The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Joe Crosby was watching Brenda, our waitress, as she took our drink order. He and his wife Jenny had recently moved down to the South End from Minnesota now that he’d retired. “Jenny was a stewardess for awhile,” Joe was saying, dipping a chip into his salsa. “You know, back when it was considered glamorous, not just a sky waitress. She loved it for the first few years.” He poked a finger in the ice of the margarita he’d finished, gave it a twirl, I guess to chill his digit.

“One flight she got a woman in first class, asked her what she’d like to eat and the woman never made eye contact, didn’t answer. Jen thought she hadn’t heard her so she asked again. Same thing, just stared straight ahead. Maybe she was deaf, ya know, but finally the woman’s husband said, matter of fact like he was used to this, ‘She doesn’t talk to the Help.’”

“Nice,” I said before thanking Brenda for the second round she’d brought us. Joe nodded appreciatively. “ Yeah. The glamour went out of stewing real quick, I mean to tell you. Jen never got over it. I said screw those people, but she looked in a mirror after that and saw someone else. Quit a few months later.” We both shook our heads. “And you know the funny part? Sad, actually. She treats waitresses bad herself. Stewardesses too. Like I guess they’re just the damn Help. Go figure.”

The Pilot House was pretty dead this Happy Hour, just Mudflap Mike and some pal I’d seen around and us, not all that happy a crowd. Joe swirled his finger in the new icecubes. “Yeah, Jen and I don’t go out much. I hope that woman in first class needs a medic someday. See if she’ll talk to him when he asks if her symptoms are heart attack or stroke….”

“Strange world,” I said, pretty sure we’d be leaving Brenda a tip big enough to put her kid through college.

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Arizona, for me, was a lot like the South End is for most Camanoites. I really didn’t have much more than stereotypes to go on. Desert everywhere, snowbirds on a migratory flight path, illegal immigrants behind every saguaro cactus, Republicans on steroids and Viagra, eternal sunshine of the mind, epidemic melanoma.

We headed into the back country, not much in the way of work or water or food. My brother and a buddy wanted a roadtrip so we took the rental rig and beat it like a bad burro off the mainroads. Put about 1500 miles on it, covered it with mud, probably ruined the suspension and gave it back to Budget as payback for the time they charged me for a new tire after I’d blown one down in Arkansas that had 32,000 miles on it. After about four days of hard travel through the backroads only coyotes and the border patrol use, my impression of the state shifted appreciably. We didn’t see one single sombrero peeking out from the arroyos. Folks were universally friendly. The sun was only out about half the trip and the dry washes ran red with flash floods that forced us back to pave roads the last day. We even got turned back by a snowstorm in the mountains, barely getting to the nearest town before our car ran out of gas miles from anywhere.

Arizona is like a lot of the west, varied and beautiful. Mountains, desert, buttes and mesas, dry gulches and reservoirs, geologic wonders and archeologic sites — it had enough to make every day surprisingly different. We passed through Tombstone and the OK Corral, took pictures of the steel border wall at the Mexican border, climbed into cliff dwellings, 4 wheeled through the Saguaro National Monument, touched a toe in New Mexico, gambled with the locals in a desert watering hole, had dinner with the man who gave Obama is first job as an attorney, forded flooded gulches and wandered once abandoned mining towns that are tourist traps now. And we still only saw a small part of Arizona.

We went through more than a few towns on their way to ghost status and we crossed hundreds of miles where the only sign of life was cacti and sagebrush. The west is still wild here even though Wyatt and Doc are long dead. It’s a Big Land, too big for this short trip, but I’ll be going back, not to escape the winter here on the South End, but to see a different South End, the one at the end of America.

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We 3 gringos took a little detour off the Arizona main roads as we headed down to the Mexican border. You got a rental car, you pretty much don’t worry about dry gulches and backwash arroyos. Those horrible scraping sounds of rock on metal eventually seem less alarming. We wanted to see the Saguaro National Monument up close, a vast tract of broken rock, cacti and the occasional black helicopter searching low along the hilltops, checking us out, maybe the only vehicle back in the scrub for the next two hours as we tested the endurance of our Kia’s shock and strut system.

The saguaros grow 200 years old, stand 20 feet tall and look comically human with their Taco Time arms waving at each other. This is where they have come for their convention, a million strong, until the road reaches the security gates of Asarco Copper Mine where ten miles of their tailings create a barren mesa devoid of saguaro or any other living thing. You want copper line to move electricity to power your TV, this is the price you pay.

By high noon we’ve reached blacktop and one of many towns drying up and turning to memory in the desert sun. Some broken down adobe block cantina offered $4 pitchers of cervezas so we beat the dust off our Stetsons and pushed open the doors, strangers in town. Five minutes later we’re provisioned and parked in the ramada off the back, just us, two black dudes, a Mexican and his wife, engaged in a homemade wheel of fortune, a vertical roulette wheel you spin and bet high or low, pretty much a primitive casino.

You may ask, is this what we came to the southwestern end of the USA for? And I will tell you, it beats a swimming pool in Vegas or a fenced resort with HBO and Wi-fi. If you go in search of the real America — okay, the America rapidly disappearing into the future — it’s not to be found along the damn freeway. But it’s out there if you want to take a few chances, risk a little inconvenience, dare the Fates and roll the dice. Or the wheel…. We didn’t lose anything serious to the hombres at the bar, all good folks, but we won back some of what 7-11 and Dish TV and Disneyland stole from all of us gringos without so much as a squawk or a whimper. We bought the bar a round on our way out and hightailed it toward Mexico. Vaya con Dios, amigos.

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