The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The Upcreekomish, once a proud nation feasting on the yearly salmon runs, wanted for nothing.  Their hunting and fishing prowess was known up and down the coast, their art was envied, their canoes admired.  They traded with the coastal clans, but for the most part they kept to themselves upriver.  When the whites settled nearby, trapping and mining, the Upcreekomish shook their collective heads but maintained peaceful relations.  Who knew they would lose everything to these men with shovels and saws?

The Otter Creek Trading Post — at least according to Three Finger Bill, a hapless logger who made it back out of the woods before he started whittling away toes and feet with his 40 inch chainsaw — claims the Post was the old Grabbinrun Mining Company’s general store back in the late 1880’s.  The Upcreekomish traded furs for canned food, salmon for bad hooch and various totem carvings for tobacco.  Was it a bad trade?  Three Finger will tell you he’s got a cedar chest ornamented with a beaver totem the professors down at the University offered 6 figures for, about the number of his fingers still usable.  Bill tells me he doesn’t need the money and besides, he uses the box to keep his bad hooch, cigarettes and canned Spaghetti-O’s in.  Sometimes life comes full circle.

Bill’s uncle Walter ran the store after the mines closed and the company script ended.  A few salty dogs kept panning, built small cabins and settled in for an early Depression.  The store survived, but like the miners and the Upcreekomish, just barely and not much to recommend the life.  Tourism brought a few fishermen and backpackers through, and the store, ever adaptable, supplied them with high priced rods, reels, fishing supplies and the ever popular corn dog and microwaveable burrito.  Mostly the store makes its profit on tobacco and alcohol, plus Lotto.

I guess you could say the locals are still getting the short end of the stick, but if you crave Spaghetti-O’s, maybe you don’t mind.

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I just got done jawboning with an old friend up north, Java Jeff, who told me a little about a capitalist venture he’d had in China. He’d agreed to build what was the largest coffee enterprise in the world with their government. Yah … bigger than Starbucks. Think about that for a South End minute.

About the time they were ready to Launch, he gets notice the good Chinese are filing a securities fraud suit against him. You know, just prior to putting the corporation on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Java Jeff, who had bet practically everything he owned on this deal, hired some high powered international attorneys to defend himself. After plenty of ‘billable’ hours, they basically advised him to get ready for bankruptcy. You know, after they got paid. Shortly before the stock debut, the Maoists offered him a plea bargain: drop his 5% interest in the company and they would drop their interest in prosecuting him. His lawyers advised him to take the deal and walk away. How do you beat the Chinese government in a courtroom on their turf on trumped up charges?

Java Jeff could see the pictographs on the wall, all right, all those years and that investment stolen from him and nothing he could do. So he signed away his 5% and sure enough, the company made $15 billion when it opened first day on Shanghai’s exchange. Anyway you cut it, Jeff lost a lot of yuan.

I’m not thinking of expanding my glass empire to China anymore, that’s for sure. Hard enough dealing with architects here in America who see me basically as a Graffiti Artist who needs police intervention and remedial treatment. But I feel bad for Java Jeff. As he said, justice isn’t a word some places believe in. Not in their jungle. And capitalism isn’t necessarily a panacea for the world’s ills, is what I say. Jeff will be all right. He knows he built the biggest coffee conglomerate on earth. Now — at least I’m betting — he hopes they’ll gag on it.

And those stories about the Premier cleaning up corruption … tell it to the gullible.

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Hank ‘the Tank’ Amundsen is standing up next to his barstool taking a swing for the outfield wall. “My gawd,’ he was gushing, “my gawd, it was something to see. That kid of mine is going to the majors, you guyz heard it first.” Pete, two stools down, sipped affably at his pint of IPA and said quietly, “I think you told us this last week, Tank.” Jerry nodded from a table full of empty pints he and the Flatheads had killed during the first hour of happy hour, ready for the second. “I believe Pete’s correct, Tank, but he forgot to mention the week before and last month and I think, check me on this Pete, I think you told us Jimmy was going Pro last year.”

“Aw, guys, I’m just a proud papa, is all. You can’t blame me, the kid is great. You can see it in his swing he’s got plenty of homers coming up. Practically got a contract signed. The scouts probably already got eyes trained on him.”

Little Jimmy, if he declared eligibility at this point, would never graduate Middle School. Tank has been sending him to camps, buying gear, tossing balls, all the stuff a Tiger Woods training dad would do since the kid was two and a half. If Jimmy had hoped for a normal childhood of bikes and X-box, it wasn’t going to happen. If Tank wasn’t hauling him and his bats, gloves and balls to tournaments and camps, he was out back of his shack where he’d set up a batting cage, firing curve balls to the poor kid, yelling at him when he whiffed, hollering in joy when he blasted one into the nettles past the swingset that Jimmy never got to use. His sister, pretty much ignored by Tank, got the swing pretty much to herself.

I don’t know what happens to all the Jimmys whose alpha dads drove them to be the best soccer player, baseball star, football hero or basketball idol, whose only dream was to go pro, make the majors, play ten years or less, then retire wealthy as Michael Jordan. I suspect they become sad, depressed, broken adults. Maybe they put their kids through the same nightmare gauntlet.

I had a buddy in high school who won state champ in swimming. When I saw him after we’d trudged off to different colleges, I asked him if he was still training for the Olympics. “I quit,” he said. When I asked why, he answered, “I spent half my life in a chlorine pool, before school, after school. All so I could compete in the Olympics, probably never make it, then wonder all my damn life why I didn’t do something else. I’m going to do something else.”

I suspect there are mostly losers out there. If we taught em to love the game, if we taught em to enjoy their teammates, if we taught em that sports were fun more than a path to riches, maybe we’d have a lot more winners. Jimmy, I suspect, isn’t going to be a winner. And his dad is going to take it a lot harder than Jimmy.

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Some days the past comes calling. I was watering our garden this afternoon when an old friend hauled into the drive with a pack and a 5 gallon bottle of water he had lashed to a roller suitcase. Got off the bus that doesn’t run the last lousy three miles of island and walked here on his way to his brother’s cabin a mile south pulling that water along dirt road and blacktop. The cabin doesn’t have a well.

Tom’s been through some changes. Haven’t we all? I knew him back when … some 30 or 35 years ago. He was a hard drinking 20 something, distributed beer around the area, loved to tell stories of bars between Montana and California, the old saloons mostly gone now or restored to yuppie shrines. I nailed the ridgepole on the day we hoisted the 40 foot log up into position on his brother’s log cabin. Felt like I’d hammered the Golden Spike on the first transcontinental railroad. Quite an honor, definitely a privilege.

Tom moved down to Arizona, did the maintenance for the spring baseball, mowed, watered, all the stuff Mesa needs to keep a desert ballpark grassy and green. He got a bad back, developed an over-enthusiastic love of alcohol, had some physical breakdowns, went into rehab, took an early retirement on disability, discovered — or acknowledged — he was gay. He looked good today. Old, maybe, older even than me, but healthy old. Walking his gear two miles from the bus dropoff, 30 years from when I knew him.

I guess in a way we’re all old codgers now, pulling our water and our stories and our packs down the highway that runs back toward home … or some reasonable facsimile. He’ll stay a night or two, reminisce, commune with the stars and the skeeters, maybe have a campfire there under the big firs up where the dirt road to the cabin ends and something else, not memory, begins. I’ll be doing something similar, I guess, thinking of all the old campfires and the nights long ago up at that cabin. What I think is we’re all hauling water, we’re all dragging stories….

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My neighbors across the road, every year now, put iris bulbs out on the highway with a sign that says FREE. Cars stop, trunks fly open and another load of plants migrates south. Over a hundred varieties of irises they brought from Oklahoma are taking over the South End, iris capital of the world.
This is a new twist on an old country tradition — passing plants to the neighbors. Look around and you’ll see our quince bush is about the age of the Nesje’s up the road. There are 3 sequoias in the neighborhood, all about the same height and age. Our mock orange is showing up from here to Tyee.
A cutting here, a few bulbs there, a piece of honeysuckle vine, a funny vegetable like our Jerusalem artichoke, some plants that make a jail break on their own like our comfrey, trees like my neighbor’s chestnuts that pop up everywhere or our filberts the blue jays plant for us and everybody else —- the plants get spread around.
The mizzus is a horticulturist. Me, I’m more of a hortichuckle-ist. I used to find plants back in the hollows, at old homesteads, by hidden ponds and muddy creek sides. I got one, a 7 foot tall monster wild orchid, a Jumpin Jimmy that spreads by spitting its seeds out of a pod. We’d find em on the roof, up in the gutter where the mulch is about a foot deep, nearly everywhere but in the house…at least for now.
You got to be careful, I guess. I suppose it won’t be long before the moralists take a swing at this. Plant swapping. It isn’t natural. It isn’t right. Ought to nip it in the bud. Stick to the native plants. Live on stinging nettle soup and quit importing foreign vegetables. Send those potatoes back to Ireland and those artichokes back to Israel where they belong….
Personally – and don’t tell Ma I said this – I’m all FOR plant swapping. Seems neighborly somehow. And saves me from those collecting trips back in the jungle and swamps now that the Jumpin Jimmies have taken over everything in sight.

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