Dear Logger: After your surprise return from a five-year bender, I’ve reluctantly kept an eye on the news coming out of your zip code. I must say, the city has come a long way in half a decade. For example, I recently noticed the headline: “Bremerton may enlist goats in battle against waterfront rats.” Naturally, I thought this would be a story about a kerfuffle between the city and boaters in the Bremerton Marina. Then I remembered that there are no boaters in the Bremerton Marina.
Nope, turns out that Bremerton’s city council is poised to employ goats against the rats in the blackberry bushes near those fancy new condos downtown. Councilman Jerry McDonald is proposing the city rent goats to mow through the bushes and expose the rats to predators. Says McDonald: “Goats eat everything, clear the end, and then we don’t have anything else to worry about.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if all Bremerton had to do was release a few goats into the city so that you wouldn’t have “anything else to worry about”? If all it would take to rid Bremerton of its vermin were a few goats, I think the city would have been cleaned up — and the taxpayers spared a pretty penny — a decade ago. But that’s almost beside the point. Maybe the councilman is onto something. Maybe goats could be employed to assist the city elsewhere — they’re about as competent as the creatures running your town.
Heck, maybe Patty Lent could hire a team of goats to operate a passenger-only ferry between Bremerton and Seattle during the next football season? She could use all the help she can get. Lent’s call to run the foot ferry to the final two Seahawks home games was about as successful a call as throwing to the end zone from the 1. Come to think of it: Once the goats are done with Bremerton, perhaps they can help the Hawks in the Red Zone.
Reluctantly yours,
— Winslow