The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back when I first moved to the wild South End, I worked graveyard weekends at the Pain Motel in Everett, Everett General Hospital. We had maybe 3 or 4 emergency rooms in the ER, what is now 65 rooms. Most weekends were pretty quiet, good for sleeping if you were the orderly, which I was. But occasionally we’d crank it up, holidays especially, but we could never predict.

My first year there was an eye-opener. A lot of blood, plenty of horror, none of it for the squeamish. I guess you can get used to about anything. But that first year I wasn’t used to the shock yet. My job was basically gopher. Run fluids to the lab, look for missing medical records, deliver supplies, take the dead to the morgue, deliver patients to the wards, you name it, that was my Job Description.

Bout a month after I started we had this motorcycle gangbanger come into the ER. Drove himself in after he’d put his hand into the moving chain. I ran bloodwork and paperwork on him to the lab and eventually I was called on my beeper to go get him in the ER and take him to his room. He was sitting up on the gurney and said he could walk okay, but I said we got rules and one is he had to get driven by gurney. “Okay, man,” he said, which is biker talk for ‘bite me’, but he said, “Let’s ride.”

A nurse ran up to me with a cup and said deliver it to the desk on the 5th floor when I got there. The biker said, “You got my fingers in there, man. They’re gonna sew em on in the morning.” I took a peek and yeah, there on ice were three fingers a bit worse for wear.

“They told you they’d sew them on tomorrow?” I asked. He said, yeah, no problem. Well, maybe not to a drunk biker, but you know and I know, if you’re going to reattach missing body parts, it’s kind of critical to do it sooner rather than later. I said, “Hey, man, talk to a nurse when we get up there and tell her what you told me. They’re not planning to sew these on you, c’mon, think about it.”

Our hospital, being a public funded hospital, took in everybody, insurance or not, no small thing really, but I learned that night not everyone receives the same care. Somewhere along the line, maybe on an adjoining barstool, I’ll probably meet an old biker, 2 finger Fred, and we’ll have a beer and maybe a laugh over this shared memory. Well … the beer, probably not the laugh.

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Like so many of us South End men in this post-chauvinistic era, I was in the kitchen chopping up vegetables for a tasty dinner for when the mizzus got home from the mine. Every store-bought pepper had this itty bitty sticker with a scanner bar glued on semi-permanent so I had to dig at it to get it off. And it got me to wondering — what kind of glue sticks like this and does washing my pepper really get that stuff off and does it add anything savory to the tastebuds and is it known to the state of California to be carcinogenic???

Now let’s understand here, I’m not talking about the government getting involved. I’m not advocating the FDA look into whether my level of glue toxicity is above some approved threshold. No sir! We’re living in the day of Get-Government-Off-My-Back and the last thing us South Enders want to see is paying some federal employee to investigate this when we can just run some studies on our own, find out exactly WHAT that sticky substance is and set up a double blind experiment to find out, for ourselves, what kind of effects this glue has. All I know it might be good for us. Might grow hair back. Might cure erectile dysfunction. Might prevent cancer.

I mean, why can’t we just think positive? Why do we assume GMO foods are necessarily so bad we got to have labeling? Or irradiated foods? Milk that last months instead of weeks? Take that fracking we got going on. The oil companies don’t have to tell the damn government what they’re dumping in those wells. They got government off THEIR backs, but do we celebrate that? Do we declare victory over burdensome regulations? Hell no, we don’t!! We whine and we cry and we scare everybody with horror stories of funny tasting well water and water that catches fire. Here’s a tip: don’t drink flaming water. Duh.

You’re worried, get a test kit and have a go at it. Government can’t do everything for ya. And when you find out those chemicals kill 99% of the bacteria down your well, maybe consider a little thank you card to the oil companies. It IS called Better Living Through Chemistry.

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A few years back we came home from a vacation to find a tree had blown down and made a direct hit on my boathouse, limbs punched through the metal roof, rafters broken in half, support poles leaning at precarious angles, nothing you want to find after a relaxing trip to get away from the problems of your world. Fortunately the little sailboat I’d built back in 1990 hadn’t been crushed but it was a close call with the collapsed roof a few inches from smashing it. I don’t sail it much anymore but it’s a much beloved possession.

With some winches and a few fresh poles I managed to jerk the building back upright, sistered up the broken rafters, bandaged up some holes in the roof and figured, well, sure, it was kind of ugly now but worth saving rather than rebuild from scratch. Year after year it kept leaning more and more, but I would shove timbers in front of it to slow it down. This week I emptied the side shed of rough cut lumber, planed the whole she-bang, took out the aluminum I’d stored for glass installations over the years and decided maybe it was time to do a little upgrade on the building so with the sun at my back, a house jack at the ready, couple of new beams and a maul for beating the old ones upright, I went at it optimistically.

But when I would get one corner upright more or less the opposite side would lean worse. I tried shoving poles and beams against that side to keep it from falling over but nothing I did seemed to work. Being an impatient sort, I finally tried to just force the bastard up and into place, got the tall corner sort of squared away before a beam let go and I found myself shouldering the weight of the entire building as it started to fall on me before frantically pulling the support pole into a precarious angle that stabilized things. Momentarily. Back in the rear I latched onto that pole, gave it a little encouragement with my 8 pound maul … and watched the whole she-bang let go, pulling the back support of the boatshed down too.

Lucky for me I wasn’t on the inside with that last tap. Unlucky for me the boatshed let loose too. I could see my little sailboat, the SS Pterodactyl, with part of the roof seemingly resting on its rear transom, a sad sight for this Popeye, just another idiot who sailed into treacherous waters without proper training, no life jacket and no one near to come to the rescue. Some of us never learn….

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Back 40 years ago the tulip fields of Skagit Valley looked like a Mondrian abstract, geometrically colorful grids laid out with Mt. Baker in the background, a photographer’s wetdream. A few folks rolled up from the cities, braving the weather and us locals, but not so many the farmers took notice. Like a lot of innocent beauty in this world, the Chamber of Commerce decided to, well, what we refer to today as ‘monetize’ those candy colored flowers. Organize, advertise, centralize — monetize! The town’s surrounding the fertile fields in the Skagit floodplain joined forces, hoping the next flood would be human.

Fast forward a few years and picture rural roads gridlocked with urbanites in cars, tour buses, on bicycles, all stopping to take foolproof colorful photos of glorious fields of tulips in perfect rows of reds and yellows, purples and pinks, with weathered barns leaning toward the Cascades. Traffic came to a halt, the highway off the interstate would be backed up like a concert crowd in an amphitheater or a football game downtown. The farmers couldn’t get a tractor or a truck through, residents couldn’t get out of their driveway, schoolbuses became prisons of trapped kids who wouldn’t get home until dark.

Success! Well, for the Chambers of Commerce and the restaurants and the art galleries and the nurseries. I drove through the fields yesterday thinking it was too early for the mobs. I got home today. There are a few fields glowing in technicolor but mostly the Big Growers have consolidated the fields near their gift/retail/tourist shops. The sightseers, searching desperately for a potty stop, mob the towns of La Conner, Conway and Mt. Vernon. You can buy 3 tulips for $10 there. You can eat at a café or a restaurant with a life-saving bathroom. You can spend the day in our very own Holland complete with faux windmills.

What you can’t do is see those old fields lost to memory where colors stretched for acres between the 20 foot high dikes that held back the Skagit. Now they only corral the tourists. And the predominant color is green.

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