Island summer, lazy and overgrown

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Summer, perennially in charge of bringing the soda, pretzels and beer to life’s party, shows up late on Vashon. I think this is because it is lazy. Also hazy and crazy, but today we’re going to focus on the lazy.

I’m noticing that most things in nature are lazy. Including me. In nature, the deck is stacked in favor of systems that use the lowest amount of energy to get a job done. Behaviorists call this “cost to act.” Physicists call it the “principle of least action.” I call it “letting the blackberries win.”

Which brings us to today’s big question: Why aren’t dandelions, blackberries or St. John’s wort lazy, especially in summer?

I spend way too much energy trying to beat those suckers back. This includes the energy expended in tweezing thorns from my skin and bench-pressing cases of ibuprofen. After spending 27 years digging up 40,000 plants (yes, I counted), I have finally won the dandelion wars, but blackberries still make weekly kamikaze raids into the lawn. I patrol the perimeter with a pair of industrial-strength loppers slung over my shoulder like a Bushmaster rifle. It is likely that the thorn hedge Maleficent conjured up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle was 100% Himalayan, and if I don’t keep after them, they will overtake my own castle — starting with the septic field.

Wort is the newest enemy to taste my blade. Hypericum prolificum is a creeping shock-and-awe assault. I mean, “prolific” is right there in the name! Fighting St. John’s wort is the only time I lament Vashon’s RA-5 zoning, which says a rural primary dwelling must sit on at least five acres. If I could add another 20 houses to our lot, with a backhoe in every garage, maybe we could uproot the final plant sometime in 2043. As it is, wort will be the only thing left after the Big Bang reverses itself and compresses the rest of the universe back into a solitary subatomic particle.

All three of these fast-growing weeds defy the principle of least action. Why can’t they be more like lightning? Talk about lazy! Electrons always pick the path of least resistance between a cloud and the ground, no matter how crooked that path is. Just like me.

After all, I’m human, and humans have elevated laziness to a whole new level. How often have you heard, “Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, never lie down when you can take a nap in a hammock?”

Lazy is part of our genius, and why not? It often feels like nature put us here on a work-release program, where we use a ton of energy up front so we can be lazy later on. We dig coal to generate electricity so we don’t have to collect firewood every day. We cook and freeze meals on the weekend so we don’t have to start from scratch on all the other days. We build oil wells and pipelines and tankers and cars so we don’t have to walk to Cle Elum.

Recently, our genius has birthed a brand-new baby genius. Why? So we can relax more. What is artificial intelligence but a way to lower our cost to act? Even shortening it to “AI” is lazy. But we worry that it will become like St. John’s wort, proliferating so rapidly that soon it will be spotted as far away as … Cle Elum.

Oops. Too late.

We could all use a drink! I vote that we put Spring in charge of the soda, pretzels and beer. She’s always late, too, but at least the beverages would be chilled when Summer shows up in July with the entree.

This year I’m asking her to throw in some tequila.

And maybe a backhoe.

Cindy Hoyt is an island comedy writer, novelist and invasive species. Check her out at cindyhoyt.com.