Thursday, July 26, 2012

Betty Jo Bouvier Is Being Eaten Alive By Sedro-Woolley Mosquito Bugs

I saw on Facebook that Betty Jo Bouvier is suffering from severe mosquito attacks.

Betty Jo Bouvier lives in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.

Before Woolley was added to Sedro, Sedro was a solo town.

Around 1885 Mortimer Cook moved his family from Santa Barbara, California to a new home and store that was waiting for them in Washington's Skagit Valley. Soon, Cook let it be known he was going to name his new town "Bug," due to the swarms of mosquitoes.

However, Cook's wife, and other local wives, the Betty Jo Bouviers of their day, protested the idea of naming their new town "Bug." So, Cook decided to name his new town after a type of tree that grew in the Skagit Valley,  using the Spanish word for cedar, which is cedro, and then making the name a little different by changing the 'c' to 's'.

A few years later, in 1889, a railroad builder named Phillip A. Woolley moved to the Sedro zone and built Skagit River Timber & Shingle, starting a company town, named after himself. A couple other towns developed in the Sedro zone. And then, on December 19, 1898 the towns all merged together and became Sedro-Woolley.

I do not know why, more than a century later, the town, which should have been named Bug, still does not have its mosquito population under control.

I think I have mentioned previously that when I lived in the Skagit Valley of Washington not a summer went by where I did not get multiple mosquito bites.

I have no clue why, in bug-infested Texas, I have not once been mosquito bitten, in all my years of exile in this hot humid zone where Texans have succumbed to the mosquito delivered West Nile Virus.

Maybe it is the copious amounts of raw garlic I consume in Texas which thwarts the skeeter bites. I did not consume copious amounts of raw garlic when I lived in Washington. Betty Jo Bouvier may want to amp up her raw garlic consumption to see if that thwarts the swarms of mosquitoes laying waste to her delicate epidermal layer.

It's worth a try.

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