The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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This is the first morning at our cabin on the flood-swollen Salmon River. The sun’s coming up over the canyon walls, a pair of geese just landed on the far shore, a crow is pestering a bald eagle and a heron is wading a small submerged island where a few shrubs bob in the fast current. A doe tiptoed across the shallow side of the river, feeling her way tentatively, then stopped halfway among larger islands in the middle before plunging into the icy currents to swim the last 30 or 40 yards, finally dragging up onto the rock embankment nearly down here to the cabin.

It would be easy to draw metaphors out here watching the river flow, draw comparisons to the ‘outside’ world of politics and the bustle of our ordinary activities, see ourselves splashing across the floodtides. But … for the time being at least, this morning anyway, why not put the pen down, douse the brain’s fever and wade into this place where time flows downstream while we sit watchful? Adam and Eve weren’t thrown out of the Garden, they just couldn’t see it finally. God and the Serpent? The kids should have realized they created both.

Even these words make for a kind of fence, one with a sign that says No Trespassing, No Admittance. We should go outside and leave the gate open behind us …

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The mizzus and me are on a Retirement Road Trip. Tonight we’re hunkered down on the raging Salmon River which is over its floodstage and rising fast. Of course we’re in a cabin alongside it, a few feet from its bank-chewing edge. The mizzus is on edge too, since we booked this place for three nights on the assumption we wouldn’t be evacuated or swept downstream, a bet she’s not willing to take now. The Salmon, what some call the River of No Return, drains eventually into the Snake near Hell’s Canyon, digging canyons deeper than the Grand as it drops 7000 vertical feet from its headwaters.

Okay, I know, if you wanted a correspondence course in Geography, you’d have gotten one on-line and accredited. But hellfire, we’re parked here, the mizzus is chillin’ and I’m blowing up the inflatable raft — just in case.

The guy we rented from just bought these cabins, signs tomorrow. He was planning to retire himself but his buddy made him that offer he couldn’t refuse. You know the one. So good it can’t be true. He’s 69, Bob is, two years younger than me and he’d sold his own resort in Oregon a year earlier when this place came up and his pal ended up with Stage 4 cancer and supposedly practically gave this place to him. He’s been here all of 5 days now. We’re the first guests and yeah, the only ones.

We’ll see. Maybe his friend saw the 10 day forecasts. Rains, pestilence and frogs. Followed by the 100 year flood. River of No Returns, indeed! Fiscal returns anyway.

But … the mizzus is retired and her river affords no paddling backwards. We’ve visited friends and we’ve hiked places from our place to the Tetons. America is a beautiful country, like the song sez. Trump fired Comey, we heard about the same time as Comey, through sporadic reports and red state newspapers. No one much cares about some Saturday Night Massacre of the FBI director, they got a river rising and so do we. It’s roaring toward Hell’s Canyon and, well, so are we. Hang onto your hats and don’t look back, the rapids are at our front door. All our front doors….

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Earth Day is coming and scientists around the world are planning to hit the streets to advocate for their profession in the face of pervasive distrust and outright hostility by our latter day Flatlanders toward Science, capital S. I don’t know if these are the same yahoos who think most news is faux news because they read it in the National Enquirer or on Breitbart, but I suspect they’re the ones who think science is a con job, perpetrated for political ends.

Global warming? They don’t buy it, not when 99% of scientists think it’s real. Just a scam to take away those coal jobs. Evolution? Oh right, then how did bats grow wings? And why would I think a monkey is anything like me, even if we have one in the White House? No, science is for suckers. Those white lab guyz just want the grant money and would say anything to get it. Plus, all our friends on Facebook don’t believe it either. Take a poll, see for yourself. Let’s vote on global warming, see how many Likes and then decide if it’s true or not. You know, if you could trust the vote count.

It’s all rigged. Everything, the news, the election, the so-called scientific studies, all dog poo. Science? You got a bunch of eggheads making up little experiments, then juggling the data and voila, there’s a theory. We’re supposed to believe it? And so what if another bunch of PhD’s duplicates the results? That’s supposed to be proof? Proof is for the hopelessly terminal gullible.

Technology was supposed to bring us progress and yeah, we all got smart phones now and internet anywhere we go. But the world has gotten ahead of us here, it’s complicated and getting more complicated and how in the hell can we keep up? By googling up everything? Okay, try googling Amorphous Anxiety, see if that’s going to tell us how to learn to live with the advances that come faster and faster. Global warming? Try global information overload. Nobody understands half of what we got in the house or the car or the office anymore. It’s like we’re moving into an alien world, a future world where we’re falling farther behind than the damn monkeys. Oh sure, the scientists say they understand it all. But you know, and I do too, they’re lying.

Those coal jobs are coming back and maybe we should all put our applications in. Down in the mine things are a whole lot simpler. Can you spell BLACK LUNG?

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Okay, buckaroos, the mizzus retired yesterday and tomorrow we’re hitting the road. Take a breather yerselves and check back in a week or so. Happy Trails

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The desert is a menacing place, I don’t care if you’re a native or a moss-backed tourist on safari to the dive taverns of Arizona with names like Jackass or Burro or Sidewinder. The boyz and me were hunting beer down in the flashflood washes and arroyos from Phoenix to Prescott. We’re old hands at this beerhunting, having gone every year for 30 years. We know the drill. Walk to the bars, do not drive. Drink, if not responsibly, at least semi-moderately. Eat. Even if it’s greasy bar food, put something in your belly to soak up alcohol. Try to maintain a modicum of control. Do not disturb the snakes or the natives, especially the venomous ones. The point is to hunt with passion, but also to bring ourselves back alive.

We made reservations in Bisbee a short walk from the historic Silver Dollar Hotel and other weathered historic taverns, but … our fellow slayer in Phoenix had asked his son and his son-in-law, confirmed golfers, along on the Hunt. These boys, nice guys in their 40’s with wives and two children each, decided to cancel our reservations and make them adjacent to the golf course in Prescott they intended to tame. None of the grizzled and seasoned Hunters had a say, but being get-along go-along yahoos, we acquiesced with subdued mutterings. In hindsight, we did not offer the sage counsel professional Hunters should have offered these tenderfeet.

The first warning sign was when they pulled their vehicles into a bar back in the hinterlands that had yet to open but did so in 5 minutes. While we sipped coffee, they threw down shots. Obviously the kids thought they were young and invulnerable. Beer? Not for them. They opted for the hard stuff. It took three or four roadhouses to wind our way up the canyon to our basecamp. By then they were feeling no pain and the day was young. Day two, they had tee times while we hiked the cacti lined trails nearby. They were throwing down shots for breakfast. Midafternoon we rendezvoused at the Palace Hotel, one of the ten best historic bars in America, downtown Prescott. Jerry was dragged in like a dead buck between the other two, blacked out from one and a half bottles of tequila. They laid him into a chair where he slumped from his wounds, unconscious but alive. We ordered another round of beers.

Hunting is not all that difficult if done correctly. Done with disrespect for the Rules, it is a nasty business and leads to all manner of vicious and unforeseen mayhem. By the end of the second night we had turned what should have been an exotic beer hunt into a morass of criminality, fear and abject self-loathing. The police finally intervened, pulling a carload of cocky amateurs onto the shoulder, hauling the intoxicated driver to jail and impounding the car. At three in the morning we went to retrieve our contrite fellow Hunter at the hoosegow. At eight we received a call that the Mex’s wife was in a Seattle hospital, under induced coma, intubated and possibly dying of what appeared to be opioid overdose. By noon we were driving him to the Phoenix airport. A definite chill had settled over the Hunters.

We’re back now and so far no lives have been lost. Next year, count on it, we’ll hunt in the Cascades once again, trespassing on the dam access patrolled by Homeland Security since Nine Eleven who threaten us or crossing the dangerously rotten old bridge high above the Cle Elum River to get back to our cabin. We won’t be inviting the kids. They can drink at home.

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