The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You can lead a jackass to water … but you can’t make em think. Some years back a 1960’s rectangular telephone booth mysteriously appeared in Hutchison Park from out of nowhere or possibly outer space. Since I’m the de facto ranger of that most southerly of county parks, it fell on me to deal with its unlikely appearance. A friend, who at the time was head librarian for the Camano branch, suggested we convert it to a Little Library so we did just that, put shelving in and stocked it with books donated by her. Literacy had come to the South End. Or so I imagined.

A week later the library was sacked, graffiti written on the walls, the shelves and books thrown into the rain and some burned. Undeterred, I restocked the shelves, cleaned up the graffiti and hoped this would be a one time event. Ho ho. Not long after the place was vandalized again, the shelves knocked over and the books strewn outside. Ever the optimist, I restored the place and hoped for different results. Which, for a year or more, was what happened. Until one day a window was broken out.

My solution was to make a stained glass replacement. I’m a believer that art will triumph over ignorance, that installing an aesthetic fix might act as a talisman against future vandalism. And for awhile it seemed my faith was substantiated. Last night, however, a pal called to say he’d found the library knocked over on its side, the windows broken out and one sculpture and the stained glass window stolen. When I got there the hundred or so books were a sodden mess, shattered glass was scattered everywhere … and my optimism was too.

Today I’ll go clean up the mess. And try not to count this as a personal failure. But I will confess, this does seem like a metaphor for the times we live in now, braggingly ignorant, malevolently self-righteous, just happy brutes knuckle down in a world shutting the door on science and knowledge, reason and rationality. Then again, maybe it’s just a couple of dumb punks whose idea of fun is knocking over telephone booths, maybe better not to read too much into it. Either way, that library ain’t coming back.