Michael Bell, a folklorist at the University of Colorado, knew as soon as he heard it that “Saguaro,” a song by a group called the Austin Lounge Lizards, was linked to a legend.
In case you, like me, are not up on the music of this little-known group, I’ll summarize the lyrics of the song, which appears on their 1984 album “Creatures from the Black Saloon.” Bell hosts a weekly folk-music radio program in Boulder, and when I was in town recently he spun the disk for me.
In “Saguaro,” a parody of a Western “hero ballad,” a “noxious little twerp,” who is target-shooting in the desert, fantasizes that giant saguaro cacti are gunmen and begins to fire randomly at them. But there is another rifleman on a nearby ridge also shooting at cacti. The second gunman finally hits one, and the huge plant falls on the twerp, crushing him to death.
This plot seems like a songwriter’s fantasy, and it bears a marked resemblance to stories that I call “animal’s revenge” legends.
But the song is based on a real incident. Although the Lizards embroidered the plot, the name of the victim—David Grundman—and the size of the saguaro—“twenty-seven feet of succulent”—given in the song echo news reports about the event from which the group drew their inspiration. (Succulents are plants, such as cacti, whose tissues are adapted to conserve moisture.)
In the original incident, reported in the Phoenix Gazette
and the Arizona Republic
on February 5, 1982, and subsequently picked up by the Associated Press, Grundman did indeed shoot at a giant saguaro cactus, which
then toppled over and killed him.
When I first heard reports of the incident without seeing the news articles, I regarded them as legends. They reminded me of the stories in which a person tortures a wild animal by tying explosives to the poor thing. The animal then turns on the tormentor or his property and inflicts considerable damage.
In variations of “The Animal’s Revenge” legends, dynamite is tied to coyotes or jackrabbits, grenades are tossed to sharks, and foxes’ tails are set on fire. The explosive goes off as the animal moves under the person’s camper or boat, blowing it to smithereens.
In one variation of “The Animal’s Revenge,” a Vermont hunter shoots a porcupine out of a tree, but the porcupine falls directly on him. The animal’s quills puncture the hunter so badly that the man dies.
The saga of David Grundman’s death caused by a cactus toppling on him seems like a further variation of “The Animal’s Revenge,” especially the porcupine-in-the-tree version. But so many people insisted that they had read it in a newspaper that I asked Arizona Republic
Food Editor Judy Hille if she could track the story down. She owed me one for the help I gave her in debunking Phoenix versions of the legend about Mrs. Fields’ secret recipe (see Chapter 6).
Hille dug up the aforementioned news stories, as well as a follow-up piece that appeared in the Republic
on February 9. Although the details of people’s retold versions of “The Plant’s Revenge” all differed from the news items, the basic facts of the story were verified. Grundman and his roommate, Joseph Suchochi, were sharp-shooting in the desert two miles north of Arizona 74, just west of Lake Pleasant, when the incident occurred.
There were a few differences between the two newspapers’ accounts of Grundman’s death. The Republic
reported that he was twenty-seven years old, while the
Gazette
said he was twenty-four. The Republic
described the plant as a “26- to 27-foot” saguaro, while the Gazette
reported that it was twenty-four feet tall. And the Republic
cited provisions of state law that declared the destruction or mutilation of protected native plants to be a misdemeanor.
Both newspapers provided the odd detail that Grundman had yelled “tim” just as the plant fell, adding that it was believed that he had meant to say “timber,” but the giant cactus got him first.
In its follow-up story, the Republic
modified Grundman’s age to twenty-four, held the cactus’s size to an even twenty-six feet, and reported that Grundman had actually yelled not “tim,” but “Jim,” the first name of his roommate, whose name was now given in full as James Joseph Suchochi.
It appears that the variations in local news stories anticipated the variations that people began telling and were the source of the ballad treatment by those singing Lounge Lizards. “The Plant’s Revenge” may not be a full-blown legend yet, but it seems to be on its way.
Incidentally, you need not send me information or clippings about the Arizona glider pilot who crash-landed into a 2,000 pound saguaro on July 16, 1986. I already have plenty of documentation about this accident, including a front-page story from the Republic
. The pilot survived the crash landing but was killed when the cactus toppled into the cockpit. A passenger survived both accidents.
It’s no wonder that we so readily believe urban legends, when the news includes stories as strange as these!