The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of folks don’t know this, but Black Friday originated on the South End. Tyee Store came up with an innovative marketing scheme back, oh, shortly after dinosaurs went extinct and the Southendomish Tribe gave up on ever getting their treaty rights to hunt pterodactyls. About 1977 it was.

They held a sale day after Gobbler Day, all you could carry half price. Folks camped all night in the rain to get first in line. Terrible cold, hard rain, horrible indigestion. Next morning shelves cleared in about half an hour. The food supplies for the entire South End dried up, hoarded by the lucky few.

Pretty soon the rumors started. Unspeakable rumors really. The denizens of the starving South End began to realize the pizzas were gone and the frozen burritos too and the Hungry Man’s were gonna prove prophetic now that they were missing from the puddling freezer chest bottom. The food riots were a harbinger, I guess. And then the rumors started drifting over to our west side, whispers at first, then full blown howls. Cannibalism, ladies and gentlemen. Cannibalism.

Eventually Tyee restocked their shelves and those delicious deli rotisserie gourmet hotdogs revolved anew. And the rumors? We don’t mention this any longer. We just advise the newcomers to stock the pantry with more than a day’s supply……..

And since then we South Enders traditionally stock up on ‘Black Friday”.

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Every Thanksgiving — without fail — our little nuclear unit would belly up to a dining room table loaded to the ceiling fan with a banquet Mom had slaved for two days to cook …. And we’d wait for the Old Man to raise a glass in toast. He’d give a short somewhat sincere thanks, and then he’d ask his predictable, inevitable question, the one his mother asked every Thanksgiving up in the most economically depressed region in Northern Maine where we all were born: “I wonder what the poor folks are doing today?”

You want to put a dull edge on the carving knife, I can’t think of a much quicker way. I know most of us this year are just thankful the elections are over, the mudslinging and the distortions are finished for, oh, a few months before the 2020 election cycle, the interminable TV and radio spots are blessedly replaced by pharmaceutical and car and deodorant ads and we can just return to our dreary monsoonal lives of quiet desperation. We can ratchet down the angst and the anger now. We can start shopping for Christmas. We can hibernate a bit.

But my Grandma, bless her kindly heart, was right to worry about those less fortunate, even though she wasn’t all that fortunate herself. Not by our modern standards that we simply take for granted as our God given American right. A full belly can lead pretty quick to tryptophanic complacency.

So when you say a prayer this Thanksgiving or make a toast over that fine Chablis and dive in for seconds on the turkey dressing, leave a little room. Not just for the desserts but for the folks who might be eating alone, who might not have much to eat, who might not have a lot to be thankful for. After all, they’re part of the family too.

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Donald J. came out today with a tweet mocking the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, calling him Little Adam Schitt. The man’s name is Schiff and if the obese President thinks he’s little, let’s see what he thinks when the House flips blue and Adam Schiff begins the subpoena process his predecessor Devin Nunes blocked.

We’re all used to our bully President mocking and belittling those he doesn’t like, meaning about everyone who isn’t on Fox News. We’re even accustomed to tweets that are lies and borderline insane, like the one two days ago that the state of California should clean up its act on firefighting strategies and adopt the highly successful Finnish model of raking up its leaves in the woods so they won’t allow catastrophic fires up there in the Arctic. The Finnish President that Donald spoke with about this pressing issue doesn’t recall any such conversation, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have one in Donald’s head.

So I can let these pass by without much angst, having accepted, like most of the King’s minions, that this is just everyday normal. The new normal, I guess we like to call it. But what is harder for me is the President going after Smokey the Bear, an American icon for nearly 70 years, the symbol of fire fighting for the Forest Service when they found a bear cub badly burned in a forest fire back in 1950. My old man worked for the Forest Service all his life and Smokey was part of mine all my life.

My dad was a Republican. He never quite acknowledged that the attacks on government included the Forest Service. They weren’t tax sucking bureaucrats in the D.C. swamp, not a bit. They were dedicated professionals managing our National Forests, creating Wilderness Areas, logging sustainably, building campgrounds and parks, yeah, and fighting fires. They fought them so successfully that now the undergrowth has built up over the years without smaller natural fires to keep the forests open and we have conflagrations unimaginable in the days when he would fly out to California or Arizona from our homes on the east coast to man the fire lines.

Smokey the Bear, he might argue and I certainly would, doesn’t live in a swamp. He’s there to remind us humans that the forests are ours to protect. Only YOU can prevent forest fires, he admonished us for all those years. So sweep the woods if you want to listen to the President. Or blame the people who fight those fires if you believe the guy. But me, I have to state categorically, the President is full of schitt.

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Some of my buddies are working hard to see who can build the largest wrecking yard on the South End. Ever since Tyee Store sold back in the ‘80’s and the new owners hauled off the acre of cars, trucks, chassis and bus parts, the neighborhood had to drive clear to Mount Vernon or Marysville for cannibalized auto parts to repair our beaters. The last trip I made to the Quilceda Swamps to pull an automatic tranny in the mudhole where a ’62 BelAire had bellied down before submerging completely into the tarpits, well, that transmission lasted less than a hundred miles before it bit the dust. Or mud. Or whatever.

Maybe that’s why we keep our dead rigs — never know when a part off the old vehicle might save us the dreaded trip to distant off-island wrecking yards. So we make our less-than-manicured acreage our own personal salvage yards. Sure the mizzus cries, sure she sobs, but hellfire, she sure isn’t going to be the one who crawls on her belly to dismount some rusted differential in the mud and the rain miles from home.

Now, you know and I do too, chances are slim to none that we’ll ever need anything off those blackberry strangled rigs up on blocks or down on deteriorated radials back by the woods. But it’s a kind of backwash insurance policy, see? If you got it, the gods of fate will pass you by. If you don’t, you might as well stick a black flag on the roof and say come and get me. It’s a law of the universe actually. And it’s certainly the Law on the South End, inviolable and terrible and probably swift. Tempt the gods at your own peril, amigo, we’ve learned the Hard Way.

So if you see an old ’65 Mustang peeking out of the nettle forests down some dead end road up a dark ravine, don’t bother knocking on that shack door to inquire how much the owner might want for that vintage car you want to restore. He needs it, my friend. He needs it for parts, he needs it for peace of mind, he needs it to barricade the door from the gods of fate.

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Two autumns ago I was rowing offshore from my trail down to the beach in my little rowboat. My favorite crabbing spot is about a quarter mile out where my pots get dropped 75 feet or so. It was a sunny afternoon, nobody on the water as far as I could see, the Sound flat as glass, the world quiet except for my homemade oars touching the water each stroke. My perfect oyster.

When the water is that still, you can hear a long ways the distinctive whoosh of a whale expelling air through a blowhole, and sure enough, just off my bow another few hundred yards, I could see the killer whales moving north in a slow procession, occasionally breaching, their black and white coloration appearing and reappearing. In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve only seen orcas rarely. The grey whales are pretty common, but not the killers. So I just sat back for awhile and enjoyed the show.

This year the alarms have been sounding that the pods are diminished to the point of potential extinction. Well, duh. The resident orcas are down to under one hundred and the sad sight of one mother carrying her dead baby on her nose for day after day captured the hearts of even the hardest hearted. So that lately we’re hearing demands to breach the dams back as far as the Snake River in Idaho and to clean up the Sound and to widen the culverts on the spawning streams. To save the Orca! To save the killer whales!

The orcas are the latest spotted owl. Their habitat has been despoiled, their food supply has been overharvested, their spawning grounds have been silted over and closed off. Yeah, they’re in trouble. So are the salmon. So are the sharks. So are the bottom fish. So are most everything out there in the Puget Sound basin, my Dungeness crabs included.

So are we. We’re not going to breach any damns on the Columbia or the Snake Rivers. We’re not going to save the whales. We waited too long. We overfished our waters, we clogged our streams, we clearcut down to the rivers’ edge, we didn’t give a damn until it was too late. Way of the world. We’ll drill the Arctic, we’ll dredge the sea, we’ll mine the National Parks, we’ll cut the redwoods. There are always people, folks with power and money and a greed that has no bounds, who will justify it. They’ll say that global warming is a hoax, that the earth is theirs to plunder, that we need the minerals, the oil, the hydro-electric, the fish and all the rest.

The orcas are up against some bad odds. What we don’t seem to realize is we’re the orcas.

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Over in leftist Europe a Dutchman has petitioned his government for the right to change his age. Why not, he says, when you can change your sex? Sure, it’s tempting to go back to diapers and start over, maybe change your parents too while you’re at it, get a fresh run at childhood, adolescence, adulthood. The Dutchman really mostly wants to be able to date younger women but who are we to judge? He wants to change his age from 69 to 49. Figures the chicks will go for that ….

I’m going to be 69 in a few months. Or 49, depending on how this guy does in Dutch court, see if he sets a global precedent. My IQ has been dropping over the years, why not correlate that with my age? I’ve alerted my plastic surgeon and ordered a year’s supply of generic Viagra. Got myself a personal trainer and haven’t breathed a word to the mizzus. If this works out, maybe next birthday I’ll apply to my old high school and see if I can work my way into the popular crowd with the benefit of hindsight. Might skip a couple or seven of the dead end jobs I had in my youth, might even go back to college and get a degree that would make me employable. Course, chances are I wouldn’t get into the In Crowd and even more likely I’d fritter away my college years same as I did before.

Plus, I’d lose Medicare. All my life I had health insurance that cost a king’s ransom and offered only ‘catastrophic’ coverage. Kinda hate to go back to those days, especially since my 49 year old bones still feel like 69. And I would hate to leave the mizzus stuck in old age while I’m cavorting like a Millenial, just doesn’t seem fair, probably not right. Plus, that IQ keeps dropping. If I added all those extra years to my longevity, jeez, by the time I hit the next 69, I’d be about as smart as my old dog was, not very.

So maybe I need to rethink this, you know, while I still can. Best case, maybe wait until we can petition the courts to raise our IQ’s.

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