Another strand of seaweed alongside the road

Looks like I'm not the only one feeling sort of hung-down and aimless.

That was in the glory years, when the "Uncle Sam" billboard was a roadside attraction on par with South of the Border and the world's largest ball of yarn. I blogged a while back about this strange highway "attraction" off the I-5 freeway just south of Chehalis (it's at the link, trust me, you just have to scroll down a little).

This goofy contraption was the work of one guy, Alfred Hamilton, wingnut, entrepreneur, and ex-farmer. The story I've heard is that he was pissed off about government because of the seizure of part of his farmland to build I-5 and so he put up the billboard to tell the world about it.

"His two-sided "Uncle Sam" billboard dates back to 1971. Over the years, it has carried a litany of messages aimed at politicians Hamilton didn't like as well as homosexuals, Russia, abortion, communism, big government, the United Nations and gun control, to name a few."

The ghost blog Meet The Stress has a nice snarky little obit for Al, who, it turns out, actually threw up this sign because his wife found out that "...the state was spending more money on welfare than on schools".

Al's gone to the Free Republic In The Sky but his successors (kids? grandkids? who the hell knows) have kept up the great curmudgeonly tradition, proudly expressing Al's full range of thought, from "Right-Wing Nut" to "Thinks Mussolini Was A Pussy Who Didn't Have The Balls To Really Bring The Fascism".

But even Al's Freeper spawn seem to be losing their edge these days. Here's what they had up on the southbound side of the billboard when I drove by today:

Ummm...the Final Jeopardy answer is: "The Egyptian army and airforce"?

WTF, guys? That's IT? An entire wingnutoverse out there to help you with finding subjects for your forty-foot-high outrage over Those Damn Libtards And Their Dhimmitude and this is the best you got?

This is your 90-mile-an-hour-fastball?

(And I noted that the northbound side was even lamer; something about how "those Damn Eurocommies are coming for their people's pensions and was yours next?", like Al's GOP pals had left any of us with an actual "pension" instead of riding the fucking 401K bus to the Poorhouse.)

Suddenly I don't feel so bereft of inspiration. If this is the best the wingnuts in Chehalis can do, Jesus wept, people, this is just sad and I feel like Enid fucking Blyton by comparison.

Out There Up North

I spent most of last week drilling along a stretch of two-lane highway south of the little town of Oakville, Washington.

The actual work site was on the Chehalis Indian Reservation, which was more butt-hurt and dog-ass than most of the northwest Washington rez, and that's saying a lot since outside the Jamestown S'Klallam Rez the little dogpatches along Highway 101 that line the west side of the Puget Sound are among the saddest and sorriest of the firstcomer gulags we've made for them to slowly die in, we white-eyes in our impartial majesty.

To give you an idea, the first day went badly - the first day of drilling usually does, but this was worse than even the usual with a bad combination of caving AND "heaving" sand and gravel. To give you a notion I've worked in this business for twenty years and have never, never encountered heaving gravel. It was awful, and we fought with it the whole day and managed to achieve a draw at best - and I suggested to the flagging crew-boss that he save time by leaving his warning signs in place and just turning them end-on to the traffic. He looked at me like I had two heads.

"Did you see that trash back up the road?" he growled, and, yes, I had noticed the little hamlet of raggedy shack-islands ringed with rust-red reefs of derelict vehicles of all varieties. "Those bastards'd have these signs gone in sixty seconds." I scoffed at the notion that anyone would be so low-rent as to steal cheap warning signs, but the flagger just repeated that the hardcases laired in those shacks would have the entire signage away to sell the five pounds of aluminum in the uprights.

So we took in the signs for the night. What a sad old world.

Anyway, that wasn't really my point for this post, since you could really care less about my work. No, it was this;

These oddities are called, collectively, the "Godspodor Monuments", and stand just east of I-5 near the little town of Toledo, Washington.

According to the linked page at "Weird Washington" these gomers are the brainchild of one Dominic Godspodor, a wealthy "eccentric" (and you'll note that wealth moves you from "batshit crazy" to the more benign "eccentric"; as always, bags of money are the KY Jelly of Social Acceptability) who wanted to honor a bizarre congeries of things and people; Mother Teresa, the Native Americans (of "all tribes", according to the billboard that sits near these things), the victims of the Holocaust, the victims of drunk drivers, African-American slaves, Susan B. Anthony, Jonas Salk, William Seward, and Lewis and Clark.

Whew.

The pillars you see in the picture are his tributes to the first three; don't ask me which is which, although I'm guessing that the one with the big Christ is NOT the Holocaust one or, at least, I hope so. That would be way too much like baptizing Anne Frank, or have the Mormons already gotten around to that?

I really don't know what else to say about these things, other than they're butt-ugly in a particularly up-in-your-face sort of ugly way. Every year I have passed it the site looks worse and worse; the field unmowed, the steel of the pillars rusting, the shoddy explanatory billboard sagging and faded.

While I have a certain amount of sympathy for the rich bastard's hobby, I have to wonder; would the half-million he spent on this gawdawful have been better spent building a factory of some sort on the Chehalis Rez, so some of all those tribes' modern survivors would have an honest job and a decent, living wage?

I suspect that Teresa and the Shoah victims would have been okay with that.

But regardless, there they stand; strange unattractive pillars in an empty field where the busy world rushes past them with no more than a puzzled glance.

Mind you, these things aren't exactly the oddest oddity along the I-5 corridor in Washington State; the "Uncle Sam" billboard south of Chehalis is a treat packed with wingnutty goodness.

And there's always Mima Mounds, Nature's contribution to Weird Washington.

But that's the State of Washington for you; ex boreas semper aliquid whacki. Eccentric monuments, wingnut billboards, and impoverished Indians crouching in the woods.

Makes me damn glad to be home south of the Big River.