The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, it’s that time once again on the South End when every walk through the orchard or back in the woods or out to the outhouse is a face full of webs. Sometimes WITH the spider. Sometimes without. We don’t have enough insects to feed them all, I know that. So it worries me …. WHAT are they catching, these godzillian spiders, that they can survive and breed and return again next fall?

I had a Big Boy in my face this afternoon, dragged in along with his sticky net, crawling up my nose, past my ear and onto my hat. I tried to slap him away, I threw my hat on the ground, I reached over my shoulder … but no arachnid sightings after he’d landed. He’s probably working his 8 legged way down my skivvies, just waiting me out hoping I’ll grow complacent, then CHOMP, some fanged bite that will grow infected, knock me back, fester, then ultimately kill me faster than Ebola. He’ll roll me up in a gauzy nightmare cocoon, chow down on me over the winter, snack when he’s hungry, take me to potlucks, who the hell knows?

Sometimes when the fog is thick and the sun is struggling to break through, you can look across the nettle savannah and every stalk, every stinging leaf is enmeshed in a dewy glisten of web. No bug has a prayer. Not one chance in hell. The spider’s rule.

I only hope they DO find enough to eat. The last thing in this carniverous world I want is some evolutionary leap forward where the webs are strong as Velcro and the arachnids are the size of pitbulls. I like being on the top of the Food Chain. I sure don’t want a predator scarier than an ISIS terrorist. Not in my backyard. On my side of the border.

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I was listening to some talking head today describing the kids entering the Job Market. They wanted to work at home, at their own computer stations, alone. Skip the co-worker interaction, they really haven’t learned social skills. Unless you count Tweeting.

I got friends whose kids never make eye contact, who never look up from their X-Box, who have no need to say hello, who live in a digital suburb of my reality but never find a reason to wander over for a Look-See. The gulf between us is huge and growing rapidly into a cultural chasm.

My folks always believed us kids were better seen, not heard, but they made sure we said hello to guests and answered a few perfunctory questions before we scurried to our rooms or the den. The kids — and especially the grandkids — of my pals, they’re beyond social graces. I suspect the workplace of their future will forego watercooler banter and co-worker etiquette. Might just as well let em work at home in their bedroom and send their reports at the end of the day.

The only problem I have with all this is that us Boomers still have to deal with them. When we’re gone, they can tweet and twitter to their hearts’ content, they can social media long distance, they can avoid face to face human interaction and lock into video games, stream Netflix and update their Facebook. But meanwhile I still have to stand next to cellphone users and my buddies’ kids playing video. When we’re gone, they won’t even notice. But it’s going to be a different world, a lot less personal, way less intimate. I suspect they’ll enjoy the peace and quiet. I’m trying to do the same….

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Some years Halloween comes early to the South End … and some years it never seems to leave. Down here in the nettle regions the kids get driven north to the Stanwoodopolis Suburbs where the candy flows like bottled mineral water and the sodium lights force phantom predators into the shadows. This season we just got the fright-filled statistics from studies that show philanthropy by the wealthy dropped by nearly 5%, wealthy being those who made over $200 K a year.

I guess the candy jars are going to empty a tad earlier when our little ‘Takers’ roll up to the festooned front doors of the Tricklers. Forget that trickle down theory of supply-siders, I think the drought of charity may be a prolonged one. And no, it probably isn’t the result of Global Warming…. Next year we’ll probably see moats around the castles and the gated communities will add spikes to the fences. Treats for the beggaring poor? Fuggedaboudit! When times get tough, some hearts get harder.

In the same study they found that the poorer folks had actually increased their charitable giving by as much as the wealthy had decreased theirs. I suspect when you belong to a community, you think of neighbors as real people struggling with the same problems as the rest of us. We don’t think of folks who can’t afford health care, folks who lost a job, folks who had their house repossessed as vampires feeding on the Body Politic. They’re us. They’re not who we ‘Unfriend’ when they need help the most. They’re who we look at in our own mirror.

It would be way too easy to demonize the rich. Sure, we could send the kids out this Halloween in tuxedoes and Armani suits. Wearing fangs. But charity, like our mothers said, begins at home, so maybe we should trickle down some to them. And no, I don’t mean give them another tax break. They already got Christmas 365 days a year.

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So three of us yahoos decided it was High Time to go over to Pt. Townsend on the Peninsula and attend the Wooden Boat Festival there, us being South End boat builders and all. We had a 12 foot Pelican sailboat, plenty sound enough for the shipping channels of the Straits, we figured, so provisioned with a box of donuts, we set off in the fog. We could hear the container ships booming past but couldn’t see them — and worse, I’m sure they couldn’t see us either, even with radar. The Trident nuclear sub surfaced close by, way close enough to see, an evil black fish that no doubt hadn’t picked us up as anything more than flotsam.

By afternoon the sun had broken through and we found ourselves near the lighthouse of what we thought was Fort Worden, just outside Pt. Townsend, so we sailed south and came upon another lighthouse and now we realized we’d mistaken our location so we continued sailing around Indian and Marrowstone Islands well into the afternoon and finally arrived at Pt. Townsend way late. With a return trip yet to come …. And the fog threatening to descend again.

We ditched the boat on the beach and hoofed into the marina. Whereupon we come upon a Pelican in the show, the homeliest boat moored up, so naturally I asked what the hell kind of duck is this thing you got berthed?? Which prompted a lively response from its proud owners and after they’d settled down a bit, I asked what was it they liked about an ugly scow like this? The water was frothing at near boil but one of the sailorboys said, “I’ll tell you what’s great about a Pelican. It can’t be sunk!”

“Can’t be sunk?” I howled. “Can’t be sunk?? Really?” And he proceeded to tell the tale of a Pelican that had capsized the last summer off the coast of Lummi Island in a storm and when help arrived, two men were rowing it while it was completely full of water! Captain Larry was practically dancing a jig on the dock pointing at me and smirking. “That was him! He flipped his boat up there last year. It’s him. It’s him!!”

“Will you pipe down a minute,” I commanded, realizing my fun with these buccaneers was over and we were embarked on different seas of mirth. “What color was the boat? Where exactly? How’d they get to shore?” To which they pretty accurately recounted my sad little nautical escape that previous summer and so I fessed up. “But,” I said, “we basically sunk. We were completely under water. More flotation under the decks,” I advised. “And a motor that won’t drag the transom down like mine did.”

Well, it’s a small world apparently, and we might have stayed for some partying and sea shanties and late night sailor lies, but the fog had returned and we still had to head back out into the shipping lanes. We went to the marina store for supplies, ascertained we had $8 between all three of us and now, a Hard Decision needed to be made. Should we buy a navigational chart? A compass? Something to eat? $8 leaves not a whole lot of options.

Being the Salty Dogs we were, we made the Hard Choice, the one a less experienced crew might eschew, the one not in the Sailor’s Manual. We grabbed a 6 pack of beer and sailed into the sunset — well, if the fog hadn’t blotted it out —three mariners moving darkly into wooden boat mythology, fearless as idiots in a dangerous dream, never to be seen in Pt. Townsend again. No doubt they recount that voyage yearly at the Festival. “Aye, the lads are out there still,” they whisper in hushed voices around the beach campfires, “ sailing in the boat that cannot sink. God rest their souls….”

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