The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/audio-A.D.D.mp3[/podcast]audio — A.D.D

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Recently I was holed up in a hotel room in Anchorage waiting either for winter ice to break or the fever from the flu I brought up from the Lower 48.  Occasionally I’d pull back the covers from over my head and turn on the cable TV that filled half my room.  Forty odd channels and I do mean odd.  But eventually I narrowed the realistic choices down to a couple of old movie stations, one comedy channel and two so-called news programs.  Let’s just say, when I recover from the flu and winter and far too much television, I won’t be subscribing to cable or Dish.
The ‘news’ programs were a definite challenge.  Granted that I was feverish, headachy and wasted, but it was a chore to watch a screen split between the commentator and the interviewed with moving identifiers replaced by captions moving constantly, the Dow Jones ticker running on top next to the channel logo with a news crawl plus a text message site and folks tweeting or texting or some damn thing incessantly creeping into consciousness at the bottom of the screen.  This is certainly news for the seriously delirious  — a never ending stream of competing images, verbiage and numbers that interrupt any possibility of focus or concentration.  Stories blurred into each other, jostled for my attention before suddenly veering into a ‘breaking’ story, then swung suddenly into a preview for an upcoming talking head, usually two heads with still more identifiers and in case I was curious, who won the football games NFL Sunday.
I have admitted I was sick.  But is this really the way we want to get our information, us healthy citizens of the 21st digital century?  By jamming it all on to an LCD screen willy nilly and mixing it with the Waring Blender to a digestible pablum that gives us a 30 minute FDA approved daily requirement of news, sports and weather in one delicious gulp?
If Marshall McLuhan was right and the medium, not the content, is the message, better buy stock in pharmaceuticals, the ones searching for a cure for attention deficit disorder.  We’re all, I think, a little fevered these days….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/audio-version-north-to-alaska1.mp3[/podcast]audio version —- north to alaska

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So I’m heading to Alaska — with the flu that dropped me to both knees the day before — and I’m admittedly not at 100% when I go through security at South End International.  Full body X-rays now, bag checks for medium size toothpastes and shampoos.  No underwear packing terrorist is getting through this gauntlet, allah akbar!  There must be at least 10 TSA agents to every passenger.
I unbuckle, empty pockets, unshoe, de-hat, pass the breathalyzer, tell them who won the Series last October and get passed on to my gate terminal.  I’m in a fog and a fever and a funk.  “Good day,” as Chief Joseph or Sitting Bull or some luckless upstart indigenous said, “to fly.”  Alaska.  Winter.  Glacial.  Just what the doctor ordered for a rough bout of the flu.
At my gate I realize I have everything but my winter coat.  It had apparently not come off the scanner conveyor and I hadn’t waited to see if it was being rescanned or donated to the nearest Goodwill.  Alaska.  With no coat.  The flu.  With no coat.
I had time to go back on the train, walk up the stairways, hurry down a few corridors and see what TSA had done with my coat, no problem, I was sure.  Except TSA didn’t have it.  They gave me a Lost and Found slip and said they’d gladly ship it to me if and when it turned up.  They’d even ship to Alaska, they said, no charge.  Can you say hypothermia?  I felt like the trapper who falls through thin ice in subzero weather and no matches for fire.
Although the gift shops sell sweatshirts and matching scarves.  Maybe buy two, layer up, look for a genuine bear fur Inuit eskimo parka up in the Anchorage outfitters’ supply tomorrow morning.  Keep the rental car heater maxed and running, I’d be okay.  The homeless do it every day.  The Occupy crowd up there might scrounge me up a tent and a coat.  I’d be fine.  Really.  Like that kid in “Into the Wild” who just launches off into the tundra, no clues, just learn on the job.
Course he didn’t have the flu.  Or chills and fever to begin with.   In the end he died.  Then again, he was a city kid.  Crazy to boot.   I’ll be just fine.  Don’t worry about me.  Really.

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Skeeter’s headed north to Anchorage on a job expedition, trains, planes, automobile and dogsled.  Wish him luck!  And pray for the dogs….   Meanwhile, scroll down the blogsite for some of those you might have missed if you need a ‘fix’.  He’ll be back, with or without a job and frostbite, in a couple of days….

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I got some groundbreaking news for all you Camano North Enders:  we found Lost Lake.  Down by us, we don’t lose lakes.  Course, we don’t have any lakes.  Got some ponds that dry up in the summer.  Got some garden features.  Even got a couple of seasonal streams.  We know where they are, although we don’t give em names.  Laziness,  I suppose.  Too damn much trouble to name a creek that dries up every summer drought.  Then it really would make sense if we named it Lost River or Hidden Creek.    For a couple months, anyway…..
I was driving around recently doing my usual Lewis and Clark on Camano, exploring the backroads in case we get another major road improvement detour, maybe come up with a Northwest Passage to Stanwood nobody has discovered yet, and right past Dry Lake Road —- another water feature disappeared — there it was: Lost Lake.  I swerved right in.  About 15 seconds later I was lost.  Which is why it’s probably called Lost Lake.  Not the lake — you!  I found the lake pretty quick.  Getting out of the labyrinth was a couple days of dead end cul-de-sacs, refusing to ask directions until the gas tank hit E.
Lots of places get lost on the “island you can drive to”.  Folks just hit the mainline to the bridge and rarely explore the tributaries.  I meet people all the time who live on Camano and have never been beyond their own blacktop turn-off.  No interest, I guess.  Maybe the high gas prices.  Fear of the unknown.  Who knows?  They started homesteading their 40 acres and left further exploration of the hinterlands to latter day  adventurers such as myself.  Which means reporting back to civilization was spotty, if not outright, rip-roaring, belief-shredding lies and legends.
The South End, while not exactly lost, is very rarely found.  Occasionally I’ll find a car cruising slowly, window rolled down to ask directions.  How far to the Whidbey Island ferry an elderly couple asked recently, obviously shaken from hours of circling the Head.   I pointed across Saratoga Strait.  The lady in the passenger seat began a slow moan.  And, of course, being the bearer of rotten  news, I felt bad too.  But hey, they probably made their way out.  A day late for the wedding they needed to be at in 15 minutes.  A lot of us weren’t that lucky.

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