The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Road leads to many destinations — as I don’t need to tell you. But … it also leads to a few box canyon dead ends, washouts and … well, Final Destinations. I have a pal who drove his camper to Moab, then to Blanding, Utah after a spat with the Moab trailer court slumlord, then on to who knew where when the camper died and was towed to Big Puddle. Big Puddle, a dry hole in the exact middle of nowhere, will be where my buddy dies, trust me. Not saying it’s a bad place, this Last Stop in the desert, but it truly is the end of the road, population pretty near zero.

Today we drove from Saguaro National Park to the town of Dragoon, Arizona to visit an old artist buddy who moved from the South End to the end of the world here. He’s built himself a two story box with one window in a desert that fries lizards in the summer, has two semi-box containers to store his possessions along with a shed or two plus a couple of trailers filled to the rafters. Desert chic. A van, a car, a truck, a couple of lowboy trailer frames, a yard full of construction debris, lawnmowers, all strewn across the property. The neighbors’ places look worse, but not by much. Unlike back home, it’s hard to hide what you hoard in the desert.

On the way out I felt a kind of pity for my friends’ hermit ways, living on social security, far from civilization, both slipping quietly into the landscape of an America more and more digitized, anachronisms as lost to modernity as prospectors up a dry gulch far far from the reach of Rome. Course, now that we’re crossing the Sonora Desert, heading slowly home, it did occur to me that maybe, just maybe, their homes are more similar to the South End that I came to more than 40 years ago than I care to admit. End of the road, end of an island at the end of a continent. We don’t always recognize the Final Destination, I guess, when we arrive.

We’re in the Phoenix Public Library, the mizzus to conduct some historical research in the newspaper microfiche, me apparently to do mine on human behavior. The hombre next to me on the public computer I was allowed 15 minutes max usage took up 5 of those minutes asking if I had bought cocaine in the library parking lot.

‘Not yet,’ I said, trying not to make eye contact or appear too interested. He inquired if I had been asked to buy a yearly park pass. I replied no. He was interested if I had ever been kidnapped. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ I answered while struggling to remember my log-in info.

A library — even a small town biblioteca — is a whacko magnet. Librarians probably should be trained in sociology and hired by social services. Drugs in the bathroom, animals brought inside, sleepers on the couches, derelicts in the hallways, the insane and the hopeless wandering the stacks — all welcome, all tolerated, all of us one big dysfunctional family.

Nevertheless, I’m always thankful to old Andy Carnegie for the invention of ‘free’ public libraries. These rich philanthropists, the 1%, I suppose, felt some small guilt over their cut-throat greed and tried to make amends to their reputations, okay by me. Sort of.

I can see I’m going to be here awhile. Maybe read a magazine. Maybe purchase some cocaine or an Arizona Park season pass. Just hope I’m not kidnapped! If you get this, don’t necessarily consider it a ransom note. Unless it’s comprised of letters cut out from a magazine…..

My neighbors down here on the South End are already talking about closing down the borders to keep this coronavirus where it belongs, up north where folks can afford quality health care. I guess they figure we can barely pay for hepa masks, much less a stay in a quarantine cell for fourteen days, assuming we live that long. Panic is breaking out from Elger Bay to the Head. You’d think the threat was nuclear annihilation judging by the chatter over the fences, time to build the equivalent of fallout shelters.

They’re talking checkpoints, border patrols, beach surveillance, possibly a Wall. Every little cough sends them into hair tearing hysteria. Some of the parents refuse to send their toddlers to school and even the Little Church in the Ravine is considering closing its sanctuary for Sunday services, so much for their faith sparing them the wrath of their God. Little Jimmy suggested we all stop getting newspapers, not to reduce the reporting of new flu breakouts in Stanwoodopolis and beyond, but to prevent the delivery guy from becoming our Typhoid Mary. Two Toke sarcastically asked if the mail should be stopped as well and was surprised when the mob cried Of Course! Janet, the newcomer across the highway from us, timidly asked if Amazon Prime deliveries would be curtailed as well. Trust me, not even Ebola would convince the neighbors to stop same day delivery of the treasures they ordered yesterday. And even if they did, you know Amazon would drop them by drone.

The stock market is crashing, countries are closing their borders, cruise ships are anchored offshore with vacationers held prisoner in their petri dishes, the President put his second in command in charge of the Outbreak, the military is canceling war games with South Korea, hospitals are practicing quarantine drills, a school nearby shuttered its doors when a staff member exhibited flu-like symptoms and the news has dropped its primary election mania to keep us fearful citizens constantly updated with fresh death counts.

These are dire times. Precautions must be taken. Borders need to be secured. This could very well be the final message leaving the Black Hole of the South End. We have to protect ourselves. Good luck to the rest of you.

We just came home from a road trip to the deserts of America. I don’t mean the barrios and ghettos of Yuma, Tucson, East L.A. The real deserts, cacti, gila monsters, border patrol. We drove through Mojave and now that we’re home I read today that the Flat Earth guy, Mike Hughes, strapped himself into his homemade rocket and blasted off for the stratosphere where, he told reporters, he would be able to look down at the planet and see a disc with its oceans held in place by ice at their edges.

I’m used to climate change deniers, folks who maybe never been in a greenhouse or even their own house when the sun was shining through the front windows, people who probably think they just inadvertently turned up the thermostat and forgot when the room got hot. Science wasn’t their subject in school. No doubt they majored in recess or football. Football without a helmet.

I think our boy in the Mojave rocket did actually wear a helmet. But as we learned this weekend, a helmet isn’t much use when the missile explodes in a fiery crash back on the flat earth seconds after launch. Tragic? Sure. A man has the right to follow his dreams, doesn’t he? We’re all guilty of stupid stuff. I’ve even managed my fair share. This week even…. But, c’mon, if I wanted to prove the earth was a flat disc, would I belt myself into a missile so I could take a picture with a camera to prove the ball we thought was earth was really a deep dish pizza? No, I would dig a hole to the other side, couldn’t take long, although the danger would be falling through into outer space. Probably make more sense to use the photos the astronauts have already but where’s the danger, the romance, the press coverage?

This same guy jumped over 100 feet in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limo, set a Guinness World Record even, probably because a flat earth’s gravity isn’t all that much to keep a limo tethered to terra firma.

A man, of course, has to do what a man has to do, but suicide by rocket is maybe pushing the envelope a bit too far. One small flight for man, one giant step backwards for mankind. Put that on his tombstone down there in the hot flat desert. Rest in Peace, Mike. The flat earth is your home forever.

Half our neighbors mysteriously leave the South End, some after Thanksgiving, some after Christmas, a slow but steady migration to points unknown. One year I asked Frank who lived across the road and was readying his 40 foot $200,000 travel trailer for what looked to be an imminent exit, where he was going. Arizona, he told me. ‘Kind of an expensive trailer for a road trip,’ I ventured. ‘Why not stay in some nice hotels?’ He told me his mizzus wouldn’t sleep on some strangers’ sheets.

Each, of course, to her own, I occasionally say, not always sincerely. But … the neighborhood sure quiets down in the winter and I’m all for that. Today we drove the length of southern Arizona, eventually reaching Yuma. Yuma, for you who have never traveled the southern border reaches, is where the Colorado River, once navigable by steamboat, is now a mere trickle of its tidal self where an outpost established over a century and a half ago still stands in a desert as forbidding as most any we’ve seen on this arid road trip. Bleak, flat, unforgiving. And yet … lining Interstate 8, thousands of my neighbor Frank’s trailer are crammed into ghettos of sun-worshippers who prefer the wall-to-wall existence of fellow exiles over a cold rainy Shangri-La back on the South End.

Promise these Bedouins in Behemoths a few months of sunshine in an implacably desolate and pitiless desert and they will be pliable putty in the hands of Machiavellian despots. FREE WINTERS IN SAUDI ARABIA – VOTE REPUBLICAN!! I guess living in air-conditioned seasonal comfort with windows facing an identical trailer 8 feet away may not feel like freedom so much as some kind of escape, a modern and humane penitentiary for the seasonally afflicted. Me, I’ll take the rain.

Learning to Fly

How does the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song go: you, who are on the road, must have a code, you can live by? Being on the road the past couple weeks reminds me of earlier trips and nearly forgotten adventures. Not that I necessarily had a code to live by back then….

The summer of ’76 I was hauling up the east coast seaboard out of Florida when I picked up a hitchhiker with his thumb out. He tossed his backpack in the truck bed and opened the door of the Chevy’s cab. ‘Where you headed?’ I inquired and he answered ‘Nirvana’

“Not sure I’m headed that far,’ I said, ever the comical cynic, ‘but hop in, you can travel til you see a sign.’ My little boddhisatva was, I realized soon enough, not so much on the Path to Enlightenment as he was searching for acolytes, folks who would acknowledge his Journey and hopefully find in him a Guide and a Way. Me, I wasn’t headed anywhere really, just a lost puppy but happy to wag a tail occasionally, a boy searching for America, not satori. The Outer Banks, however, beckoned and I took a ferry to get there, my would-be Guru tagging along, maybe thinking at Kitty Hawk he would learn to fly.

Once on the ferry he opened the truck door and whacked a spiffy new BMW with it, springing the irate owner out of his bucket seat, leather contoured, probably heated, the seat and him both. My rider, unchastened, muttered something vaguely and insincerely apologetic and got back in the truck … only to decide to exit and once again whack that polished and gleaming BMW on its once immaculate door panel. The driver, now furious, came out screaming. My guru seemed oddly unfazed. ‘Hey man,’ he intoned, ‘it’s just a car. Chill out, why don’tcha?’

Chilling out was NOT on this guy’s mind and his car was WAY more than just a car. I think he thought it might be — for a moment anyway — a license to kill. Code or no code, I decided the time was ripe for my own self to intervene. ‘My hitchhiker,’ I said, making it clear legal action would not involve the owner of the culprit truck, ‘said he was sorry. I think he’ll be more careful from now on. And besides, the damage is cosmetic, not really worth violence. Just my opinion, of course ….’ And then I walked away to watch over the side the deep blue Atlantic. The dogs could fight it out if they wanted, but without a referee.

My guru and I camped two nights on the Outer Banks, but on the 3rd day I announced I was packing up, heading north. ‘You’re welcome to ride along,’ I told him, to which he replied I was making a huge mistake leaving. He had, he said somberly, a lot I could learn. ‘No doubt,’ I said, ‘but I don’t mind learning the hard way, on my own.’

I still remember my almost Guru standing next his pup tent, the wind moving sand across the road, not even a wave goodbye. Like a lot of folks you meet on the Highway of Life, who knows where their path eventually led? I’m betting, though, he never thinks back on me.

Road Tripping

We’re on the road, me and the mizzus, one destination in Arizona to meet up with old friends in Sedona, the rest … well, like I said, it’s a road trip, side trips welcome, kind of the way the mizzus and me fell in love, on the road, a backpacking trip that ended with premature snow in the Big Horns then morphed into a Mexico detour..

We stayed on the Columbia River Gorge last night next to an incredibly weathered Indian church and houses, a village, I guess, browned, tilted and barely standing, its own museum next to the Bonneville lock and dam. South and north were two fishing platforms where the tribe netted salmon before the dams destroyed their harvests, a skeletal reminder of a slow genocide most history books omit. Traveling the byways is an unfurling history lesson. Especially if you drive with an historian riding shotgun.

We’re running the east side of the Cascades, dodging snow, high plains drifting, cutting east across roads a mile high with no traffic or services for vast distances. You want to know what I think America is — Clue: it’s not Trump, it’s not politics, it’s not the Japanese internment camps we passed in Tule Lake — it’s this wilderness that stretches beyond anyone’s view, this sea to sea purpled majesty, a continent that rolls and heaves and manages after centuries to remain wild and free. Yah, corny stuff. Until you hike it or drive it … or simply stand in awe of it.

I love this country. Let me say it again. I love this insane country. People ask me why we don’t visit Paris or Beijing. Why we don’t travel the world. My answer is I want to see Death Valley. I want to go to the Everglades. I won’t be happy til we’ve gone to see the ancient bristlecone pine forests. I don’t care so much to stand in line to see the Parthenon or the Louvre. Sure, they would be great, fabulous, swell. But … I’d rather see the Appalachians in the fall. Big Sur anytime. Mt. Rainier again soon.

You can have your cities, all of them. I have a love affair with America, the land. We’re on a road trip to see what we haven’t seen before and a few places worth returning to. It’s a second honeymoon, a third, maybe a 25th. The mizzus is with me and I’m in 7th heaven. Heaven, I hope, if I believed in fairy tales, will look a lot like this.

Luck’s a funny thing.  Some folks don’t much believe in it – or don’t want to – since they think they’re the Captains of their own Destiny.  Me, I’m easily seasick on the storm tossed waters of my life … so I put more faith in luck than my own crummy navigational skills.  I guess living on the South End had a lot to do with it.  You find yourself on an island on the edge of a continent, you think it’s a short walk before the next move is a wet one.   I came when no one had heard of Camano, few people lived here and most of the cheap land was far down at the South End where I stumbled in one dark and stormy night.  Luck had pretty much run out, jobs were scarce and a bad marriage had foundered on the rocks thanks to the aforementioned maritime skills.
I bought a shack and 7 acres for the princely sum of $25,000, everything I had down, $225 a month for the next 15 years.  Sound cheap?  Well, I had a hard time meeting that mortgage the first few years.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the poorhouse.  Corny as an A.M. radio pop song, I fell in love, got married to my old sweetheart and fell in love too with my place, the South End and my life.  Lucky?  You bet!!
We take forks in the road all the time.  I know buddies who always wonder where the other road would’ve take them.  I don’t look back.  I don’t use the rearview mirror because it takes all my attention to drive the road I took, the one with the NEXT fork and the unexpected curve.  You ask me — and I know you didn’t —luck is part being ready for it.  It’s not a lottery ticket, it’s that small opening, that slim opportunity, that sudden chance that may not come twice, the one that veers up out of the headlights and offers, for those who are ready for it, a new game, a fresh start,  a brand new road.  Luck, I’ll admit this: it does take some skill.

What with all this global warming this year, the South End’s been inundated with snowstorms, monsoons, windstorms and bad craziness – all of it culminating in power outages that last for days.  The neighbors who didn’t snowbird it to Phoenix or Baja are about half deranged breathing generator fumes and cursing the PUD, the government, God and the day they retired to a backwash like South Camano. 

     I try to reassure em, being the Good Samaritan I am.  I tell em about the good old days where we lost the Grid for even longer, even more often.  I tell em how the missuz came to my love shack in ’81 in a raging storm.  Power out, trees down, tide lashing the beach, practically had to cut our way home to a dark shack she’d, fortunately, never set eyes on. 

     I tell em, think romantic.  Think oil lamps and candlelight, quiet conversation, flickering shadowplay and the haunting strains of a banjo gently weeping.  Think, this is how it once was.  The wind strumming the fir boughs and the world vibrant and pulsing in a way TV pretty much dulled.  Think of that old lovelight rekindled and warming like a cookstove, the dreams rising once again, yeasty and full of glutinous potential. 

     That’s how this old codger thinks of the South End.  And if I have to be reminded of it every storm, every power outage, every candled memory, well, it’s a welcome few days.  And Ma and Me, we think of em sort of as anniversaries.  Course, after 3 or 4 days, we’re ready for TV.  Or divorce.  Or maybe just a generator of our own.

Living here on the ‘Island You Can Drive To’, most of us only drive to the House You Live In. Kind of understandable, considering there’s no outlet malls or fast food franchises beyond our mailbox. Further on, there’s just more blacktop, identical mailboxes and, well, more of the same. Which I guess explains why most of our northern neighbors have essentially no idea whatsoever of what lies beyond their driveways to the south. You might think that commute to Stanwoodopolis and beyond would grow tiresome. You might think idle curiosity would kick in after the 1000th commute to I-5. What the hell IS down at the end of their island? Where do those other roads GO??

But no! We are creatures of habit, apparently. Whatever pioneer spirit led us to the end of America, we’re no Lewis and no Clark either. We’re like the Conestoga family headed west that took one glimpse of the fierce gauntlet of the upcoming Rockies and decided Kansas was plenty far enough. Better to take the easy way out than risk it for the improbability of a promised Paradise the brochures probably exaggerated.

A few years back we had some serious construction on the mainline down the gut of the island. Months of detours that forced the complacent shortest-distance-between-two-points-is-a-straight-line crowd to shunt over to the picturesque and historic west side. Believe me, to listen to the outraged outcry or read the vitriol in the letters to the editor, you’d have thought we’d routed them through the alleys of Hell or the horrors of Smokey Point. They wanted a detour on a blacktop nearby that was definitely not designed for heavy traffic and they wanted it NOW. Our commissioner, Bill Thorn, god bless his decisiveness, said no, it’s a temporary inconvenience and we won’t destroy a perfectly good road to make the GPS-averse electorate shut up their weeping and lamentations. Grow up, fer cryin out loud!

Next election, of course, the crybabies exacted revenge. Bye bye Bill. You can lead a horse to the South End, but he’ll thank you by kicking you half to death. Better, we’ve learned, just to tell em what they’re missing. No need to drive any further than necessary. Curiosity, after all, kills.