The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We live on what the tourism folks like to advertise as the Island You Can Drive To. It’s sort of true, unless you come at rush hour or a busy summer weekend, then it’s more like The Island You Can Crawl To, not quite as appealing but never the less, slightly more accurate.

I read in last week’s Stanwoodopolis Gazette that the city planners were going to propose multiple plans for a bypass around the gridlocked megalopolis, most imagining a beltline out through the farm fields to the north before looping back to the main highway at the edge of town just before the Memorial Bridge leading to the island. Farmers are already upset, downtown businesses are peeved, the City Council doesn’t need another civil war after the deadlock over if what where and how to site a new City Hall, the city administrator just quit and, well, everything’s pretty much normal in our fair city.

Not being a registered voter in the town, I suppose I’m not really welcome to offer my outsider suggestions. Sure, I’ve driven that gauntlet through the sewer lagoons for 44 years, but it doesn’t make the local yokels Velkommen sign any more welcoming now than it did when I first arrived with long hair and no money, no job and no doubt a bad attitude. Times change, I’ll grant you, but some things don’t. The downtown businesses are still as friendly as ever, meaning they want our bizness but not our presence. Shop, but hurry on home now. Here’s your hat, what’s my hurry?

So okay, here’s my two cents, a long time suffering outsider who tried the SHOP LOCAL slogan and never thought reciprocity was part of the deal. Build the Tunnel! Bertha’s done digging Seattle’s, haul it north, set it up by the new high school and dig til you reach the bridge. Now there’s a bypass. Out of sight, out of mind. Stanwoodopolis gets the peace and quiet it has always wanted and we islanders get to bypass the town that never really wanted us in the first place. If the city puts up a Velkommen sign at the island end of town finally, well, I’m saying it’s too damn late. Dig the bypass!

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