Ask Clay: What are tumbleweeds before they are tumbleweeds?
Clay Thompson is off today. Here's an old favorite from Dec. 24, 2010:
Today's question:
What are tumbleweeds before they are tumbleweeds?
"See them tumbling down, pledging their love to the ground ..."
Does that ring a bell? It's from "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," a hit many years ago by the Sons of the Pioneers, a Western band that often featured the immortal Roy Rogers. I always found the "pledging their love to the ground" part a little weird, but there you have it.
I found several videos of the SoP performing this hit, but they all had long, complicated Web addresses that looked like more trouble than they were worth. It wouldn't be hard to find some yourselves.
I did find a video of Roy Acuff, he of "Wabash Cannonball" fame, balancing his fiddle bow on his nose during a performance at the Grand Ole Opry, but that hardly fits the bill here, does it?
None of this answers the matter at hand.
Tumbleweeds are the dried-up carcasses of Russian thistles that break off at the stem and go tumbling along with the wind, scattering thousands of seeds as they go.
Russian thistle seeds first showed up in South Dakota in the 1870s, inadvertently brought from Ukraine in sacks of flax seed.
Thistles spread across the West, reaching the Pacific Coast by 1903.
Their journey should have been blocked by mountain ranges, but tumbleweeds first hit the road at a time when farmers were plowing up the prairies and planting crops such as corn and wheat, opening avenues for the weeds.
And, of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention Chandler's famous tumbleweed Christmas tree. It's not the sort of thing you see every day.
How Chandler's Tumbleweed Tree tradition got started
60 years of celebrations: Work begins on Chandler's Tumbleweed Tree