The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that’s indescribable to my backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classinG up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.      Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t Discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.      Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.

The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable inside straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”

Guitar Bob and I were sitting out with the dogs and couple of 6 strings, enjoying the last of what must be the warmest summer either of us have ever seen in our combined 70 plus years of living here in Pacific Northewest. The sun had set over the South End, traffic has slowed to a dribble, the hounds were lounging at our feet and a contemplative mood was descending on all four of us there on the porch while we played some blues and drank some beers.

Right before darkness settled in completely, the dogs set up a racket slightly out of rhythm with ours then raced to the fence on the highway to menace a passerby walking on the shoulder. Bob hauled the beasts back onto the porch and a voice floated across the summer lawn. “You mind if I play some guitar with you?”

I’d forgot Bob’s not partial to uninvited guests. Or even invited ones most of the time. So I mistakenly said, sure, c’mon in, the dogs won’t bite now that they’ve been fed. Bob hauled his guitar, his beer, his dogs all into the house and left me to play host. I gave the kid my guitar and he played something loud and a little troubling, but hey, music’s a universal language and he was doing the talking. My job was to listen.

He was, he explained when he’d finished his concerto, living down the road, trying to deal with ‘the auditory hallucinations’. He was a spiritual man, he blurted, but sometimes the spirits were intrusive. In the dark I couldn’t see his face or his expressions, just this voice explaining himself, his lack of work, loss of faith, those voices talking to him all the time. I asked if it helped to live down here all alone, end of an island, end of the world. He was thinking maybe he’d move back to the city. More work. More company.

After awhile I said it was nice talking with him, but I had to get on home. He got up and walked down the drive into a dark moonless night. Maybe voices were talking to him, I don’t know. I had the feeling they weren’t guiding him toward any light and I felt bad I wasn’t either. It can be a lonesome place, the South End, no worse maybe than other places, but when you lose your way down here, it can seem like a long ways back to the place you came from, the place you tried leaving in the first place….

The South End Gun Club meets every 3rd Thursday of the month, rain, shine, Hell or High Water. They have a short meeting, discuss New Bizness, welcome the new recruits (mostly women these days), then move right on out to the Range. Drinking used to be allowed, but after the incident with Fast Draw Davy, the club reluctantly voted to make abstinence a requirement. Probably a wise decision.

Davy was always, drunk or dead sober, a hothead. He could shoot the eyes off the Obama photo the Club loved to use for a target at 50 yards with everything from his Glock to a favorite semi-auto to a full auto. Some of the boyz had mixed feelings about this. No, not the President as target — they were almost universally hostile to a Muslim as Commander-in-Chief — but whether Davy should brandish his AR-15 at the Range, considering it was illegal to own a weapon of mass mayhem. But Davy had helped half the membership in conversion techniques and they felt somewhat reluctant to take a stand against a gun they themselves now owned … or coveted. Davy was damn proud of that machine and its undisputed firepower. He meant to show it off every chance he got.

The Range has a long and checkered history of late night firefights and high decibel debates, and the new arrivals to the adjoining properties, once pastures or woods, but now expensive McMansions whose professional owners liked their peace and quiet, didn’t much cotton to all these NRA zealots with their high caliber hi-jinx. As always, one man’s rights are another’s pain in the ass, but … welcome to the land of the free, home of the bravado.

When the sheriff’s deputies had come out on successive Thursday night meetings responding to the neighbors’ complaints that there was automatic weapon fire, Davy, being Davy, had become belligerent. He could quote the 2nd Amendment backwards and forwards and by god, no tin star punk kid was going to tell him what gun he could or couldn’t own. Maybe the fact that he was holding his prized rifle in one hand a beer in the other set off alarm bells in Deppity Richards playbook, but fifteen minutes later every available cop on the island was parked with blue lights strobing at the Club’s back lawn next to the shooting range and they were moving in, shotguns up and safeties off, and for a few moments it looked like an O.K. Corral showdown. Everybody but Davy put their armaments on the ground — obviously this was out of hand.

Davy, though…. Davy seemed to be considering his options. Seriously considering them. Which, if you’re an officer of the law and you’ve asked an armed man once, in a not polite way, to drop his weapon, you are expecting an immediate acquiescence, not a fidgety wild-eyed hesitation. When Davy set his beer can down, the Gun Club stepped backwards almost as one crowd. The cops brought down their riot guns and holy moly, what seemed almost comical a minute ago, wasn’t at all funny right now.

Billy Wasserman, the current president of the Club, said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dave …” about the time Deputy Richards repeated his demand the gun be put down NOW!

Well, Davy did. The officers handcuffed him, put his AR-15 in a squad car trunk and that night’s practice on the Range turned into a late night conference where alcohol was banned from all future meetings. As well as illegal firearms…. Davy got his gun confiscated along with a steep fine and two years of probation. He got himself another semi-automatic, converted it, but he never tries to bring it to the Club. Just like the rest. Laws might be made to be broken, but not flaunted. Even on the wild South End.

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

I read a letter to the editor recently from a newly minted graduate of our school system railing about that same school system as mostly purveyors of communist propaganda. It forced him to learn about Islam but didn’t teach the Bible. It taught him Egyptian history but never, not once, mentioned Moses parting the Red Sea. Apparently his science teachers wouldn’t touch it either, afraid, probably it would subvert the shaky foundations of rationalism.

I’ve lived here long enough to remember when those commies used to bring in Creationist speakers and when evolution was fairly taboo, days our Graduate would like to bring back. Religion, I’ve learned the hard way, is a tough subject to tiptoe around. Any religion. Just not an amusing topic for the True Believer. So mostly I just pick a safer target and hope not too many toes are stepped on.

But I hafta say, in a country that vents mightily about the Taliban or extreme Muslimism, it is troubling to realize the folks who hate the false gods and beliefs of others would gladly set up their own religious schools and maybe make 2nd class citizens of their Jewish classmates or their Sikh or Hindu or B”hai or Buddhist or Catholic or …. Well, anybody but their particular sect. They want freedom of religion all right. Theirs, not yours.

I wish religion WAS the opiate of the masses, but sadly, it’s the testosterone. Maybe if we didn’t have religious beliefs to fight about, we’d wage wars over scientific dogma instead. The Big Bangers vs. the Multi-Dimensionalists. Eat this theory, blasphemer!!

Facts, though, don’t seem to matter, just fervent faith. I can’t prove it … so what? I believe it so it’s true. Obama’s a Muslim, evolution is a fraud, the moon landing was hoax, God is a Christian, the universe sits on the back of a tortoise, aliens are among us, the world banking system is controlled by Zionists, the Stanwoodopolis school system is a communist conspiracy.

It’s nice to know that our taxes have done a fine job educating our children. I think they’ll be ready to take their place in society. Sometimes, honest to your God, even on the South End, there’s no place to hide from these people.

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously. Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd. Even if we had groundhogs! This thing just gives Science a bad name. And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, Mayan Calendar, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.
Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity. Hellfire, if winter’s just going to last until April, we figure there’s no point in fighting serious incentive-reducing Inevitability. We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait for spring. This is how civilizations thrive: they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and happy hours.
The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected. Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see? And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans. No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots. And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring. The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.
Simple. Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct. And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding. We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation. We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it. Crab Dog Day. Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register. If we can keep PETA at bay….

Being an adventurous yahoo, a curious sort, I ventured up north into the Cascade Mall, our local temple of consumerism in its heyday, now … well, a fluorescent and ghoulish mausoleum, mostly shuttered storefronts with a few zombies roaming the long corridors in search of the last remaining merchandise. Scary place on a rainy afternoon. Not even the teenagers hang here for social hour anymore, no doubt preferring to sex-text from the privacy of their homes.

I can remember when the mall got built, 1989, just north of the Skagit River on the road that connected Mt. Vernon to Burlington which became, instead of a sleepy two lane stretch with dying businesses, a four lane highway to Sears and Penneys and Macys in a gleaming half a million square foot emporium of commerce. The little strip malls of Mt. Vernon emptied in the wind that sucked the life out of them and downtown too. Outlet malls sprung up with the speed of overnight mushrooms, bursting through pavement and fill dirt. Burlington was on the map. When Arcan Cetin walked into the women’s department of Macys in 2016 and shot dead five people, the mall was already wobbling from the Great Recession’s toll of nearly ten years. Scary place indeed!

But here I am, looking for an oversized Pyrex baking pan that I couldn’t find in my usual thrift stores. Well, one scratched up one that I can go back to if need be…. I am a bit stunned at the vacancies of this place, entire wings with no stores, the main corridor empty except for odd little clothing boutiques, Victoria’s Secret, nails and pedicure salons, most devoid of any shoppers, some devoid even of salesclerks. But I stumble down to Macys bestrewn with banners announcing their Big Closing Sale, 50% off Everything in the Store! Boy, howdy, my lucky day.

Surprisingly the shelves are mostly still stocked. I wander with two other people through the kitchen stuff, find what I’m looking for and announce myself at the cash register, figuring sirens and lights would clamor forth with a small celebration of a Purchase! An elderly clerk asks if I’m ready and I nod a vociferous affirmation, you bet I’m ready to save half the price of this Pyrex beauty. He fumbles for a sheet of figures, mutters that he has difficulty with the calculations for housewares and, helpful as can be, I say 50%, like all the banners all around the store trumpet. Not too hard, eh?

But no, he informs me solemnly, housewares is only 25% off. I rebut that the signs all say Storewide 50% on Everything. Got him there, I’m sure. But mais no, monsieur, he tells me, the sign says UP TO 50%. If it does, you would need a microscope to see that miniscule caveat, but I know when I’m beaten, I know a bait and switch when I fall for one, and I also know there is no way on god’s warming earth I’m paying one dime more than 50% off the sticker price, plus, I remember why I never come to places like this to shop. Or will again.

Of course I also know by the time I drive back to Goodwill for that scratched Pyrex, some more savvy shopper will have grabbed it. Time, I suppose, to shop Ebay with the full appreciation that this will be another nail in the coffin that is … or was … Cascade Mall.

The year of the American Bicentennial I was a bit adrift. Marriage was gone to hell, jobs weren’t what I might have hoped for, the future didn’t look bright. I decided to take a Road Trip, maybe figure stuff out, maybe get myself a Plan, maybe not. I was 24 years old.

My old pickup, a rusty Army castoff, was my chariot to the Deep South, parts of which I had never been to, so I headed down through Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, headed, I had no doubt, for New Orleans. Around Little Rock I picked up a hitchhiker. My intention was to pick everybody with a thumb stuck out, take them where they were going, not as if it would be out of my way. The road was wide open, my nose was my GPS. And yeah, I know, kind of a hippie way of looking at things, but hey, when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, not that I really had, most directions look like Up. My hitcher was about my age, a little down on his luck too if I didn’t miss my guess.

“Where ya going?” I asked the guy who was my very first act of Good Samaritanship. “Goin to Little Rock,” he said, “to kill my no good bastard brother-in-law.” Now, I’m used to guy talk, rough around the edges, but just talk. Blowing off steam, nothing much more. But my rider wasn’t blowing off steam, at least not til he got to Little Rock where, he made it abundantly clear, even vivid, how he was going to dispatch his bastard brother-in-law.

Since I was just a sojourner on the road myself, both of us kind of lost souls, I gave him some half-assed advice that basically amounted to don’t kill the guy, bad karma, jail time, the usual pablum you yourself would give to the potential murderer riding shotgun in your pickup. I have no idea whether he killed that no good brother in law, but I had the feeling, by the time we reached Little Rock, he was reconsidering. I did what I could, right? Everything except call the Law.

My next hitchhiker was a 30 year old black guy standing next to a battered suitcase outside New Orleans. He was, he told me, just out of prison and the sheriff in his redneck Texas town told him he had 24 hours to get out … or else. He had a pretty good idea what that or else might be so he hit the road and here he was, on his way to Leesburg, Florida where some kin were. So yeah, we talked about the murder he committed, some white guy who was threatening a kid he was with supposedly, a white kid even, got 10 years, finally got out. Time for a New Start. You know, somewhere else.

He rode with me for a full day. For a murderer he seemed like an okay guy. Not knowing any other killers, I may not have been the best judge, but at least he wasn’t on his way to murder anybody like my last rider. Counts for something. When I pulled over to pick up two guys at a filling station, he grew extremely agitated. “No way, man, don’t give these guys a ride.” I asked why and he said “can’t you see they’re no good, man. They’re bad dudes, you don’t want to pick them up.” Maybe I was being harsh but I said “you killed a guy and you’re worried about these two?”

Well, in the end I drove past these bad dudes and felt a little bad that already I was violating my vow, my karmic duty. Looking back now some 40 odd years later, I think he was right. He knew people a whole lot better than me. You think maybe things can’t get much worse, you’re as big a fool as I was. I took my rehabilitated murderer all the way to Tallahassee, gave him an old sleeping bag since he wanted to wait til morning to go into town, wished him luck. He wished me the same. My luck eventually turned. I have a nagging suspicion that his maybe didn’t. I hope this time I’m wrong.