The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, it’s definitely been a relief to spend a week or so detoxifying from politics. You take the ‘cure’ in Wisconsin, they substitute sports for methadone and the Green Bay Packers for Donald Trump. Part of the reason I left the Badger State in the first place back in ’76, a happy adios to deer hunting and the Posse Comitatus. Still, when you have nearly overdosed repeatedly on the news and there’s no Narcan for political junkies, a tonic of football and walks in the Driftless Area prairies isn’t the worst substitute. Course, now I’m back on the needle.

An addict could feel like Rip Van Winkle gone cold turkey to come home to the latest batch of outrages. Our Fearless Leader has obviously gone rogue, looks like to this asylum seeker. He admits he’s asking foreign countries to meddle in the next election, all to the good so long as it benefits himself. He figures, I guess, that Uncle Joe is going to be his opponent so naturally he’s looking for mud. I was sitting with a Republican friend — and yeah, I know, I’m consorting with the enemy, but if you have as few friends as I do, you’ll take what you can get. Last night he was defending his President against those unfounded charges by those mean and nasty Democrats. “What about Biden and his kid?” he kept asking. “How did the kid get a job that paid a fortune with a Ukrainian oil company, huh?”

I said the same way most of our lobbyists get theirs, parlaying their connections or their previous jobs in the government. I don’t like it but it isn’t illegal. Asking the Ukrainians to dig up dirt, well, sir, that’s a slightly different issue and we won’t even mention Biden and the boy haven’t been shown to have done anything wrong.

What we got here is the usual tactic when wrongdoing is discovered. Deny deny deny … until they get the goods, then attack attack attack. Go after Biden, smear Schiff, mock Pelosi. Worked for the Mueller Report.

My buddy is like a drug pusher for politics, sets your teeth on edge and forces you to fact check the internet to see if you’ve completely lost your grip on reality. Which, judging by the news overdose I got the last couple days, either I have or else the country has gone crazy. Sure gonna miss those Packers….

Yesterday the temperatures hit 90 degrees here in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, all glaciers already melted so don’t be concerned at the unseasonable weather. A student of meteorology would suspect this was a harbinger of some radical change in the global climate and yeah, the front rolled in with winds, lightning, thunder, pestilence, frogs , flash floods and biblical omens for an already saturated state. Driving through the storm last night, I crawled along leaf-covered blacktop through huge puddles with wipers that couldn’t sweep fast enough. Lighting blistered the sky, illuminating an ominous watery landscape.

Time, I think, to head home to the land of soft drizzle now that the monsoons are here and the temperatures are falling 50 degrees from yesterday’s, no time to slowly acclimate. And trust me, I didn’t bring winter parkas.

Said goodbye an hour ago to the Old Man. Left him standing forlornly in his driveway, 96 years old and you wonder if this may be the Last Adios. Course, it’s not the first time I’ve wondered that, probably not the last. Hopefully.

I remember saying goodbye to my grandfather after our annual yearly vacation in Northern Maine. He always gave me his old fedora and when I said see you soon, Grampy, he shook his hatless head, pulled my hat lower and said no, you won’t. And I didn’t.

Tough coots, my relatives. Stoic, hard-nosed, no nonsense. You live, you die, whadja think would happen? Take your best shot and accept the results. The world belongs to the living, don’t look back. Yankee Puritans, I guess. Long winter coming, though. This 96th one won’t be any easier.

My 96 year old dad and myself are holed up for the weekend in Northern Wisconsin, bullshitting and reminiscing, but mostly watching the leaves turn color and sky moving across the glassy surface of Silver Lake. Minnesota and Wisconsin, lands of more than 10,000 lakes, long ago ran out of names for all of them, having reverted to multiple uses for Pine, Fir, Birch and Silver, of which even Google Map couldn’t differentiate the multiplicity. There’s even an Archibald Lake, but near as I can tell no Lac du Skeeter or even a pond bearing that noble moniker.

The only movement this morning is the percolating coffee, a few bugs skimming the lake surface, one sparrow hawk sliding swiftly through the pines on the lakefront and nothing else.. The day, the lake, the woods, the world … all frozen in near perfect beatitude. Not even the loons break the silence. Thoreau, eat yer heart out.

Bruce, next door, a rough, tattooed, chain smoking, alcoholic ex-over-the-road truck driver, inherited his cottage from Petey, who lived hard and died harder. He’s lived on Silver Lake all his life, knows who lived where and how long. Petey called his live-in girlfriend ‘squaw’ but loved Bruce who looked after her when her health spiraled downward. Bruce, no stranger to xenophobia and racism, ignored Petey’s admonishes to shack up with his ‘own kind’, a kind of tolerance in itself, what gives him some small right to consider himself religious.

Soon, but after we’ll be long gone, the lake will freeze two feet deep, buried under snow, and the great north woods from Maine to here will empty out its summer vacationers, leaving only the real residents, hard scrabble folks who watch us interlopers with mistrust and for maybe some work repairing cottage roofs, frozen pipes, deck replacements, snow plowing driveways. They may think they will inherit this earth, but eventually they’ll sell their share.

Here it is, Day One of my new 12 step program to quit. So far, so good. No chills or uncontrollable shakes, no night sweats, no spiders crawling up the walls, no violent outbursts of unspecific rage, no crawling to the closest friend for a fix. I know, it’s only been a few hours —- the worst is yet to come.

Still, I’m optimistic I can beat this addiction. Course, to do it, I needed to change my routines, stay off the internet, avoid friends who mean well but would only hasten the eventual ‘falling off the wagon’. I need to refocus my attention, get myself busy, leave town. Right now I’m waiting for a plane to Chicago, then on to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin should be the perfect tonic. Autumn colors, crazed football fans, deer hunters, Indian Summer, rural roads, school buses back on their routes. Back to my roots, a nice trip down Nostalgia Boulevard, maybe go down to the U.W. campus and bask in those memories of halcyon days back in ’68, a zit-faced kid with his future waiting to embrace his hopes and dreams. You know, before the Siren’s lure of his addiction.

Maybe Wisconsin isn’t the best choice, I’m thinking now. That year, 1968, the campus exploded in violence, anti-war riots, National Guard bivouacked on the football field, curfews and student boycotts, the year —- years, really —- when the addiction began with its tiny tentacles growing in my still-forming brain. The Chicago Convention, Johnson, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Nixon, Agnew, Cambodia, Watergate, all spreading like a toxic mycelial mat across my synapses. Easy to see in hindsight, not so obvious back then.

50 years later and this monkey rides my back like a giant tick sucking blood, engorged to monstrous size. Killing it might kill me. But we’ll see, won’t we? Maybe by Day 6.

Meanwhile, one step, one day at a time. No newspapers, no news, no debates about impeachment, no mas, no mas. Politics Anonymous. Nobody said it would be a cakewalk. My plane is about to board. Wish me luck!

Oh, and if you get word Trump has been impeached … go ahead and call me. ASAP.