The lawns on Fauntleroy freak me out. It is a tweaked world of Competitive Landscaping, specifically designed to intimidate, and it frightens me.

That huge windmill-like apparatus 200 yards north of the ferry dock is a motion-detecting laser beam, poised to vaporize anyone who treads on the Astro Turf.

It’s not just Fauntleroy; it’s everywhere lawn manicuring fanatics make their neighborhoods feel like chained compounds guarded by Uzi-wielding mercenaries. 

There’s clearly a control issue at play. I’m going out a limb here, but I have a theory: Vashon does not enable control freaks. 

Lawn care, to the extent that we have lawns, is an excellent example. The Island mocks our lame attempts to give it a haircut. It’s all we can do to keep the forest from munching our homes and families alive.

I have six different weapons for my anti-jungle insurgency, and the nettles and blackberries still win. Expletive! Trees fall, destroying my pretty paths, moss wreaks havoc; every day in every way, my roof gets bigger and greener. 

Our dog got stuck in that hideously prolific sticky vine thing the other day and whimpered at me helplessly. I commiserated for a couple minutes then freed him.

This Vashon Control Problem stems, so to speak, from the ferry phenomena. A recently-relocated and retired Islander told me he’d stopped worrying about ferry times; he just goes to the dock and catches the next boat.

Hello? But what about the 12.5 minutes I give myself to get to the boat, exactly enough time, from both my house and downtown? How could I possibly stop thinking this way?

This isn’t about speed; it’s about control. It’s the 20-year engrained habit of time fascism, couched in that exquisite excuse for suddenly leaving meetings and dreary events: “Uh, gotta go catch my boat! See ya!”

Then arriving at the boat, on either side, and it’s suddenly a two-boat schedule or a medical emergency or some other uncontrollable randomness, and it’s backed up to the John L. Scott office or Starbucks, or it’s Memorial Day weekend, and you just forgot, and the blood pressure rises, and the “Psycho” soundtrack begins.

“Give it up,” Vashon whispers, soothingly, annoyingly. 

Give up, for example, trying to build a raccoon-proof chicken coop. They’re drawn here, those denizens of suburban garbage. They swim across the sound in gangs at night, like covert special forces, to maraud our coops and massacre our free-range products.

I have friends, who shall remain nameless, who lost their entire 25-plus coop population in two weeks. And this is no reflection on lame carpentry or a wussy guard dog. It was a demoralizing Gentleman Farmer moment.

They have names, many of these fowl, and personalities. We could have a massive cemetery for sacrificial poultry: the Tomb of the Unknown Chicken. Weird as that sounds, I see a committee forming.  

Give up trying to clean your house when important, judgmental people come to visit. Your floor, your downstairs, your closet — it ain’t happening. City people have Everything Drawers; we have, admit it, Everything Houses. 

It’s spring. We tidy, we sweep. We even hands-and-knees scrub, repaint, bleach and deodorize. But then some house-elf-gone-bad visits in the night, and our homes are returned to their natural state of detritus equilibrium. More expletives!

Give up trying to control your children — Island youth are impossibly strong-willed, and any effort to instill habits of civilized behavior is for naught. They are free-thinking, independent, yet feral and in league with the raccoons.  

This is where it hits closest to home. Most of us over 35 were raised in the age of true parental rule. I don’t mean Nazi Puritans (which are surprisingly common), just the “do what I say because I said so” kind of thing, which for some reason doesn’t seem to work here. No more expletives …negotiation.

These pervasive attempts to control are, here as everywhere, survival instincts. After all, we’re staring into the abysses of our own mortality, ecological catastrophe and mildly unsatisfactory career choices. The world almost ended May 21, for Heaven’s sake. 

So in a sane attempt to contain the insanity, we move here, thinking that will help, hoping to wrest aesthetic control of our lives from a society at war with good taste. We limit our access to urban, media-hyped culture, and organize our lives in a quieter friendlier way, mostly pesticide-free.

And then we find there’s something untamable here, and control freakdom reeks of futility, like our compost bins and garbage cans after a raccoon party.

Give it up. Vashon, the Island, with a mind of its own, is desperately trying to save us from ourselves.

— Kevin Joyce is a performer, producer, writer and teacher who, along with Martha Enson, runs EnJoy Productions.