The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I know a lot of folks who are upset as hell about our porous borders. We got Mexicans coming up through Texas, Central Americans sneaking in through Arizona, Cubans boating into Florida, Microsoft retirees rolling into the South End. It’s apparently no more possible to secure the bridge onto the island than it is to guard the southern borders. This last week the Governor of Wisconsin, running for President but fading fast, proposed a fence on the Canadian border. I guess those disenchanted hockey players up north might be contemplating a mass exodus. Over in Europe the refugees from the Middle East are flooding the continent.

Me, I’m not too worried about Canadians. I’m worried about the immigrants we’re building in Amazon, at GM, in factories across America. Robots! That’s what worries me. Job-takers. Amazon wants to use drones to make deliveries door to door. Forget building a wall — they’ll just fly over. Gated community? Not unless they put up a canopy over the entire suburb.

Computers with bodies. Robots with attitude. Artificial intelligence smarter than me and my neighbors. Just what we need…. We’ll look back with nostalgia at the Hispanic crews who used to manicure the fescued yards of the wild South End, folks who you could talk to, folks who ate lunch at the Diner, real folks, flesh and blood folks. With families. And dreams.

The only dream a robot’s gonna have is to take your place. They already hypnotized most of us now. We live in their world, the virtual, digitized one we still think is in our control. Oh yeah, the immigrants are coming all right. We’re bringing em in like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Only they take over while we’re wide awake.

It’s Harvest Time on the South End and no, I’m not talking about marijuana. The Bud Hut and legalized cannabis pretty much ended that era. I’m talking kraut. Sauerkraut. I know most folks wouldn’t put a forkful of the stuff near their dog, much less their mouth, but I spent some time in Wisconsin where kraut was considered, if not a delicacy, a staple. So I guess it was only natural that I became an artisanal kraut maker.

We got a couple of huge old stoneware crocks, one 8 gallon and one 12 gallon, that we’ve used, oh, the last 20 odd years. We have an antique maple cabbage shredder that sits over the crock with three blades about 6 inches long that a head of cabbage riding on a little box carriage passes over while each blade shreds nice long ribbons into. When we have a few inches’ worth we add a handful of non-iodized salt and a big handful of garlic, then shred some more. Once we got the crock full we haul it down to the shack where the fragrance won’t disturb those with delicate olfactory buds. They think it stinks to high heaven. Which it does about one day later.

The cabbage, see, is fermenting. Bacteria starts breaking it down and the water that’s released gets frothy and aromatic. I got a weighted stoneware lid that keeps the cabbage under the foam and in the liquid. When you think you like the stage of fermentation — or when you can’t take the smell any longer — you haul the crock back up into the kitchen and you bottle it in Mason jars. That’s what we’re doing tonight. Some jars we’ll boil to stop the fermentation and some we’ll just put in sterilized jars, let them keep ‘working’.

The old timers would keep their crocks in the cellar over winter, scrape off the mold and enjoy all those probiotics long before the yuppies ever heard of yogurts and live fermenting foods. Me, I’m not a big fan of scraping molds off my foods. Probiotics are one thing, fungus is another….

Next week’s food blog we’ll explore the mysteries of homebrewing. Probiotics with a Kick!

CEO’s ‘wages’ are going up faster than skyscrapers in Seattle and Gomorrah, the paper said yesterday. This is good news indeed if you believe in trickle down economics, not so good if you have to scrape for rent and groceries. Like my old Uncle Bernie used to say, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’. Course, now that he’s one of the richer, he figures we all can get there too. The poor? Well, all boats rise in an incoming tide of wealth, which might’ve been truer when wealth was more evenly distributed.

Little Jimmy, an auto body worker at O-Zi-Ya Body and Paint, makes a little more than minimum wage but not much more. He’s got a wife, Lisa, who works part time at Jolene’s Gift and Boutique and she does make minimum wage, no more. They have three kids and a second mortgage on their double-wide over on the east side of the island. One of the kids, Julie, has a congenital heart condition which requires surgeries and medications. They’re in debt up to their collective eyeballs. You might think they’d be all for Obamacare, cut into those expenses. But you’d be wrong.

Jimmy got into it with Two Toke Tom the other night at the Pilot Lounge. Two Toke was celebrating the Supreme Court’s latest decision that turned back the move to kill the Affordable Health Care Act. Little Jimmy was positively livid. “Socialized health care!” he fairly screamed.

“What the hell, Jimbo?” T.T asked. “You don’t have ANY health care.”

Jimmy, red in the face and pounding his fist on the table, spilling beers, cried, “I pay my own way, Tom. I’m not a #@*&)*!^ freeloader.”

“Okay, okay, Jim. Settle down. They aren’t handing out free beer,” Tom said, “and I’ve lost about a buck’s worth on the table here.”

Jimmy went for a bar rag, shaking his head. Two Toke drew circles in the foamy puddles, tasted a finger, then smiled sadly in my direction. “I know,” he whispered, “let it go.”

I knew he was thinking about Julie. Me too. What neither of us knew was whether Jimmy was.

The Upcreekomish, once a proud nation feasting on the yearly salmon runs, wanted for nothing.  Their hunting and fishing prowess was known up and down the coast, their art was envied, their canoes admired.  They traded with the coastal clans, but for the most part they kept to themselves upriver.  When the whites settled nearby, trapping and mining, the Upcreekomish shook their collective heads but maintained peaceful relations.  Who knew they would lose everything to these men with shovels and saws?

The Otter Creek Trading Post — at least according to Three Finger Bill, a hapless logger who made it back out of the woods before he started whittling away toes and feet with his 40 inch chainsaw — claims the Post was the old Grabbinrun Mining Company’s general store back in the late 1880’s.  The Upcreekomish traded furs for canned food, salmon for bad hooch and various totem carvings for tobacco.  Was it a bad trade?  Three Finger will tell you he’s got a cedar chest ornamented with a beaver totem the professors down at the University offered 6 figures for, about the number of his fingers still usable.  Bill tells me he doesn’t need the money and besides, he uses the box to keep his bad hooch, cigarettes and canned Spaghetti-O’s in.  Sometimes life comes full circle.

Bill’s uncle Walter ran the store after the mines closed and the company script ended.  A few salty dogs kept panning, built small cabins and settled in for an early Depression.  The store survived, but like the miners and the Upcreekomish, just barely and not much to recommend the life.  Tourism brought a few fishermen and backpackers through, and the store, ever adaptable, supplied them with high priced rods, reels, fishing supplies and the ever popular corn dog and microwaveable burrito.  Mostly the store makes its profit on tobacco and alcohol, plus Lotto.

I guess you could say the locals are still getting the short end of the stick, but if you crave Spaghetti-O’s, maybe you don’t mind.

I just got done jawboning with an old friend up north, Java Jeff, who told me a little about a capitalist venture he’d had in China. He’d agreed to build what was the largest coffee enterprise in the world with their government. Yah … bigger than Starbucks. Think about that for a South End minute.

About the time they were ready to Launch, he gets notice the good Chinese are filing a securities fraud suit against him. You know, just prior to putting the corporation on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Java Jeff, who had bet practically everything he owned on this deal, hired some high powered international attorneys to defend himself. After plenty of ‘billable’ hours, they basically advised him to get ready for bankruptcy. You know, after they got paid. Shortly before the stock debut, the Maoists offered him a plea bargain: drop his 5% interest in the company and they would drop their interest in prosecuting him. His lawyers advised him to take the deal and walk away. How do you beat the Chinese government in a courtroom on their turf on trumped up charges?

Java Jeff could see the pictographs on the wall, all right, all those years and that investment stolen from him and nothing he could do. So he signed away his 5% and sure enough, the company made $15 billion when it opened first day on Shanghai’s exchange. Anyway you cut it, Jeff lost a lot of yuan.

I’m not thinking of expanding my glass empire to China anymore, that’s for sure. Hard enough dealing with architects here in America who see me basically as a Graffiti Artist who needs police intervention and remedial treatment. But I feel bad for Java Jeff. As he said, justice isn’t a word some places believe in. Not in their jungle. And capitalism isn’t necessarily a panacea for the world’s ills, is what I say. Jeff will be all right. He knows he built the biggest coffee conglomerate on earth. Now — at least I’m betting — he hopes they’ll gag on it.

And those stories about the Premier cleaning up corruption … tell it to the gullible.

Hank ‘the Tank’ Amundsen is standing up next to his barstool taking a swing for the outfield wall. “My gawd,’ he was gushing, “my gawd, it was something to see. That kid of mine is going to the majors, you guyz heard it first.” Pete, two stools down, sipped affably at his pint of IPA and said quietly, “I think you told us this last week, Tank.” Jerry nodded from a table full of empty pints he and the Flatheads had killed during the first hour of happy hour, ready for the second. “I believe Pete’s correct, Tank, but he forgot to mention the week before and last month and I think, check me on this Pete, I think you told us Jimmy was going Pro last year.”

“Aw, guys, I’m just a proud papa, is all. You can’t blame me, the kid is great. You can see it in his swing he’s got plenty of homers coming up. Practically got a contract signed. The scouts probably already got eyes trained on him.”

Little Jimmy, if he declared eligibility at this point, would never graduate Middle School. Tank has been sending him to camps, buying gear, tossing balls, all the stuff a Tiger Woods training dad would do since the kid was two and a half. If Jimmy had hoped for a normal childhood of bikes and X-box, it wasn’t going to happen. If Tank wasn’t hauling him and his bats, gloves and balls to tournaments and camps, he was out back of his shack where he’d set up a batting cage, firing curve balls to the poor kid, yelling at him when he whiffed, hollering in joy when he blasted one into the nettles past the swingset that Jimmy never got to use. His sister, pretty much ignored by Tank, got the swing pretty much to herself.

I don’t know what happens to all the Jimmys whose alpha dads drove them to be the best soccer player, baseball star, football hero or basketball idol, whose only dream was to go pro, make the majors, play ten years or less, then retire wealthy as Michael Jordan. I suspect they become sad, depressed, broken adults. Maybe they put their kids through the same nightmare gauntlet.

I had a buddy in high school who won state champ in swimming. When I saw him after we’d trudged off to different colleges, I asked him if he was still training for the Olympics. “I quit,” he said. When I asked why, he answered, “I spent half my life in a chlorine pool, before school, after school. All so I could compete in the Olympics, probably never make it, then wonder all my damn life why I didn’t do something else. I’m going to do something else.”

I suspect there are mostly losers out there. If we taught em to love the game, if we taught em to enjoy their teammates, if we taught em that sports were fun more than a path to riches, maybe we’d have a lot more winners. Jimmy, I suspect, isn’t going to be a winner. And his dad is going to take it a lot harder than Jimmy.

Some days the past comes calling. I was watering our garden this afternoon when an old friend hauled into the drive with a pack and a 5 gallon bottle of water he had lashed to a roller suitcase. Got off the bus that doesn’t run the last lousy three miles of island and walked here on his way to his brother’s cabin a mile south pulling that water along dirt road and blacktop. The cabin doesn’t have a well.

Tom’s been through some changes. Haven’t we all? I knew him back when … some 30 or 35 years ago. He was a hard drinking 20 something, distributed beer around the area, loved to tell stories of bars between Montana and California, the old saloons mostly gone now or restored to yuppie shrines. I nailed the ridgepole on the day we hoisted the 40 foot log up into position on his brother’s log cabin. Felt like I’d hammered the Golden Spike on the first transcontinental railroad. Quite an honor, definitely a privilege.

Tom moved down to Arizona, did the maintenance for the spring baseball, mowed, watered, all the stuff Mesa needs to keep a desert ballpark grassy and green. He got a bad back, developed an over-enthusiastic love of alcohol, had some physical breakdowns, went into rehab, took an early retirement on disability, discovered — or acknowledged — he was gay. He looked good today. Old, maybe, older even than me, but healthy old. Walking his gear two miles from the bus dropoff, 30 years from when I knew him.

I guess in a way we’re all old codgers now, pulling our water and our stories and our packs down the highway that runs back toward home … or some reasonable facsimile. He’ll stay a night or two, reminisce, commune with the stars and the skeeters, maybe have a campfire there under the big firs up where the dirt road to the cabin ends and something else, not memory, begins. I’ll be doing something similar, I guess, thinking of all the old campfires and the nights long ago up at that cabin. What I think is we’re all hauling water, we’re all dragging stories….

My neighbors across the road, every year now, put iris bulbs out on the highway with a sign that says FREE. Cars stop, trunks fly open and another load of plants migrates south. Over a hundred varieties of irises they brought from Oklahoma are taking over the South End, iris capital of the world.
This is a new twist on an old country tradition — passing plants to the neighbors. Look around and you’ll see our quince bush is about the age of the Nesje’s up the road. There are 3 sequoias in the neighborhood, all about the same height and age. Our mock orange is showing up from here to Tyee.
A cutting here, a few bulbs there, a piece of honeysuckle vine, a funny vegetable like our Jerusalem artichoke, some plants that make a jail break on their own like our comfrey, trees like my neighbor’s chestnuts that pop up everywhere or our filberts the blue jays plant for us and everybody else —- the plants get spread around.
The mizzus is a horticulturist. Me, I’m more of a hortichuckle-ist. I used to find plants back in the hollows, at old homesteads, by hidden ponds and muddy creek sides. I got one, a 7 foot tall monster wild orchid, a Jumpin Jimmy that spreads by spitting its seeds out of a pod. We’d find em on the roof, up in the gutter where the mulch is about a foot deep, nearly everywhere but in the house…at least for now.
You got to be careful, I guess. I suppose it won’t be long before the moralists take a swing at this. Plant swapping. It isn’t natural. It isn’t right. Ought to nip it in the bud. Stick to the native plants. Live on stinging nettle soup and quit importing foreign vegetables. Send those potatoes back to Ireland and those artichokes back to Israel where they belong….
Personally – and don’t tell Ma I said this – I’m all FOR plant swapping. Seems neighborly somehow. And saves me from those collecting trips back in the jungle and swamps now that the Jumpin Jimmies have taken over everything in sight.

Opportunity occasionally comes knocking for most of us.  Trouble with us South Enders, we don’t often answer the door.  You take Wild Bill, the South End String Band’s former bass player.  He and a couple of  buddies started up their own advertising agency down in San Francisco back in the heydays of the Grateful Dead, rented themselves an office and hired a girl Friday.  The boys came back from lunch one fine California day and their secretary Shelly said there’d been a guy in to see them, Steve somebody or other, who was starting his own company and wanted to sit down and talk publicity, promotion, advertising, just what Wild Bill and his cohorts were in business to do.

Hot damn, a client!!  They told Shelly to make an appointment to meet them at Bill’s apartment that night.  There was a ’49ers game on Monday Night Football and they figured they’d mix a little pleasure with business.  Their new client, no doubt, would get a kick out of drinking some beer and rooting for his home team, and maybe at half time they could kick around some advertising strategies before the second half kickoff.  Steve came by and the boys put a beer in his hand, told him to have a seat, kick back and enjoy the game.  Well, quite a few beers later, the game being close and all, they never really got much strategizing in.  Steve sipped at his beer, mostly to be friendly, but obviously he wasn’t much of a drinker and worse, he didn’t seem much interested in who won the football game or maybe he didn’t even understand the damn game.  Odd guy, real quiet, sober as a judge.  Finally the boys pretty much ignored him completely and by the 3rd quarter Steve excused himself, thanked them for the beer and said he probably should get on home, he had work to do.

Haw haw, work to do??  On a Monday Night Football night?  With San Francisco playing?? The boys just shook their heads when he’d gone.  Probably some poor gomer with a sure-to-fail business and they were probably lucky not to waste time on a losing bet.  They popped a few more brewskis and settled in for the 4th quarter.

Next day Shelly asked the bedraggled football fans how the meeting went with Steve.  Okay, they said, odd guy.  Great game, though, the ’49ers pulled it out in the last quarter.  “You want me to call Mr. Jobs back and make another appointment?” Shelly asked.  Naw, the boys said, Steve’s on his own and good luck to him.  Haw haw.

Last time I looked Apple was the biggest company in the world, Steve did okay without the boys and Wild Bill ended up in the South End String Band.  Nobody knows what happened to Shelly.