Cucumbers Are the Mavericks of Garden Politics

It was Sunday.

In Yucca Valley, an earthquake of 7.4 magnitude--largest to strike this state in half a century--rumbled across the High Desert. In Mongolia, doughty descendants of Genghis Khan trekked for hours on horseback across the Gobi wastes to cast their ballots in their country’s first truly democratic parliamentary elections. In my garden, what I have come to regard as the great cucumber crisis entered its fourth grinding week.

Don’t laugh. If Thoreau was entitled to find the universe in a snowflake, I’m entitled to find it in my vegetable garden, at least on my day off. You pay your money and you pick your Walden.

Moreover, like the Mongolian election, my cucumber crisis has its origin in geopolitics--or, at least, in the great movement across borders that characterizes our post-Cold War world. In this case, the culprit is the Medfly. This is not funny. It ruined Jerry Brown’s life and now it’s after mine.

I raise a lot of cucumbers. Big ones. Japanese cucumbers to be precise, Early Perfection to be poetic. They’re long. Some are as tall as Barbara Boxer. But there are a lot of them. That used to be a blessing--well, at least a shtick. I always thought they made amusing hostess gifts.

“How, uh, unusual. Most people I invite to dinner bring wine or flowers. Tell me, are there more at home like you?”

Then the Medfly arrived in my neighborhood. The county agricultural authorities declared us a restricted zone. Large signs remind me daily that “home grown” fruits and vegetables are not to be removed from my Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. That’s fine when you’ve got a lot of tomatoes, which I do, because you can sun dry them and preserve them in oil. Very nice. Last fall, I took three jars to friends in Ireland. It’s OK for onions and shallots; you can store them for future use. It’s all right for cabbages, which keep, and, even, for eggplant, which can be preserved in oil in the Italian fashion.

Cucumbers are another matter. You can only put up so many pickles. You can only eat so many Greek salads. You can serve them in yogurt with dill a la Russe. You can toss them with a good Chinese rice vinegar and sesame seeds. But, sooner or later, you are sick of them.

So, unfortunately, are your neighbors.

The more charitable of mine simply refuse to answer their doors. Others, aware that I have been known to stick a 32-inch cuke through their front-door mail slot, stand in the doorway, point to their Westec sign and hiss: “Armed response.”

But my resentment of the Medfly cannot touch my loathing for the common garden snail. It is one of my garden’s preposterous conceits that I use no chemical pesticides. As a result, snails proliferate like, well, cucumbers.

I hate them. There’s no other way to put it. They are like skinheads or rap music--beneath contempt. I once read somewhere that they were imported into California during the 19th Century by a French immigrant nostalgic for escargot.

If I could find his grave . . .

Snails eat everything. At the moment, they are attacking the Quatro de’Oro yellow peppers I raised from imported Dutch seed. They only thing in which they seem utterly uninterested is the curly endive. Maybe that’s because they got enough of it back in France. Maybe it’s because, like everyone but me, they hate curly endive. I have a lot of curly endive. I once served my wife a salad of Japanese cucumbers and French curly endive dressed with a shallot vinaigrette.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“The adjective that comes to mind,” she said, “is appalling. “

Anyway, I’d given up on the Medflies and was killing snails Sunday when my mother called to whine about the earthquake, whose epicenter she happens to live near.

My parents and I are close friends. I am grateful for what they’ve done for me, and they admire my better qualities--my prose style, for example, and my flawlessly dry martinis. In any event, I was preoccupied with the snail plague when my mother called to talk about the damage to various relatives’ homes. Portable phone cradled on my shoulder, I proceeded with the examination of my peppers.

“You’re not paying attention,” she said. “There are times when I feel you lack a certain compassion,” my mother observed constructively.

“Are you kidding?” I replied, “Important people, many of them members of the cultural elite, consider me very compassionate.”

At that moment, I turned over a leaf and spotted another snail.

“Die snail scum,” I growled, and crushed it between my fingers.

She sighed, and I remembered her motto:

“You got a kid, you got a knife in your heart.”

Later that day, the gardening behind me, I dropped into my favorite pub. It’s a congenial sort of place, very Irish. I like to call in there after Mass for a quiet pint and a cigar. It’s pleasant to begin the week with the sound of Irish voices.

Unfortunately, they were complaining about the earthquake, too.

“Did you hear about Seamus?” a friend asked.

“I did not,” I replied.

“Packed up the wife this morning and went to San Francisco because of the quake. And her in her eighth month.”

I thought of Seamus, the immigrant from County Clare, and his American wife. Not four months ago, he’d been on the stool beside me, talking of his own mother.

“I called her,” he had said, “and told her I’m after taking the wife to Cedars-Sinai, grand place that it is, for Lamaze classes.”

“ ‘And what would that be?’ she said.

“ ‘Natural childbirth.’

“ ‘And what would that be?’ she said. ‘Do they hire others to do the birthing for them in America?’

“ ‘No, ma. It’s about breathing and stuff and how I can help her when the baby is born.’

“ ‘And when did you take your medical degree?’

“ ‘No, ma. It’s about the stuff I can do to help her there in the delivery room.’

“ ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what sort of woman have you married? Has she no decency at all? She wants you there when the baby is born?’

“ ‘Ma, it’s the 20th Century. Wouldn’t you have wanted Dad there with you when I was born?’

“ ‘I would not. I bore your father nine children. And when each of them, including yourself, came into this world, your father was right where he belonged--in the pub.’ ”

“Here’s to your mother, Seamus,” I said, raising my glass.

“And to yours,” he said, “good women that they are.”

Now if they only liked cucumbers.