Before I was a lowly grad student, I was a lowlier wildlife tech working on an Island off the coast of California. The Island was covered in cactus. When I arrived on the Island, I was issued a Leatherman. (For those of you who don’t know what a Leatherman is, see the picture to the left and notice the handy pliers).
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Cactus,” replied my boss. Then he smiled. “You’ll understand soon enough.”
I spent twelve weeks smashing trails through fields of prickly pear cactus and evading jumping cholla like they were land mines. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of meeting a cholla cactus, they are called jumping cholla (pronounced choya) because all you have to do is walk by one and they throw spiny cactus balls at you! Spines 360 degrees around!
Occasionally, the spine of a prickly pear would spear me in the leg or slice through my boot to my foot, but that was no big deal. The Cholla were evil. And one day, I learned just how evil they were.
I was walking on my smashed prickly pear trail, minding my own business, when a spiny cholla ball flew at me and attached to the back of my calf. I didn’t realize the cholla had stuck to me until I was mid-stride…and had effectively glued the back of my calf to the back of my thigh with a ball of cactus.
Yes, that’s right folks. I found myself standing in the middle of a field of cactus on one leg! With no place to sit! Because I had a ton of spines stuck in me, I couldn’t pull my calf from my thigh. Nor could I grab the cholla ball with my hand…unless I wanted my hand to join the cholla ball party.
So yes, I thanked my boss when I finally made it back to camp, because I had somehow managed to pull the Leatherman out of my pocket and pick, spine by spine, the cholla out of my flesh without falling over into a field of cactus.
