Shelter-In-Place
III:
My
Rolled Yards
or
"The Toilet Papers”
by
Jamie Jobb
Today
was a good day, strategically speaking. Eighteen days into our
“shelter-in-place”, I came home from my intermittent
hunter-gather expedition with TWO packs of toilet paper! Granted,
they’re very skimpy packets of only four rolls each. But they were
two-ply! That beats the last six-roll pack of one-ply which a
grocery clerk rescued from storage for me two weeks ago. Our
situation became dire after our last Costco run which coincided with
the first day of The
Panic Runs, so to speak. The Big Box Store had flushed itself of paper
towels too. So we’ve been running low on two of life’s
essentials for over a month.
Actually
I was quite lucky to get the two packets today as Safeway’s
One-Per-Customer limit was still in effect. Fortunately for me it
was just after 6 a.m. and few people were in the store. After
ringing up the sale, the checkout woman whispered she wouldn’t
notice if I left the store, came back in and got another roll to take
to the only other checker working that morning. Sure enough, that
worked and I got our second pack.
Another
clerk they call “Junky”
(it’s an Philippine thing) says he’ll save me another packet (or
two) Friday morning. “Just be there again at 6 a.m.” he
warns. I mark that on my calendar with a note to get to sleep early
the night before. Oh, how quickly does The Post-Modern Hunter/Gather
adapt to ever-changing conditions of our new wildling conurbation!
Most
of us recall days not long past, when toilet paper and paper towels
were not endangered species. Who knew a pandemic with more impact on
lungs than guts would cause such a ridiculous run on the supply
chain? Things are so dire that, according to The South China Morning
Post, an armed trio of thugs stole 600
rolls in a Hong Kong panic-buyer heist in February outside a
supermarket in Mong Kok. Two were arrested, their knife confiscated
and their haul estimated to be worth US$220.
A
few of us fondly may recall those far more distant days when there
was more than enough toilet paper in the world for groups of
teenagers to leisurely hang it from trees.
(pause)
I
guess I should explain.
*
* *
Most
Americans of a certain generation – those who came of age between
The Depression and Climate Change – have heard about somebody’s
place getting “TP’d”. Meaning their humble abode
(especially its landscape) was delicately draped in scores of
streaming toilet paper banners hung high from above, as if by Zeus
itself.
Actually
the rolls were deftly tossed by human hands. Particularly gifted were
those paper pitchers who could lob a streaming roll over, around and
through 50-foot oaks, without wasting one sheet off the roll. I
never did appreciate that term – “to TP”
someone. It sounded too Native American to me. And there was a
far better expression for the covert operation.
In
Alabama we called it “rolling yards” – a more proactive
term. Folks there still use the term. And, it was an activity that
I engaged in willingly, with friends a dozen times as a sophomore and
junior at Birmingham’s West End High School. When I moved to Miami
we only rolled two yards (both in luxurious Coral Gables), and
Florida kids did NOT call it “rolling”. Those
sun-burned wimps!
Two
of my Alabama rolling friends are deceased, so naming them now could
not embarrass them. My two main cohorts were pals from West End’s
football team: Bobby Atcheson, our starting fullback, and Roy Sims, a
B-team quarterback. I was a linebacker. When we were lucky, Joe
Price might run along with us to roll a yard.
A
halfback, Joe went to our cross-town rival Ramsay High, but his
brother was starting center at Auburn, aka “the loveliest
village on the plains” (more on that later). So Joe was very
cool with us. And he was a rolling expert: he had lots of ways to
toss the rolls: overhand, underhand, hook shots. He had “the
touch” we
all envied.
A Steph
Curry, well
ahead of his time.
If
Joe couldn’t go rolling, Bobby usually drove and was our
ring-leader, although I recall Sims and I were the go-to
roll-gatherers. We’d collect our toilet paper one roll at a time.
It wasn’t easy, this self-imposed One-Roll-Limit. In a fast-food
place full of people, you couldn’t just pop in and out of the
restroom because our mission would be obvious, and we’d blow our
cover!
I
should further explain: The unspoken, unwritten rules in Birmingham were
quite clear to those of us obeying them. Rule Number One: You
absolutely could NOT purchase toilet paper for these public
displays of disaffection, which almost always involved boyfriend vs.
girlfriend (and usually Bobby’s girlfriends). No, no, no! We had
to spend most of the night running around town, from filling station
to restaurant to any available public restroom, “borrowing” the
stuff.
It
was all sleight-of-hand and very seat-of-our-pants. We stuffed a
roll into our crotch and waddled out with it. Our night progressed
like this: one roll at a time. Thus all the time it took. Three
hours allowed four guys to collect enough rolls for decent visual
effect.
*
* *
The
greatest “rolling” effort I ever saw did not involve me directly,
but my teenage son. I just woke up to find it. And it wasn’t in
Alabama, it was in California in our town outside San Francisco. So
of course, West Coast kids called it a TP job.
My
son obviously had annoyed someone in his senior class, maybe a fellow
baseball player. And it must have been a big deal: he wouldn’t
talk about it, none of his friends would say anything either.
But
we lived next to an incredible creekside canopy of Quercus lobata
(California white oak or
“valley oak”) in a forest of at least two dozen trees. Our house
was not under the oaks, which sat between us and the road. But those
trees loomed over our neighborhood.
Based
on my own vast Alabama experience, I know it must have taken at least
six kids and maybe 60 rolls to do that much coverage. Certainly
these suburban students bought all those rolls. But they were very
quiet and very effective in their work. My windows were open and I
slept facing the trees, so any loud disturbance would have awakened
me. I assume it must have been a mix of athletes and art students,
given the perfect pitch and precise installation of their exhibit.
I
first saw their work on my way out to get the morning paper. I
crossed the creek and looked up to see a gentle breeze slowly sway
hundreds of 80-foot long strands of plush two-ply. I was struck by
the sheer beauty of it all!
And
it looked incredible from the street. When I came back into the
house, my son was eating breakfast. I said “There’s a
surprise for you in the oaks outside. Take some bags with you, so
you can clean it up.”
Funny, I thought in that
moment, not once in Alabama did we ever consider the parents of the
girlfriends’ yards we had rolled. And, given the time and the
residue of Southern Hospitality, we actually knew those
parents!
*
* *
Auburn’s
notorious Toomer's
Corner oaks
– basking in
their former glory!
The
State of Alabama hosted perhaps the most
notorious Rolled Trees of all time, those known as “Toomer’s
Oaks” which grew at the entrance of the Auburn University campus
across the street from Toomer’s Drugs. After major football wins
by the Auburn Tigers, fans would “roll The Oaks”.
The hundred-year-old Auburn
trees needed no introduction in The Deep South. Tales of
Toomer’s Oaks were legend across Dixie, or at least in the
Southeastern Conference.
But
things got ugly in 2011 when those oaks suddenly upped and died,
as they say down South. It turns out, a transplanted Alabama fan,
Harvey Almorn Updyke, Jr., pled guilty to poisoning
the famous oaks shortly after Auburn miraculously beat ‘Bama,
28-27, in the 2010 Iron Bowl, when the Crimson Tide blew a 24-point
lead.
Updyke
spent 70 days in Lee County jail and was ordered to pay a $800,000
fine. That figure was well beyond his means, so the court ordered
him to pay $500 a month. But Harvey payed less than $5,000 in six
years, so the Court ordered him back before the bench to explain why
he did the deed yet refused the fine.
But
Updyke had already explained why, on the radio. Right after the
incident happened. Updyke called
Paul Finebaum’s talk show to confess.
It was quite a stunning
admission of guilt by
a guy who did not
grow up in The Cotton State,
where he came to learn
the
new term for what he’d
known
as a Longhorn to be simply:
“TP’d”. Here’s
what he said on the radio:
“When
Bear Bryant died, I was livin’ in Texas. And I didn’t really
understand the Alabama-Auburn rivalry. But a good friend of mine
that lived in Birmingham sent me a copy of the newspaper showing the
Auburn students rolling Toomer's Corner celebratin’ Bryant’s
death … Let me tell you what I did: The weekend after the Iron
Bowl I went to Auburn, Alabama cause I live 30 miles away, and I
poisoned the two Toomer’s trees … I put Spike 80DF in ‘em.”
Of course, Updyke undid himself in that call-in confession which was traced to his phone. But the story of Toomer's trees did not end with Updyke’s tale of woe. Auburn’s arborist attempted to save the poisoned trees, but was unsuccessful. So The Corner was redone, tainted soil removed and two fully-grown Southern Live Oaks planted where the old trees grew.
Toomer’s
trees after an Alabama
fan poisoned them in
2011
The Moral of These Stories
Given
that
Alabama governor Kay Ivey has yet to issue a full statewide
stay-at-home order, Toomer’s trees are not yet out-of-the-woods, so
to speak. But
at least, we’re
all old
enough now to know
what
we didn’t know then:
Toilet
paper does not
grow on trees!
1
April 2020
(last of three parts)
