They Just Keep Rolling

I know everything in nature has its “special purpose” but I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what it is.  One example: tumbleweeds. It’s been a windy winter which means that every wall next to a freeway is buried under piles of the things. Sometimes the stacks are higher than the twenty-foot walls they’re covering.  If you live in a cul-de-sac it’s even worse – they can bury an entire house and you can’t even re-direct them into your neighbors’ yards.  Tumbleweeds are nearly impossible to dispose of: It’s illegal to burn them and you can’t put them in the “green waste” because they pollute the mulch.  The only option is the dump which doesn’t make any sense because they can simply roll away. It seems kind of pointless to load them in a giant trailer, take them to the dump, and then watch them just roll away again into someone else’s yard.  As far as I know nothing eats tumbleweeds; you can’t make them into shirts (like hemp); there’s no point in smoking them, and they have sharp stickers.  Maybe their only purpose is to make Western movies look more depressing.  I suppose High Noon would have been less dramatic if daisies were floating by in the background.