ugliness is in the eye of the beholder
Back in 1980 we had a rash of vandalism targeted at Elmer Hovik, a local Developer the Seattle Times called a huckster. Elmer built Camaloch and went on to go bankrupt slashing and burning Thunder Ridge which sat idle for the next 30 years. In America you can go broke, set up new partners and the banks will let you go right back at it. Elmer went broke the 2nd time working on Onamac, but in the meantime he managed to carve up some prime real estate on the way down, one being my suburb across the street. Named it Brutus after a cow he owned. The Camano Homeowners Association formed about then just to fight Elmer.
Elmer and his cows had set up mobile home sales about where the golf course clubhouse is now. That way he could cut down our trees, bulldoze the lots and have you watching TV in the comfort of your single wide in the time it takes to say Chapter Eleven….
Some Monkey Wrenchin Gang wrote on the side of one of the tilted trailers in big black spraypaint STOP THIS UGLYNESS. Spelled ugly with a Y. About the same night all the survey stakes got pulled across the road from me in the development named after a bovine, so naturally the police came to chat with me about my whereabouts on the night in question, did I hold a grudge against Mr. Hovik or his cow, and would I like to plead guilty now and avoid a public trial and the subsequent humiliation? I said I thought Elmer Hovik was so low on the evolutionary totem pole, he ought to apologize to the worms above him. I said I didn’t remember where I was last night, much less a week ago, but chances are I was playing banjo in front of the woodstove with my dog Dr. Gonzo who could vouch for me. And I declared I wasn’t guilty and I could prove it.
Carl, the deputy, said he would like to hear my alibi. My alibi, I said, was that I could not have committed that dastardly act of desecrating a mobile home because I was an English teacher once before I became a South End misfit. He said SO? And I said, YOU obviously would’ve flunked my class cause UGLYNESS is misspelled. It’s got an “I”, not a “Y”. Also, Sherlock, you got the wrong culprit.
“Maybe you misspelled it to throw us off,” the wily officer said. I said, “I told you, I was an English teacher and no self-respecting English teacher would knowingly misspell a word and have every passerby see it. We took an oath. But good luck finding your killer,” I said, “and look for someone who flunked English.”
Truth is, they never DID find the desecrator. But I did. I almost turned him in too, not for vandalism, not for getting me in hot water with the law — that’s right: for misspelling UGLINESS. Which is a kind of ugliness to me.
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