The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

Bob the Baptist lives up the hollow where the dirt road south of me dead ends in a swampy cul-de-sac. You look hard you can see past the abandoned cars, rotted boats, rusty appliances, kids’ toys, broken furniture and busted machinery to where Bob’s shack leans into the last century. Just to be sure nobody will steal this stockpile of valuable rusty corroded parts from his junkyard covered with leaf mulch and blackberry vines, Bob has nailed handwritten signs every few hundred feet: NO TRESSPASING POSTED KEEP OUT!! PRIVIT PROPPERTY, like anyone would venture into his place. By the driveway or entrance or whatever it is that isn’t maintained and is overgrown to the point any vehicle trying to drive in would be scratched to bare metal by berry thorns and cedar limbs and lost equipment, he’s nailed a plywood plank painted black with white words: JESUS IS COMMING SOON!!

These are the End Times, Bob tells us neighbors. South End Times, anyway, if Bob’s place comes under scrutiny. It looks like Armageddon hit yesterday. Windows are broken out and covered with plastic that’s now tattered. Doors hang off their hinges, usually open winter or spring. The first time I went back there looking for my dog who’d wandered off, I walked through an open door with books and magazines strewn everywhere, thinking it was an anteway or a porch … until I realized to my horror I was deep into his house. Believe me, I backed out of there fast as anything, expecting a shotgun blast from Bob the Baptist. He walked up a minute after I’d exited his home sweet hovel and demanded to know who I was, what I wanted, why I was there. “Lost dog,” I mumbled.

“We’re ALL lost,” he fairly howled. “We’re all lost and we don’t even know it!!” Tobacco stains ran down his matted beard and his eyes bulged like King Lear in a room full of psychiatrists.

Bob’s okay, actually, reasonably harmless and even sociable occasionally. The neighbors hear him once in awhile, exhorting whatever demons drive him day in and day out. Apparently the demons aren’t listening. Awhile back we heard he used to be a minister over the other side of the mountains. Heard it from one of his flock. Bob had had an affair with the local TV station’s weathergirl and his wife had run off with the church’s deacon. The weather lady moved up to a megawatt Atlanta station and Bob was banished to the wilderness. I guess it makes some sense he ended up down here. Although … Bob still hasn’t figured out most of us don’t think of this as punishment or penance. Hell, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder too.

This year’s pre-Christmas windstorm, fresh on the heels of the Skagit River’s historic floods, knocked down two of our large hemlocks, tore the top off one of our first live Christmas trees planted in the early ‘80’s and left us with no power or water, phone or internet for four days. After two weeks we still don’t have internet. Zipley says they sent someone and it was fixed but when we got home from New Years, still no connection to the outside world. The Zipsters say they’ll drop by sometime this week, no rush. After all, who requires more Epstein stories, Trump outrages, eco-disasters, news from the war zones or any and all social media??

In other words … Christmas this year may not be white but it most certainly will have no White Noise. Just a return to the way things were when we first arrived on the isolated end of an island not yet discovered by the beachfront-hungry hordes desperate to escape the teeming cities of Seattle or Stanwoodopolis. An era before the internet wrapped its addictive tentacle around our frontal cortex, when time moved more by the ebb and flow of tides than the spaces between Tik Tok videos.

Was it a better era? No need to ask the young folks — it’s like asking an opioid addict if sobriety is preferable, it’s an impossible question at this point. But me? Oh baby, you bet it was! It wasn’t just the economy that globalized. Everything did. We live now in a personal space invaded by constant information from the world outside, news in fragments, images from the electron screen that have absolutely nothing, nada, to do with our real lives, our friends, neighbors or family.

Over the years we’ve let reality slip out of our consciousness, replaced by virtual experience, kitty videos, doomscrolls, snippets from an outside world we imagine is more our world now than the one outside our front door. And we like it. It keeps us constantly engaged, amused and safe from boredom.

I’m two weeks or more into withdrawal. We spent Christmas with traveling friends over on the Olympic Peninsula for our annual bah- humbug getaway for four days, then another week just the mizzus and me driving down into Oregon then over to the Idaho border to visit old friends and celebrate New Years. Were we bored? Don’t kid yourself. This was the real deal….

Some days the past comes calling. I was watering our garden this afternoon when an old friend hauled into the drive with a pack and a 5 gallon bottle of water he had lashed to a roller suitcase. Got off the bus that doesn’t run the last lousy three miles of island and walked here on his way to his brother’s cabin a mile south pulling that water along dirt road and blacktop. The cabin doesn’t have a well.

Tom’s been through some changes. Haven’t we all? I knew him back when … some 30 or 35 years ago. He was a hard drinking 20 something, distributed beer around the area, loved to tell stories of bars between Montana and California, the old saloons mostly gone now or restored to yuppie shrines. I nailed the ridgepole on the day we hoisted the 40 foot log up into position on his brother’s log cabin. Felt like I’d hammered the Golden Spike on the first transcontinental railroad. Quite an honor, definitely a privilege.

Tom moved down to Arizona, did the maintenance for the spring baseball, mowed, watered, all the stuff Mesa needs to keep a desert ballpark grassy and green. He got a bad back, developed an over-enthusiastic love of alcohol, had some physical breakdowns, went into rehab, took an early retirement on disability, discovered — or acknowledged — he was gay. He looked good today. Old, maybe, older even than me, but healthy old. Walking his gear two miles from the bus dropoff, 30 years from when I knew him.

I guess in a way we’re all old codgers now, pulling our water and our stories and our packs down the highway that runs back toward home … or some reasonable facsimile. He’ll stay a night or two, reminisce, commune with the stars and the skeeters, maybe have a campfire there under the big firs up where the dirt road to the cabin ends and something else, not memory, begins. I’ll be doing something similar, I guess, thinking of all the old campfires and the nights long ago up at that cabin. What I think is we’re all hauling water, we’re all dragging stories….

When I was in 8th grade my family moved us from the idyllic scrublands of Georgia to the decidedly urban swamp of Milwaukee where I went to middle school next to the giant silos of the Schlitz Brewery,’ The Beer’, according to the 10 foot tall letters on the towers, ‘That Made Milwaukee Famous’. Needless to say, the move was a culture shock for me and my two brothers. I sat in the back of my classrooms with the girls who had been booted out of Catholic parochial schools for … well, let’s just say, unbiblical behavior.

Even only 13 or 14 year olds, these banished babes were children in adult bodies, maybe not the brightest bulbs in my pre-pubescent firmament, but definitely the most sexual creatures I had ever had the pleasure to be seated next to. Not that I really understood on a cognizant level the attraction, but let’s just say the pheromones worked their magic. On some intuitive level I understood any appeal I might have for these fallen angels would not be the result of my skinny, geeky, shy self, nor my intellectual prowess, limited as it was. No, I needed something more, some heretofore undiscovered secret power, my own feeble alternative to male pheromones.

So I became a comedian. Parked far from the blackboard and our various teachers’ desks, I proceeded to entertain these girls with their padded bras, tight sweaters and short skirts with whispered witticisms, soft spoken sarcasms regarding our educators’ attempts to teach us math and science and conjugation. Every girlish giggle only encouraged me and gave me renewed confidence. Sure, the teachers noticed, usually admonishing the guilty laughers, not me, the clown with the innocent face.

The girls mostly flunked our courses. And no, I don’t blame myself for their distractions. These cuties wouldn’t need college — they had attributes the rest of us would have sold our souls for. Which the nuns figured these ladies had already lost.

Me, I graduated 8th grade for all the advantage it gave me. But … I did become a hopeless wiseass, no diploma, just an unaccredited degree. And girls, wherever you are, thank you, thank you, thank you. You all were my muses.