Skunk smell FTW

Back in DC, I bowled regularly, a.k.a. was in a bowling league. But not just any league, I was in a GAY bowling league. My colleagues had fashioned snarky team names like Men with Balls and Always in the Gutter. My team was called the Evil Bitches. This was much closer to how we wanted to see ourselves than our actual collective temperament, and there was more than one occasion when the opposing team members would shake our hands at the end of a night, only to say, “you know, you aren’t really that bitchy.” We considered changing our attitude to suit the title, but were too lazy to make it happen.

Blowing my knee out at my wedding, it was a while before I could execute my proper bowling approach and land my weight on my left leg. Seven months from my surgery, to be specific, and I felt a little unsure at first. But now the knee is comfortable. Good thing, since I joined a league again. A GAY league. Now now, there is no gay league in Walla Walla, but there is one in the Tri-Cities. This means that out of a population of 170,000 people (according to 2008 Census estimates), there are 40 gay bowlers, or GLBT bowlers, to be exact.

There are still the tongue in cheek team monikers—I’ll note here that a women’s team stole the “with Balls” phrasing in this league, Dolls with Balls—but at this point the similarities with DC’s teams cease. They are much more laid back players, classic Northwest, if you will allow me the indulgent reference. Gutter ball? No big deal! Missed the head pin? Just try again!

Trust me, I never, never saw this during my three or four years of league play in Virginia. I think people would have ejected their hearts right out of their chests if they’d had to actually say cheerleady things after bad throws.

Not that we weren’t nice out east. We just really wanted to do well, and reward greatness. We gritted our teeth after an errant ball and grunted, “next frame,” or the more desperate, “next game.” Sometimes these were followed with a half-sincere “it’s okay.” More common was the line of strikes and spares down one team’s frame, followed by cheering and high fives. There is so much high fiving in bowling that it is practically a sport within a sport.

The high fives are often done by teams who are very peppy, the kind of team that one hates to play because they’re just so in your face about their excitement, when all one wants to do is just figure out the oil pattern and throw a good rock or thirty. There’s the team that went to great expense to procure matching bowling shirts that look fantastic until you see the simply awful-looking attempt at a logo on the back. People, sometimes less is more, or at least, more easy on the eyes.

The funniest opponents are the teams who are either mad at each other that night, or who are so frustrated with their bowling that they begin taking it out on each other during the night. I can really mess with their already wobbly psyches, like telling them, almost condescendingly, that maybe this next ball will be The One, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. (Seriously? All hope for humankind rests on Ted Logan’s shoulders? I’ll never get over this.)

Such attempts at sinking a foundering ship don’t work in the Tri-Cities league, which is so close to the Hanford nuclear Superfund cleanup site that everything in that area begins with the prefix of “Atomic.” Atomic Muffler, Atomic Storage, and Atomic Bowl. The best part about this atomic neighborhood, in my opinion, are the little hydrogen atom graphics that accompany these buisneses, friendly little electrons that practically have a smiley face, as if the last thing they would ever dream of doing is harming anyone. Hanford, of course, is the place that created the nuclear material that the US dropped on Nagasaki. I don’t suppose those hydrogen atoms had smiley faces that day.

The folks in the Tri-Cities league are well aware of this history, and yet, they all carry on in what is basically a factory town’s final resolution, courtesy of the Department of Energy. Bowling is a release for them from their work days, to be savored and enjoyed, even if it is only a few pins knocked down at a time. For me, traveling the 50-some-odd miles from Walla Walla every week, it’s a way to be around geeky and fun gay people again, and to help string together things I’ve enjoyed before with my life out here.

It is a 50-mile drive, however, and it takes me right past the awful Boise Cascade paper mill. Last night I was relieved of the putrid odor by, of all things, a skunk. It’s saying something when dead skunk smells better than the process of turning trees into cardboard. How nice of Mr. Skunk to take one for the team.