Editor's note: CNN contributor Bob Greene is a best-selling author whose current book is "When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams."



"Tumbling tumbleweeds" have been romanticized in song, but they're no fun in some parts of the U.S.



(CNN) -- "Do we like them?"



Patrick Victor, a game and fish commission employee in San Carlos, Arizona, repeated the question back to me as if I had proved my lunacy by asking it in the first place.



"Do we like tumbleweeds?" he said. "No one likes them. They're not like in the cowboy movies. We consider them garbage -- worse than garbage. There is nothing to treasure or cherish about a tumbleweed."



We were talking about tumbleweeds because of a theory I had been pondering:



In this country, because of the immediacy of news, it seems as if everyone from one coast to the other is worrying obsessively about the same thing at the same time. You name it: the banking meltdown one day, the feared floods in Fargo, North Dakota, the next; the forced ouster of the head of General Motors one morning, followed soon after by the street demonstrations in London during the Group of 20 summit. We all tend to fret together about one crisis at a time; undoubtedly there will be something new for all of us to be nervous about together before sundown tonight.



So the goal here was to come up with something utterly unlikely -- something that, in 2009, you wouldn't think would bother people -- and find out if it does.



Tumbleweeds. That, just picked at random, was the test case.



"They can be a pretty big problem out here," said Scott McGuire, a code enforcement inspector in Greeley, Colorado. "When the wind is right, they'll pile up right to the roofline of a house. Seriously -- people can't see out of their windows or even easily get out of their homes."



There was something instructive, even (in an off-kilter way) comforting, about learning this: the affirmation that, in this increasingly monolithic country, there are still local vexations that override the breaking news bulletins on the national networks, that people in one pocket of America are routinely dealing with forces that people a few hundred miles away are blissfully unaware of.



Just hearing about it makes life seem somehow more life-size.



"I meant what I said literally," McGuire said, continuing on his pinned-in-the-house-by-tumbleweeds theme. "They are big and prickly -- they can blow for hundreds of miles, sometimes all the way from Wyoming. They go until the wind dies out or they run into something. That's when people can have piles of them pressing against their homes -- when the tumbleweeds stop there."



Tumbleweeds, if you haven't thought about them in years, may seem like a gauzy memory from old Western movies, a nostalgic high-plains symbol of desolation and loneliness. There was that campfire song by Roy Rogers and his group, the Sons of the Pioneers; once you think of the lyrics and melody again, you can't get it out of your head:



"See them tumbling down/Pledging their love to the ground/Lonely but free I'll be found/Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds."



But in the 21st century? In our connected-by-broadband, addicted-to-cell phones, technologically tethered nation?



Tumbleweeds? As something to be concerned about?



"They're ugly and nasty," said Charlene Hardin, the county manager of Roosevelt County, New Mexico. "They can make our roads impassable. You can see 12-foot-high, chain-link fences with tumbleweeds piled all the way up to the top. They're very flammable -- toss a cigarette, and you have a big fire.



"Tumbleweeds are more than a nuisance out here. We'll get
What dominates news? What are some parts of the U.S. plagued by?
banking meltdown "Tumbling tumbleweeds"
question: What dominates news?, answer: banking meltdown | question: What are some parts of the U.S. plagued by?, answer: "Tumbling tumbleweeds"