The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported.  Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV.  Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff.  Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new.  But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride.  You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it.  They make stuff.  That’s what art is.  Creation.  If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’.  Always that damn ‘if’.  I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is.  Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady.  I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich.  Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records.  I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job.  No way.  You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue.  Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job!  What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours.  Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

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Well, sir, it’s just about that time of year again for old Skeeter to round up the boyz and journey up into the High Country.  I know what you’re probably thinking —- but you’d be wrong.  Mostly.  It’s time for our annual safari up into the snowfields of Roslyn for our 20th or 25th or umpteenth Beer Hunt.  Used to be more of us hunters, but time and domesticity have taken a toll.  We’re down to a motley crew of die-hard veterans, grizzled men who can travel for days on a subsistence diet of barfood, cheap hotdogs and canned beans.  Times have changed over the decades, but we haven’t.  Sadly.

We got a run-down packrat infested cabin near the Cle Elum River dam and reservoir right on the edge of Suncadia.  Suncadia is a 5000 acre high end mucky muck resort and retirement community carved out of elk country, clear cut and subdivided and over-developed for the 1%ers.  When they began bulldozing back 10 years ago, they chained off our access down the rutted dirt mountain road we always used.  Legal access, I might add.  So we did what any South Ender worth his salt would do, we cut the damn lock with bolt cutters and drove the usual easement 5 miles into the interior.  Kind of ruined the 9th green of their new golf course, it turned out.  Although it did get their attention in a hurry.

The boyz, I maybe didn’t mention, are lawyers mostly — how we all met, actually, back in their law school days and my slumming — and now one is a prosecutor for Tacoma and another is a judge in King County.  You want to tangle with folks over property easement rights, you couldn’t pick worse victims.  Needless to say, we now drive through the Guard Station, where they know us well, and they say hello, have a nice stay.  Stay means stay off the putting greens with our vehicles.  After the first trip in on their fine blacktopped roads, at least until the last mile or two, we use the trails to the dam or else bushwhack over to the rotten bridge across the raging Cle Elum to get to the sacred hunting grounds of Ronald and Roslyn and sometimes even as far as the Cle Elum, the town.

The damkeeper — shortly after 9-11 and the fear of Al Qaida blowing the dam — would threaten us with arrest.  The judge would apologize and we would be courteous, but we were crossing that dam like it or not.  After Suncadia’s megabuck tactics, the U.S. government held little to no fear for us Beer Hunters.  I admit we’re an older, if not wiser crew now.  We don’t look for fights any more.  Nope, we’re all business.  And that business is hunting the wild and wily ales.  Oh, some day we’ll probably ‘catch and release’ I suppose, but that day is a long ways off.

So  bear without old Skeeter a day or two while we’re traipsing the Cascades, stalking prey from the Brick to Old #  5, the Past Time to the Brewery, and maybe even a couple new waterholes along the trail.  Give you a break from all this moonshine wet powder wisdom.  You might want to do a little hunting yourself in the meantime….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/audio-chamber-of-horrors2.mp3[/podcast]audio — chamber of horrors

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