The true story of Kudzu

The patrol car sat idling with its headlights stabbing at the inky blackness.

“Car 2, this is dispatch.  Car 2, I repeat, this is dispatch.”

“Roger dispatch, this is Deputy Davis. What’re my orders?”

“Continue to monitor the situation.” the radio crackled.  Strange lights had been seen over the Southern part of town.  Deputy Arthur Davis had been sent to investigate.

“I’ve seen nothin’ so far,” the brave Deputy replied. “No little green men.”

“Awrighty.  Come on back home. Coffee will be ready when you get back.”

The deputy jumped back into his car, pressed in the clutch, threw it into first gear and scratched out of the gravel driveway. Edna’s coffee was worth driving like a bat out of New Jersey.

Of course, aliens did land that warm steamy June 1939 night. Just like they had all through the 1930’s across the South. Except they weren’t little green men. They were little green vines.  Vines that grew up to a foot a day.  Vines whose brains burrowed deep in the ground and resembled roots.  Their arms spread across the landscape, covering barns, power poles, hills and anything else that stood still too long.  Soon whole countrysides were covered in it. They were there to conquer the world. And they started in the Southern United States.

The Roosevelt administration, briefed by the military, was well aware of the invasion. “We can’t panic the public. They’re already stressed out over the whole Depression thing,” the President said. “Tell them it is a vine imported from Japan to stop erosion.”  The military had tried everything — flamethrowers. Bombs. Grenades. Machetes. Nothing stopped the aliens’ advances. The lie was the last attempt to explain the green, leafy assault to an unsuspecting, but gullible public.

So the next time you see “Kudzu” remember that it’s an alien invasion from the planet Kudzurian.

Oh, and Deputy Davis?  He was never heard from again. But his patrol car was found covered in Kudzu in 1964.