The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

“Nobody likes lawyers … until you need one.” My brother, attorney at law

Texas is drowning. Well, maybe not all of the Lone Star state, but the Houston area just got the most rainfall in U.S. history, some 50 inches in less than a week when Hurricane Harvey stalled over them and dumped the equivalent of one and a half inches over the entire continent. That, for you literalists, is a helluva lot of bathtubs overflowing.

The President even flew down there, no insignificant deal when you consider he has no Trump resorts or hotels to overnight at with his contingency. And you thought Houstonians were suffering! Nevertheless, tens of thousands are homeless, roads are impassable, 40,000 houses are ruined and the rest will soon be filled with black mold and soggy drywall. FEMA will bring in the formaldehyde trailers and contractors from all over the country will haul crews and equipment into Houston for a years-long cleanup estimated to be 50-100 billion dollars.

This is a catastrophe of the first order. All that chatter of Texas seceding from the United States, that’s going to be forgotten soon as Ted Cruz tries to round up the federal relief funds he voted against after Hurricane Sandy. The Damn Government?? You can forget that kind of cowboy talk now, not when folks need a hand.

All that blather about self reliance, independent Westerner, keeper of the Alamo’s legend — let’s cut to the chase. We have government to do the things we can’t do individually. The Texans will learn soon enough that this is not Evil, it is not necessarily Big Brother — it’s the way we build and sustain civilizations. So if secession is what they want, fine, turn down the money, Ted, the rest of us can use it to build roads, schools and courthouses.

Remember the Alamo, Ted. But keep in mind, they all died.

So I’m in the grocery store frequented by the high school crowd at lunch breaks and on the wall of their latrine I find scrawled with a knife: Dare to be Normal. Driving into the parking lot minutes before, I had noticed a young girl dressed hat to boot in black, adorned in all manner of body puncture, looking for all the world like a poster child for National Sado-Masochism Day. Except for the pink stuffed animal strapped to her backpack. Inside the rough exterior of our would-be dominatrix lurks the soft heart of an innocent adolescent, apparently.

When I left the store I noticed a small knot of teenagers waiting at the crosswalk beside the highway for the light to change. All identical to the teddy bear toter, sans the teddy bear. Sure, it occurred to me to roll down the window and yell Dare to be Normal! but …. And here’s the rub …. These kids were normal. When we went to high school, we all pretty much looked homogenous — go check out your yearbook if you still got one. I don’t really want to dare anybody to be normal. Vote Ike again. Drive a Chevy. Drink Coke. Eat a Popsickle. Listen to the Beatles. Join the Army. Get a Job. Cut your Hair! Take out the Nose Ring!! Buy something at the Mall!!! Get married !!!! Have a family!!!!!!! Get a cemetery plot ahead of time!!!!!!!

Next time I’m in the grocery store, I’ll be looking for my little graffiti writing conformist. I assume he’ll be the one who isn’t dressed Goth, doesn’t have tattoos, wears blue suede shoes and a letter jacket and sports a butch crewcut regular color. He’ll look like my old man, is what I figure. And Dad, if it IS you philosophizing on the bathroom wall, knock it off! The kids will turn out like you after all, count on it.

“Cursed are the evildoers!” Pastor Paul cried to the congregation of the Little Church in the Ravine this past Sunday. “God will smite them and their wicked ways!” he exclaimed as he held his battered leather bound King James version above his head, a mighty instrument of the Lord. “Just as he punished the wicked in Noah’s day, so will he punish them now!” And with that he pounded his Bible to the plywood pulpit with a resounding bang that stunned his flock.

“There is no escape from the Lord’s Judgement! The Sodomites are drowning in their own sin. The EndTimes are truly upon them! They will be judged just as each and every one of us will be judged. Only the repentant will be saved. Only those who renounce their sins. Ask yourselves, each of you, do you want to drown in a sea of fire? Do you?”

Pastor P. was sorely agitated, obviously. The assembled sinners were squirming in their metal folding chairs, quiet as the condemned. Down in Houston the waters were rising by the hour. The Great Flood, as Paul had predicted many a Sunday service, was finally upon them. The news from Texas was grim and getting grimmer. No one was to be spared in a city of millions. People were being rescued off their roofs, by fishing boats and helicopters. Houston was one gigantic lake with no escape.

Pastor Paul had paused for effect and was just about to exhort once more, lifting the Bible up for another hammerblow, when Sarah Jensen suddenly stood up in the middle of the aisle where she had been sitting. Her mother lived in Houston and she hadn’t heard Word One since the hurricane took out power and communications to the city. Her mother was 83 and certainly no sinner, Sarah had been thinking. She lived in a groundfloor apartment by herself, managed to get around with the help of a walker, lived day to day by herself. Sarah was fearful she would be trapped in that apartment with no one to help her and here she was 2000 miles away listening to Pastor Paul ranting about Judgement Day.

She had stood up, but once up, she couldn’t move. Just stood there like a small tree in the torrential current of Pastor Paul’s fiery sermon. It was as if she had risen to leave, perhaps. Or …. what? Catch her breath? Every eye in that congregation waited expectantly for her to do something. To speak. To sit back down. To leave the church. But Sarah didn’t move. Finally tears began to fall from her bowed head, slowly at first, a hot trickle, then a constant stream. Someone touched her hand. Pastor Paul seemed to be speaking, maybe to her. How long she stood there, she didn’t know. And when they helped her to the door and then to her car, she didn’t care. It seemed like it was raining all over the world.

Sarah’s mom called later that afternoon from a Red Cross shelter. Some Samaritan in a fishing boat had motored down her block calling to folks who might still be trapped indoors. He heard Sarah’s mother answer from inside her apartment and he carried her out through the brown swirling floodwaters to his skiff. The man had another elderly gentleman on the seat beside her and in the back were two dogs her rescuer had found swimming side by side. The man by her side said to her over the noise of the outboard motor once they were under way, “Kind of a small Ark, ain’t it?”

I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

We take so much for granted, us Moderns. Oh, I don’t mean you, of course. Me, maybe. But the truth is we live in a predictable world, electricity always on, water in the taps, thermostat at our fingertips. Get our food when we’re hungry, get our entertainment at the touch of a button or a mouse. Life’s easy for us Americans. Complacency is our middle name.

So why is it we whine so much?? Are we spoiled brats in the Garden of Eden, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have? Have we become soft and lazy sitting at our computers, goofing with our ‘devices’? Two Toke Tom thinks it’s something else the night we’re parked on his rickety porch waiting for the full moon to rise out across Port Susan about where Mt. Pilchuck has turned the last of its snow golden as if God Herself had poured butterscotch topping on its ice cream peak.

“You and me, Skeeter, we’re the last of our kind.” Tom had been living up to his nick name while I’d been working on a beer or three. “We’re outliers.”

“Outlaws, you mean?” I asked, not sure what he was driving at.

“We’re outside looking in. We want heat, we cut wood. We want water, it comes from our well. Food’s out in the garden, down at the beach. We’d rather build something than buy something. You built a house and I did too. You build boats, I build furniture.”

“What’s your point, Tom?” I cut in, knowing he could go on past midnight with this. We’d done it many a moon, full or not.

“I mean, we live in the world.” When he didn’t elaborate, I said, “We all live in the world,” but he shook his head. “Naw, not the natural world. They live in offices, they live in fluorescent light, they live inside their entertainment center, they think nature is the weeds out by their sidewalk. They’ve gotten themselves stranded, man, and they don’t get what they’re missing anymore. They got their social media bullshit and that’s their reality, talking to people they don’t know or can’t see or who the hell cares? It’s all two dimensional. It’s all disconnected from this.” He swept his arm out into some galaxy he was apparently Seeing. “People have lost touch, that’s what I’m saying. They’d rather live in the Digital World. Pretty soon they’ll have little automatons living with them. Bots, man, doing their bidding. And when the robots decide to take over, people won’t even notice. Because they’ll be robots too, man.”

“Cut back on the weed, Tom,” I said, popping my next beer. “We got our own issues.”

Fortunately the moon began to show over by Three Finger Jack, just a glow at first, then quicker than you might think, a fat pumpkin of a moon orbiting the globe while we sat lost in our own thoughts on a porch on an island where the world kept spinning whether we noticed or not.

“Just like in the movies,” I said.

“Pretty as a hologram,” Tom cracked back.

I was a kid in Georgia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wasn’t real sure how far we were from Havana, but some of the neighbors were real sure the commies were going to nuke the bejabbers out of our locale so they put concrete block fallout shelters in their basements. Malcom, the father of my friend Anita, kept his hunting rifle by the door and told me, when he gave me the tour of this subterranean future home, how he would have to shoot me and my family when we came begging to get in when the bombs began to fall.

At school we did the nuclear drill, the one where we got under our desk. Don’t look at the blast, we were instructed, you’ll be blinded. I’m not sure if my desk was sufficient to stop radiation, but hey, any port in a storm. Now that I’m an old geezer and managed to live through decades without having ICBM’s landing in the neighborhood, it’s a little like deja vu to have all this talk of Korean missiles landing in our backyard. I’m expecting half the neighbors to start digging their fallout shelters any day. The news, gotta love those folks, like to keep the drumbeat going.

Me, I’m too old to excavate for our shelter. The neighbors probably think they should keep a hunting rifle next to their door to keep me and the mizzus out when the nukes rain down, but I plan to reassure them. We have an old school desk next to our front door, usually for sitting on when we put our shoes on to go outside. I figure if it was good enough in 1962, it’s good enough now. We just have to remember to keep our eyes shut when the mushroom cloud shows up down the road….

A lot of you readers out there maybe didn’t know you were part of a national conspiracy of radicals bent on violence and the destruction of the American Way, did you? I sure didn’t. Here I was, minding my own bizness, trying not to get wound up by every tweet my Commander-in-Chief sends out, a little troubled by that riot in Virginia maybe over taking down that statue of Gen. Bobby E. Lee, but c’mon, what with the Korea nuke scare and the end of civilization as we know it, what’s a small re-enactment of the Civil War?

Some Nazi nutcase runs down a few folks, well, who’s going to defend him, right? The authorities caught him quick enough, the courts will handle the rest. Call it domestic terrorism, call it murder one, call it a sad day in the USA, but nobody in their right mind would cut this guy slack. He is, after all, a Nazi and nobody likes Nazis except maybe other Nazis.

But now I’m learning that those liberals, meaning you and me, don’t kid yerself, are just as bad. Extreme violence, inciting mayhem, protesting methinks a bit too much. Alt-Left. Dangerous, radical, menacing and un-American. Folks who want those statues of the brave white men who fought so valiantly to keep slavery alive in their cotton picking states taken down along with the Confederate flag flying over state capitols and county courthouses. Just as bad as the Aryan Nation crowd. Just as dangerous as the white supremacists. You didn’t know that? Well, ignorance is no excuse. Not these days….

Now, I’m like you probably, sort of confused. But before we run out and lobby for a Hug-A-Fascist Day, let’s just try to calm down, get our priorities straight and, if possible, join the Mainstream. Try some daytime TV or binge on Netflix. If you think you’re part of the solution, wake up, you’re really part of the problem. Sorry to hafta tell ya.

For months now the lamestream news, desperate for something to report other than the President’s latest tweetstorms, has been hyping the lunar eclipse. “Life changing,” some of the folks interviewed claimed, one guy having gone to 8 or 9 around the globe. I guess his life needs changing the way my truck’s oil needs changing. Regularly and often.

Down in Oregon where the total eclipse will be visible along a track stretching from this coast to the Atlantic ocean, traffic is already starting to back up out in the rural areas where folks have reserved every motel, airbnb and cabin available. Needless to say, the laws of supply and demand are in full force. Hotel rooms run into the thousands of dollars, camping spaces go for hundreds. Good luck finding a porta potty, the rumor is there are none to be found at this late date if you were contemplating renting your backyard to a few dozen sungazers. Gas prices are shooting up and now the stations report they’re completely out of fuel. Life changing? I’m starting to see the truth in that observation.

Up here we’ll get 90% of the eclipse. I was going to offer up our airbnb rental at 90% of the going rate down in Nowhere, Oregon, but I was a little late getting a jump on the capitalist action. You snooze, you lose. I could feel sorry for myself, you know, knowing my life will not change with this astronomical event of the decade, but I plan to be out in the eelgrass Monday morning chasing Dungeness crab around. I’m hoping when the daylight suddenly goes very dim on these primitive creatures, they’ll freak and come out of their hidey holes. Me, a modern boy fully versed in the laws of nature and the orbits of the moon, will be waiting for them. I know in these post-modern Trumpian times, knowledge can be a useless weapon sometimes, but the Day of the Eclipse, I’m figuring the Light’s going to come back. Call me an optimist.

I was a kid in Georgia, first grade until seventh. We moved there from the North Carolina Appalachians and we’d moved to North Carolina from the pine forests of central Mississippi. Y’all can still hear some of my Southern drawl even 55 years since I moved back into the North. But when I moved to Georgia, what they heard was Yankee. And what I heard from them was nearly an incomprehensible foreign language.

I took a mandatory year of Georgia History in 6th grade. Mrs. Crabtree taught it and Mrs. Crabtree thought 90% of Georgia History was the Civil War. We didn’t study much U.S. History, probably to my school it was more like World History. Mrs. Crabtree was pretty adamant that the wrong side won the War Between the States, the Yankee Invaders. Me, I was definitely on the Wrong Side, story of my sorry life.
You folks who haven’t lived awhile south of the Mason-Dison Line, you maybe think the North won that war. What you don’t understand is that the Confederacy never really surrendered. Oh sure, Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant at Appomatox in 1865, but most of the South didn’t sign those documents. They still haven’t. You maybe think slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, but like I said, you haven’t lived down there. The KKK still runs rural towns, blacks weren’t slaves, they’re sharecroppers, voting rights are systematically undermined by Jim Crow and now voter suppression laws, the South still flies the Confederate flag, the South still reveres Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the rebel generals who fought to save their ‘culture’.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re tackling that thorny issue of whether we should be celebrating the folks who fought to preserve slavery. One hundred and fifty years later we’re fighting the same war Lincoln did. Most of this country thinks the statues should stay put. Sort of like Grant letting the rebels take their horse and their guns and their white privilege home — you know, in the spirit of Yankee generosity.

Me, as a former Yankee in Jefferson Davis’ Court, I say it’s time to declare Victory once and for all. Take the statues down, remove the Confederate flag and give blacks equal rights. If this seems harsh, if this seems like we’re disrespecting Cracker Culture, get over it. We let this go for a century and a half. And Mrs. Crabtree, if you’re still alive, I got some news for you. The right side won.

The mizzus came in today from collecting the daily papers down the hill on the road and said it was eerie. Eerie? I asked. Eerie, she said. No birds chirping, no birds making any noise at all. This afternoon I was up island with a friend watching an owl land in her backyard cedar tree. No crows came flying in to hound it half to death. No robins slammed their bodies up against it. The woods was, well, eerie for lack of cacophony.

My friend mentioned what Karen had said, the birds weren’t chattering away, they weren’t twittering or tweeting, they were silent. It was as if the internet had suddenly gone Dark. The aviary e-mails weren’t rolling in, the news feeds had gone dead, the social network had shut down. It was, okay, eerie.

We’re in a weird meteorological vortex, the high pressure cell off the coast is dragging hot weather up from far down south with temperatures hitting three figures by tomorrow or the next, about 15 degrees above normal, plus, the fires up in British Columbia are raging and now we’re pulling the smoke down here. We can’t see across to the Olympics anymore and Whidbey Island, a mere three miles away, is barely visible. The smell of woodsmoke is everywhere. I wonder if the birds and everything else in the woods is waiting to see if the conflagration is coming.

I tended bees for a short time. If you went into the hives, you smoked the entryway. This sent the honeybees into a fire drill of grabbing up the babies, scooping up honey, guarding the queen and in general, getting ready for the holocaust. Smoke, I imagine, sends a vestigial message to all of us critters out here in the wilderness. Fire is coming. Get ready. Shut up and pay attention.

Course, I don’t really know. Faux science on my part. I could set up some experiments, burn the back woods and see what the creatures behind me do. Run a few double blind studies, crank out the analysis, submit the data, posit a theory. Get some grants, apply to the U.W. science department for some research assistants, see if I could get some sponsors in the corporate world.

But you know I’m not gonna do any of that. I’m going to watch and listen awhile. I’m going to see if the birds stay silent so long as the smoke darkens the sky. I may keep my mouth shut myself. Like Karen sez, it’s eerie.