The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This past couple of weeks a Canadian film crew was on the South End to begin shooting the definitive documentary on Colton Harris Moore, aka the Barefoot Bandit and Amateur Aviator, and now our best shot at any claim to fame.  They’ve got producers and financial backers, they’ve got experience and equipment, they’ve got Rick Wood, our former cub reporter for the Stanwoodopolis Gazette lining up interviews and interpreting the native dialect for these Torontans.  They plan to tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story, so help them God….
Today they dropped by my place: lights, camera, okay, not too much action, but I played a little banjo and regaled the neighborhood one more time with the Ballad of Colton Moore, the South End String Band’s bastardized version of Jesse James — another American youth memorialized in song and film, a role model for the next generation of kids who will look fondly back at crime that wasn’t cyber.  We live in an era already relegated to nostalgia, trust me.      I think the documentarians wanted the banjo in there but mostly they wanted that ‘Deliverance’ feel only an inbred South Ender can provide, six fingers and a simpleton grin, amiable as a jackass on PCP.  They came to the right place.  They found the right guy.
Not too long back Lance Black, the screenwriter of ‘Milk’ who won the Academy Award for it, was up with Bob Friel, the freelance writer from Orcas who’s  written the definitive book on Colton and who was in Bahama when our boy was apprehended.   These are serious people, principled people, unlike ourselves, and it was a real pleasure to drink whiskey with them and tell more than our usual lies.  Lance will be doing the Hollywood movie this year now that he’s done working with Clint Eastwood on the movie ‘Hoover’.   Bob will no doubt be a major consultant, edging me out of any imagined royalties.  Between them, this will be a serious and reflective film.
Which means it will probably be shot on location in Vancouver.  Well, Vancouver Island.  But let me be the first to alert the Chambers of Commerce on Camano and Stanwood.  Drive to Forks and check out Vampireville over there.  Down on the South End, we’re locked and loaded. Tyee Store has the tour buses ready.  Elger Bay Store has the Colton memorabilia priced and promoted.  The time is now to rename Camano ‘Colton Island’ and quit lollygagging around with Snow Goose festivals and Slow Food Roots Music.  Let’s speed it up, folks!  In fact, I recommend to all restaurants, hardware stores, clothing boutiques and assorted stripmalls on their way to sinking into the sewer lagoon — get Colton in that name.  Barefoot Burglar Burgers .  Colton Camera.  Colton Curios.  Okay, you get the idea…..  Gear up and sell out!  The kid is going to make you rich.  The recession is OVER!  Course, so is our pastoral, laid back lifestyle.  What?  You thought fame came cheap?

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CLICK-TO-HEAR-reply-all.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — reply all

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Used to be, folks would complain about the slow speed of the Post Office.  Took forever to get a letter, they said.  Stuff got lost.  Cost too much for a stamp.  Too much junk mail.  On and on….  Me, I always loved the Postal Service.  Send a letter to some backwash address in the Ozarks and 2 days later, some mailman would haul up, by mule if necessary, to deliver it.  Straight to their door, no matter where.  For 25 cents or so.  Costs a little more now, but not much.  If that wasn’t efficient, what was?
E-mail, that’s what.  Or Twitter.  Or Facebook.   Hardly costs anything, my advocates for killing the Post Office say.  And …. you don’t have to lick an envelope.  Well, maybe it is cheaper.  Unless you count in the cost of your computer.  And high speed internet.  And a printer.  Ink cartridges.  Cellphone.  Subscription costs.  Okay, you still don’t have to lick an envelope.
I suppose most of us haven’t gotten a real letter since that Christmas card back in 1982.  And that was probably a ‘form’ letter Xeroxed to all the kinfolk what new grandkids were born and who graduated from what school (but skipping the criminal arrests and convictions and the drug rehab news).  Now, unless you took typing, you have to hunt and peck a message, which explains Twitter.  Kind of cuts down on the length of any message you got to poke it out on some itty bitty keyboard.  And syntax, well, who’s got the time anymore, really, when a few choice syllables abbreviated to their purest form will suffice?
I finally noticed my pals who get my letters never wrote back.  Lost art.  I’m sure they thought it was quirky and quaint, a handwritten letter.  Maybe a little wordy in this new fast paced world.  Now I notice the responses to my e-mails pretty much indicate they don’t even read these with any depth of understanding.  Couple word response, let me know they got some kind of message from me.  I suppose I could lament the passing of the letter as artform, about as useful as crying over the demise of newspapers or books or illuminated manuscripts.
But I will say, I never worried about my letter inadvertently going to 100 other people when I accidentally hit REPLY ALL, I don’t care how many envelopes I didn’t have to lick.  Sometimes maybe efficiency isn’t all that we’re after.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/click-to-hear-old-flames.mp3[/podcast]click to hear — old flames

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I got an e-mail awhile back from an old girlfriend from my high school daze.  How she got hold of me is no mystery since it’s how a lot of folks get in touch these days now that we’re all on the great data bank of the internet.  She probably could’ve gotten my driving history, my credit rankings, my employment information, my political affiliations and hopefully my marital status with a few clicks of a keyboard.  No accidents, no tickets, no job, no credit rating, no kids, no tea party memberships.   One wife.  Happily married.  Very happily.
We had a nice and cordial correspondence in which, in a few paragraphs, we filled in the years since we held hands in my folks’ Buick and smooched in the woods near our place before I had to trundle off to my job on the second shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling plant in Northern Wisconsin.  She would soon be off to college while I would be two more years getting out of my hellhole high school.  She was really my first love, a platonic affair that was something we both could look back on and smile at, if not laugh out loud for how sappily sweet and innocent we were.  Outside the Amish community, those relationships are as unlikely now as a horse drawn carriage.
I don’t think she had any interest in one of those Facebook affairs or anything like that.  You know:  look up an old flame and see what they’re doing now that maybe we’re lonesome or divorced and the kids have moved on and our parents have died.   Send a few photos to see if we’ve grown a bad paunch or lost our teeth or maybe our smiles or gone to seed and old age.  If not, maybe make a date for dinner or drinks, fall in the sack, fall in love, give that 45 year hiatus a kickstart and see if our adolescent judgement was still okay.
Happens everyday on the internet.  Nothing to smirk about either, you ask me.  Love is a commodity in short supply these days and I wish folks the best at finding it, whether it’s a seedy bar or an e-mail to that kid they dated back in the good old days who went off with old so-and-so and found out 20 years later it was a bad marriage.
But it is odd to have the distant past come around the corner at you.  A sort of ‘what if?’ moment.  Not just what if for some imagined life with someone you knew when you were sweet 16 and never been kissed, but all the forks in the road, all the imagined possibilities one choice made unfeasible for all the others.  I am not immune to such flights of fantasy, having gone back to find a love thought lost, hoping beyond reason she would not be married, would not have kids, would not have a life real enough to make any fantasies of mine dissolve like a cold fog in a summer sun.  No, if anyone understands the impulse to go back, to take the fork not taken, you bet it’s me.  It is a rare thing to backtrack, to see the mistake and go back for a possibly well-deserved rejection, then to have it fall the way your mind’s eye imagined it, corny and uncynical, an old Hollywood love story nobody could sell today.

I’m fairly certain my childhood squeeze isn’t looking for anything more than some spark of nostalgia, a small suspended friendship from across the gulf of years, a gentle reminder that we parted friends, no hard feelings either, and went off to live lives totally apart and different from the other’s.  She does, after all, have a husband, kids, grandkids, a complete life in a small town near where she was born.  Teaches Sunday School at her church, goes to her kids’ weddings, just retired from her job even though her husband still has a year or two.  She’s not looking for a romance novel here.  Although the missuz may not be as certain.  And I’m not looking for a bodice to rip.  Unless it’s the missuz’s….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CLICK-TO-HEAR-mountains-from-molehills.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —mountains from molehills

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You live in the country out here on the island, you find out the real population is not human (no offense to my Republican friends), it’s an ever expanding group of citizens who live underground (no offense to my artist friends, who burrow and bore (no, not borrow and bare, no offense to my indigent pals) and who seem to be building an entire infrastructure beneath our lawns without bothering to get building permits (no offense to our current commissioner).  I’m talking moles.  Interstate highways rolling just beneath the surface rhododendron to garden, the little buggers tirelessly  tunneling their way from grub to grub.  Who the hell knows what they’re doing?  And who really cares?  At least until they decide to come up for some air.  In the morning those beautifully manicured suburban lawns look like small mortars were exploded by Libyan insurgents.  Ugly piles of dirt and rock sit atop the weed-and-fed fescue and explode in gravelly shrapnel when the John Deere riders hit them.  You better believe this is war.
Moles, at least to me, are like mosquitoes, a plague to be borne, not warred on.  In the end the human race will die off and yes, Virginia, there will still be skeeters and there will always be moles.   Tell that to my neighbors!  They have incredibly complex military strategies plotted out, staged, implemented and studied when they fail.  One retired Seattle police sergeant sat in a lawn chair and simply waited with his service revolver.  When he heard them surfacing, he undid the safety.  When they poked their little pink nose up into his space, ka-boom.   Underground crime dropped 50% that year, but it wasn’t long before new recruits tore up his lawn.  They’ve tried traps and poison, they’ve stuck dried blackberry cane with one inch thorns poking into their sensitive little feet so they’d bleed to death in the hole, they’ve stuck high pressure hoses into the tunnel, they’ve hooked their muffler exhaust to the exits and revved the engine on old trucks to kill them silently.  And the neighbors with noise.   They’ve cursed and they’ve stomped, they’ve bought high frequency noise repellants, they’ve tried the power of prayer.   Nothing works.   They’ve even dumped raw gasoline into the caverns, let the fumes slowly move thru the network, then they’ve set a match to it.
Don’t try this at home!  It is extremely dangerous, not only to yourself, but to the neighbors too.  The moles, not so much.  I think they move quickly along when the odor of gasoline makes the tunnel obnoxious even to them.  They probably set up little lawn chairs over by the azaleas and watch when the whole thing detonates.  Nothing quite it like it, really, when the sod lifts suddenly from its mooring,  and smoke and debris pour out of the mole holes.  Probably loosens the soil nicely for further excavations, is what I figure.  Probably not so great for the perfectly manicured lawn.   At this point, of course, we aren’t thinking rationally, are we?,  we’re thinking revenge.
There are lessons here for all of us and I don’t just mean West Point strategic planning.  The truth is, when all the assaults have proven futile, when the inordinate time spent is ultimately not worth the goal, when the expense is beyond anything sane, sometimes you just have to learn to co-exist with the varmints you live next to.  The moles, I mean…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CLICK-TO-HEAR-caller-ID.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — caller ID

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