He took machete, pickax, and shovel and began hacking through the jungle behind the house. How could there be a rainforest in parched San Diego? The original owners had planted a green belt of ivy around the house, the one crop they watered, leaving the kiwis to die and the orange and avocado trees to fend for themselves.
With the thermometer topping one hundred degrees, hot by San Diego standards, even for dry heat, he slashed, thrusted, jabbed, swung, and dug, clearing an opening through ivy trunks thick as trees, hollowing one out, like an ancient Sequoia, through which Merlot Mac drove his Gator.
A muffled rolling thunder of bombs blasting in the background from Camp Pendleton triggered the dog’s barking. “It’s OK, boy,” the man reassured him. “They’re on our side."
Helicopters whirled overhead thap-thap-thap-thap-thap returning to base from sorties. His mission on the ground – to capture and hold a piece of flat land, then clear it so choppers could land.
In those days, combat continued in Iraq and Afghanistan and while the troops overseas operated in 120-degree heat, the man and his neighbors enjoyed the comforts of home, peace and prosperity. At the height of heat in the day, he kept fighting for the sake of the troops and swung his pickax against imaginary mangrove trunks. Half a world away, Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents tunneled through mountains and U.S. forces played a life-and-death version of whack-a-mole. Toiling in the vineyard became his moral equivalent of war and the least he could do was work in the yard as hard as the troops overseas. To stop meant surrender and defeat. The troops couldn’t take a break at noon, go inside, have lunch, drink a cold beer, take a nap, and take up the hunt for the enemy in the late afternoon. If they couldn’t rest in the heat of the day, neither would he, so he kept up the work.
The photo, nineteen years later ... the ivy is largely in retreat, but has yet to surrender, and resurges with winter rains. The vines planted among them struggle, some bearing good fruit. As for the troops, always remembered, always thanked.
