A Weekend Pirate

I love pirates, although on this very blog one of my readers pointed out pirates don’t bathe much and so it’s probably bad to have a coach airplane seat next to one. My husband’s family owns a boat. While cruising the water, I like to pretend we’re pirates of the Minnesota St. Croix, ready to take over small fishing boats and make off with their treasure of beer and bait. It turns out I’m not the only one on the river who fancies themselves a pirate. Smalley’s the pirate bar just opened in Stillwater, facing the rogue waters of the St. Croix. There you can order a BBQ sandwich on a toasted bun branded with the Jolly Roger and a shot of rum to chase it call the Kill-Devil. Johnny Michaels, the bartender, describes the Kill-Driver: “If an actual pirate came in here and asked for a drink, this is what we would give him. It’s a drink for today’s pirate.”*
Wow! A drink for today’s pirate. Since I regularly bathe, but I still proudly fly the Jolly Roger, I consider myself today’s pirate. Of course, I don’t engage in any actual raiding. I just daydream about it, and how the short brutal, life of a pirate might be preferable to the long, tedious, meaningless life of a computer programmer. I guess you’d call me not a weekend warrior, but a weekend pirate. I swab the deck with highly concentrated deck wash. Instead of scraping barnacles off the hull, I’m scraping off zebra mussels. But a life on the high seas is a life for me.

*Tom Horgan, “Pirates of the St. Croix”, Star Tribune, August 1, 2008, Section E Page 4.