The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The End of the Road Tavern isn’t actually where the road ends, but it’s close. A few Forest Service roads branch into the mountains and there are a few cabins up Rainbow Creek, but otherwise most traffic stops at the tavern. Donny Butler owns it, bartends, cooks and breaks up fights. He closes Monday and on Christmas, but otherwise Donny is always open. No one around UpCreek recalls him taking a vacation and if he’s ever been sick, it was on a Monday. His cabin is in the woods behind the bar, but none of us regulars have ever set foot inside. Most of us can’t imagine him in such a domestic setting and the others think the house is just his storage area.

You want to know what’s happening around UpCreek, the End of the Road is where you can find out. Who’s poaching what and where, who’s catching cutthroat and what size, whose wife is cheating with who and whose kid is going to prison for what crime. Two years ago Donny got a license to sell hard stuff, figuring to double his profits like a lot of the taverns downriver. Which he did. A lot of profit in a bottle of Jack, not so much in a keg of beer. Donny noticed even the women started coming around, ordered cocktails he had to learn how to make and these were very profitable, plus the ladies brought a fresh clientele and a new atmosphere. He put some checkered tablecloths on the stained tables, tidied up a bit and added salads to the menu. The End of the Road seemed like the Start of Something.

This hunting season a couple of Seattleites celebrated two buck kills a little too exuberantly. “Double Shots!!” they shouted deep into the night until Trapper Jim, also deep into his cups, took umbrage at the out-of-towners’ good luck and his own lack thereof. Later Donny admitted at the trial, he should have quit serving all three. Hindsight doesn’t need a high magnification scope. Jim was untying a 6 point from the hunters’ Range Rover roof when they stumbled into the parking lot. Words were exchanged, push came to shove and Jim pulled his 30-30 Winchester off his Chevy pickup’s rack and shot one of the men.

Who lived … fortunately. But that’s why the End of the Road no longer serves booze and why women drink downstream. Or quietly at home.

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We got an election tomorrow, oh boy! Money’s been rolling in like gasoline on a tire fire. The airwaves are full of stench and smoke. The lies and insults and accusations and blame have left a charred landscape. Nice to know in this democracy we all mostly hate government. Nothing like burnout and cynicism to give the young folks hope for the future.

Fox News Channel runs 24/7 at the End of the Road Tavern where we’ll watch the returns come in. Donny, the owner, says he doesn’t believe half of what the Talking Heads pontificate about, he just likes their animosity to the present ‘regime’. Donny fought in Viet Nam, left a lot of buddies in paddies at Khe Sahn, lost a leg below the knee to a mortar round and came home to a country he claims spit on him. A lot of the regulars at the End of the Road served in Nam. They’re bitter all over again every time they see the vets honored now. They think they could’ve won the war if the country had supported them, just the way we won Iraq. Well, the first Iraq. Now they’re not so sure after the 2nd one and Afghanistan.

Up here in UpCreek, patriotism runs strong, which is odd considering how far from the Reach of Rome we are. Course we also got folks like myself who burrowed in up the river to get as far away from flagwaving as we could get. It’s taken a lot of years to gain even a meager acceptance from these people, but I guess we grudgingly respect the other for toughing it out up here, a place few stick with, a place others vacation at, or trout fish or hunt for deer and maybe bear. Those of us who stay are mostly loners and losers, refugees from America, wanderers who tired of wandering. We’re throwbacks to the early settlers, hard living, hard livered, hard headed honchos searching for a homestead thought lost long ago but still here up river at the foot of the Cascades’ northern wilderness for those willing to endure the hardships.

Most of this crew here tonight at the End of the Road didn’t cast a vote. They don’t like any of the candidates, wouldn’t trust em if they handed out free ammo at Dirty Larry’s Gun Shop. But they love the USA, the red white and blue, and on Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, more than a few have cried in their beers and beards. All I can figure is, it’s a free country, room for all of us and there’s no law yet that says you have to vote or that you’re required to love it.

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I spoze the ghosts of the past are always waiting in the closet of the present for an opportunity to jump out of the dark and say Boo! in a voice that’s creepily familiar. Post Traumatic Spook Syndrome: finding a former self you thought you’d buried come knocking one midnight dreary. Sometimes, though, you’ll get a different doorbell.

My old buddy Ralph got one awhile back. Knock knock … who’s there? And lo and behold, there was a woman he’d ‘known” back when we all lived in the ‘hood. She was underage then, what the law would define as statutory rape then and now, but here she was 10 years later with a curly headed boy in tow, claiming, she said, the child was his. Whoo hoo…. The sins of the past do come stalking occasionally, the stuff of tragic novels.

Ralph, of course, was shell shocked. “Mine?” he asked. “Yours,” Desiree informed him matter of factly. Of course Ralph realized the implications after a quick deduction of the kid’s age versus the time since he and Desiree had made whoopee in her mom’s ghetto apartment while she was away working to support her dysfunctional family now that her boyfriend had disappeared after providing her with 3 children. And here was one of them, in the same sorry boat, looking for dear old dad.

Ralph, hard as it is to believe, was prepared to do the Right Thing by her. Child support, PTA, college tuition, wedding expenses, etc. At least that’s what he told me one confessional — and I believe he would have. But Ralph is nobody’s fool either, unless you count Ralph, so he asked Desiree if she’d mind having a paternity test. After all, the kid didn’t really look much like Ralph at age 10. Desiree balked, called him a few names, then ultimately admitted to friendly extortion. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and Ralph figured okay, he’d had his fun, now it was hers. He gave her a little money, guilt money I guess. And he fears she’ll be back for more. I think maybe she never left….

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Jerry Hatrick had converted the back booth of the Marina’s Pilot House Lounge into a personal office, judging by the papers strewn around his empty pint glasses. “Whazzup?” Flathead Fred asked amiably as three of us yahoos slid in with our own beers at risk of foaming onto Jerry’s table top filing cabinet. “You doing your taxes early this year??”

Jerry pushed a pile of papers into a heap, leaned back with a groan and said, “Just trying to decide whether to take Social Security now … or wait.” The boyz are all over this one since we’re of that age. Fred took his at 64 even though the benefits were way less than if he’d waited til 70. “I’m grabbing what I can before they go broke,” he told Jerry. Phil laughed. “Fred, if the government goes broke, you got worse troubles than no monthly check.”

“Laugh all you want, Phil, I’m hedging my bets. There’s less people putting in and more of us taking out. You do the math.” Jerry said that’s exactly what he was trying to do before we interrupted. And that was assuming he lived until, oh, 90 and then how much would the difference be if he took early retirement and what would it be if he took it at 66? The last thing he needed was Fred’s monkeywrench logic, which included inflation, health insurance, nursing home care and anything else he could throw in to muddy Jerry’s mathematics. “Whadda you think, Skeeter?” Phil asked about ¾’s of a pint into the discussion.

I’m 64 and eligible for an early pay-out myself. Recently I got my earnings statement for the past 47 years. Four years I made zip. Nada. Zilch. Nine I didn’t break into 4 figures. The boyz consider me semi-retired and so do I … since about 1975. Truth is, I tell em, I’ll be working as long as I can. Which, of course, cracks the table up.

“Next you’ll be wanting us to buy your beers out of sympathy,” Fred crows, shaking his head. Fred worked for 45 well paid years as a construction foreman. His reduced benefits would look pretty good to this grasshopper who fiddled away his working years. Jerry’s going to have a hard time too, I know. But his working days are over with his arthritis problems and pretty soon he’s going to have to roll the dice like the rest of us. If I know Jerry, he’ll have a few more pints, divide by an even number, weigh the empty glass and then flip a coin. Just like the rest of us high rolling gamblers….

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We got home late last night to find the front door wide open, leaves blowing around in the livingroom, the house cold as the frigid outdoors which was dropping past freezing, a hemlock crushing half the boathouse and woodsheds, the water association across the street working on the system so that black water clogged every faucet at the new house and the toilet filled with what looked like septic water.  Today I’ll see what needs to be done about most of the above.  Sunny and cold here on the tropical South End.  Pretty if you weren’t looking at disasters.  Home sweet Home!

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