The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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You might not guess it, and you might actually be alarmed to know it, but I was a school teacher back in 1972. Taught English and Social Studies to 8th graders, those pre and post pubescent adolescents who drove a couple of my colleagues to retire early. Truth is, I retired early too. But it was my fellow teachers and administrators who drove me to it. Or so I like to say. You know, 40 odd years later….

I guess you could accurately say that I wasn’t cut out for teaching. I came out of the radical 60’s where one entire semester our campus was in full blown riot, National Guard camped down at the ballfields, buildings trashed and finally one blown to pieces. After nearly four years of grueling studies in pharmacology, street protesting and alternative philosophies, I realized I maybe didn’t have the credentials for, well, probably any serious occupation beyond car wash employee. So I took some education credits, just to hedge my bet. Who knows, I might like teaching.

I got a job teaching 8th graders. Eighth graders are an interesting subset of humans, half already passed into virtual adulthood, half still immature as a 3rd grader. It was like teaching in a one room schoolhouse circa 1850, kids age 6 to 18. Being a graduate of a radical institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I came into the profession with radical ideas. Schools, or so I thought at the time and pretty much still do, are nothing more than prison lite, get those brats into some cells and keep them busy all day long. Instill in them virtues that would make working in a factory or a corporation palatable. Obedience. Subservience. Acceptance. Sit down, shut up. Do what you’re told, get a good grade. Act out, the Man will sit on your head.

So naturally I dispensed with seating charts, grading systems and most rules. My fellow teachers watched with horror my kids outside hanging from the trees where we would take books and read on sunny days. It looked like Monkey U. My principal stopped by one day to inform me that one of my kids’ parents, a University professor in English lit, was extremely distressed to drop by his son’s class only to find him in white facepaint with blood smeared on his lips in the filming of our epic zombie movie. “It was ketchup,” I smiled. “No zombies were harmed in the making of our film.” Oddly, this was not reassuring to him. Nor was the fact that I refused to issue grades, just written evaluations.

The zombie movie, no doubt the inspiration for our current wave of endless copycat books, television shows and B movies, was really a social commentary on the school itself complete with shots of zombie like students in my fellow educators’ classes, sitting in rows, half awake, barely alive. My fellow educators, once we began to screen the film for 25 cents a head, were less than amused. My principal trudged once more to my room to inform me school policy forbade charging money for school activities. I said I didn’t realize that. We instituted the novel concept of voluntary donations and had Gerald, an 8th grade gorilla the size of a bar bouncer, ask forcefully for those voluntary donations. We made more than enough money to pay for processing the film with plenty left over. Lessons in Capitalism 101. And still the administration complained!

At the end of the year my principal explained that I would not be coming back and he would not be offering letters of recommendation. I explained that this was okay with me. I had had a dose of the education system and maybe it was time to remove myself and set out to explore the ‘real’ world. He heartily agreed and for once we were on the same page. The real world, it turned out, proved that I was probably right to get those now useless teaching certificates in the first place. I was ready for some mean lessons in the school of hard knocks. The zombies were about to have some fun with me this time.

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Any of you unfortunate enough to know me probably understand that I’m not the kind of hombre who wanted neighbors. Thomas Jefferson famously said people should live far enough apart that they can’t hear their dogs’ barking. Times change, I understand that, but in these modern times, I’d like to think we would live separate enough not to hear each other’s lawnmowers, chainsaws, weedeaters and teenagers’ boomboxes. So imagine my distress when, two years after moving to the end of this island at the end of the continent, the trees across from me were clearcut and a 52 lot development was slated for my neighborhood. I immediately went looking for a new home, up river by the Sauk and Skagit convergence, over on the peninsula, out by the coast, somewhere I could hide out.

Needless to say I never left the South End. The development got scaled down to 26 lots and for the past 3 decades, about one house a year was built. My own included…. This past year the last house was finished and the clamor and clang of construction ended, the quietude enfolding us like a benediction. Amen.

Today we were over at the annual picnic our neighbors put on for themselves and those of us across the road. The mizzus and me are the only non-members who attend, but every year we meet the folks who moved in the past year, shoot the breeze, carry in a potluck dish, eat potato salad and hamburgers, reminisce and get reacquainted. Slowly but surely over the years we’ve made our peace with a more crowded neighborhood than we’d maybe wished for. And slowly but surely the neighbors are no longer folks older than us but quite a few are younger. I can see where this is going. Through bifocals clear as day.

I haven’t always been on the best of terms with these newcomers of ours, I’ll admit that. Probably their fault, I figure. And in the old days they didn’t get along with each other. Not my fault, definitely. But as we all sat around the picnic tables at the cul-de-sac’s only shade under the big leaf maple on a hot summer day, I felt at home with all these folks, all these neighbors of ours, some new, some old, and I count myself lucky, this crusty curmudgeon, for the friends we’ve made over there and the friends we’ll make in the coming years. We crab together, we talk across the fence, we go to birthday parties and anniversaries, all that socializing you might expect when you move to the country and not the suburbs. If you live near your neighbors, close enough, say, to hear their beagle bellowing, think about that picnic once a year if you don’t have one already. Invite the neighbors and if they don’t come like some of ours don’t, it’s their tough luck. Chances are, up close and personal, you’ll find you have plenty in common. And don’t let the potato salad sit out too long….

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When I moved to the wilds of Northern Wisconsin as a high school kid, the Big Deal was to letter in sports. They had, for a school out in the swampy boondocks, a reputation for winning teams, particularly swimming and tennis. Maybe there just wasn’t much else to do for us future paper mill workers.

A buddy of mine was a helluva swimmer. Won state championship when he was a junior, set records when he was a senior. We all figured he’d go on to collegiate swimming, probably try for a shot at the Olympics. Every morning before school, every afternoon after, he’d be in the pool. The kid was half porpoise. The future, through his swim goggles, looked bright. After graduation we both went off to seek our destinies, John to win awards, me to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life, a 50/50 proposition. It pays, in case you hadn’t noticed, to decide on directions early then stick to it. Tiger Woods started at 3, kids nowadays probably are doing laps in the womb.

A few years after leaving for our separate colleges, I ran into John. “Still swimming?” I asked, expecting new gills and a long rundown on trophies, awards, scholarships, endorsements from nose plug sponsors.

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I quit it. Gave it up.”

“Seriously?” I asked, wondering if he’d been hurt maybe, but no, he said, just wanted to live a life, not just live in chlorinated pools, training for a shot at the Olympics.

The Olympics are going on this week in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s best athletes competing in beach volleyball, ping pong, target shooting, side pocket pool, mudwrestling, horseshoes, every sport imaginable. I’m betting John and I are two of the few who don’t follow the Games. He’s a professor now in Idaho, I’m still wondering what to do with my life. But … I suspect our lives are more interesting than the ones of those dedicated to some sport only the very few will ultimately succeed at. It’s easy enough to be a Loser in this specialized world without taking on the longest odds possible. John, well, he’d be surprised to hear it, but he’s always been a hero to me, a man who could walk away while he was ahead.

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Amid rumors that our commissioners have decided to divest the county of its parks, the South End Environmental Koalition (SEEK) has begun a campaign to Save Our Parks (SOP). Ginny Davis, the newly appointed president, spoke at the South End Chamber of Commerce, arguing that parks mean tourism and tourism means dollars. Ralph Hinshaw asked if she thought our little 5 acre park —Hutchison Park — really brought tourists into our ‘economic sphere’.

“Seriously, Ginny,” he asked, “who the hell comes to that park except teenagers doing drugs and having sex? You think they’re going to fuel the economy down here?” Ginny realized she’d maybe gone down the wrong cul-de-sac, citing economic growth where economics barely existed, but Harry Walton, owner of Tyee Megastore, stood up and declared he sold a lot of ice cream bars to the bicyclists who stopped at the store and he’d seen more than a few eating popsicles at the picnic tables down at the park an eight of a mile north.

Ralph avowed how he’d never seen a soul down there much less a motorcycle gang with sweet tooths. Ginny, who didn’t catch the humor in that, asked, “What do you think, Ralph? Sell the park for a building lot? Not much revenue in a single house on a lot zoned for 5 acre rural residential.”

The South End only has this one park. Course it only has one store. One diner. One hair salon. And two art galleries. Which are extraordinary if you’ll allow me to play art critic. We got plenty of art studios, some good, some not, but they all add to the mythology of the fabled South End, if not, admittedly, to the tax base.

Personally, I think the park should stay. I don’t give a fig or a fart if folks throng to its short trails and its unused BBQ grills or notice the flowers or idiosyncratic sculpture. Some day when this is an art mecca for weary urbanites, they’ll have a place to pull in and check the GPS for how to get home. Meanwhile the teenagers got a place for backroad sex.

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