The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s crabbing season once more, diminished now to a two month opening, five days a week. Ordinarily I walk the eelgrass jungles for the vicious beasts, but when the tides aren’t low, I do what the rest of us down here on the South End do, I use a boat and set pots baited with delicacies from Trader Joe or catered in by Brenda’s Catering and Chow. Everyone these days uses motorboats, but I’m still rowing my little aluminum scow, the one with my homemade oars. Because the State, in its scientific wisdom, requires pots to be pulled the fifth day, I had to row out for mine in whitecaps. Believe me, you pay attention to every stroke when waves are bashing the sides of your tiny tub.

I did okay going out, then managed to pull both pots without flipping the boat. I should maybe mention I’m about 400 yards, call it a quarter mile, out from shore in 75 feet of water. Nobody’s around and nobody’s going to call 911 if I go overboard. I have a lifejacket worst case…. I should probably carry life insurance too.

Going back, though, was harder. The wind had picked up and I was taking worse waves on the sides. My pots were cramping me up for rowing and the direction of the wind was anything but where I wanted to go. Sure, I thought to myself, a smarter man would’ve never come out today. A man with minimal brains would’ve turned around halfway out when the rowing became hard and the danger apparent. Even a dummy might’ve figured leave the damn pots and get his sorry butt back to shore. But … I’m a South Ender and by god, I was going to get those pots and whatever crabs they held even if it meant I had to risk life and limb. This is what differentiates a salty dog from a landlubber professor of economics, in case you were wondering.

Halfway back my left oar caught a wave and hung up a moment. When I got straightened out, I noticed a nut had fallen off the oarlock and next thing I knew the whole gizmo that attached to the oar was coming apart and sure enough, it did. I tried to find the nut down in the crab blood and bait water, but it was nowhere to be seen and last thing I wanted to do was get down and start a panicked search so a rogue wave could swamp me. Gordon Lightfoot said it maybe best in the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: Where in the world does the love of God go, when the minutes turn to hours?

All I know is I cursed myself for not tightening those bolts up good and tight. Nobody to blame but one sad sorry soon-to-be-saltier dog. Worst case, I’d be blown up to the state park at the point, five miles north, not drowned at least. I had crab so I had food. Raw, but survival skills demand a bit of compromise. Sure, I was a little wet, but not hypothermic. And … I still had that oar.

So I paddled one side, rowed the other. I don’t recommend this method, but in a pinch, I can testify, it works. From shore I’m sure it looks like a drunk with one bad arm, every stroke turning the boat about 45 degrees, the waves smacking it, then a paddle turning it back the other way. I finally washed up on the beach not too far from my original launch site.

Some call this recreational crabbing. Even on the South End, this hardly qualifies for recreation. All I know, those crabs are going to taste real good tonight.

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We’re in a motel tonight, downtown Lewiston, Clarkston, near the Snake River. We’d planned to camp at Palouse Falls but … our annual park permit expired today and nobody seems to be around the state park to issue a new one. We could pay the daily, but why? Especially when we looked at the campground, a treeless hellhole of blistered desert, temperature at 100, no shade.

The next state park didn’t even offer camping … although it did have trees and a swimming beach and a huge boat launch into the Snake. Why put a campground here? So … we ended up here at this cheap motel. The first one we looked at was pretty much a rent by month, down and out auto court. This one seemed better but it turns out half of it is rent by month, down and out too. With a swimming pool and coffee in the lobby.

Our new neighbors next door, who we haven’t officially met yet, were just visited by the police. The mizzus is sporting a black eye and has two kids in tow. The old man is a mean little mofo, jawing on her since we rolled in. MY mizzus thinks maybe she’s tried to escape to this one room sanctuary and he’s found her. The cop convinced me she’s right.

It’s a mean old world, that’s the truth. We vacation, I guess, so we’ll leave our peaceful enclave and experience real misery firsthand. Sort of a vaccination — not enough to kill, just enough to build resistance. You know, the way the evening news does every night….

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You leave your little bubble of pastoral paradise on the South End hoping to see some natural wonders OFF-island, you end up in the American hinterlands pretty quick. Over the mountains where trees thin out to sagebrush, poverty isn’t hidden any longer down fern-lined drives and a cedar forest. It isn’t covered over in blackberry vines the way it is at home. Personal junkyards are glaring in the implacable sun. And the rusty mobile homes lined up in graveled scars on the landscape sport corroded air conditioners stuck out aluminum windows, a small and rattly relief against the three digit heat of desert afternoons.

Welcome to the barrios del norte. I watched an Hispanic couple and their son sitting together in a park yesterday in the shade of one of the few trees, the father reading aloud to his boy while mom talked on her cellphone. These are the immigrants some folks want to round up and send ‘home’. Three of twelve million or so. I think — and don’t tell my Republican friends I said this — I think maybe they ARE home.

One of the GOP candidates says they bring drugs and they’re rapists, all of em. Up the road from me a couple of days ago we had a party of white kids call 911. A young woman had strayed off into the jungle of the nettled South End and hadn’t returned. The group of eight or so admitted to the deputy and the fire boyz who’d responded that they’d all been shooting heroin. They were worried she’d gotten hopelessly lost in our Amazon, but, miraculously, she stumbled into their cabin’s clearing just then, unhurt except for some nettle stings. The deputy departed, his job finished there and so did the fire crew.

If drugs are an ‘immigrant’ problem, I suspect we’re being a little selective if the rich white kids can party with syringes and smack and the police say ‘have a nice day.’ Out here in the sun-blistered boondocks, I guess reading to your kid might just be reason enough for deportation. Maybe the rich kids will kick their habit and want those orchard picking jobs, the ones the immigrants take away from white folks.

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I just heard Taco Time and Burger King announce they were going to start using Real Food. This is Hot News indeed: a restaurant serving actual ingredients!! The chemical factory stocks must be sliding headlong down a freefalling Dow. Course, I also heard if they were selling a ‘brand’ name, like Coca-Cola, they weren’t going to make it real, they don’t care WHAT Coke’s slogan sez. If high fructose sugar isn’t real, what is??

I spoze I shouldn’t poke fun. It’s a good sign, serving real food in a fast food joint. Who knows? Maybe us enlightened shoppers will demand the same thing in the grocery store. Maybe we’ll demand tomatoes that have a taste again! Fruit that wasn’t picked 2000 miles away! Apples that aren’t about 2 hours from applesauce! Vegetables that aren’t 10% pesticide! Food that’s food! Food that’s real, dammit! Like they got at Burger King!!!!!!!!

It’s a new world, all right. Organic section in the produce aisle, gluten free in the bakery and in the beer depot even. Gluten free in the hardware these days, can’t be too careful. You got a nut allergy, they got nutless stuff, no problem.

Free range chickens, cage free eggs, yah shure, u betcha. You want fresh, we got farmers’ markets. Artisan bread, cheese, whisky. And no, whisky’s not just for dinner anymore.

These are the Good Times. Altho … I heard Trix and Cap’n Crunch are taking out their artificial additives too. These are the cereals of my youth. I can still conjure up the chemical taste of Cap’n Crunch. Without those additives, all you got is the box, okay maybe if you dissolve it in milk. Course, it’s undoubtedly got dioxin from the paper milling process. All I know is there’s gonna be a lot of hungry kids in this additive-free world.

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Uh-oh, Skeeter’s taking off once again. I know, what a slacker/blogger the mofo is! But let’s cut him some slack. The guy has had a difficult time lately with his so-called career. He was a finalist for a Colorado project, looked like the frontrunner, only to be asked, just prior to boarding a plane to go pitch his glass proposal, if he could possibly put his stained glass mural in something other than their windows. They didn’t ask his sculptor competitors if they could put their sculptures on something other than the entryway courtyard grounds. You know, hang them from a cloud or something.

Skeeter said, and I quote: “Huh?” Then he said, and I quote again, “Let me know when to cancel the flight into Colorado.” And they said, quoting once more, “Cancel now.” You think the blood-sport of public art isn’t hard, think again. Skeeter’s got plenty of war wounds from recalcitrant architects benumbed by the legacy of Frank Lloyd always Right, window manufacturers voiding warranties and clients nervous about, well, everything….

Course, you don’t want to hear this and Skeeter doesn’t want to depress you with his problems. Life is fine and if he did want to whine and cry and throw himself on the floor in a fit of despondency, he’d be the idiot and one thing Skeeter isn’t … well, okay, maybe he is. But he has sense enough to pick himself up, dust his hat off and say let’s just move on. Which, of course, is exactly what he’s doing, moving on. Out of town, out of sight and maybe out of mind. His, anyway.

Once again, apologies for leaving anybody who reads this stuff in the lurch. Give you time, maybe, to work on resumes or write that novel you always thought you’d write or just watch more Fox News and see what the fair and balanced crowd thinks that President of ours is doing to ruin America. Skeeter, he’s going into the hinterlands of the ruins, see what the locals there have to say about the current state of affairs. Actually, he’s going to the Tetons. Purple mountains majesty. He’ll get back to you in a week or so….

Purple?

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