Wendy’s Costly Tumbler
A
few years ago, KNTV outbid rival station KRON to become
the NBC affiliate for the San Francisco Bay Area.
Without ties to once-powerful NBC, KRON withered away, relying
on a staple of paid programming, local news, Dr. Phil
and Fear Factor syndication to pay the bills.
Despite its demise, it still boasts a handful of quality
Bay Area-themed shows, including Henry’s
Garden, a pleasant gardening show that takes place
in the backyard of its host, Henry Tenenbaum, one of KRON’s
newscasters.
The
show addresses gardening problems that are common in the
Bay Area and interviews experts around the region on subjects
as diverse as orchid care, ornamental footpaths and falconry,
making sure to mix in some yuks and hijinks. Mega-channel
cable and satellite packages surely have made times difficult
for local niche shows like Henry’s Garden, so part
of the appeal of supporting this underdog is a hope that
the Tivo people will use our viewing data to get the word
out that someone is watching the show.
There’s
something endearing about watching a low budget local gardening
show that I don’t experience when watching a nationally-broadcast
program, sterilely packaged by the DIY network. I
feel nostalgia for the days when Herb Caen was in his prime,
making up words and throwing his dots around. I even
feel wistfulness for the mystical America of Rockwell, when
puns were more valuable currency over the airwaves than
outrage, although thankfully this longing for the good old
days doesn’t entice me to vote for “Three Strikes” legislation
or make generalized demands for accountability.
As
you can imagine from my description, Henry’s Garden
doesn’t typically get my heart racing. After all,
one of its selling points for Lynn and me is that with Tivo
we can skip the weekly floral display segments and see an
entire episode in fifteen minutes. It’s akin to watching
televised golf: it is soothing. About a year
ago, however, during Henry’s visit to the garden of fellow
KRON newscaster Wendy Tokuda, I got a little fired up.
Tokuda has put her broadcaster’s wages to good use, creating
the finest backyard vegetable garden I’ve seen. Multi-tiered
in form, with edibles of many textures, it was worthy of
a French chateau, a New Age retreat or the grounds of a
restaurant boasting a Michelin star.
Tokuda
attributed her green thumb to a number of factors, but the
most tangible was her two expensive drum composters.
Each was perhaps five feet long and six feet tall, with
a handle that turned the large steel drums to mix air into
the decaying matter. As she cranked, she spoke of
the thrill of composting, which drove her to steal bags
of leaves from her neighbors—as well as perfect strangers
in her community—so that she could feed the hungry drums.
Tokuda
didn’t divulge much about her magnificent composters, so
after the show aired I scoured the internet for more details.
With only a little difficulty, I found her model—the
Mantis ComposT-Twin, which isn’t much of a name for
the gold standard composter. Unfortunately, after
about an hour of research on Mantis’s website and a few
composting sites, I found it hard to justify the purchase.
On the upside, I learned that the ComposT-Twin is rat-proof
and designed to turn leaves into compost in a couple of
weeks—in contrast to lower-tech methods that can take up
to a year. On the negative side of the ledger, though,
was the undeniable fact that it is too large for our yard,
unless I could persuade Lynn to let me decommission our
patio. Also, they’re just too heavy to maneuver up
steps, arrive unassembled and cost over $400 if you factor
in shipping. Plus, some disgruntled clients complained
that the enclosed nature of the ComposT-Twin—I like to pronounce
it Compos Tee Twin—kills off too many beneficial insects.
My
fears of owning an expensive steel albatross won the day,
but didn’t squelch my dreams of eventually owning a fancy
composter, so during our summer vacation, on our dashes
between the West’s national parks, the ComposT-Twin was
an occasional topic of discussion.
In
mid-summer, long stretches of the I-90 in Montana and the
I-80 in Wyoming appear to the road weary visitor to be a
monochromatic blur, with only occasional small towns and
their adjoining strip mines to break the uniformity.
To be fair, these are both beautiful states, but after a
few hours I felt numb like “Mad” Max Rockatansky hurtling
through the haze emanating from the heated blacktop.
I differed from the Road Warrior, though, in the sense that
I don’t have a damaged psyche, crippled by the graphic death
of loved ones at the hands of a motorcycle gang. Nor
do I have to eat uncooked, canned dog food or fill up our
tank from gasoline collected in a dead man’s hardhat, as
it spills from a ruptured tanker truck. Things in
Montana and Wyoming have not gotten to that stage, although
the remnants of the waning oil industry—still derricks,
stark refineries with penitentiary fencing—pay a visual
homage to the Mad Max series.
Instead
of pining like Max, I was content to pass time recreating
each meal of our trip in my mind in chronological order.
Though recent meals had disappointed, there were plenty
from our week in British Columbia to savor. Often,
Lynn and I would perform this exercise together, bemoaning
the poor quality produce that we’d recently eaten, which
inevitably would swing the conversation to the prolific
tomato hedgerow in our backyard and how we couldn’t wait
to harvest it. Of course, I would throw in my two
cents about the benefits of an expensive drum composter.
“A
Home Away From Home For Liberal Elitist Swine”
Shortly
before our trip, we read an account of a cross-country trip
by our favorite columnist, Jon
Carroll, with whom we happen to share a zip code and
99% of a worldview. He gave some good advice for the
road: steer clear of the fanciest restaurant in town
and hit as many a college town as possible en route.
The former is a breeding ground for overpriced disappointments;
the later a haven for the multi-cultural palate.
Like
many urban Californians, we’ve been spoiled by the diversity
of the state’s food and the quality and availability of
its produce. As uninitiated visitors to small-town
America, we failed to consistently make the right restaurant
choice, so we ate a number of meals in Wyoming and Montana
that lacked zest, not to mention nutritional value.
In
support of Carroll’s advice, we found Boulder—home of the
University of Colorado—to be the mother lode. It is
Berkeley on a mountain bike.
There
are multiple Mediterranean restaurants. The local
alcohol emporium displays the French wine sold by the Californian
winemaker Bonny
Doon in the French section, not the California section.
When we were there, an independent bookshop hosted
a lecture by the translator of a 12th century mystic Muslim
scholar. Street performers prowl the auto-free shopping
district, contorting themselves, juggling on unicycles and
showing an encyclopedic knowledge of our nation’s zip codes.
Perhaps most tellingly, you can find an overpriced microgreen
salad without difficulty.
Above
all, the Boulderdashers are athletic. A walk through
downtown reminded me of a vacation in Italy where I was
constantly embarrassed about being underdressed. In
Boulder, I was underfit (as well as conspicuously lacking
in windburn and Patagonia attire).
While
in Boulder, I happened upon another mother lode that I either
fortunately or unfortunately couldn’t indulge in.
Our friends Dave and Diane took us shopping at McGuckin
Hardware Store, a Boulder institution for the wealthy,
the struggling grad student, the handyman, interior designer,
computer enthusiast or gardener. Prominently displayed
next to some handsome glazed pots was my dream composter—compact,
light, rat proof and a mere $150. Now that I have
a little distance, I can tell you that $150 is too much
for roughly the equivalent of a beer cooler that’s skewered
to an aluminum stand, but at the time I felt regret that
I couldn’t purchase it because our car was stuffed to the
gills. I considered it, but there was no way I could
justify that purchase. Mingling with the regret, though,
was a little relief because now I could yearn for, dream
of, and talk about the tomato-growing benefits of this new
composter during the upcoming drive through the flatlands
of Utah and Nevada.
To
be continued…
Mr.
Lewis can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.
Copyright
© 2005 by Jeff Lewis |
