The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

What I loved the most about the Trump years, aside from the bullying, dog whistling, money grubbing personality, was the propensity to lie. Fake news, everything was fake news. Catch him red handed, he’d attack the accuser in the most blatant, shameless way. Roy Cohn taught him well.

So now, what we have is an attentive world that, when confronted with, oh, say, an invasion of another country, its Fearless Leader, with a straight face, can claim it was merely self-defense. Or a faked bombing of a hospital, wasn’t them, it was a ruse to cast blame on them. What we’ve exported, this Shining City on the Hill of a country, isn’t democracy, it’s the lesson that prevarication works. Deny deny deny and maybe the true believers will believe that too. And if they don’t, deny more vociferously.

Keep saying the election was stolen, keep calling the war in Ukraine an incursion, stifle the press, ratchet up social media, muddy the water, bloody a nose … it’s a brave new world, pal, and if you don’t like it, well, next regime change maybe you’ll like a prison cell better, get your mind straight, get your facts bent around the right lie. Turkey, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, they must all love the Trump Doctrine: Lie through your teeth. Shut down the internet. Jail the dissenters, the disseminators of fake news! White is black, two plus two is who the hell knows.

Course Trump didn’t actually invent these notions, he just made them acceptable. To dictators, to strongmen, to a goodly portion of the Republican Party. Thanks a lot, Donald, for making us a role model.

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.

Just about everything you need is here on the South End. I admit we haven’t got a Mac Donald’s yet and there isn’t a Mall within hollering distance, but I’m talking about the Important Things, like a Modern Art Gallery, a café with friendly waitresses and a decent cup of joe, a mom and pop grocery that rents movies and knows your name, a little church to save a few souls – but not too many.

We used to have a garage and a junkyard back when Snowdens ran the store at Tyee. The first time I went to the garage, I needed my universal joints fixed. Ted was out there with his drinking buddy Seth – you see Seth Road by Mabana –that’s who Seth was.
They said sure, young feller, pull it right in, friendly as could be to a newcomer to the South End. I should’ve known things weren’t quite up to snuff, though, when they had ME under the truck handing ME tools and telling ME what to do next.

Course I was new and eager to get along with these fine neighbors of mine, and when in Rome, I thought, be a gladiator or be eaten. So with the help of these good ole boys I got the thing tore up fairly handily. Next day I hitchhiked into town and got myself some new universal joints – now I know you’re thinking isn’t it odd I got to go in myself, and I was thinking the same myself … but next night Seth and Ted drank and told lies to each other between supervising my cussing and grunting and smashing my knuckles and now I was thinking this is the damndest service station I ever had the misfortune to go to, but it was the ONLY garage on the island and it got me out of the winter monsoon, so I kept at it.

When I got done and crawled out from under that greasy blood-spattered pit I’d spent hours in, I asked how much I owed em for my time. I mean they had a genuine Slicker here is what I figured.
Ted said he thought maybe if I brought a bottle by someday, we’d call it even, and I thought well, that seems about fair.

It wasn’t til a week later somebody told me Ted’s wasn’t a real Service Station – just a place he worked on his own rigs. Later, when I took the jug over, we had a good laugh at my expense. And that was the first and last time we had us a repair shop on the South End and I guess you’re looking at the Head Mechanic. Retired now, thank you.

entropy
ĕn′trə-pē
noun

A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

This past couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning up after the snowstorm that bent over small trees, broke huge limbs off the Doug Firs, toppled a couple of our sheds and collapsed old fences. And so naturally I’ve been mulling over, during hundreds of trips to the burn pile, the concept of entropy. I hear tell the entire universe as we know it is in constant decay, entropic, in other words. You probably don’t need an astrophysicist to tell you that, just wake up every morning with new aches and pains, all the more so when you’re cleaning up a few tons of storm debris and hauling it around the property.

Yesterday I deconstructed a kayak shelter that had crashed after the snowload tipped it off balance, admittedly a poor architectural design devoid of structural engineering stamp, but I guess I hadn’t anticipated snow that weighed as much as ice falling in a surprise attack pre-dawn. I managed to use the truck and ropes to pull the other kayak shed upright, then added extra supports for any future snowstorms. Right, fat chance the new design would be much better than the last. I took the disassembled parts of the old one and used those to build a cute little shelter for our roadside RUBY Airbnb rental, the one with the crabpot and a metal crab hauling itself up onto the sign. Course, you know and I do too, using old wood cuts into its longevity, but hellfire, I’m trying to embrace entropy, not fight it.

The storm came on the heels of a weeklong garden fencing project I’d just completed, the one to keep the varmints out and the vegetables hostage. The old fence was built nearly 30 years ago, a fancy geometrical cedar artwork complete with stained glass in the gates and arbors, now rotting away. What I could keep, I left. What could be repurposed, I repurposed. Some on the new fence’s gates, some to make artworks down by the road, and yeah, I know, they won’t last 30 years this time. So sue me….

In my old age I’m constantly reminded of this notion of perpetual decay and for the time being I keep reciting Dylan Thomas’s recommendation to rage against the dying of the light, not to much avail. Things fall apart, buildings fall down, fences rot and trees uproot. If I’d created the universe, I might have reversed all this, not really sure what the thinking was to make disorder the modus operandi of all things. And yeah, I know, not my call….

When I left college I moved up to a Polish homestead in Northern Wisconsin, no running water other than a hand pump in the front yard, leaned-over outhouse out beside the ‘summer kitchen’ and wood for heat. I thought it would be nice not to work for awhile. I’d saved some money from working through college, which tells you college didn’t cost what it costs today. I think my last tuition payment was $250 for a semester. This was the Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison. That was 1972.

I know most folks would prefer to jump right into their careers, get a jump with that degree, maybe plan to travel later. You know, when they’d established themselves. Me, I’m not much for procrastinating what seems fun. Work, that’s a different deal. I’d pretty much burned out on work back in college. It wasn’t that I was thinking Retirement at 21, but a Prolonged Vacation seemed just the ticket. Give me time to think, time to relax, time to ponder the Future.

My next door neighbors, cousins of my wife at the time, were unfamiliar with those kind of concepts. They saw two people, so desperately poor they had to live rent free in an old farmhouse no one had inhabited in decades, pumping their water from outside, burning firewood to keep warm. It was inconceivable to them that we were not in Need. And so Eddie wandered over one autumn day to announce he had set up an interview for me at the local schoolbus company. I said, “Gee Eddie, you didn’t have to go and do that….” But Eddie waved me off. “It’s the least I can do,” he called as he walked back home.

This was bad news indeed. Should I call the bus company and decline my interview? Eddie would think — no, he would know — what a shirker I was. I decided to go to the interview. I wore some jeans that were mostly holes, threw on an ugly Goodwill shirt and wandered down to the bus lot, figuring, if I acted strangely enough, looking the way I looked, long hair past my shoulders, they’d make the interview brief and send me home. Easy. Great solution.

Ted and Wally, the owner and his mechanic, were in their office when I got there between shifts. I allowed as how my neighbor had talked to them about me working here, here I was. I could see they were amused by the sight of me right off the get-go. But as sometimes happens with me, I’m a sociable guy and before long we’re talking about everything from deer hunting to vegetable gardening, politics to TV shows. Even though I didn’t even have a TV. They asked me what kind of business I had with college and I said I studied literature. They looked at me blankly. “Books,” I said, “fiction. You know, like novels.” Ted shrugged and Wally shook his head.

I tried again. “Like when you were in English class, those books you read???” Ted laughed. “I never read em,” he said. “Fact, I never read any books.” Wally said, “Me neither.” “None?” I asked, incredulous. “Seriously??”

Well, they admitted they’d read some ‘men’s’ magazines and such, but books, no way. As a recently graduated English major, this was akin to finding myself in some backwash of the Amazon. I tried a few more times, thinking they’re having some fun with the new kid, but pretty soon they had convinced me that no, they were basically illiterate and proud of it. I shook my head. “Okay, I need to bring you boys some reading you might like.”

“When do you want to start?” Ted asked. I thought he meant when did I want to bring them some Tolstoy, but of course, that was how they got their new driver to fill an opening they needed filling. And how my retirement ended before it really got started.

When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide berth too.

Now that Covid is squarely in the rear view mirror for most of us (maybe for half it’s always been there) we can turn our sequestered attentions to more important matters than mask mandates and booster vaccinations, only a million of us died these past couple of years, time to move on. And no, I’m not talking about commie teachers propagandizing that racism still exists or gays should have equal rights anymore or if Roe v Wade is going to be relegated to a Supreme Court waste basket. I’m talking about Ukraine, that country most of us couldn’t find on a map that Vlad Putin has been attempting to redraw for a decade now.

Oh, I know a sizeable percentage of us couldn’t identify the United States on a world map, but let’s not go all tangential on our educational system, we’ll have plenty of time for that in the midterm elections. Ukraine, stick with me here. You remember Chernobyl, maybe saw the Netflix series, well, it’s in Ukraine. Or maybe you vaguely remember the last impeachment trial, all about quid pro quos, military aid in exchange for finding dirt on Biden’s kid? No? Well, once again, that was Ukraine, the place where Vlad had already annexed Crimea, said Khruschev had gifted them that country when he maybe was drunk on vodka but now he wanted it back. Khruschev, remember? Okay, never mind, it was a long time ago. Back when Russia was part of the Soviet Union. Yeah, they’re different.

We had a Cold War, see, Iron Curtain. Ring any bells? When the Soviet Union collapsed, all those countries Russia had snapped up after World War Two — and I know you’ve heard of World War Two, the Good War? — well, Russian let them go. Too much work maybe, too many languages, too much trouble. But Putin thinks this was the biggest mistake in history and apparently he would like to return Russia to its glory days, you know, before the country became a kleptocracy and a poster child for corruption. They were communists back then, like the Fox News folks think teachers are now here in Amerika, but once again, let’s leave that for later. And we hated communists. We hated Russia. Bad, very bad. Us, good, very good. Those were simpler days, my friends.

Now things are complicated. Our President-in-Exile thinks Putin is good. A genius, in fact. And the right wing media echoes that sentiment. I don’t know, maybe they think we should annex Canada, smart move, genius move in fact. Mexico? Well, we got all the drugs we need without the cartels in our downtowns. But … I was talking about Ukraine, wasn’t I? I can see this is possibly too byzantine. And anyway, what’s it got to do with us?

Living at the bottom of some right wing wishing well, the patriots, the true patriots, are sounding the bugle for military intervention, this time not for taking over the Capitol Building and restoring Donald J.’s rightful place on the throne, but for standing up to Vlad the Impaler over in Ukraine. They say if only Trump were still Fuhrer, Ras Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine. These are the same folks who declared that Biden was warning about a phony invasion in the first place, but now it’s his fault.

I’m worn down by these people. The same ones who rallied round the flag for the Gulf Wars, calling anyone who disagreed, traitors. Now America is weak, they say, its leaders are impotent and exhausted. What we need, they say, is a guy who, when in office himself, toadied up to Putin every opportunity he got and who now calls him a genius for how he handled the Ukraine invasion. Very smart guy, that Vlad. Well, I can tell you two guys who don’t qualify as smart or geniuses.

There are always people who admire dictators, authoritarians, bullies and overlords. Strongmen, they call them. There will always be folks who like the idea of a boot on someone else’s neck. So long as it’s not theirs. Apparently we have more of these people among us than I ever realized. They might not pick up a gun and march to the Capitol, but they don’t see anything wrong with the crowd that does.

I’m not sure what qualifies as patriotism anymore. Used to be, a loyalty to your country. Obviously the line has shifted. I suspect when the entire world condemns our boy genius, Putin, these folks will be eating crow and denying they ever cheered him on. Hypocrisy, if not patriotism, is certainly a virtue to them.

Back when I first tried to make a ‘go’ of my stained glass, I paid for a yellow page ad in the local phone book. You know, until there were half a dozen different books. And before the internet made them essentially obsolete … despite the proliferation dropped off on the ground by our mailbox. Invariably I got calls for window repair, safety glass, mirror, about everything glass related EXCEPT stained glass commissions, but … I answered every call and message machine and always they thanked me for getting back to them.

This, I sincerely believe, is our obligation as bizness people. But not, apparently, on the salty South End. Never was, never will be and I should know, having been here 45 years. The new arrivals, folks who maybe need a roof repaired or a toilet fixed, ask me why, when they’ve left a message for Bubba’s Fix-It Shop, Bubba never calls back. And neither does Clyde or Will or any of the other contractors down here or up island. They think maybe they’re being discriminated against by the locals, meaning us old timers. I say, naw, just good ol’ boys who never return calls when the economy is good, only when they’re out of work and the mortgage payment is overdue and the mizzus is threatening to leave them with the kids after the divorce is finalized.

I hired a neighbor to grade and gravel my driveway about a year ago. I’ve called him to see if maybe the gravel is sitting on one of those container ships I see anchored across Saratoga Straits over by Whidbey Island, you know, a supply chain issue. My guy never answers a phone and if you think he’s called me back, I got some prime nettle acreage you might be interested in instead of investing in cryptocurrency. Folks like to believe in the quaint notion of Shopping Local. Me, I gave up on that a long time ago. Nowadays I let my fingers do the walking, maybe not in the phone book, but on the internet. You want to Shop Loco, be my guest, but Bubba’s not calling you back.