The Quest for Creeping Charlie
by James Powell
In the early 1950s, George Muir, a college student with his librarian mother’s love of books, often stopped to browse at the sale bins outside a used bookstore on Yonge. The street had recently been chosen as the site for Toronto’s first subway line, one constructed by the trench-and-cover method. This meant digging up the roadway and temporarily replacing much of the sidewalk with wooden planks and railing.
The bookstore owner sat just inside the door wearing a look that said this too will pass, meaning the dust, noise, and drop in foot traffic. But as the subway work dragged on he moved his chair deeper and deeper into the gloom of his shop and the sale bins brimmed.
One day Muir pulled from a pile an old volume called Ponder’s Hornbook, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes in no seeming order. It fell open at this anonymous entry: “When asked to name the smartest of all the animals an ancient wise man replied, ‘Surely the megamensalopes, because they have avoided discovery by man.’”
Muir laid the book aside. But the megamensalopes remained in his thoughts. If they existed, he could understand why they kept their distance from man. How many animals had men hunted to extinction or worked to death or sent to the slaughterhouse? Before falling asleep that night Muir vowed he would be the one to find the sly creatures. Later he told this to some college friends over beer. When they laughed, Muir, who had his father’s thin skin, never mentioned his quest to anyone again.
* * * *
After college he went to work in his family’s hardware supply business. He also joined the Toronto chapter of the Explorers’ Club, with their pith helmets, easy chairs, and trophy heads on the walls. Like the other members, Muir was drawn to those regions the ancient cartographers marked with warnings: “Beyond this point there be dragons.” Here, he was sure, the megamensalopes lived to escape discovery by man.
Muir gave his quarry a good deal of thought. He decided they couldn’t be invisible. No animals were. But like chameleons they might be able to blend into the background. He imagined them as centaurs with human torsos on the bodies of small deer. But not too small, for they would need good-sized brainpans. For his part Muir knew he wasn’t the smartest guy around. But that might actually help when he found the megamensalopes. Maybe he and their brightest would be able to communicate. He remembered reading an old Russian saying: the dumber the peasant the better his horse understands him.
To prepare for expeditions to distant locales, Muir spent several summer vacations leading a packhorse through the Canadian Rockies on a club project to follow by land Alexander Mackenzie’s canoe trip to the Pacific in 1793. But he didn’t care much for life in the great outdoors. Knots others tied with fluid grace he labored over, and in the end they slipped. The mountain peaks and river valleys did not charm him because he sensed no megamensalopes lived there.
One night as he lay thinking in the dark under canvas—reading by gasoline lantern gave him a headache—Muir decided his quarry must surely know it was not in man’s nature to leave any place unmapped or peak unscaled. He also reasoned that if they were smarter than the other animals, the megamensalopes would be lonely and drawn to the same humans from whom they knew they had to hide. He likened them to the green men of Celtic mythology who in their curiosity stared at man out of the forest in masks made of foliage.
So Muir left the Explorers’ Club and started looking closer at hand. He didn’t think the megamensalopes would care for the suburbs where they might be mistaken for deer and hated for eating expensive shrubbery. No, they’d be city dwellers, feeding off humbler plants like the pungent ground ivy Canadians called Creeping Charlie which grew throughout Toronto in vacant lots and poorly tended lawns. And since we are what we eat, Muir named them Creeping Charlies. Megamensalopes was just too much of a mouthful.
* * * *
When spring brought the first ground ivy, Muir knew the Creeping Charlie herds were heading back from wintering in the States. On his lunch hours he would look for neighborhoods where the ground ivy grew thick. Then he would return at night, for he suspected the Creeping Charlies were nocturnal. But he avoided the more sordid parts of town. Not caring for them himself, he assumed the Creeping Charlies wouldn’t either, particularly at night.
When he found his quarry, Muir meant to protect them from the likes of zoos or circus sideshows. Then, he hoped, the Creeping Charlies would choose him as their spokesman. He saw himself standing before the United Nations to scold the delegates for their exploitation of the creatures of this Earth.
* * * *
by James Powell
In the early 1950s, George Muir, a college student with his librarian mother’s love of books, often stopped to browse at the sale bins outside a used bookstore on Yonge. The street had recently been chosen as the site for Toronto’s first subway line, one constructed by the trench-and-cover method. This meant digging up the roadway and temporarily replacing much of the sidewalk with wooden planks and railing.
The bookstore owner sat just inside the door wearing a look that said this too will pass, meaning the dust, noise, and drop in foot traffic. But as the subway work dragged on he moved his chair deeper and deeper into the gloom of his shop and the sale bins brimmed.
One day Muir pulled from a pile an old volume called Ponder’s Hornbook, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes in no seeming order. It fell open at this anonymous entry: “When asked to name the smartest of all the animals an ancient wise man replied, ‘Surely the megamensalopes, because they have avoided discovery by man.’”
Muir laid the book aside. But the megamensalopes remained in his thoughts. If they existed, he could understand why they kept their distance from man. How many animals had men hunted to extinction or worked to death or sent to the slaughterhouse? Before falling asleep that night Muir vowed he would be the one to find the sly creatures. Later he told this to some college friends over beer. When they laughed, Muir, who had his father’s thin skin, never mentioned his quest to anyone again.
* * * *
After college he went to work in his family’s hardware supply business. He also joined the Toronto chapter of the Explorers’ Club, with their pith helmets, easy chairs, and trophy heads on the walls. Like the other members, Muir was drawn to those regions the ancient cartographers marked with warnings: “Beyond this point there be dragons.” Here, he was sure, the megamensalopes lived to escape discovery by man.
Muir gave his quarry a good deal of thought. He decided they couldn’t be invisible. No animals were. But like chameleons they might be able to blend into the background. He imagined them as centaurs with human torsos on the bodies of small deer. But not too small, for they would need good-sized brainpans. For his part Muir knew he wasn’t the smartest guy around. But that might actually help when he found the megamensalopes. Maybe he and their brightest would be able to communicate. He remembered reading an old Russian saying: the dumber the peasant the better his horse understands him.
To prepare for expeditions to distant locales, Muir spent several summer vacations leading a packhorse through the Canadian Rockies on a club project to follow by land Alexander Mackenzie’s canoe trip to the Pacific in 1793. But he didn’t care much for life in the great outdoors. Knots others tied with fluid grace he labored over, and in the end they slipped. The mountain peaks and river valleys did not charm him because he sensed no megamensalopes lived there.
One night as he lay thinking in the dark under canvas—reading by gasoline lantern gave him a headache—Muir decided his quarry must surely know it was not in man’s nature to leave any place unmapped or peak unscaled. He also reasoned that if they were smarter than the other animals, the megamensalopes would be lonely and drawn to the same humans from whom they knew they had to hide. He likened them to the green men of Celtic mythology who in their curiosity stared at man out of the forest in masks made of foliage.
So Muir left the Explorers’ Club and started looking closer at hand. He didn’t think the megamensalopes would care for the suburbs where they might be mistaken for deer and hated for eating expensive shrubbery. No, they’d be city dwellers, feeding off humbler plants like the pungent ground ivy Canadians called Creeping Charlie which grew throughout Toronto in vacant lots and poorly tended lawns. And since we are what we eat, Muir named them Creeping Charlies. Megamensalopes was just too much of a mouthful.
* * * *
When spring brought the first ground ivy, Muir knew the Creeping Charlie herds were heading back from wintering in the States. On his lunch hours he would look for neighborhoods where the ground ivy grew thick. Then he would return at night, for he suspected the Creeping Charlies were nocturnal. But he avoided the more sordid parts of town. Not caring for them himself, he assumed the Creeping Charlies wouldn’t either, particularly at night.
When he found his quarry, Muir meant to protect them from the likes of zoos or circus sideshows. Then, he hoped, the Creeping Charlies would choose him as their spokesman. He saw himself standing before the United Nations to scold the delegates for their exploitation of the creatures of this Earth.
* * * *
