The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Collect-Call-from-Daffodil-Hill.mp3[/podcast]audio — Collect Call from Daffodil Hill

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If you wander back through our woods beyond our old shack, you’ll pass into a ravine where the trail is lined with bleeding hearts and periwinkle, sort of a path into our own worldly heaven. It meanders around past the Nesje farm, then turns uphill through a nice stand of fir and follows the pastures over to the east side of the island where it eventually pops out at Guitar Bob’s place near the Tyee Store and the Art Gallery. I used to keep a couple of miles of trails cleared where I ran every morning in moccasins, carrying a sickle to slash at the always intruding berry vines and nettles. The woods back there stretched unbroken clear to the Head where nobody much went but us kids, young and old. And maybe the Barefoot Bandit.
I would find old homesteads long gone and I’d collect their heirloom plants to bring back to our homestead. Daffodil Hill was an acre of golden flowers every spring, escapees from someone’s ghost garden. The old house was long gone, just a shadow of myrtles to mark its passing. I’d carry a gunnysack and a small spade, dig a few hundred bulbs each spring, then plant them back home, mostly in the woods where it was too dark for them to prosper. Kitty’s grave and old Dr. Gonzo’s too are marked with them up by the shelter I had in the hemlock copse where sometimes I slept at night only to wake up with slugs sliming my hair.
You walk over to Tyee Store now, what used to be woods, but got clearcut twice since I started making trail, you would find the old farm that must have stretched from the west side to the east a century ago. In a clearing off Tamarack Road was an old cabin, covered in ivy and the ivy was up in the firs, a ruined cathedral of green reaching to the treetops, dark and forbidding like dreams covered in kudzu. Just before you got to the blacktop by the store there was another house, mostly just a foundation and some rotted walls fallen in on itself.
A telephone line still stood where the driveway must’ve been. And an outhouse which was pretty much intact. The last logging operation they pushed the house into a pile with a bulldozer and that’s still sitting there in the pasture now, covered with blackberries. The outhouse they left, leaning into its past. Even loggers get nostalgic for what they’re taking away, I guess.

Sometimes I think I’m like that, an old fool growing even older now, even more foolish, looking back over his shoulder more than where he’s going. And these stories I’m telling you, they’re like that outhouse with the telephone line coming in off the highway, its dryrotted pole waiting apprehensively for the next winter storm. We’ll all be gone soon, that much is true, maybe the only thing. And someday someone else will wander this way, wondering who planted Daffodil Hill and where did they go, those people who once lived here not so very long ago, the pioneers who lined their dreams with bleeding hearts and left clam shell trails going nowhere now, the folks who maybe thought their outhouse was a telephone booth, who left a few clues for the next stories of the once wild South End.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-how-the-rich-get-richer.mp3[/podcast]audio — how the rich get richer

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I heard a study recently that said the poor are more charitable than the rich. On average they give almost twice as much of their income percentage-wise to those in need than their wealthier brethren. They also volunteer more for charities and non profits, service groups and outreach programs. Basically, if my sociology statistical studies are still in semi-working order, this proves, not quite conclusively but damn close, the South End is way more philanthropic than our neighbors up yonder ensconced behind their key carded gated communities.

I had a friend tell me in all seriousness awhile back (in regard to my bemusement over her financial plight at the time) that a million dollars just wasn’t what it used to be. What exactly do you say to a pronouncement like that? Do you work out the math of inflation vs. income? Do you shrug your overburdened shoulders and just agree? Or do you take pity and offer up a loan …. you know, to get her by until that devalued million dollars returns to its rightful place in the economy?

These are tough times. Especially, I guess, for the rich. Or, more aptly, the folks who no longer count themselves among the Gatsbys of Camano. Their stocks have slipped, the value of their two homes has dropped, their retirement funds seem inadequate now, even their hedge fund broker refuses to return their frantic calls — that vast chasm between Us and Them looks like a ditch, not a Grand Canyon. And if sacrifices must be made — and believe me, they must — a little less giving to the needy is definitely the order of the day.

Meanwhile, down here on the Lower Tiers, we kind of see we’re all in this together. So we still donate, we still volunteer and we still give. We don’t have much, but it never seemed too little somehow. Even though a hundred dollars isn’t what it used to be.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Avoiding-the-Ditches.mp3[/podcast]audio — Avoiding the Ditches

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We all make mistakes. So okay, us South Enders make a few more than most. I don’t know whether poverty leads to more tragedy per person or tragedy leads to more poverty. My Republican neighbors think they know. Even the ones who are poor and have more than their fair share of bad drama.

I’m not one who thinks money can buy you luck, but it can sure narrow the odds. And I am a believer in keeping a buffer between me and the wolves outside the shack door. Bad luck comes to us all; I just don’t want it to carry me over the Edge.

Jenny was driving her beat up Chevy station wagon to town a month ago. It’s a relic from the days of cheap gas, wide as a semi and half as long as the Exxon Valdez. She needs it to haul hay for her horses, she says. I could ask, of course, how it is a woman barely able to pay the rent can afford horses, but I’ve learned to keep my prying mouth shut. It’s a free country, they tell me, at least until the credit stops.

Jenny was lighting a Marlboro, trying to reach the length of Kansas to the cigarette lighter gizmo over by Abilene, and hit the CD replay to hear her favorite song one more time, dropped her unlit cig on the floormat and of course reached down to find it. Happens all the time. One brief moment of inattention, next thing you know, you’re in the ditch, wheels up, blood on the dash.

Jenny’s in shock, the ambulance hauls her to the Skagit hospital emergency room, Carl hauls the Exxon Valdez to his South End Towing impound lot back behind O-Zi-Ya trailer court, the sheriff issues a citation for Inattentive Driving, Jenny goes through a few surgeries for lacerations and a torn shoulder, the hospital and doctors bill her more money than she’s earned since 2004, the horses go hungry and are given away, Carl wants $600 to release her wagon, Jenny can’t work with a cast, probably couldn’t work with one, and now the rent is due.

I sure don’t want to cast judgement, but judgement is definitely at issue here. The very least I can say is if you live on the South End, watch where you’re going. It’s a winding narrow road. And trust me, the ditches are damn deep…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-teaching-the-kids.mp3[/podcast]audio — teaching the kids

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My neighbor Fred is standing next to his 40 foot expandable travel trailer with his SUV hitched to its bumper as he’s venting his ire at the free transit bus that’s just gone by. “See that?” he asks, waving irately at the emergency lights flashing while the driver picks up another neighbor’s teenage kid, skateboard under one arm. I give him a fish face, not much meaning he can read, because I know where Freddie’s headed. He’ll start with the bus subsidy for all the freeloaders on the South End, then he’ll move on to taxes, most of them wasted, frittered away on government services he sure doesn’t want or need. He voted for our Tea Party commissioner, he’ll tell me again and again, in hopes she’ll ‘starve the beast’, what he calls shrinking government down to something the size he can flush in a toilet.

Freddie worked all his life at Boeing, bastion, he says, of a Free Enterprise system. I used to argue with him about all the military contracts and tax breaks, but Fred worked on 747’s , not cruise missiles. He retired a wealthy man after 30 years, bought a nice home, owns motorcycles and sports cars and travel trailers and about every piston driven device that he can fit in his driveway, the motorcoach shed and a three car garage. He’s got HIS and by god he doesn’t want a red cent going to someone who didn’t work to get THEIRS. Not directly and not indirectly. That free bus bugs him no end and it’s only one item on a very long list of Grievances.

No one says you have to be generous. Or magnanimous. Or take care of the needy or the poor or the infirm. Freddie doesn’t see any, not one, familiar face among the downtrodden and he doesn’t see it as his problem. More than half us South Enders and the island too don’t either. They got theirs and they can’t imagine losing it to bad health or a bad economy or just bad luck. They aren’t their brothers keepers.

“See that kid getting a free ride,” Freddie says sneeringly. “you just taught him he doesn’t need to work.”

“He’s 13 years old, Fred,” I say. “Too young to drive, too young to buy a car. He goes to middle school. You think he should pay tuition?”

Fred pauses a nanosecond. “Might not be a bad idea.” I expect he’ll write a letter tonight to the commissioner.

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