When I was a boy, I imagined I might become several things, but none of them was a banana lumberjack.
Yet such I’ve become, each year a few weeks after nature’s frosty-freeze wipes out the largest of the banana plants – those with fruit that ripened too late, or an even later flower in lieu of bananas never to be born. These aren’t majestic oaks stretching into the sky; Raja Puri bananas reach maybe 10 feet (although that modest span might’ve actually reached the sky this morning, as a very low fog lent a Hound of the Baskervilles’ air about the place). I dropped five of them, most with extremely wet and juicy trunks of about 6 inches in diameter, soft enough that my hand saw sliced through almost like butter, butter with a little stringy resistance and the slightly spoiled smell of expired prehistoric uber-grass, which is pretty much what a banana is, isn’t it?
Short as they are, these water-filled trunks weigh a lot, as water tends to do, and one fell close enough to Bosco the Oblivious Canine that I had to give him a heads up in the form of the “move-your-butt” command.
You cut down the trunks of bananas that bore, or tried to bear fruit before the cold of winter put a stop to their attempt. That’s because once fruit or flower appears, the plant will quickly die, it’s work done, to be replaced by two or three smaller stalks just waiting for a little more sun. This year the cold winter killed several of the small banana stalks, too. But the large and mid-sized stalks appear to be mostly firm, a few just a little mushy near the top. This is a sign they yet live, so you don’t cut them back to ground level, because a large-stalked Raja Puri is likely to produce fruit fairly early on, meaning that you can harvest it before next winter’s mean old cold.
After cutting their dried up leaves with scissors, I observed the green of new leaves pushing through the tops of four or five banana stalks. Soon these ugly brown totems will sheath themselves in tropical green again and all will be well with the world.
