The 400 Euro Hedge Fund

No, this is not an investment advice column nor is this a rant about the recent worldwide economic meltdown. This is about us trying to get rid of the awful hedge that "adorned" the front of the house for nearly a decade.

Sometime ago, some huckster or other, sold half of Anglet, our community, on the idea of using a plant called Eleagnus x Ebbingei (and for which I use the Latin term "crap") for creating hedges rather than the tried and true fern and other pine related plants that grow happily in our sandy soil. Well, sooner or later all of these hedges looked like dry kindle wood, and their ugly, brown leaves provided as much adornment as last year's Christmas trees.

So, a decision was made (not by me): "We must get rid of the hedge!"

Our neighbor was getting rid of some pesky bushes that had invaded half her garden so we called over the two swarthy men who were doing the cutting and digging out of the bush's roots.

The lead fellow, a guy with chest and arms so hairy he seemed to be wearing a chinchilla coat under his shirt, rubbed his chin (which could easily be used as sandpaper) and scratched his head (the only part of his body that had little hair), then hunched down to look at the trunks of the plants.

He sighed, and huffed, and puffed, and then pronounced, "Je pense que ce sera un boulot difficile." I have always found that a better translation for "difficile", when speaking to local workers, is "expensive".

My wife argued that it could not be that difficult since I had been cutting the hedge for years with just a pair of rusty clippers and the man laughed and argued back that clippers would hardly do the job on those thick trunks.

The difficulty was argued against by my wife and restated by the swarthy guy for half and hour; at the end of that time the man's final statement came down on us like the sentence from a judge known for his free use of capital punishment: "800 Euros."

"What? That is outrageous!" I yelled. The swarthy man did not understand English but he understood the red of my face and the loudness of my voice. Nevertheless, he shrugged his shoulders in a take-it-or-leave-it gesture. We left it.

After the two worthies left, my wife said, "There's nothing for it: WE will have to do it ourselves." Of course, I immediately understood that the "WE" meant me.

This was not the first time I had been "we'd" into a lousy job. Sometime ago, my wife got the idea that we should have a "potager", a vegetable garden. I will tell you in another blog entry how THAT turned out.

Anyway, my wife's idea, and I will not dispute that it was a good idea (it is not the conception of her ideas but rather the execution of them with which I have a problem) was that we would save at least 400 Euros if we went and bought the proper tools and rented something in which to carry the corpse of our hedge to its ignoble end in the local "déchetèrie", as the city dump is called.

Well, the wheels started to come off the cart, as they say, when we looked into the price of renting even the most modest vehicle during the three or four days that I estimated would take me to cut down that wall of infested shrubbery we called our hedge.

Since we were left with an unwheeled cart, the only thing we now had going for us was the donkey, i.e. me! My first plan of attack was to douse the whole thing with petrol and set fire to it but that was overruled by my wif as impractical since a wall of fire was sure to alarm the neighbors who would call the fire department, who, in turn would probably put out the fire. These "pompiers" are a nuisance sometimes.

Plan B: I would cut the thing into pieces, put said pieces in bags, and cart resulting bags to the dump. OK, that would only take a couple of months. Maybe I would be done before our guests arrived (we rent the house in summer, yet another theme for a blog entry!).

Thus it began: I cut a large branch, using my branch cutter, from the first bush. A cloud of pollen, dust, virus spores, insects, spider web, and sundry dispersible miniatures spread over the front of the house, driving away any breathable air and filling my throat and lungs with that lethal concoction.

Fifteen minutes later, after my coughing spell had ceased, and I had expelled a kilo of pollen, dust, and grime from my lungs, I surveyed the tangled mess of branches and leaves that lay before me and thought "There's no way I am going to get that tumbling tumble-weed into a bag and then into the car."

Plan C was hatched: I began to cut the branches and leave stems into smaller portions, putting them into a bag which would make it easier to transport the resulting garbage. Then the world's reigning queen of kibitzers came out of the house:

"Mais, what are you doing?"

"I am cutting the thing down into pieces so I can put the stuff into bags."

"But, it will take you forever! Just cut them so they fit into the car!"

"No, because then we will have a car full of pollen, and dirt, and virus spores, not to mention the fact that it will be impossible to see behind me through a forest of shrubs.

"But, in that case you should..."

"No, no, no," I said cutting her short, "here is the deal: you are inside, enjoying the cool of the house, sitting nice and clean before your computer while you answer email or shop for shoes; I am out here in the broiling sun, cutting the hedge-from-Hell into manageable pieces, and contemplating umpteenth trips to the déchetèrie to get rid of the stuff. So, guess who has the right to decide how this is going to be done?"

She went off pouting but she went off.

Two days later, I had cut off all of the branches and leafy stems, and had deposited them in the recycling bin at the déchetèrie. Now what was left to do was dig out the thick, huge trunks and their roots.

Not a few neighbors stopped by, leaned over the fence and seeing what was in store for me proceeded to give me advice on how to deal with the problem. Fortunately, most of the advice was given in French so I just gingerly smiled, nodded, said "oui" or "d'accord" a couple of times, and just ignored it because one, I did not understand most of what was said.; and two, I would have ignored it even if I had understood it, so all things considered, I was acting pretty much on my own recognizance.

Pick ax and iron bar in hand, I managed to pry the damned trunks loose but now the roots held them in place. I went inside the house and announced, "I need an ax!"

My wife looked at me with alarm and surprise, probably thinking that sunstroke was the instigator of my demand and maybe wondering if she was not the intended victim.

"Why do you want that?"

"I need to chop off the roots," I said with some desperation.

Off we went to Castorama, where they have everything you can think of, except what you are looking for at the time. No axes. We tried a regular hardware store and there we found what I wanted: a real hand ax. Not the wimpy kind boy scouts use to chop kindling but the robust kind with which you could fell an ox if you hit it square between the horns; and the way I was feeling, I could have done so, had an ox got in my way as we drove back home.

I chopped and pick-axed and manhandled the trunks and roots out of the ground and into the boot of the car. A half dozen trips to the déchetèrie later, I sat down, exhausted and thirsty, and downed a couple of liters of lemonade.

My wife came out of the house, looked at the ground cleared of all the hedge and said, "Ah, now if you just level the soil I can plant some flowers."

It was a good thing my arms were too tired to lift up the ax.