The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I drove my jalopy down to Bellevue and Babylon this week. They got a new Pay-as-you-Drive lane system now, fast lanes for the folks willing to pay up to $10 for a commute to Microsoft and the high tech cubicles, more if you’re like me, the occasional traveler without a transponder and a special bank account. I thought I’d already paid my gas tax and license fees, maybe now I could drive the same roads as the rich, especially since percentage-wise, I was paying even more than them.

I figured wrong. As usual. I’m used to sitting in the back seats of planes jammed in like a chick in the crate going to the slaughterhouse. I’m growing accustomed to feeling second class. Nobody said life was fair, even in a democracy. You pay to play. College. Jewelry shops. Opera. State parks. National parks too. High speed internet. Politics. You maybe thought your taxes give you a free pass to Yellowstone or equal opportunity at the ballot box, think again. It costs $10 to drive into the State Park and I not only throw more optional money at them on my driver’s license fees, I maintain a county park us Friends of Camano Island Parks maintain so the county can use the saved dollars to enforce boat launch fees when I haul my sailboat down.

Maybe the rich do deserve their own lane for commuting. Maybe they deserve every break we can give them. When the King’s carriage rolled through on the highway to the castle, you better believe us peasants pulled over, doffed our caps and bowed ceremoniously to M’Lord. Call me cantankerous and slap me with a macaroni, but I don’t like it.

Probably won’t be too long, though, the gated communities down here will demand their own lane over the bridge onto the island. That, or they’ll go whole hog and insist the state retrofit a drawbridge, just for them, the rest of us, buy a boat. It is, after all, an island. If the riffraff can’t swim, all the better. A few less of us and the property values will go up. The free ride is over. For now, the boat ride’s fairly cheap.

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