Bullhead

It was an hour past sunrise on a glorious summer morning. The air was clear from a rain storm that had gone through the valley the day before, and the views of the sky and mountains were glorious in every direction. A photographer may have complained at missing the best lighting of the morning, but it was still pretty good. I thought, “What a privilege to be out here today!”

As I ran along I noticed a familiar plant at my feet, and immediately recoiled. It had fern-like paired leaves on long vines growing along the ground, radiating out from the central root. On closer inspection, at regular intervals along each tentacle, there were clusters of prickly seeds hidden beneath the leaves. These seeds are the very embodiment of evil: the bullhead thorn.

Locals around here call them “goatheads,” but I can’t get used to that name. Not only does “bullhead” sound better, but it also rolls off of the tongue with less resistance — a fact that makes it easier to yell the word in anger, when necessary.

And it is necessary — especially when you’re a kid who loves to ride bikes.

My first encounter with bullheads was in July of 1987 in Turlock, California. We had recently moved there from Indiana, where bullhead thorns don’t grow. My brothers and I took turns riding a bike around the block until its tires went flat. We called for our dad, who inspected the tires and quickly found the culprit. He pointed at the little thorn sticking out and said, “Bullhead.”

Thus commenced my childhood battle with Adam’s curse:

“And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife⁠, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

“Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread⁠, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:17-19, emphasis added).

Without exaggeration I can claim to have patched hundreds of punctures made by bullhead thorns in bike tubes over the last 4 decades. I have witnessed the tears of children — including myself, back in the day — shed both in sorrow and in anger, when bike rides were cut short, when miles were walked home, when patches wouldn’t stick to tubes, when more than one hole had to be patched, and when new thorns were hit within the first quarter mile of a ride after spending an hour patching holes from the last ride.

Yes, bullhead thorns are evil, pure and undiluted.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was in a good mood on that beautiful morning. I had someplace to be in an hour, but I wasn’t far from home and I figured that I had time to uproot this one bullhead vine as a bit of community service. A quick search provided a small rock, which I used as a digging tool, and a few seconds later I had the cursed thing pulled out by its root.

There I stood, my cape gently blowing in the breeze, holding the vanquished weed. OK, I wasn’t actually wearing a cape, but that’s how I felt. The world was safe again for children.

I chucked the octopus vine onto the calf-high weeds in the yard of the dilapidated house that had let this vine grow on its sidewalk, and turned to continue on my way. But in the very next step I encountered another bullhead plant just like the first. The rock was still in my hand, so I dug this vine out and threw it in the yard like the first one.

The reader may guess where this is going. Evil is never encountered in isolation, but everywhere travels in gangs. By the time I had uprooted two bullhead plants I had seen several more, and had already resolved to battle them all. Five minutes later they were added to a growing pile in the neglected yard, and the pathway was clear.

Or so I thought! On the other side of the driveway was another patch of bullheads at least as big as the one I had just cleared out. What sense would it be to clear one side, but not the other? I sighed and started digging again.

As I worked I thought of the sacrifice I was making. I didn’t have to be here, after all. “Somebody ought to thank me!” I said to myself. Several vehicles drove by on the road, but nobody paused to tell me how thankful they were.

The weeds were worse on this side of the driveway, and the plants were smaller so it took longer to clear ground. While grabbing the root of one vine I got a thorn stuck in my left thumb. I surveyed the remaining vines and saw that I was almost done. “Good,” I thought. “I’m getting sick of this.”

Suddenly an old man with a big gray beard approached quickly, waving his arms. “All you’re doing is plantin’ seeds!” he yelled. I looked at the pile of bullhead vines in the yard. The man continued, “Those are all gonna sprout and then you’ll have ten times more!”

“I just want them off the sidewalk so kids don’t get flat tires,” I said.

“But that’s the wrong way to do it! I’m telling you,” he said.

He was right, of course. I had thought the same thing while throwing the plants up there. The vines would die, but the seeds were alive. They would desiccate and fall to the ground, and by the next year, or the next, this whole yard would be a spaghetti plate of bullhead vines.

“I don’t care if they grow on his yard,” I said, feeling defensive. Obviously whoever lived there didn’t care either.

“The right way to do it is to put them in bags,” he continued.

“I don’t have any bags,” I said.

“Look, you’re just gonna make it worse doing it that way,” he insisted. “Think about what you’re doing!”

I held up my hands in surrender and shook my head. “I don’t know! I’m just out running,” I said, and turned away. A few paces up the sidewalk I threw the little rock into the gutter, and I didn’t look back.

As I ran home I felt the smart of the thorn in my thumb and thought about the experience I had just had. Two people agreed that there was a problem, but differed in their approach to it. The combative approach of one well-meaning person had turned away and offended the other well-meaning person. If we had somehow combined my willingness to work with the old man’s knowledge of how to do the work, then we might have made our community a better place. Instead we engaged in contention while planting the seeds to make our problem worse.

I imagined myself as the old man on some future day, coming upon a younger man throwing bullhead vines into the yard. “Good morning,” I might say. “Thanks for doing that. Can I get you a bag to put those in?”

Life is full of weeds, and it always will be while we are mortals in a fallen world. But we can do better than the old man and I did. We can approach one another with gratitude and kindness, especially when correction is needed, and work together to make the world a better place.

Cover image from Miansari66 – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25146262

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Alan B. Sanderson, MD is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is a practicing neurologist.