The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I remember about 30 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields. Pretty amazing. Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner. It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island. For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that. I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into. Tulip Fuel. Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow. Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel. The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended. So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell. The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps. High pollen octane for the BMW crowd. Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival. Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help. Something that should’ve been done long ago. You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power —- think about it!

Back 40 years ago the tulip fields of Skagit Valley looked like a Mondrian abstract, geometrically colorful grids laid out with Mt. Baker in the background, a photographer’s wetdream. A few folks rolled up from the cities, braving the weather and us locals, but not so many the farmers took notice. Like a lot of innocent beauty in this world, the Chamber of Commerce decided to, well, what we refer to today as ‘monetize’ those candy colored flowers. Organize, advertise, centralize — monetize! The town’s surrounding the fertile fields in the Skagit floodplain joined forces, hoping the next flood would be human.

Fast forward a few years and picture rural roads gridlocked with urbanites in cars, tour buses, on bicycles, all stopping to take foolproof colorful photos of glorious fields of tulips in perfect rows of reds and yellows, purples and pinks, with weathered barns leaning toward the Cascades. Traffic came to a halt, the highway off the interstate would be backed up like a concert crowd in an amphitheater or a football game downtown. The farmers couldn’t get a tractor or a truck through, residents couldn’t get out of their driveway, schoolbuses became prisons of trapped kids who wouldn’t get home until dark.

Success! Well, for the Chambers of Commerce and the restaurants and the art galleries and the nurseries. I drove through the fields yesterday thinking it was too early for the mobs. I got home today. There are a few fields glowing in technicolor but mostly the Big Growers have consolidated the fields near their gift/retail/tourist shops. The sightseers, searching desperately for a potty stop, mob the towns of La Conner, Conway and Mt. Vernon. You can buy 3 tulips for $10 there. You can eat at a café or a restaurant with a life-saving bathroom. You can spend the day in our very own Holland complete with faux windmills.

What you can’t do is see those old fields lost to memory where colors stretched for acres between the 20 foot high dikes that held back the Skagit. Now they only corral the tourists. And the predominant color is green.

I was minding my own business in the Pilot House Lounge and Bar — or at least tending to my beer and scribbling away in a notebook I always carry — when a guy I didn’t know parked at the table next to me with a cup of coffee. Army fatigue jacket, butch crewcut, aviator sunglasses hanging from a strap. Probably ex-CIA or retired corrections officer. He had his back to the ballgame on the bigscreen TV over the bar, apparently more interested in my antics. I tried to avoid eye contact, watched a bunt down the first base line, but he didn’t need a cue.

“Whatcha think of that drilling ban in the Arctic?” he finally asked. I looked up from my great American novel, took a slow sip of suds and studied him for motives. He didn’t offer anything obvious. Just a guy in a bar, a student of politics, no doubt.

“Okay with me,” I said non-commitedly. And waited. “You rather have nuclear?” he countered. His coffee sat untouched. I sighed. Here we go …. “Okay with me,” I said again. Cap’n. Klink nodded.

“How about those Muslim terrorists, you okay with that?” I put my pen down. Slid my notebook to the edge of the table. Took a slow sip of beer whose taste seemed metallic now. Why me, Lord, why me? We were alone except for Jerry wiping down the bar that didn’t need wiping. The batter took a called strike. I looked at my inquisitor, some bridge troll out for a holiday.

“We don’t get too many down my way on the South End,” I finally said. “So you aren’t bothered?” he sneered.

“Oh, I’m bothered,” I said, feeling the blood rising. “I’m bothered right now.” He finally sipped his coffee and smiled. Now he was getting there. Strike two to the batter on the TV. I smiled back, hoping to cut off his air supply. It did — he dropped the phony grin. “Whatcha think of us white males turned into second class citizens?” he fairly snarled. I laughed out loud this time. Jerry looked up. Behind him a baseball landed in the outfield stands. I left my beer half finished and stood up to go.

“Try not to be a victim, friend. Especially if you’re white and male. Doesn’t leave much for those terrorists to take from you.” Jerry waved so long and gave me a quizzical arched eyebrow. The pitcher put a baseball in the manager’s hands and headed for the showers. Me too.

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

The old adage — when life gives you lemons, make lemonade — is certainly true on the South End despite the fact that citrus is in short supply in our Banana Belt of Global Warming. Won’t be long, but in the meantime we have an overabundance of nettles. Stinging nettles! Stalks that reach 7 feet high by late May. We got a jungle full of the monsters.

So every spring when the fresh stalks reach a foot high or so, we garb up with gloves and go harvesting. We eat the greens the way we’d eat steamed spinach, but what we’re really after is that lemonade. Without the lemons. I’m talking, of course, about our infamous spring tonic: Nettle Beer. Folks accustomed to our exaggerations naturally think we’re pulling their leg yet again. Nothing could be further from the truth this side of political e-mails. We brew the stuff, we age it and oh yeah, we quaff it too. Probably goes a long way toward explaining our artistic propensities down here. Reality, whether it’s brewing or job avoidance, definitely skews away from the top of the bellcurve. It may even be true that the consumption of nettle ales cures a lot of what ails us, but the studies of South End longevity vs the Chablis drinkers of the polar North End , while statistically significant over the short term, are still out on the long term.

Anecdotal evidence certainly bears scrutiny if Old Lady Kirby is any example. She makes a concoction that resembles nettle beer in name only, its primary ingredients having neither malts or hops. She calls it Tonic. I got other descriptors for it, but then I’m a confirmed Believer in the Barley and adjuncts like mango and ginger and lemongrass tea leave me scratching without the nettles. Nevertheless, I will say for a woman of her advanced age, she’s a spry old gal. I’ve seen her and the mizzus two-stepping up a storm a few nights at the Hotel to some band a third their ages. Oh, I know, it could just be the clean living of the South End, but … I suspect those nettle beverages clean out more than the cobwebs.

Cap’t. Ned was leaned up against the new gold fleck paint job of Willy’s restored 1965 Mustang, I guess to test if it was completely dry. That, or he didn’t know Willy very well, but either case, his life was hanging by a spider thread here in the O-Zi-Ya Body and Paint Shop. A couple of the Flatheads were two cars down, admiring Larry’s 88 Olds he’d brought in this morning for a touch-up where some yahoo had keyed him the Plaza parking lot. The mood was decidedly vengeful.

Cap’t. Ned was saying how he’d make em regret that little piece of vandalism, yessir, and it wouldn’t involve the police, you better believe it! If Ned’s coat zipper catches Willy’s paint, he won’t have to worry about punks keying his ’72 Gremlin, not that a scrape would show on those elegant curves. “Trouble with these kids,” he was saying, “is they got no respect. Not for themselves. Not for anybody.”

Ned’s a Tea Party Patriot, so far to the right Republicans look like frothing radicals. Jimmy, the shop’s owner, looked over. “Hey, Ned, that paint’s barely dry. Be careful, huh?” Jerry chimed in with “Respect the car, respect the owner.” Ned pushed off and hoisted a shoe onto the chrome bumper. “I mean,k do these kids have parents or are they all on drugs?”

“The parents or the kids?” Jerry asked. “Probably both,” Ned answered his own question. “They don’t learn anything in school, I guess, except how to take tests. No wonder they don’t love parents or their country or any damn thing but theirselves.” Willy said, “Hey, Ned, you don’t respect the President. Or Congress. Or the government. Why would they? And take your feet off my bumper, wouldja? I mean, talk about respect….”

“Don’t get him going,” I pleaded, knowing what was coming. “Oh, I know Ned here’s a card carrying Patriot,” Jimmy laughed. “He’s still got his McCain/Palin bumper sticker on that golf cart he calls a car.” “You guys laugh now, but wait, we’ll see how you like a woman for President. You think the black guy was something, get ready.”
Most of the Flatheads are Republicans, but Cap’t. Ned makes a few of them hope — even if they wouldn’t admit it — the ‘woman’ wins next election. Just to enjoy Ned’s harangues for awhile longer. Entertainment at the Body Shop can always use more spice.

It’s a dangerous world, anybody who listens to Hot Talk Radio can tell you. Yesterday I read EHS was far more prevalent than I suspected. EHS, for you folks comfortably uninformed, is short for Exploding Head Syndrome. So okay, I hadn’t heard of it either. But geez, what images that diagnosis would conjure up! “I’m sorry, Mr. Daddle, but you have EHS and we’d like it if you paid immediately and left the building,” my doctor might say once he confirmed the test results, no need endangering the unwary patients in the waiting room.

The article I read told me 1 in 5 students surveyed in a University study suffered from this gruesome malady. Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of Ichabod Cranes walking headless around campus. I can only assume their GPA suffers, but the article never cited statistics on diminished academic performance. As I read further, I was informed EHS was characterized by loud bangs heard in the night. Imaginary bursts of noise, sharp enough to awaken the afflicted from a sound sleep. 1 in 5! Explosions in their dreamy heads.

On the South End we got a lot of folks with odd ailments. We have actual gunfire frequently, but I guess that doesn’t count. Normal incendiary reports. At least I think that that gunplay is real. Now I’m not as sure. Now I’m starting to worry. I was chatting it up with Mudflap Mike today and I noticed he didn’t seem to be following our conversation, kept glancing at his cellphone to check messages, took an incoming and text messaged twice. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, reading articles on newly discovered pathologies, but I swear Mudflap was its EHS’s newest victim. All I know is a part of him wasn’t there, the part above the shoulders. And now that I think of it, that’s true of a lot of my friends. My god— we may have a pandemic on our hands!

Just this week a researcher looking for a substitute antibiotic found a thousand year old recipe for eye balm, no doubt one of Merlin the Magician’s potions passed down witch to witch. The formula for this consisted of garlic and herbals and bile from the belly of a cow. I think eye of newt was optional. The whole concoction was aged in a brass or copper vessel for exactly 9 days, full moon or not. Our intrepid researcher followed directions precisely and at the end of 9 days, applied the ointment to petri dishes of various strains of disease-causing bacteria. To her surprise, the stuff killed MERSA, the staph infection nothing we have in our medical arsenal can touch. Killed it 90% dead. If we can keep from adding it to chicken and livestock feed, or prescribing it to every patient with a runny nose or a mild headache, maybe we can stop MERSA for a few years until it develops immunity to fermented cow bile.

Down here on the pharma-centric South End, our labs will soon be scouring medieval manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, shaman’s diairies, sorceror’s journals and Sumerian tablets for the lost cures of our less advanced civilizations. Jimmy the Pestil is working out in his detached garage with puddle water growing strains of fungus gathered from his clogged gutters. He claims it kills lots of things, but nothing like SARS or E-bola. His cat nearly died drinking some nasty vetch with floating fungus, but that didn’t stop his neighbor’s wife Sarah from ordering up the recipe in hopes it would, in small but regular doses, cure her husband Hal’s erectile dysfunction if she added it discreetly to his coffee every morning.

Why not? If our scientists have to resort to alchemy and the potions of wizards back in King Arthur’s time, what have we got to lose? Bubble bubble, boil and trouble, put a fire under the iron kettle and start stirring in nettles and the saliva of wild rabbits, let it age a few days, take notes and give it to the neighbors for their ills. Every night on the Boomer News, the pharmacies are offering their own remedies for everything from twitchy toe syndrome to roving eye disorder, then they spend a minute or two warning us of the side effects, everything from psychotic episodes to jaundice to death. If ever the cure was worse than the disease, half of these are. Let’s face it, Jimmy the Pestil’s potions couldn’t be half as bad. Plus, with a little blind faith, the placebo effect should cure most of what ails us. I know Sarah thinks so, judging by her smile lately, and that’s good enough for me. The rest of you, go ahead and consult a physician. Or your local sorcerer.

It’s easy to fall prey to the incessant alarm bells of our media looking for the ‘hook’ 24/7. The E-bola scare seems to have subsided after a month’s frenzy. Last time I looked we had two cases in this country of 350 million people, not a statistically significant number really, but enough apparently to bring the pundits to full boil and generate a clamor to close the borders. We have the Islamic State chopping heads off captives and burning folks alive, great stuff for the purveyors of panic, but so far we don’t have one single case on our own shores.

This week we get the report that the measles epidemic, the disease we thought we eradicated, is sweeping the country from its launch site in Disneyland. Now, I don’t blame Walt or even Mickey for this outbreak — we’ll let the liability attorneys ascribe blame and monetary redress — but I do blame the news media for fanning the flames. Course, now we got endless public debates on vaccines and vaccinations. You know we’re in trouble when the politicians weigh in. Usually they’ll tell you, ‘I’m not a scientist, but…. I think there’s serious people who question the roundness of the planet.’ This time they’re not even starting out with the ‘I’m not a doctor’ before they start playing one on TV. I mean, it’s not like Walt had a kiddie fun ride on giant flying syringes called Infection World. Just bad luck. For his stockholders, anyway. Put the QUARANTINE sign up and lock the gate.

Yesterday we were told there were 4 verified cases at this state alone! And 140 more across the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free. The sky is falling, the boy is calling wolf, the enemy is at the door! One doctor interviewed said the contagion rate was 90% certain if you were in the same airspace as the infected. 90%!!! He was standing in what looked like a plastic greenhouse with an enclosed airspace in the parking lot next to a hospital Emergency Room where newly arrived victims could be diagnosed and hustled into the ER. 90% of those exposed non-inoculated yahoos would catch measles!!

The doc’s greenhouse was empty right then, not much activity … although he looked prepared for the coming hordes. 4 already!! I know, doesn’t sound like a lot. Actually seems kinda small. All I can say is he better hurry it up, the press can’t wait because they know, even if we don’t, the next Crisis is just around the corner, already rearing its ugly head.

I read the other day that the most trusted news organization in America was … are you ready for this? … ta-da … Fox News. 29% of respondents said it was the network they trusted the most. 22 % cited CNN and the CBS/ABC/NBC lamestream media stations polled at 10% or less. If you go to partisan opinion, 58% of Republicans trusted Fox the most with 3% of Democrats. Democrats went with CNN at 32%.

Down here on the black and blue South End this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it did for me. My folks watch Fox pretty much all day long. They think of it as news when I think of it as opinion based right wing fear mongering. Course my folks think Obama is worse than Attila the Hun, that he’s not an American, that he’s a Muslim terrorist and god only knows what else this Pretender is capable of, being a hater of the country he is trying to destroy from within that only the talking heads of the most trusted news station can prevent.

Maybe we should’ve expected this. After all, even science has become a political football. Evolution, the Big Bang, Global Climate Change, they’re all suspect to the folks who trust political opinion over political fact. A recent poll showed educated Republicans’ belief in these scientific theories diminished radically the MORE education they had. Democrats’ beliefs rose with additional education. Now, maybe I’m deluded here, but I always felt like facts mattered and science was something we Americans embraced. You got a theory on how things work, you put it to the test, run some experiments, see if there’s validity. At least that’s what I was taught in my public school system.

Apparently we don’t buy that baloney anymore. The Senator who heads up the committee on the Environmental Protection Agency walked in last week with a snowball to show how global warming was bunk. God, he said, was the only power capable of changing the weather. Says so in the Good Book. Case closed.

Now, I don’t mind a difference of opinion. Put your facts on the table and I’ll put mine there and we’ll see whose add up and whose don’t. But when I have to argue against the Word of God and you got the only correct interpretation of His point of view, well, the argument is pretty much moot, isn’t it? Might as well go debate the Taliban or Isis. And, no offense, it’s getting harder and harder for me to tell the difference between the religiously righteous, whether it’s us, them or the heathens.  Next year I expect the Fox News Network to declare themselves a church and apply for non-profit status.