The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The temperature hit 60 degrees today, a couple weeks before the vernal equinox. 60 degrees, for any of you who live in less temperate climes, is basically a summer day here, what we call unseasonably warm. On days like this we drop what we’re doing and we get our butts outdoors. Which I did. Which is where I am right now, sitting at our picnic table, pen in hand, beer at the ready. I know, it’s a tough life … but save your pity for those poor souls who have jobs, indoor jobs anyway.

Seemed like a good day to wander into the Pea Patch so I did. Cut up potatoes and planted them in mounds. Sowed seed for salad. Hauled the scarecrow over to a new spot. Roto-tilled. Put up the pea fence. Gentleman farmer, that’s me.

Every year I say I’m going to cut back, grow only the stuff that grows well with our cold maritime nights. And every year I plant the whole she-bang all over again. Corn that barely ripens, artichokes that have heads the size of a pingpong ball, tomatoes that stay green. If I didn’t, I’d think I was Backsliding. And when you reach my ripe old age, you want to keep any forward momentum going even if it’s de-accelerating faster than reverse glacial accretion. It’s the same with woodcutting. I think, gee, maybe I’ll switch to propane heat. Save hauling 10 or 12 cord of wood out of the back 40, just hit a thermostat when I’m chilly. But I know it’s a slippery slope. And that slope leads to a Laz-y-Boy and a channel changer.

What I think is you have to see the future as Potential. As Progress. You have to have something to work Toward. And don’t mean tonight’s PBS programming. Me, I’m growing dinner. I’m splitting my heat for a warmer winter. I came to the country so I’d be tuned into the seasons, I’d till the land, I’d plant orchards and I’d make firewood. Sure it gets harder every year. Damn right it does. But not near as hard as the day when I sit here looking at an overgrown garden gone to grass and weed again because I can’t bend down far enough to poke seeds into the ground.

But today feels like spring and as we say on the South End, hope springs eternal. My salad days aren’t over yet and my woodsheds are nearly full. I’m even betting this will be a good tomato year. Like I bet every year….

Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. He kept on digging the hole he was digging. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl, the night bartender, will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

You live in a remote backwash like we do, you might think life is passing you by. But even for those of us sitting still, the world keeps spinning. Live long enough and you’ll have a book or two of stories, I guarantee you. Even Little Billy.

Little Billy lives in the While-a-While trailer park that Ralph Wissmach set up back in the ‘70’s, not really zoned for it, but that was back when the South End was a little wilder and regulations were flaunted with impunity if not relish. Ralph owned most of the single wides, hauled them in as rentals, then leased them PLUS added power and water surcharges. If Ralph hadn’t acquired a ferocious taste for blended whiskies, he might have done okay, but he drank most of his rent money and neglected upkeep in the park. By the turn of the century the While-a-While was a ghetto, tenants made payments only occasionally and the sheriff steered clear if possible.

Little Billy’s castle was the trailer at the end, leaning partly into the woods, curtains always drawn. The adjoining trailer was vacant, curtains fluttering tattered out its broken window, allowing Billy even more privacy. Cats by the dozen came in and out at Billy’s through a pet door he had cut into the fiberglass back door of his abode. His neighbors saw more of the feline herd roaming the park than they did of Billy.

The Trouble began when the Carter brothers rolled in one windswept monsoonal day late in November, off-loaded their rust-eaten 4×4 trucks, then, over the next week, were joined by their kin and girlfriends until the trailer was wild with metal rock and constant fighting. Strange cars and grungy people came night and day. Billy kept an imperious silence through the next couple of months. Except for the cats the Carter clan would’ve suspected his place abandoned.

Then, one drizzly night after New Years, the Carters decided to amuse themselves by shooting at Billy’s cats with a couple of .22’s. By the time Billy stepped out on his rickety porch step, three of his felines were dead or bleeding next to the trailer. Billy stood stock still, just a silhouette in the backlit doorway, and watched silently as Joel Carter, drunk on Jack Daniels, stoned on grass and cranked on meth, lifted his rifle to his lips and pretended to blow the smoke away. Before he laughed and went back inside.

What went through Joel Carter’s empty head when Billy came knocking, nobody will ever know. “Wuzzup, asshole?” he muttered to Little Billy who was standing on the porch with a .38 in one hand and a bleeding cat in the other. When he saw the pistol, he smirked. “What now, Wyatt? We gonna shoot it out at the OK??”

Billy, apparently not much for light banter, put a slug in Carter’s kneecap, eliciting a howl that could be heard out to the highway. He watched the backrooms of the trailer erupt into activity, the entire tribe now gathered and shrieking like deranged Banshees. Billy held his gun up for silence and got it immediately. Then he shot a writhing Joel Carter in the other leg, brought the weapon to his lips and in an ironic gesture lost on the assembled trailer trash, blew smoke off the end of the barrel.

In the novel that won’t be written, Billy might have driven off into the night, never to be heard from again. But this being real life and not Hollywood, the sheriffs arrived 15 minutes later and took Billy away. He gave no resistance and the only words anyone heard him speak was when they shoved his head down before he was put in the back seat of the cruiser. “Someone needs to care for those cats.”

We got a serial thief in the neighborhood, known pretty much to all of us and the sheriff. Like most of our thieves, he’s got an opioid problem, meaning, he’s graduated from oxycontin to heroin . Since he doesn’t work, money to buy his drugs is a constant concern. So he decided on a life of crime here on the fiscally troubled South End.

When he first embarked on robbery as a career track, he broke into the next door neighbor’s house, kicked in the front door and lugged out a safe. A few days later and a few doors down, he kicked in the front door and hauled out their safe. Then, a few more days later…. well, you know the modus operandi by now. If you were a wily detective in the sheriff’s crack crimestopping force, you could just about follow the crumbs that led back to Bobby’s lair where he lived with his grandmother. All of us could.

He was eventually pulled over for a moving violation and lo and behold, he was found carrying all manner of stolen goods. He went to jail a few months, then recently was released. His grandma, bless her understanding heart, took him back in. He promised he would quit the needle, get some help, maybe even get a job. She believed him; after all, he was blood.

Well, maybe you’ve never known a junkie. Maybe you think they’re a lot like you only a little down on their luck. Maybe you think if they only caught a break. Or a grandma who’d give them a hand up, they’d be okay. They’d become good citizens, get a job, pay taxes, go straight. I’m a bleeding heart liberal but I’ve know a few junkies. I lived with one for awhile down in Seattle and Gomorrah. And she ended up stealing from me. Not because she disliked me. Just because she needed drugs more than she needed friendship.

So last week grandma’s safe turned up missing, back window broken into, her jewelry and coin collections hauled out the front door. I asked if anyone thought it was Bobby and no, it must’ve been that other addict down the road, the one whose brother just got out of prison, a junkie too. Great, an ever increasing number of suspects.

Grandma, though, found some of her coins that were in the purloined safe on Bobby’s floor when she came in to vacuum, pretty irrefutable evidence, and so she confronted her ward and of course he hit the front door running and lit out down the highway. Grandma called the Law. I suppose a Philadelphia lawyer might ask why she didn’t call the Law first, maybe let them question Bobby, but that never occurred to her apparently. So her loot and jewels are gone along with her grandson. I give it about a year, Bobby’ll be back with another chance to turn his life around, all forgiven once again, this will make it about the fourth or fifth time. I don’t know if inbreeding is to blame, but the South End’s getting a sad reputation, you ask me.

I got a brother-in-law,Jimmy, who’s been unemployed awhile. His job got eliminated and since he’s near 60 without a lot of work experiences or training, new jobs were hard to come by. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, one of the many who believe that only the shiftless don’t work, only the ‘takers’ are on food stamps, only those who feel ‘enititled’ accept government handouts. Although he thought it was okay to take unemployment compensation.

Well, he ran that until the fund was empty and so, too young to retire, he hit the streets looking for a job to tide him over until Social Security kicks in. Don’t tell him Social Security is a form of socialism. Not while Bernie Sanders is running for President. Unfettered capitalism is his religion, don’t muddy it with Obamacare or Medicare or the rest of those quasi-commie programs. He’s not bitter he was laid off — he’s an Ayn Randian who believes the Captains of Commerce have done their best DESPITE government interference. Minimum wage should be just that: the minimum the market will bear. EPA, OSHA, the FDA — get them off corporate backs and let corporations compete freely. Laissez faire! The gospel according to Rockefeller and Carnegie and Gates.

Ask him about corporate welfare, tax breaks for Boeing, government subsidies, sweet capital gains on hedge fund managers — he see that as ‘just doing business.’ His mizzus, laid off from her bank years back, found work at a community college and they both hated she’d found a public service vocation. Good benefits, though…. They gave her lots of allowance when her depression worsened, granted sick leaves and absences. When she couldn’t work at all, they finally cut her loose and let her collect unemployment. She too swallowed her Republican pride and ran the account to its end. By then Jimmy had his pink slip.

These are hard times for the working poor of America and there are hard lessons to be learned. By those willing to learn…. Jimmy, I heard yesterday, had finally found gainful employment. “What did he find?” I asked, glad they wouldn’t have to sell their house. Next time you go into your local WalMart, that Greeter at the door with the smiley face vest and the ‘Welcome to WalMart”, there’s Jimmy, pleased as punch he works in corporate America, greatest country on earth. I suspect in a month he’ll change his tune on that minimum wage issue.

Nettleopathy

Down here in the hortichuckled South End, we’ve been working tirelessly in our bio-tech greenhouses to get a leg up on the competition for artisanal medical nettle in preparation for full legalization. The naysayer would add pessimism to persistent fogs, pests and piracy for our prickly perennials, but our agrarians won’t be deterred. Certainly not in the face of hoped for profits when the crops are paroled when their many medicinal attributes overcome the fears of a paranoid anti-itch society.

Admittedly we have an uphill climb. Anecdotal horror stories of recreational nettle users overdosed and overscratched back in the ravines days after their unsupervised experimentation still serve fodder to those without scientific understanding of our latest advances. Superstition still surrounds the eight foot itching posts that darken the interior of the South End trail system. Many of the neighbors assumed the Barefoot Bandit, like his mythic predecessor D.B. Cooper, had perished in the nettle jungles trying to escape the relentless dragnets of our inimitable law enforcement officers. More likely he used the nutritious plants for survival and herbal remedy.

Thanks to our researchers’ unravelling of the genus Urtica’s genome, we’ve engineered strains of nettles scarcely irritable to a baby’s backside. Now, hopefully with a healthy influx of venture capital from investors who can realize profits heretofore unimaginable, we can begin the P.R. campaign to bring Medical Nettle out from under its pharmacological reputation as the Bad Boy of Invasive Plants to a more reasoned and sane understanding by the general public. Nettleopathy, the gentle application of epidermal stimulation, may soon be as accepted a healing technique as acupuncture (without the needles!) Fear and ignorant superstition will give way to scientific method and enlightened medical practice. The Dark Ages, my friend, are over for the South End. Artisan Nettle: Better Living Through Genetic Modification. And coming to a shop near you….

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium. He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights. Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….
So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders. The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait. Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays. Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday. Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger. And … well, shure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.
My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture? Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency? Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy? Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?
All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation. The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

Well, it’s time again for a vacation to the snowy tundra of Wisconsin, maybe take a breather from the strange politics of this primary season, give you a break too from these ramblings and rantings.  I’ll try to keep up but if I fall behind, scroll down for some oldies and maybe not too goodies from the distant past.  I barely remember writing them so you probably don’t remember reading them.

Help us drive the snakes out of Stanwoodopolis this Thursday night 6-9 PM with a wee Celtic celebration at the Stanwood Hotel. We’re greenin’ the town and celebrating an early spring. Lads and lassies one and all come down and dance to the wild jigs of the South End String Band. There be blarney stones plenty to kiss and leprechauns to toss. If you’re lucky enough to be Irish … you’re plenty lucky enough! Thursday night we’re ALL Irish.
Stanwood Hotel March 17th, 6-9 PM

Maybe you missed the big news this week: physicists have observed gravitational waves, something Einstein predicted 100 years ago. Or maybe you heard, but you’re like me, wondering what I’m supposed to do with this breaking news, run out and buy a surfboard? A few years ago, okay, over a billion years ago two black holes ate themselves, distorting space and time just like Albert said they would.

You might be asking yourself, where do black holes go when they shrink and shrink and grow incredibly dense? Their gravitational pull sucks in even light itself. Hard to see the inside of these if no light is emitted. Telescopes are pretty much useless, sorry Hubble.

I wonder sometimes if the reason people don’t believe in science is that deep down we don’t understand it. Take quantum physics, for instance. Really strange behavior on the subatomic level. Particles behave different if they’re being observed. Don’t know about you, but this is mind boggling to me. How do you trust experiments if the experimenter affects the results just by watching?

The world we live in is beyond us now. Computers and lasers, microwaves and particle accelerators — I suppose they made Facebook possible and maybe that’s plenty for 95% of us. Gravitational waves, oh boy, let us see back to the Big Bang, sure, but will it give us better cellphones or 3-D printers? Those we can believe in, not the mumbo jumbo that contributed to ceating them.

Pretty soon our cars will do most of our driving, our machines will do most of our thinking. Satellites will spin in geosynchronous orbit and our TV reception will improve. Hopefully these gravitational waves won’t fuzz things up. We got some favorite programs to watch.