The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Snow Goose Bookstore is closing its cover this month after nearly three decades of serving the literati of Stanwoodopolis. The two sets of owners were the monks keeping the guttering flame of Uff-da civilization from going completely dark for the past 30 years. They were the Book Bambis vs. Amazon’s Godzilla where we all expected they would be Bezo toejam in a year, no more, but they held on despite terrible odds, through the Great Recession, despite Google, despite Kindle, despite a world whose attention spans are too short for a novel or a work of non-fiction or a poem by e.e. cummings.

Oh, I know, most of you will say ‘the world has changed, Skeeter, even if you haven’t, Gutenberg is dead, send him some flowers for his grave, move into the 21st Century, embrace the tweet, stick with haiku.’

First it’ll be the bookstores, then the libraries and finally books themselves. Who has time to read them anyway if e-mails are nudged aside by text messaging? U no, wen speling and puncs have dyed. My old pal Prof. Ralph visited from the hinterlands of Minnesota last week. He was, like myself, an English major back in our college years. I asked him what he was reading these days and Ralph just shrugged and said ‘not much’. Not much what? I asked and he said not much of anything. If us English majors have given up on the great American novel, maybe there really is no hope.

Prof. Ralph is writing, he said, probably a bit defensive about abandoning Hemingway and Updike. ‘A novel?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘philosophical musings.’ Great, a solipsistic diarist, completely uncontaminated by outside ideas, especially one who no longer reads anything, just what we need instead of the Snow Goose Bookstore. Close the door, shut the gates, the barbarians are definitely on their way.

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Well, Buckaroos, Skeeter’s going into the hills once more on the annual Beer Hunt, must be about the 30th anniversary. A lot of trophy bottles mounted at the hunting shack up by Rosyln, Washington. The herds aren’t as big now, of course and the backlash from Orlando may actually put a crimp on our quest for new military style weaponry. In fact, I may suggest to my fellow beer hunters we just catch and release this year. Maybe photograph the elusive prey and mount blowups on the cabin walls.

Then again, these are hardened hunters and my wussie suggestion may get outvoted as a little too politically correct. We boyz are democratic, if nothing else. Last year we crossed the Cle Elum Lake dam where, since 9-1-1, the federal property has surveillance cameras and multiple No Trespassing signs. In those years just after the Towers came down, the Dam Keeper would come out and threaten us with arrest. We explained we were patriotic United States citizens, but dammit (no pun intended) we were walking across that dam. The other direction home was 15 miles in the dark.

We never learned if he reported us to the FBI. We never saw mention of terrorist infiltrators storming the dam in the Cle Elum Gazette. Apparently our numbers and our hostile demeanor were enough to convince the Dam Keeper not to mess with our semi-invasion. The Keeper is gone now, no doubt budget cuts in these fiscally fraught times, but the cameras and the No Trespass warnings remain. Last year a police cruiser passed us on the road to the dam, turned and passed us again. We apparently aren’t on their Watch List.

At any rate let’s hope we aren’t this year either. Until my return or extradition, feel free to peruse some old entries here. I don’t remember writing most of them, you probably won’t remember reading them either. On the South End, every day is brand new.

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I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.

Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.

Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.

Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.

“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.

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If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chases Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

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