”

“I done my share o’ weed-shapin’ when I was young an’ foolish,” said the father. “Back in Woodstock, I changed to a marijuana leaf, and a dern hippy nearly smoked me up! I’ve still got the ash marks to prove it!”

“What did you do?” I asked, intrigued.

“I changed into a blade o’ grass, an’ that really messed the hippy up!”

The young Mandagorum is seen to this day, still claiming marijuana is not addictive, and saying he can stop any time, though he habitually changes to the marijuana shape once a week or more.