The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We’re in a motel tonight, downtown Lewiston, Clarkston, near the Snake River. We’d planned to camp at Palouse Falls but … our annual park permit expired today and nobody seems to be around the state park to issue a new one. We could pay the daily, but why? Especially when we looked at the campground, a treeless hellhole of blistered desert, temperature at 100, no shade.

The next state park didn’t even offer camping … although it did have trees and a swimming beach and a huge boat launch into the Snake. Why put a campground here? So … we ended up here at this cheap motel. The first one we looked at was pretty much a rent by month, down and out auto court. This one seemed better but it turns out half of it is rent by month, down and out too. With a swimming pool and coffee in the lobby.

Our new neighbors next door, who we haven’t officially met yet, were just visited by the police. The mizzus is sporting a black eye and has two kids in tow. The old man is a mean little mofo, jawing on her since we rolled in. MY mizzus thinks maybe she’s tried to escape to this one room sanctuary and he’s found her. The cop convinced me she’s right.

It’s a mean old world, that’s the truth. We vacation, I guess, so we’ll leave our peaceful enclave and experience real misery firsthand. Sort of a vaccination — not enough to kill, just enough to build resistance. You know, the way the evening news does every night….

You leave your little bubble of pastoral paradise on the South End hoping to see some natural wonders OFF-island, you end up in the American hinterlands pretty quick. Over the mountains where trees thin out to sagebrush, poverty isn’t hidden any longer down fern-lined drives and a cedar forest. It isn’t covered over in blackberry vines the way it is at home. Personal junkyards are glaring in the implacable sun. And the rusty mobile homes lined up in graveled scars on the landscape sport corroded air conditioners stuck out aluminum windows, a small and rattly relief against the three digit heat of desert afternoons.

Welcome to the barrios del norte. I watched an Hispanic couple and their son sitting together in a park yesterday in the shade of one of the few trees, the father reading aloud to his boy while mom talked on her cellphone. These are the immigrants some folks want to round up and send ‘home’. Three of twelve million or so. I think — and don’t tell my Republican friends I said this — I think maybe they ARE home.

One of the GOP candidates says they bring drugs and they’re rapists, all of em. Up the road from me a couple of days ago we had a party of white kids call 911. A young woman had strayed off into the jungle of the nettled South End and hadn’t returned. The group of eight or so admitted to the deputy and the fire boyz who’d responded that they’d all been shooting heroin. They were worried she’d gotten hopelessly lost in our Amazon, but, miraculously, she stumbled into their cabin’s clearing just then, unhurt except for some nettle stings. The deputy departed, his job finished there and so did the fire crew.

If drugs are an ‘immigrant’ problem, I suspect we’re being a little selective if the rich white kids can party with syringes and smack and the police say ‘have a nice day.’ Out here in the sun-blistered boondocks, I guess reading to your kid might just be reason enough for deportation. Maybe the rich kids will kick their habit and want those orchard picking jobs, the ones the immigrants take away from white folks.

I just heard Taco Time and Burger King announce they were going to start using Real Food. This is Hot News indeed: a restaurant serving actual ingredients!! The chemical factory stocks must be sliding headlong down a freefalling Dow. Course, I also heard if they were selling a ‘brand’ name, like Coca-Cola, they weren’t going to make it real, they don’t care WHAT Coke’s slogan sez. If high fructose sugar isn’t real, what is??

I spoze I shouldn’t poke fun. It’s a good sign, serving real food in a fast food joint. Who knows? Maybe us enlightened shoppers will demand the same thing in the grocery store. Maybe we’ll demand tomatoes that have a taste again! Fruit that wasn’t picked 2000 miles away! Apples that aren’t about 2 hours from applesauce! Vegetables that aren’t 10% pesticide! Food that’s food! Food that’s real, dammit! Like they got at Burger King!!!!!!!!

It’s a new world, all right. Organic section in the produce aisle, gluten free in the bakery and in the beer depot even. Gluten free in the hardware these days, can’t be too careful. You got a nut allergy, they got nutless stuff, no problem.

Free range chickens, cage free eggs, yah shure, u betcha. You want fresh, we got farmers’ markets. Artisan bread, cheese, whisky. And no, whisky’s not just for dinner anymore.

These are the Good Times. Altho … I heard Trix and Cap’n Crunch are taking out their artificial additives too. These are the cereals of my youth. I can still conjure up the chemical taste of Cap’n Crunch. Without those additives, all you got is the box, okay maybe if you dissolve it in milk. Course, it’s undoubtedly got dioxin from the paper milling process. All I know is there’s gonna be a lot of hungry kids in this additive-free world.

Uh-oh, Skeeter’s taking off once again. I know, what a slacker/blogger the mofo is! But let’s cut him some slack. The guy has had a difficult time lately with his so-called career. He was a finalist for a Colorado project, looked like the frontrunner, only to be asked, just prior to boarding a plane to go pitch his glass proposal, if he could possibly put his stained glass mural in something other than their windows. They didn’t ask his sculptor competitors if they could put their sculptures on something other than the entryway courtyard grounds. You know, hang them from a cloud or something.

Skeeter said, and I quote: “Huh?” Then he said, and I quote again, “Let me know when to cancel the flight into Colorado.” And they said, quoting once more, “Cancel now.” You think the blood-sport of public art isn’t hard, think again. Skeeter’s got plenty of war wounds from recalcitrant architects benumbed by the legacy of Frank Lloyd always Right, window manufacturers voiding warranties and clients nervous about, well, everything….

Course, you don’t want to hear this and Skeeter doesn’t want to depress you with his problems. Life is fine and if he did want to whine and cry and throw himself on the floor in a fit of despondency, he’d be the idiot and one thing Skeeter isn’t … well, okay, maybe he is. But he has sense enough to pick himself up, dust his hat off and say let’s just move on. Which, of course, is exactly what he’s doing, moving on. Out of town, out of sight and maybe out of mind. His, anyway.

Once again, apologies for leaving anybody who reads this stuff in the lurch. Give you time, maybe, to work on resumes or write that novel you always thought you’d write or just watch more Fox News and see what the fair and balanced crowd thinks that President of ours is doing to ruin America. Skeeter, he’s going into the hinterlands of the ruins, see what the locals there have to say about the current state of affairs. Actually, he’s going to the Tetons. Purple mountains majesty. He’ll get back to you in a week or so….

Purple?

The KKK in South Carolina is holding a rally to protest the banning of the Confederate flag last week, I assume mostly as a recruitment tactic. The mizzus was surprised the KKK still exists. Admittedly there’s no active chapter on the South End. Course, we don’t have a whole lot of minorities a KKK could light crosses in their front yards. You want a hate club, you need someone to hate, otherwise you might just as well join the Moose or Rotary.

Rudy, down at the Diner’s Debate Society, sometimes gets up on his high heels to rant about the ‘War on White Males’, but Anita, the current owner, usually cuts his legs off at the knees with her sarcasm. “Wait til after Hillary’s elected,” she called over to Rudy’s table of male pensioners hoping she wasn’t going to cut off their coffee pipeline. “When she stops you poor white boys’ Social Security payments down to what us women get, then you can talk to me about Male Discrimination. Course, I’d be glad to hire you victims on as morning waitresses, let YOU work for the measley tips you high-rollers leave.”

Rudy’s like a lot of folks these days, one of the oppressed. Taxes too high, jobs too scarce, the country —or so he thinks —is on the downward slide. He blames immigrants, he blames the damn government, he’d blame global warming if he didn’t think it was a left wing conspiracy mostly to bring him down a few more notches. And he blames women for expecting equal pay, equal jobs, equal rights. He thinks Bruce Jenner’s sex change is an act of treason to us he-men.

I watch Anita pour him his 4th cup of joe. He meekly says thanks, but we all know he resents being challenged. Rudy lives in an insular world of bitterness. Bitterness to WHAT, I don’t know. We live in a world of plenty, a peaceful world, a world most folks would envy. Nothing seems sadder to me than a refusal to be happy. But Rudy and his kin the KKK are looking for fresh recruits who think the oppressed are the oppressors. Maybe Anita has the right idea — give him a refill of kindness and hope for miracles.

There are people who think the Civil War is over. They even think the North won. All I can say — as a person who grew up down in Dixie — Gen. Robert E. Lee may have surrendered at Appomattox, but the South sure didn’t. Slavery might’ve officially ended, but white supremacy didn’t disappear with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Confederate flag, what some folks declare as a symbol of southern pride and its honorable heritage, still flies at state capitals and is still a part of their own state flags and license plates. These people will tell you, with a straight face, the War was fought over state’s rights. Not slavery. Oh no, not slavery. Just the state’s right to own slaves. And the War of Independence was fought over soggy teabags, I suppose. These folks think our birthday was yesterday.

The Confederate flag still flies because these people are still fighting the Civil War, still denying Africans, now African-Americans, the vote, equal rights, a proper place in the post-bellum South. They resent the current president, in large part because he’s an uppity black man. Or half black man. Which, for the proud Confederates, is totally black. The Republican Party, happy to jump on the racist bandwagon, what we call the ‘Southern Strategy’, fans the flame that’s been smoldering for 150 years.

This week a few shame-faced Southerners called for banning the rebel flag in light of the killing of 9 innocent black churchgoers by an Aryan nation nazi bigot who paraded himself under that same flag and decided to wage war on the inferior race that was trying to take over his white country. Even Walmart has said it will no longer sell Confederate merchandise, profits be damned!

Germany banned the swastika. Nazism was a national scar that would take generations to heal. But they’re willing to try. The South … not so much. 150 years later and they’re still in denial over the stain of slavery. If you think this is the final surrender, you don’t know the South. Ban the flag, but don’t assume they’ll be saluting Old Glory any time soon. Not in your lifetime anyway. Not in mine. There’s no truce. Just another bitter indignity to endure. Just more salt in old wounds.

Rumor has it, once again, that Tyee Store is reopening. They evidently gave up on the dream of growing marijuana legally. Probably illegally too, I’m betting. Gonna just sell cigarettes and beer and wine and white bread, all the supplies we South Enders were waiting two years for. Two and a half, but let’s not quibble — let’s celebrate!

Me, I went out today with my trusty sickle and reopened my trail from the back 40 to the road just south of the store. About a mile last time I kept that trail. New folks have moved in back there. Fences have gone up. Blackberries have blocked the path. It’s been, after all, two plus years for the jungle to reclaim my trail, the one I made back in 1985. Although … that trail has moved the way a river alters course. Trees have come down, pastures have been fenced, two loggings have changed things drastically, barbed wire has fenced me out. So okay, change is inevitable. I’m a South Ender; I’m familiar with the notion.

But a few new neighbors forced me into the woods for some serious bushwhacking, mostly to avoid the appearance of trespassing. Okay, the actuality of trespassing. I know what the Amazonian explorers must’ve felt like, hacking into the wilderness, running into dead ends of insurmountable barriers, turning back and trying another route. I didn’t have a guide. Since the Barefoot Bandit left the scene, the interior is uncharted territory. In the end I cleared double the trail I eventually plan to use. Maybe the deer and the raccoons can use the rest.

It’s a pleasure, in case you wonder why I bother, to still be able to traverse the island west to east by moccasin. In the old days I’d slash my way across, buy a beer, jaw with the storefolks and the local yokels by the crackerbarrel, then wander back to the west side. Me and Marco Polo, Lewis and Clark, Livingston and Stanley. They got the fame, but I get a beer. Pretty good trade-off. And who knows? Maybe they’ll grow cannabis too eventually. Save us wasting all that garden space ….

Skeeter’s headed for the hills…. That’s muy correcto, amigos, he’s vamoosing to the mountains of Rosylyn for the annual Beer Hunt, no license necessary. And no, we’re not going politically correct. Meaning, we do NOT catch and release. I know it sounds cruel to some, but sometimes tradition outweighs compassion. Ask a white southerner crying over their rebel flag. “My great grandpappy fought those damn Yankees so we could have states’ rights. I just want to honor his service.”

Sure, it’s a proud tradition, fighting for the right to keep human beings as slaves … or at least the right to keep them from voting now that the traitor Lincoln freed them. Traditions like that are, as Scarlet might say, gone with the wind. If they ban the Confederate flag, what’s next, a ban on swastikas??

Beer hunting. A whole different animal, trust me on this. We’re thinning the herds is what we’re doing. It’s not like we’re Nazis, killing them because we’re superior. It’s not some kind of foamy genocide. Jeez…. We respect the ales. We honor them if you want to know the truth. Someday, when beer hunting is deemed as uncivilized and immoral as slaveholding, our progeny will stand up for us, one last rebel yell!! “My grandpap fought those bottles to a standstill up there in the coal hills. If you want to take down that statue in the square of Skeeter standing mightily in front of two dozen dead ales, you’ll do it over my dead body.”

Course, Skeeter hasn’t got any grandkids….

I was in the checkout line of the local pharmacy — and no, I don’t mean the Bud Hut — behind an older fella who had a joint remedy, some kind of modern snake oil guaranteed to alleviate arthritis, hair loss and lack of sexual desire. Wendy, the cashier, rang his cure-all up, something like $19.99, cheap, I guess, for a panacea. “My husband takes this too,” she told the geriatric gent. The customer nodded imperceptibly, swiped his credit card and waited for his receipt.

I’m always annoyed at folks who treat their checkout people the way they’d treat a store mannequin, just seems rude to me. The auto checkout was tailor made for these yahoos. So I asked, just to fill the awkward silence, “Well, did it work for him?” Our customer perked up at this; after all, this is close to a testimonial if not a full-fledged pharmaceutical double blind test. Wendy paused. “Jimmy says it does, so I guess it’s worth the money.” Her tone of voice suggested maybe Jimmy was BS’ing and the money was going down a rathole. “I hope that works miracles,” she said to the Arthritis Kid.

Exactly, I thought. We’re hoping for miracles at $19.99, why not throw the dice? I was over at a buddy’s house later on and asked him how his girlfriend’s broken arm was doing. You ask health questions at my age, you’re either desperate for conversation or you need counseling yourself. “Not great,” Billy said. “It isn’t healing up like it should. But … we’re taking Bone Broth.”

“Bone Broth?” I asked. “Yeah,” he answered, “lemme show ya.” Dr. Billy went to the fridge and extracted a quart jar of brown jello with lard on top. He gets bones from the local butcher, dumps them in a crockpot and boils em down for 3 days. Bone Broth!

“And you what?” I asked, “rub it on as a liniment?” “No, man,” Billy said, “you heat the liquid up and drink it.”

This, I guess, is homeopathic remedy writ strange. You got a broken bone, drink bone broth. You got hair loss, boil up some hair. Osteoporosis, well, bone broth again. Alzheimers, okay let’s not get into sweet meats. If you’re in pain, you’ll try most anything, if looks like, I get that. And maybe the placebo effect will actually kick in and work. What I don’t want to see are new ads from the pharmaceuticals for bone broth, replete with the warnings, may cause permanent rigidity, hardening of the spinal cord and permanent priapism. Course, they won’t call it bone broth, something pseudo-scientific like fibulagelomex or osteoglanulax. Or maybe just Elmer’s Glue.

Homeless on Camano

The county just got the results in for their survey locating the homeless on Camano. Turns out they didn’t find any. None. Zero. Zilch. I guess they went from gate to gate in the gated communities, maybe looked behind the forsythia, then moved on. Nobody came down to the South End, that’s for sure.

Turns out Island County sent teams into the hinterlands to search out the homeless. Well, except not Camano Island. The housing resource coordinator was quoted in the Gazette, “We just didn’t have the time. But next year we hope to get more of a head start.” They did manage to send out some fliers on the transit buses asking the homeless, if they were indeed out there, if they would respond. No responses were forthcoming. The coordinator speculated that maybe the homeless just didn’t want to be identified as the homeless. You know, IF there were any homeless.

I suppose this could be a new paradigm for social services in America if Washington DC gets wind of this. Poverty? Post some placards on telephones asking the poor if they’re poor. Call us, we want to help. You a veteran not getting medical assistance? We put some fliers on the buses in your town. You maybe didn’t see them? You out of work, chronically unemployed? We posted a notice on Facebook. Maybe you need to buy a computer, get some DSL service, reach out to us. We want to help….

I ran a poll myself this week. Posted a notice on my blogsite asking anyone in county government if they were intelligent enough to be holding office. If so, please call in to southendbrainresearch.com and answer the brief questionnaire. Take about half a minute, just want to do a head count of the bright ones…. Surprisingly, nobody responded. All I can say, if I can use the county’s own methodology, there’s no intelligence over there in Whidbey Island government. Course, maybe they’re embarrassed to identify themselves as smart. Or they’re just being modest.

Next year we’ll maybe have some time to organize IQ search parties. This year we were just a little too busy. In the meantime hopefully all the homeless over here will find decent housing. You know, the folks who don’t exist here in paradise.