The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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You can tell you’ve left Kansas, Dorothy, when the road signs mark caribou crossings, moose crash zones or Watch for Bison markers.  We’ve seen bear and moose and buffalo and mountain goats up here in the Yukon and Alaska interiors.  Mountains taller than Mt. Rainier aren’t even given mention on the roadside markers — instead we get prose on the heroic efforts of road builders with no identification of Mt. Logan dominating the background just shy of 20,000 feet and only 700 feet short of being the tallest mountain in North America.  I guess there’s so many, another Big One just doesn’t pique their interest, probably the way Minnesotans yawn over that 9767^th lake.

One in 60 Alaskans owns a bush plane.  Not surprising when you see the mountain ranges on every side and glaciers carving huge valleys toward vast river basins.  There are three — count em — highways basically that traverse the state.  To reach the capital, Juneau, you have to come in by boat or by plane.  Now add a little snow, arctic fronts, temperatures far below zero, 40 or 50 degrees below, plunge the state into seasonal darkness, what I might call eternal night, and you have a world almost lunar if we ever build the Sea of Tranquillity Highway.  Think frontier.  Vast spaces of wilderness so remote no one goes there, not even the Inuits, not even the bush pilots, not even the gas and oil conglomerates.  Superimpose Alaska on a map of the continental United States and it covers all of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and half of North and South Dakota plus Oklahoma.  It would stretch from South Carolina at the Panhandle to the Pacific at the end of the Aleutians.  The bugger is big!!

Me and Larry are going to drive all the highways before we leave.  Thousands of miles from the southern Kenai Peninsula to the Arctic Ocean up at Prudeau Bay.  Like the South End, history’s pretty much gone to rot and ruin.  Nature’s a little too harsh to afford saving old cabins and frontier stores for future tourists.  Alaska’s a wilderness.  Maybe in a hundred years the historic motels and gift shops on the Al/Can, preserved and restored, will serve as vicarious treks for stalwart sightseers on their virtual internet travelogues.  If nothing else, they’ll burn a lot less fuel than we’re burning.

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Well, here we go again!  The good news/bad news dichotomy.  The good news is we made it back in one piece from the wilds of Alaska.  The bad news is it’s blog time again.  I assume you’ve learned the Aeolian harp and are now fluent in 2 or 3 languages.  Probably got the Chinese poetry translations down pat too.  Maybe even — no, probably — you got more erudite interests than reading South End Scripture or Skeeter soliloquys.  That’s what withdrawal is all about.  Learning that when the monkey is off your back, life is fine.  You didn’t need that fix after all.

Take me, for instance.  I hauled up to Alaska with my buddy and chauffeur, Sky Pilot Larry, through B.C., the Yukon, the interior of the North Star state and, just to synchronize with all of you in sympathetic Cold Turkey, I decided to deprive myself of one of my fav-o-rite indulgences.  Drinking.  I didn’t even drink Lite Beer.  Sure, the spiders and bugs came off the walls of my tent.  Course I had the shakes and tremors.  All that delirium stuff….!

And that was only the first hour before we hit the border at the Blaine truck crossing for customs inspection of the glass crates at the impound yard.  I think they sensed my anguish and took pity so they never did anything but lock Larry’s trailer and send us north where I could howl to my heart’s content with the grizzlies and the coyotes, the moose and the mosquitoes.  The buffalo may have been hairy figments but … they blocked the road in the Yukon.  And the muskox up by Prudeau Bay, hell if I know if they were real or not, but they sure seemed like it coming up off the Sag River delta.

Long days indeed up there in the Midnight Sun!  Try it dead ass sober and see how long they are.

“Moderation,” I heard espoused recently, ” is for cowards.”  Well, perhaps.  But abstinence, I submit, is for the birds.  The real trick of living is to maintain your balance.  It’s different for each of us.  Maybe a small dose of Skeeter here and there, you can manage it without undue personal harm.  Sure, there’s going to be a reader or two who take it too seriously, too far, who lose their way, who actually believe half this stuff.  Junkie mentality.  Comic addicts.  I don’t know.  Sure, we should help them if we can, same as the gamblers, the alcoholics, the crack users, the dope fiends.  But the rest of us?  Just proceed with caution.  Most of us will be okay.  In the end all I can say is: Read Responsibly.

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I got some good news and I got some bad news. The bad news is I gotta go back to work. I’m taking a trailer full of glass up the notoriously pot-holed Al/Can Highway to install two murals in Anchorage, one at a fire station, the other at the U of A’s Science Building. I will be pretty much incommunicado except for some limited conversations with moose and long haul truckers. Meaning, this blogsite’s going to sit stagnant as a muskeg mosquito hole until I get back.

The good news is you get to take some time to pursue more spiritual goals than reading on the internet some yahoo’s scribblings on the cave walls of his inner psyche. Chances are when I get back stateside, you’ll have taken up the Aeolian harp or tackled War and Peace in the original Russian or are translating 5th century Chinese poetry into Spanish. You’ll find you have the time to practice calligraphy or hot yoga or yodeling. Maybe volunteer down at the South End Historical Society or take lessons in Tai-Chi. Or worst case, you’ll do like the rest of us ne-er-do-wells down here and synchronize to the tides and the moon, the long days of summer.

I envy you, I really do. I’m the Maynard G, Krebs of this island. Work is a 4 letter word hurled in shock and disbelief. Some folks subscribe to the notion of work as what gives meaning to life. Trust me, I’m not one of them. Still, a ‘living’ has to be made, they tell me, as if ‘living’ is equivalent to a paycheck. We know better down here, but … a paycheck is still important. Just not as important as ‘living’.

Be glad you won’t receive epistles from the tundra where I whine and cry, bitch and moan, throw myself on the permafrost with a whimper and a strangled curse. I’ll spare you that, at least. Meanwhile, good luck on the harp. Keep tabs on the tide. Grow your gardens and listen to good music. Think of me up there in Mosquitoville but don’t pity me too much. Chances are pretty good I’ll have a helluva good time too.

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My neighbor Roy was down at the new watering hole the other day trying to decide between the 3 dozen microbeers they have going stale on tap. So many choices, so little time …. Finally, after inquiring about a couple of their options with the bartendress who really didn’t know much of anything about any of them other than reading the name off the tap, Roy asked her what she preferred. Roy is single and probably thought it would give him a leg up on a possible dating opportunity if he ordered same as her.

So what if she’s 20 years younger, drinking the same beer is one rung up the ladder of shared ‘likes’. Now, if she liked to fall asleep on the couch watching ESPN after a hearty dinner of peanuts, Doritos and vodka tonics, Roy was in like Flint, a match made, if not in Heaven, somewhere this side of internet dating.

“Bud Lite,” she told him, beer of choice. “Bud Lite?” he repeated, sorely disappointed. It was as if he’d gone to a white linen restaurant, asked his waitress what was good this evening, and been told Big Macs. With fries. Roy told me he actually considered ordering a Bud Lite so as not to hurt her feelings. Roy — as you can see — is a Sensitive Man. Although his first wife, and second one too, might disagree. He met them both in bars late at night in Stanwoodopolis. Poor lighting, I guess, or lack of competition. A relationship probably lasts longer built on more than a shared thirst, but then, I’m not a marriage counselor.

Roy finally decided he’d just go somewhere else to find a beer. Maybe he noticed her wedding ring or maybe it was just too many unknowns on all those taps. Down at the South End we like to keep it simple, but not too simple.

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Quite a few islanders ask me if they’re South Enders or not, thinking, I guess, there’s a geographical demarcation, a Mountain View/Dixon Line. I usually tell them it’s more a psychological barrier, but then they think I mean psychotic and before you know it, misunderstandings turn into subtle hostilities and they decide they don’t want to be one of us after all. It’s not exactly a social club. Most of us down here didn’t choose to be South Enders. These things just happen.

Nevertheless, it does get a person to thinking: maybe we should annex a few acres here and there, suburbanize the backwashes and the bayous, zone them as Free Thinking refuges, then while we’re at it, liberate the gated communities trapped behind remote controlled bars and alarms with their high def TV’s and their BMW’s. Lower their taxes, if nothing else, fair compensation for the loss of their overvalued self esteem. Get em off their High Horse and their high property tax.

Hellfire, sometimes I get grandiose and imagine we could bring our enlightened way of living clear up to the north end, maybe even Stanwoodopolis. A little Shucks and Awe or maybe Aw Shucks and Law, liberate them from their backward ideas on government and philosophy. South End Exceptionalism! The 21st century’s answer to Manifest Destiny. I know, it sounds good to me too.

But then I pause and think: if we break it, we own it. Iraq just went to pieces this week and if we couldn’t bring those folks some good old fashioned American Values, how do we expect Utsaladians and Camalochers to get behind our South End Ideals? They got their tribal ways, entrenched for decades and barely hanging together by a thread. Upset the delicate balance and we’ll reap the whirlwind. Onamac vs. Finistere, grabbing for that northern gas pipeline. Juniper Beach sweeping down on Twin City Food, overtaking its strategic barricades on the river. Terry’s Cornermen capturing Cascade Lumber. It would make Middle East sectarianism look like Wednesday night women’s mud wrestling at the Leatherheads Pub. No, I think to keep the peace we need to keep the boundaries defined. You folks envious of us South Enders, well, you probably need to talk to a realtor down at Windy Rear. Or just wait til you lose your job. You’ll find your way here….

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