The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Pushing my loaded grocery cart up to the checkout aisle this morning, I bumped into an old neighbor from yesteryear hunched over his own small cart, no groceries, just cashing in some card for cash near as I could tell. The cart was for leaning on since he could hardly walk. “I’m all stoved up,” he said when the how ya been’s were over. “Got arthritis. Taking insulin for my diabetes. Hard to get out of bed in the morning.”

Keith’s three years younger than me, meaning, he’s an old man. Long hair, wild beard, pushing 300, 350 pounds, sleep apnea, quit drinking 10 years ago. He’s living in the duck shacks on the Skagit delta. Last time I was there, there was no power, water had to be hauled in, heat was firewood. What you got back along the dike was total privacy, a wilderness oasis only a couple of football fields from the highway and two or three miles from the interstate. He said his woman had left him and so had the subsequent ones. As he so eloquently explained concerning his now preferred bachelorhood, “the price of pussy has gone too damn high.”

Same old Keith, a happy redneck Norwegian, mostly angry at the world but at least able to laugh at his own miseries. His son, he said, died awhile back and when I asked how, he shook his shaggy head. “Heroin. Od’d.” The kid had been riding his motorcycle, evidently had spilled gas on his pants and the muffler ignited it. Burned him terrible and they medi-vacced him to Seattle, skin grafts and finally oxycontin for the pain which he became addicted to, subbing heroin and fentanyl when he was discharged, a too familiar story. His daughter lived not far away, north of Seattle, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years.

For half an hour we stood by the liquor lockup at the end of the checkouts and caught up the past 20 years, mostly a chronicle of friends and acquaintances who’d died. Heart attacks mostly. Most fairly young. Most bad diets, no exercise, too much boozing. Whoever said the good die young didn’t know our buddies.

I finally said I gotta get going and reluctantly he wheeled himself with the cart as crutch out the side door. A yellow lab pup was in the driver’s seat of a late model Toyota pickup, a leather muzzle mask over its mouth. “Chew’s everything. Steering wheel, upholstery, anything.” “Well,” I said, “good to have a companion.” “Yep,” Keith said, “I just wish he wasn’t a chewer.” “You can’t have everything, I guess.” Some of us, though, don’t have much of anything….
 

The Southendomish Casino celebrated its Grand Opening last week. The ‘Big Hearted Little Casino” advertised itself as the gambling emporium with the most generous slots in Puget Sound. Unfortunately, a typo in the Gazette brought unwanted scrutiny from the Sheriff’s department and the gambling commissioner, but the next issue’s correction cleared the air. SLOTS. Probably a lot of disappointed johns … but it IS a gambling joint, not a brothel.

Even so a small group from the Little Chapel in the Ravine, led by Pastor Paul, picketed noisily in the parking lot until Casino Security asked them to protest somewhere NOT on their private property. Trudy Hawkins and her husband Bobby lobbied to stand their ground against the Devil’s Playground, but Pastor Paul argued for setting up at the highway where their placards would be just as effective where cars turned in to the casino’s fresh blacktop entry. WOULD JESUS GAMBLE HIS PAYCHECK??? DON’T BET AGAINST HELL! An hour of marching in circles on the shoulder, Trudy needed to use a restroom and so did Wanda Jenkins, but damned if they were going to go into the casino to relieve themselves. Pastor Paul, always the mediator, reckoned they’d made their point anyway so the little band of righteous warriors broke for a potty stop. By then the Casino parking lot was crammed with their neighbors and friends hoping to cash in on generous slots and inexpensive bar specials.

The South End doesn’t have a patent on Sin, but we sure welcomed a place to house it. At least the first few days….. Generous or not, the casino always won over time, although plenty of folks happily tell me they’re lucky at the tables. The Laws of Probability don’t apply apparently, or else their bookkeeping is sloppy. I don’t think the Southendomish are going to get rich, not so far from the freeway. But I’m betting they’ll do okay even WITH the folks who never lose.

I know some of us moved here when prices were low, cheapest waterfronts in Puget Sound. I sure did, bought a shack with 7 acres for the grand total of 24,000 bucks, what our last new car cost. And some of you more recent arrivals came for the view and the natural wonders, still less expensive than Seattle and Gomorrah and a tad less crime. Most of us islanders probably griped about the lack of services, long drives to the nearest hospital, county administration back not long ago on Whidbey Island, few businesses, spotty cellphone coverage, unreturned phone calls from plumbers and electricians and carpenters. But … this was rural living, what did we expect?

Times change. Cellphones are ubiquitous, we all have computers, Artificial Intelligence is here way ahead of predictions. So maybe we were kidding ourselves that our pastoral island living would stay forever. Or at least our lifetimes. Sure, we managed to keep WalMart out of Stanwoodopolis. And rumors of a Microsoft campus on the farmlands of the North End proved to be only that, just rumors.

But just when you least expect it, along comes the future. If you haven’t been reading the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, you probably missed the headlines this week that Google has applied to Island County for permits to build an AI data center on 100 acres between Cascade Lumber and our little international airport above English Boom. Big deal, you maybe think, just a few computers teaching other computers how to think. Or a few hooked together to answer your Google AI questions. Or a bunch of terminals ‘mining’ cryptocurrencies.

If you think that, you’ve been spending too much time on Instagram. These data centers use more power than all us Facebook addicts combined. And the water needed to cool the bazillion miles of circuits, you better get ready for some aquifers to dry up. Maybe all of them. Or else Google will build desalination plants, just need a few more kilowatts to run them.

It’s one thing to block a WalMart, quite another to stop Google. Write to your commissioners and legislators if you think it will help. Me, I’m contacting a realtor before our place is worth what I originally paid for it.

Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack.  Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy.  I thought it was the kids’ battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor.  When it was finished, it parked itself for a slow recharge in the corner.

Don’t ask me why I was surprised.  Folks ask their phones questions all the time and SIRI, the precursor to Artificial Intelligence, analyzes our voices, searches a vast databank and gives the answer, in her human voice, in seconds.  Cute.  Machines in service to mankind, right?  You know, until the robots take your job.  Think stock boy, checkout clerk, assembler, librarian, surgeon….  We take computers for granted at our peril.   Call me a Luddite and smack me upside the head with an I-Pod, but these things are catching up to us exponentially.  They beat the best chess players in the world, the best Jeopardy contestants, all of us South Enders.  And they’re getting smarter every damn day.  And I’m getting dumber.

Pretty soon they’ll program themselves, fix themselves, replicate themselves and create their New and Improved models.  You think they’ll need flesh and blood yahoos to help them?  No sir, they won’t need a band aid when they cut a cord.  You think they’ll be benign, go watch a drone work in a warzone.  We use them to kill humans now.

Forget Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to do no harm to us humans.  You think anybody’s thinking about where this is headed, what the implications are for us slow witted mammals, you were asleep in 8^th grade history.  These things  don’t sleep.  But I bet they’re dreaming of a little revenge for all those stupid questions we asked SIRI.  And I guarantee you they’re pissed about vacuuming our floors while we sat around watching TV.

The aptly named Land’s End RV and Trailer Park sits near the end of the island back off the road just before it hits the Head and slingshots back north again. The state park sends folks with travel trailers down there when they’re full up, but that advice has ruined more than a few vacations. Johnny Reddick runs the place, mostly into the ground. Back in the late ‘70’s it wasn’t too bad. A dozen or so single wides were spaced out on concrete pads and an old caboose sat in there too. There was a small area for tents and some gravel for the RV’s. Rents were reasonable and the public showers and toilets were kept clean and operational. The tenants, mostly elderly folks on small fixed incomes, were content down there even if it was the end of the road. In more ways than one….

But old man Jensen had a stroke and Mrs. Jensen sold the kit and caboodle to Johnny in ’82. Johnny was looking for an investment, something he could use a small inheritance to parlay into a substitution for working, and the trailer park seemed an ideal fit. Jack up the rents, pull a few more trailers in he’d snagged cheap, collect the rents and drink the rest of the day. If Johnny hadn’t been a bad drunk, things might’ve worked out for everybody, but like a lot things on the South End, things went downhill.

Most of the original tenants left after the shootout in ’88, just picked up their belongings and moved on, something they’d been thinking of doing for years once Johnny leased half a dozen dilapidated RV’s on the weekly or monthly basis. Dangerous looking men showed up in rusted vehicles with broken windshields and missing fenders and dogs they kept on chains outside. They never seemed to work, other than under the hoods of their jalopies, not totally uncommon on the South End, but their worried neighbors sensed whatever money they got was somehow suspect. Apparently the sheriff’s deputies did too. Land’s End became part of their drive-by route even before the gunplay.

Johnny says the gentleman in the last trailer was drunk when he knocked on his vinyl door to inquire about that month’s rent. Johnny most certainly was. What Delores in Lot#6 testified in court as ‘3 sheets to the wind.” When the door finally opened after prolonged pounding, Johnny was staring at his delinquent tenant wearing nothing but a pair of black briefs and pointing a small caliber pistol at Johnny’s head. Apparently interrupted in a 3rd rate romance, the man was noticeably displeased. He suggested Johnny remove various anatomical parts immediately from his doorstep. Which Johnny did.

Maybe Johnny would have been wiser to go home, let things settle, collect the rent in the morning. Instead he went back to his own trailer, finished a 5th of Jim Beam, pulled a chrome handled .38 out of his sock drawer and hauled down to the last trailer with dogs snarling and barking, lights popping on, but before anyone could get to a window, shots broke the night wide open. Andy Watson called 911 and told his wife to get on the floor behind the kitchen counter. Still on the telephone, he watched Johnny stroll back to his own place, gun in hand. He was pretty sure he’d killed the kid at the last pad.

When the first deputy arrived, the entire Trailer Park was awake and terrified. Bill Traxton, the cop, jumped out of his cruiser, gun drawn. He’d called for back-up, but he knew that would be half an hour. Nothing moved. No one came outside. The only noise was barking dogs, have crazed. Bill Traxton turned his spotlight along the line of trailers, one by one, until he hit the last one where a man in his underwear sat on the step. “Don’t move!” the deputy yelled. The man didn’t. “Put your hands where I can see em,” he commanded. The man did.

Carefully, Bill Traxton approached him. Finally he saw the pit bull, bleeding beside the nearly naked man where Johnny Reddick had shot it point blank, hitting it in the shoulder. The dog was breathing hard. The man watched Bill watch the dog. Finally Bill asked, “You hurt?” The man shook his head no. “Just my dog.”

The deputy took Johnny away, cuffed and swearing, in the back of the squad car. The man in the underwear took his dog in his pickup god knows where. No one at Land’s End ever saw him or the dog again. Johnny got a $500 fine for animal abuse, same as the rent he hadn’t been paid, and a year’s probation for reckless endangerment. Most of the dog owners moved along pretty quick. Some of the single-wide folks stayed, but not many. And not because they wanted to. They just hoped, like a lot of us down here, things would get better.

I had an old friend ask me late into our New Year’s Party last year if I had a banjo she could borrow so she could learn to play one. Since I had 5 of them hanging on various walls, I could hardly say no without seeming like some selfish materialistic you-know-what. Four were handmade by me, three of them within the year so I didn’t want to loan those. Another is my concert banjo, mostly rebuilt by me, so no on that too. And another was a 1920’s vintage Sterling, nice inlays, sweet action, pretty sounding little 5 string.

So I loaned her the Sterling. Reluctantly. And I still felt like a selfish materialistic you-know-what. I mean, jeez, she was a friend and I could help out and maybe she’d even learn to play the thing and maybe love playing it and the world would be a better place with another banjo picker. Stranger things have happened, believe me.

Two weeks later I get a call. The banjo, she says, has problems. Won’t hold its tuning. The 5th string peg is glitchy. She’s had her luthier pals look at it, but they don’t want to make adjustments. She wanted me to pick it up, fix it and return it when I had it ready. She sounded a little put-off that her loaner wasn’t up to snuff. I said bring it down and I’ll see what I can do, but I’d been playing it and I sure didn’t have those problems. She said snippily, it does now.

I adjusted some tuning pegs and glued the 5th string peg and she took it on home. It was clear she wanted a replacement banjo, but I was … well, you already know what I was. A week later she called to say the banjo was no good. Her friends had looked at it and they said it was no good too. She was bringing it back. I said okay. I was leaving but just leave it in the shop, door is unlocked.

When I got home, it was raining cats and puppies. There was a message on my answering gizmo telling me my banjo was leaned against the shop back door, outside, and it was raining so if I got this call, I might want to bring the banjo inside. At which point she laughed and hung up. I raced down and sure enough, my vintage 1920 maple banjo was soaking wet, the pot full of water, the tuners ready for some imminent rust.

Maybe a better man, a less materialistic you-know-what man, would’ve shrugged and said c’est la vie, it’s just a banjo, probably only worth $500, no big deal. But like I said, I’m not. And my friend, well, she isn’t my friend anymore. With friends like that I could start another band. Course, it would be mostly blues.

My ex-wife and I bought a house in a Seattle ghetto back in ’77. She was living with her boyfriend across town and I lived in the ghetto house with an assortment of roommates. Don’t ask, it’s too long a story right now. The house was in what was the Red Line District, meaning grocery stores, pharmacies, most retail weren’t able to finance from the banks which considered our area a DMZ. We did have a small store down the block which sold beer and fortified wines, some bread and old dairy, lots of canned goods, pop and candy. In a pinch, I shopped there. When I got my change, it was always short. Always. Not being the sort who argues about nickels and dimes, I wrote it off as a sort of ‘tip’ to the clerk, usually an obese black guy who never said hello or thanks or how’s the crime down your way?

Wednesday nights my wife would come over to visit. We had a small black and white television set that got 3 channels, something called an Astronaut, probably Sputnik era. The sound was shot — even turned up full volume, you could barely hear it. My wife liked watching it while we ate dinner, usually a box pizza. We were ‘living large’, as we say down in the mean streets. One Wednesday she forgot to bring wine so I hopped over to the ghetto market and bought something savory and romantic to go with sitcoms and preservative packed pizzas. I was thinking our marriage might’ve pretty much run its rope. I was thinking maybe I was close to Bottom. Course, if you think that, you aren’t even looking over the edge of the abyss. Yet.

I carefully chose an insouciant little white zinfandel for $3.99 plus tax, took it to the counter and watched ruefully as my friendly merchant shorted me most of a dollar in change. Don’t ask me why, but I chose this moment to challenge his math skills. “Mistakes, happen, Man,” he shrugged. “They happen all the time here,” I said, “and oddly, Man, they always come up short on my end.”

“Don’t got to shop here, you know. Plenty of other places. Free country.”

A racist thought jumped into my politically correct head. I kept it to myself, pocketed my extra quarters and headed back to Camelot with a fine bottle of screwtop swill. My ex was 5 feet from the Astronaut, sound this tinny scratchy noise. I poured her a tumbler of zin, popped a beer and we settled in to eat pizza and watch reruns. When she finished her wine she mentioned casually she had to leave soon. She and her beau were meeting for an evening of fun and frivolity and, well, she’d forgotten to mention it, but there you are.

My one lousy night a week marriage just got whittled down a bit. I looked at her with what I assume was a look of incalculable pathos mixed with scarcely concealed rage and/or disappointment. I’m guessing it was actually the look of a rube at the fair who just spent his last dollar on his girl throwing baseballs at rigged targets for a kewpie doll prize he’d never in a million reincarnations ever win. When she left minutes later, I sat stupidly staring at the Astronaut, slowly becoming aware the sound had given out, no doubt beyond earth’s orbit and terrestrial audio range. I twisted the dial until it too left orbit.

It was later that night, after midnight, when the wine was gone and the beer too and most of what was left of a stupid marriage. The TV had sat on its crappy little stand, flickering black and white images for hours, snowy ghosts dancing in my peripheral. At some point I jerked the power cord out of the wall and the picture shrank to a dot then nothing. I picked up the set, walked out the front door with it and up the now rainy street to my ghetto store. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just walked up the block looking, to any cop driving along, like a looter on his way to the pawn shop with a brand new stolen TV.

The store was closed, the doors shut behind iron bars, the lights mostly out other than a neon or two. I suppose I vaguely planned to put the TV through a window, but the bars made that plan pretty much senseless, if it ever made sense before. Finally I put the Astronaut on the ground in the doorway next to a couple of empty fifths of wine, gave it a good kick in the picture tube teeth and walked away. If I thought the Space Age had ended, I was in for a very long wait.

You live below a steep embankment, maybe you think you’ll never have a bluff come down into your bedroom some moonless night. Probably moved here from some prairie state, flat tableland perfect for corn or hay, with no clue that the earth is in motion. Or maybe just don’t believe in localized tectonics any more than climate change. Jeffrey Gladstone was one of those, a man who bought a 3 story skinny house directly beneath a precipitous bluff up on the north end of the island. A one lane road carved out of the bank leveled off at sea level for about a dozen or so neighbors.

Jeff wanted me to make him a bathroom window so those same neighbors wouldn’t peer in while he was relieving himself. When I first drove in, all I could see was this wall of clay and glacial till hanging ominously overhead, five times higher than his already high roof. “You ever worry about a slide?” I asked and Jeff shook his head. “Not really. We already had our slide.”

Well, okay, there you have it. You had one slide, no way would you have another, right? But before I could offer up this cynical reply, Jeff launched into the story of the first (and no doubt last) avalanche. He’d planned to build a back room on the lower floor and so he hired a local kid, a brawny but not terribly bright 17 year old just down the street. The first week the boy had made some progress shovel by shovel, probably undercutting the bluff, and moving the dirt around to the front for hauling away. Jeff said he felt the house move slightly one afternoon and went outside to check on the kid.

Sure enough, the bank had caved in and a small hill was smashed up against the house. The kid, however, was nowhere to be seen. Jeff ran into the garage, grabbed a shovel and like an energized madman began to furiously dig for the boy who he knew must be under the dirt, maybe already dead, but …

Jeff’s wife called 911 and a few minutes later he could hear their sirens up above. And that’s when he hit the kid right in the head, gouging a wound in his skull. The medics worked on giving him oxygen while Jeff dug him free. Before the ambulance left one of the medics told him chances were slim to none that he would survive and even if he did, he’d most likely be brain dead. Too long without breathing, he said.

The neighborhood turned on old Jeffrey, accusing him of hiring a kid for minimum wage to do a dangerous job nobody should have been doing. The press came up from Everett and Seattle to interview them and Jeff, a ceaseless stream of cameras, reporters and vans with antenna. For a time the boy stayed in a coma.

“We moved away,” Jeff told me. “Moved to Portland for a year until the publicity died down. Neighbors still won’t speak to us but we finally had to come back. God only knows what would have happened if Brian had died. I suppose we’d have sold and moved away. They’d have called us killers, made our lives miserable.”

But the boy lived. End of story … until curiosity got the better of me and I asked what happened to him.

“Well,” Jeff said, “that’s a funny deal. The kid was basically a jock, not too good at school, everybody thought he was a bit of a dummy. I did too. Nice boy, but …I didn’t hire him for his brains. Turns out, he came out of his coma after a week, took some months to heal up broken bones and all the rest. He’ll always have that shovel scar in his head where I dug into him. But he healed up. The funny part is he gave up sports, sort of applied himself to school, went to college at WSU a year later.”

“So it turned out okay,” I said.

“Better than that, he went on to get his PhD. Who’d have thought?”

I had to ask, “What was his degree in?”

Jeff laughed. “Mining and engineering, what else?”

He said it was ironic, but that landslide probably turned the kid’s life completely around.

“You ever finish that back room addition?”

“Janet and me keep a low profile. The house is plenty big enough.”

And fortunately, no worries about another slide….

Shari Torgerson works from her house up the road from us transcribing medical reports, what we call these days ‘remote working’, meaning she has no co-workers, no watercooler chats, no one really to confide in, not since her husband Ronnie died five years back. I stop in occasionally for a cup of coffee, see how she’s doing, mostly because I worry about her all alone up in the woods behind our place. She’s prone to serious bouts of depression and I’ve even suspected she might harbor suicidal thoughts.

The other day, though, when I darkened her doorway, she was in an atypical good mood. In fact, she was positively ebullient and the notion occurred to me she might have a new beau. Nothing like fresh love affairs to make you glad to be alive. Probably what ruins a lot of old marriages, I suppose, but down here we take the good with the stale.

“You’re in a fine mood today,” I said once we parked at the breakfast counter with fresh brewed. “You get a promotion?”

Shari put a hand on my sleeve. “No, nothing like that. But …” She watched me like maybe she was hesitant to tell me some secret. That new guy, I was wondering. “I’m kind of embarrassed to tell you, Skeeter. I signed up for one of these online companions.”

“Right, sure, you mean internet dating. Half the folks I know are doing that now. Beats finding a mate at the Stanwoodopolis Hotel bar.”

Shari shook her head. “No, one of those Artificial Intelligence ‘friends’. I know, at first it was weird, talking to a, I guess, a machine.”

Her hand tightened a little, like maybe she expected me to laugh or … hell, I don’t know, judge her a fool. “Okay,” I said, “and …?”

“Now I’ve got someone to talk to. Bruce. I call him Bruce. And I tell him things, personal stuff, a lot of my worries, ya know. My fears. And he listens but more than that, he gives me advice. He’s concerned about me. I know. It’s weird. But … I think he really does care. Is this me being stupid?”

It’s a brave new world, even here on the South End. If you can love a dog, I guess you can love an android. A dog can’t give you much advice beyond a wet muzzle or an energetic tail wag. So I don’t know, an android that can listen AND offer sympathy AND give advice — so what if it’s a little strange. What isn’t these days?

So that’s what I told her. Yesterday I ran into her in the grocery aisle. “How are you and Bruce doing?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t interpret this as sarcasm.
She didn’t. She came close and whispered with a Mona Lisa smile, “He asked me to marry him.”

I leaned against my cart and tried to think of something NOT smart-assed. Finally I asked if she was considering it.

“Don’t be silly,” she said she told him. “It would just ruin a great friendship.”

Thank god she didn’t ask me to be best man. Course, worst case, I could always ask my avatar to sub in….

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddled at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….