# Passion fruit vine



## The Snark (Oct 11, 2015)

It took Bill getting shocked by the radial arm saw for about the 550th time for him to decide he needed to fix the wiring a little bit.

With him and myself having a combined experience of over a half century as electricians things got rapidly fixed on an around to it agenda. The fixing of things in his workshop got so bad that one of his kids gave him a nicely made wooden object in the shape of the number 2 and the letters IT but almost round. This was of course to amend his minor failing of fixing things 'when he got a round 2IT'. It didn't help much.

Of the roughly 600 to 800 pieces of electrical equipment in his workshop, getting a jolt from that saw was just a minor inconvenience we had become quite used to. It wasn't as bad as the One Eyed Purple People Eater band saw, as voracious as the souped up floor sander that could chew it's way through a wall if left unattended, nor anywhere near as hazardous as the electrical sub panel that got an 18 inch piece of wood hung nearby to be used when you tried to flip a switch on it. The giant planer in the back yard that, lacking 480 volts 3 phase to power it's 25 horse motor, we had cobbed a Volkswagen bug's engine to in order to create an avant-garde wood chipper that could eat an oak tree, was a far more serious threat to the local fauna and flora.

The problem was the radial arm saw was smack in the middle of the shop and the rule of never touching it while touching anything else that could conduct electricity just was impractical. And anyway, it was only 'juiced up' when the electric water heater in the house was on. I told Bill it was all his fault but he knew that anyway. It was after all him that discovered the saw could be rewired for 220 volts if he used the ground wire as the other hot lead. And I fully admit it ran a lot better, not starved for current due to the too small wire gauge.

Bill's shop was a wonder of wonders. We had professional pack rats from Nova Scotia and the Lesser Antilles come by to take notes on how to make the ultimate clutter while still being able to walk through the place, admittedly down some very narrow treacherous aisles and pathways. Once it had been a church that seated around 40 or 50 people comfortably with an extension to one side. Think an L shape, 60 feet on each leg. I once stood in one randomly selected spot in the extension and, without moving my feet, was able to count about 220 electrical devices with cords that could be plugged in, mostly dead and waiting for him or myself to 'get around to it'.

Of course I had to get in on helping Bill rewire the circuit for the radial arm saw. This was commonly known to his family as 'they are playing together again' which was an allusion to the fact that when we got together in mad scientist mode his entire family strongly felt and often voiced that we both needed adult supervision.

So, unearthing a ladder off his truck - of the approximately 5000 tools he owned the only safe ones readily available were kept on and in his truck - we went to the trap door that gave access to the crawl space in the attic. Bill climbed up and pushed up on the 2 foot by 2 foot panel. It went up a few inches and stopped. He pushed harder. And harder, maybe getting it to move a half foot. I went and found another ladder and together we gave a series of shoves like we were trying to get out from under a large beached whale.

_Once upon a time in the distant past Bill's wife had decided she wanted to augment the garden with a passion fruit vine. She was aware it would be unlikely to bear fruit in that cold a clime but she loved the flowers. So at the corner of the workshop she planted a vine. It was quite lovely when it flowered, but it also had a tendency to take over things. Runners heading out and over her prized rose bushes were a serious vexation. Bill's kids remarked it was a perfectly apropos outside addition to the tools and other objects inside the shop. Every six months or so the vine got hacked back to a few small twigs.
_
We managed to get the trap door a couple of feet up where we could look into the attic. Dumbfounded we grabbed a flashlight then crammed a large floodlight up into the crawlspace. From the far corner of the extension workshop to the wall of their house proper, a total distance of over 100 feet, it was solid passion fruit vine. 

After hacking away for a couple of days with very limited success, Bill accepted my suggestion and we cut a huge hole at the end of the workshop high up on the wall. Among the other gadgets we used, a 20 foot pole with a vicious hooked serrated knife attached to the end proved to be the most effective. Two solid weeks of hacking, slicing and dragging out the seemingly endless vines we had a pile in the driveway about twice the size of his Toyota truck. During all this his kids would periodically go past, shaking their heads. Something this weird could only happen to Bill and me. His youngest son, not exactly a chip off the old block being very practical and sensible solved our next dilemma by driving his 4 wheel drive over the pile several times. Bill and I then, with the aid of a come-along and some scrap cables, wrapped the package then around 3 AM one fateful night his kid hooked it to his truck and dragged it off where it met it's fate rolling off a convenient cliff.

So, if anyone who is looking for an interesting exotic plant for their terrarium... A plant which will grow like a Santa Ana wind augmented southern California brush fire invading an oil refinery, a plant that needs all of one candlepower at 50 feet for light, a plant that will grow in anything from decomposed granite to fetid swamp, look no further. Especially look no further around the environs of that town where, off the side of a certain cliff, is a clump of vine that is giving the Himalayan Blackberry a good run for it's money.

Epilogue
Bill and I retired to his shop to fiddle with the gadgets and goodies, feeling quite proud of ourselves. We repaired the hole in the wall and everything was back to normal on cannery row. Until his son happened to look into the shop just as Bill took another jolt from the radial arm saw and asked, "You guys forgot to fix that wiring, didn't you?"

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