The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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When I first moved to the South End, there were no eagles in the area. If I had company who asked about seeing a few of the national birds, I drove them 50 miles up north to Deception Pass where usually we could spot one or two working the channel with its whirlpools bubbling up baitfish. The first eagles to show up around me built a nest in the Tyee Store wrecking yard out back so they could hunt in the pond the store stocked with bass and trout. So much for the notion that eagles are xenophobic. They’re looking for easy food and if they have to nest in a Walmart parking lot, so be it.

A friend mentioned to me the other day that she had seen 19 eagles circling overhead above the beach. That’s more air traffic than an Amazon drone testing site. The eagles have definitely rebounded since lead poisoning nearly killed them off back in the 60’s. So when I was exploring a bluff a few miles south of here the other day, standing maybe 300 feet above the waterfront, I spied a lone fir tree below me and there, about 50 feet down was a new nest with an eagle sitting on her eggs in plain unobstructed view. Maybe you think big deal, so what? But ask yourself if you’ve ever seen the inside of a ten foot diameter eagle nest. We look UP at eagles’ nests and maybe if we’re lucky, across at one like the one that’s over at the state park the last few years.

But to have a view from above? C’mon, it is a big deal. Especially if you have a camera and are willing to come back every day to watch for when the eggs hatch and the parents bring in salmon or grey whales to feed the little tykes. Maybe watch them fledge, stepping off over the abyss and catching that first draft above Puget Sound. Needless to say, I’m going to keep the location to myself. I don’t need National Geographic or the Flathead Vintage Auto Club beating a rush hour path to the nest.

I probably won’t give the pair cute names and I won’t post photos of the hatchlings on Facebook. You three or four readers of this un-viral blog will be part of an elite coterie of eagle voyeurs. PBS, eat yer heart out….

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The mizzus and me went out to investigate rumors that an old log cabin on the island was about to go up for sale, presumably one of the oldest ones still standing. The current owner and his siblings were interested to know if the Historical Society might be interested in buying it, maybe save them the hassle of a real estate deal, agents, subdivisions, onerous contracts and even more onerous commissions to be doled out. Since the place was a bit out of the bounds of the genteel gated communities, I went along as shotgun. You never know what sort of varmint are laying in wait back in the nettle swamps.

Turns out half the family was up there in the hollows, drinking whisky and sitting around a campfire, tossing flies on a fishing pole to the trout they’d stocked in a fair sized pond. Looked all the world like a scene from Deliverance without the kid with the banjo sitting on the porch. And sure enough, the old log cabin was standing after a century or more, parked on log rounds instead of footings, weathered as boom pilings and festooned with antlers and antiques hung from every nook and cranny in that dark little home. Judging by the antlers, they must’ve cleared out the deer population in that neck of the woods no time flat. The boyz liked their venison and their trout. And they liked to bullshit, which is why we came.

They regaled us with ragged memories, sometimes sharp, sometimes a little rounded from too many retellings. Jim, the Homer of the group, grew up in that cabin. Plenty of siblings, all crammed into about 4 or 500 square feet, one bedroom, different times for sure. Heated the place with a big camp cookstove, three times larger than the one there now. He told us about the military plane that crashed in the woods behind them, two airmen dead, debris scattered for the scroungers after the government carted most all of it off. Talked about their jobs at the Weyerhauser Mill, poker games in the cabin, keggers, the usual good ol boy tales.

We asked why they were selling. Well, they replied, here’s the deal: we decide to keep the place in the family, all the kids, the new generation, they don’t give a damn about this place, they don’t care about the history, they’d just end up fighting about the upkeep, who owes what, who did what, then finally sell the homestead and divvy it up, use it to go traveling instead of working or whatever the kids these days do. Naw, we’re gonna sell it ourselves, take the money, use it how we want.

I get it. Take a couple dozen kids, grandkids, wives and husbands, see how they like sharing the chores, the repairs, the utility bills, the taxes, the lawnmowing tree trimming brush cutting endless joint responsibilities and add them up until you get a splintered family tree. Interestingly enough the boyz figured the kids and grandkids would have little to no interest in the family homestead, just sell it and use it instead of working or’ whatever the stuff they do is called’, probably doing them a favor by not offering it up as a family inheritance.

And so another legacy bites the dust. Or sinks into the swamp. Or just gets lost to the entropy of rot and rust and ruin. A lot of history is like that here on the South End, nothing we don’t see all the time. Too many for the Historical Society to buy and maintain, for sure. But we took a few pictures, heard a little of the family sagas, wished em luck selling the place and hope the new owners will value the log cabin enough to keep it standing, not just bulldoze it under. Chances are they’ll bulldoze it under. In the future, no doubt in my mind at all the historians will mark this the Era of the Gated Communities.

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Maybe by now you’ve canceled your subscription to the lying New York Times, turned off the radio that has NPR, switched from PBS to Comedy Central and erected a chain link fence around your property and put security locks on all your doors. If so, stop reading right now, no need to disturb your attempted disengagement from all things Trump.

Today the man demanded the NY Times apologize profusely to him for allowing Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman to call him the enemy of the people. He’s incensed, he’s steaming mad, he’s outraged. After all, he calls the NY Times the enemy of the people. You get too many enemies of the people and the message gets diluted down to truck stop coffee strength, no caffeine, just the urge to pee. When attacked, strike back twice as hard. File lawsuits, tweet in capitals, revert to name-calling but don’t just sit there waiting for the next shoe to drop. Escalate! Roy Cohn Principal #1.

Get ready for some serious tweeting this next year. Committee after committee will demand tax records, testimony from his staff, subpoenas for his bank records, a constant dribble of illegalities, fraud, criminality, emoluments, nepotism, back-channel communications with Russians, real estate shenanigans, a very long list of what it takes for a president to become the enemy of the people. Impeachment? They don’t need no stinking impeachment with all the investigations they’ll be holding. And if you think Mr. T is outraged now, hold on to your britches. What’s coming will be red hot.

His personal attorney Cohen warned us about this guy. He won’t go gentle into that dark night. He’s not Nixon. He’s not going to see the merit in accepting what will be an avalanche of incriminating details and step off before the poop hits the fan, not Trump, not his way.

And if you stop and think about it, what has he got to gain? Soon as he leaves office, the wolves will have legal access. Maybe you can’t indict a sitting president, but you can sure indict an ex-president. Roy Cohn’s advice isn’t going to help our boy once he’s lost the bully pulpit and there’s no ignoring the subpoenas anymore. The real question is Cohen’s question: will he leave office willingly? Or is something ugly waiting down the road?

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A month or so ago I tried to burn down my old house, accidental arson, but to no avail, just scorched some walls and fried the panel box and its antique breaker switches. So now I’ve torn off the interior walls, dismantled the old breaker box and installed a modern one, then reconnected wires and jettisoned even more I don’t need. Just for fun I replaced the old barnwood walls I tore off with a crowbar and replaced them with new cedar and tongue and groove maple flooring.

Now I have to call in a state inspector to certify it was all done according to code. Needless to say, I’m nervous. Not so much about the panel box replacement as the half mile of wires running throughout the shack, up the walls, exposed, illegal, definitely not code. I’m hoping I’m only being inspected on the box, not the entire house. Because of those fears a year ago I decided not to replace the panel. If I had been shut down, we’d lose the power to run the well. It’s one thing to live without electricity in the shop, quite another without water up at the house. This time we ran wire down from the main house to run the well house … so if we’re red-tagged by the inspector we can flush toilets and still make coffee. Small blessings!

I’ve been thinking how much of a miracle it must’ve been when that old shack got its first electricity. Water could be pumped from the 1930’s piston-driven Mayers pump one hundred feet deep directly into the house. There’s an addition on concrete, the only part of the house not on post and beam, that was the indoor bathroom. No more outhouse! They could power a refrigerator like the coil top GE electric one I still have in the freezer room. They could read at night by incandescent bulbs, run a sewing machine, listen to a radio! It must have seemed like a miracle all these things we moderns take for granted, a defining moment, a cause for celebration. I think maybe I’ll know exactly how they felt. If I pass that inspection….

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