The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Well, the bad news arrived this week and no, it wasn’t about our favorite President or Global Warming. It wasn’t even about the buildup of arms near Iran or the launching of intermediate missiles in North Korea. Venezuela was even pushed off the front page. Not that these aren’t all definite or even existential threats, but a United Nations science report was released warning us that if we do not wise up as many as a million species on this planet will become extinct in the next hundred years.

I know, faux science. So what if 20% of the earth’s species bit the bullet over the last century, you’re thinking. We got plenty more where those came from and probably even some brand new ones incubating in the jungles even now. Ebola, AIDS, swine flu viruses, hey, they’re rolling in to replace the ones dying out, right? Hopefully we’ll lose a few pests, poison ivy, mosquitoes, antibiotic resistant fungii, the cold virus, Herpes and the Trumps, all those questionable species that make our lives a living hell. Nettles too!

Course that isn’t exactly how it works, is it? We got this whole interdependency thing going, this Web of Life, that means when one species dies, plenty of others suffer, kind of like losing the Democrats and now look what we got. But I digress. As usual. My apologies. Take mosquitoes instead. There’s always folks who want to introduce sterile male Anopheles into the environment to put a stop to Zika or the black plague, but how many birds live on eating mosquitoes? What happens to them? And if those particular birds die, what dominoes are next?

You get rid of Trump, maybe you end up with Bannon or some other alt-right dickhead. Okay okay, I’m off subject here again. Sorry. My point is this. I was up on my roof the last two days, scraping sixteen species of mosses, lichens, small
bonsai trees in the gutter, an entire universe of mushrooms, alien byrophytes, plus all their attendant bacteria and god only knows what else munching merrily in the flora that makes my roof an interdependent world of decomposing fir needles, leaves and windblown seeds. I argue with the mizzus every year that we need to let this live in peace, that we must learn to coexist, that science is now on my side on this.

But I’m always outvoted one against one. So if a few hundred species died the last couple of days, don’t point an accusing finger at me. And anyway, there are 999,900 left. Although … I may have unintentionally set off a dire chain reaction. With a little luck maybe the Trumps will be the next victim in a domino of extinctions. Wishful thinking, I know, but a man can dream, can’t he?

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The Southendomish was a proud tribe, versed in the ways of the salmon and the whale before their numbers diminished to squat. Members of the tribe were scattered to the four points of Puget Sound, denied tribal rights given the others by treaty and left to scrounge what few clams and mussels and crabs they could. When the whales became scarce and the hunting grounds crammed with vacation homes, the Southendomish were nothing but a fading echo back in the nettle ravines, a myth now to the locals where once their canoes ruled the waters.

History, even for the white invaders, is continually lost to rot and rust and ruin, but for the Southendomish, little remains of their culture, not the language or the customs or their fishing skills. Oh, a few clam middens here and there. An old carving in a tree on the bluff at the Head where dozens were killed by a landslide below. An occasional stone weight for sinking their woven nettle fishing nets. But there are no photos, no oral histories, no living memory of the tribe.

So when the good city of Everett found a dead whale beached on their waterfront, the folks down there, unaware and uncaring of the noble history of the Southendomish, decided to tow the bloating beast to the former hunting grounds of the island here, a fresh indignity to the legacy of the natives, to decompose into a putrid and incredibly obnoxious smelling pile of rotting blubber not even a starving crow would approach. It arrived two days ago in an isolated cove near the Head, forty feet long, who knows how many tons. The South End evidently has been designated an unofficial cetacean burial ground, a compost pit for the NIMBY’s across the water far from the olfactory hell that now emanates from down at the beach. Thank you very much. What’s the next gift, smallpox?

If we could gather enough concerned neighbors, we would happily return the favor. Haul down our own unwanted compost waste, our sani-can pumpings, our poopscoop collections, our seafood leftovers, our dirty Pamper diapers and dump them on the waterfront of the privileged rich, a fair trade. But in the end, don’t think the Southendomish will be avenged. They won’t, not by a long shot.

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I was reading in the fake newspaper we get every morning how a dead grey whale had washed up on the shores of Everett’s industrially pristine waterfront, so to minimize the rotting smells of blubber decomposing in the unseasonable sunshine, the DNR folks were going to tow it to ‘an undisclosed location on Camano Island’. For those of you not versed in the topography of our fair island, let me explain that the only place remote enough for cetacean disposal is the South End, an eight mile stretch of shoreline with high bluffs from our place to the opposite side where houses end and a desolate stretch of beach forms the Head where few humans interrupt the gulls and eagles.

So me and the mizzus grabbed a camera and went in search of the carcass before decomposition would make it unapproachable even by telephoto if the wind were blowing the stench in our direction. The tide was minus 2, making the circumnavigation possible without being caught half way and forced to hunker down up in the driftwood logs against the eroding bluffs to wait for hours before proceeding further. We had fair winds and a warm sun in our face. We were on a mission: to find the great grey whale.

We walked to the Head, photographing eagles and Mt. Rainier, but no whale sightings. Plenty of whale holes where the beasts had plowed the sandbars for ghost shrimp, but not the bloated body of Moby. We plunged ahead, turning north past the Tulalip tribes’ tidelands at the southernmost point of the island, the true South End, where a century back their people had been killed in the dozens by a landslide while encamped in the very place we now walked. Ahead lay 3 or 4 isolated coves, perfect for the dumping of giant marine carcasses far from human habitation. I figured one of those would be the burial ground.

A fever not unlike that of Ahab took possession of me, an obsessed quest for the great mammal, dead or alive, it no longer mattered. We stumbled across rough cobbles, past shipwrecks, below eagles’ nests, around landslides, over sandflats soft with the cavities of a million clams, all the while expecting the whale, always the whale, around the next bend, behind the fallen boulders, but no, there was no whale by the time we reached Tyee and its ghetto of beach houses jammed relentlessly together between the base of the bluffs and the rising sea levels.

The whale, we learned later, hadn’t yet been towed. It was arriving that night. This morning I’m debating whether to walk the Head again. The fever has yet to abate. The great fish is out there. Dead as last night’s fevered nightmare. Dead, but not gone. Somewhere on the remote stretches of the South End, she rises, thar, thar she rises! You know and I do too, I will have to return as well.

And when the bloodlust diminishes, when the great grey beast has bleached white its bones in the relentless sun of the South End, we will, all us inhabitants down here, collect our refuse, our trash, our composting detritus and hopefully barge it down to ‘an undisclosed location’ in that pristine city to the south, a fair exchange, the very least we could do to return the favor.

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Maybe you get up every morning, like I do, dreading the latest tweets, the next outrage, the newest cracks in the Constitution and you think, like I do, just 20 more months, if we can just weather a little more than a year and a half, we’ll wake up to a Return to Normalcy, we’ll have survived the madness, we’ll take back our lives. But then you pick up a paper, like I did today, and read that Billy Graham’s braindead kid thinks Trump deserves two more years, ‘reparations’, he calls them, for the injustice of having Mueller investigate his contacts with the Russians and now that Barr has declared complete exoneration for any possible obstruction of justice, well, time to toss out the Constitution and give our Leader a few bonus years.

You can’t make this shit up, you really can’t. When Pelosi raised the possibility of Trump declaring the 2020 elections bogus and refusing to leave office, she was echoing the President’s own attorney, Michael Cohen, who suggested just such a scenario. What you are learning, each and every pre-caffeinated dawn, is that everything is possible, no matter how twisted, no matter how illegal, no matter how improbable. There’s no use trying,” [Alice] said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice is getting plenty of practice these days. More than six some days. Ten thousand lies since Trump took office, about ten a day, a remarkable record. And now we just take it for granted. ‘Ignorance is strength,’ Orwell said in 1984. Now we got a strong man in the White House. ‘Freedom is slavery. War is Peace.’ The news is fake. Up is down. The sky is falling.

Me and my friends are sick of it. We’re fatigued by the slow rolling tidal wave of idiocy, corruption, lawlessness, mendacity and ignorance. The GOP, watching their party taken over by thugs and crooks, has decided to go along in order to survive. Survive as what? Toadies to a mad king? My friends used to believe a price would be paid for such cowardice, but we don’t anymore. We just hope and pray we can survive til the next election. We hope the madness will end then. “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” Most mornings, that seems to be true. But then, what is true anymore….?

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