The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”

Pushing my loaded grocery cart up to the checkout aisle this morning, I bumped into an old neighbor from yesteryear hunched over his own small cart, no groceries, just cashing in some card for cash near as I could tell. The cart was for leaning on since he could hardly walk. “I’m all stoved up,” he said when the how ya been’s were over. “Got arthritis. Taking insulin for my diabetes. Hard to get out of bed in the morning.”

Keith’s three years younger than me, meaning, he’s an old man. Long hair, wild beard, pushing 300, 350 pounds, sleep apnea, quit drinking 10 years ago. He’s living in the duck shacks on the Skagit delta. Last time I was there, there was no power, water had to be hauled in, heat was firewood. What you got back along the dike was total privacy, a wilderness oasis only a couple of football fields from the highway and two or three miles from the interstate. He said his woman had left him and so had the subsequent ones. As he so eloquently explained concerning his now preferred bachelorhood, “the price of pussy has gone too damn high.”

Same old Keith, a happy redneck Norwegian, mostly angry at the world but at least able to laugh at his own miseries. His son, he said, died awhile back and when I asked how, he shook his shaggy head. “Heroin. Od’d.” The kid had been riding his motorcycle, evidently had spilled gas on his pants and the muffler ignited it. Burned him terrible and they medi-vacced him to Seattle, skin grafts and finally oxycontin for the pain which he became addicted to, subbing heroin and fentanyl when he was discharged, a too familiar story. His daughter lived not far away, north of Seattle, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years.

For half an hour we stood by the liquor lockup at the end of the checkouts and caught up the past 20 years, mostly a chronicle of friends and acquaintances who’d died. Heart attacks mostly. Most fairly young. Most bad diets, no exercise, too much boozing. Whoever said the good die young didn’t know our buddies.

I finally said I gotta get going and reluctantly he wheeled himself with the cart as crutch out the side door. A yellow lab pup was in the driver’s seat of a late model Toyota pickup, a leather muzzle mask over its mouth. “Chew’s everything. Steering wheel, upholstery, anything.” “Well,” I said, “good to have a companion.” “Yep,” Keith said, “I just wish he wasn’t a chewer.” “You can’t have everything, I guess.” Some of us, though, don’t have much of anything….
 

The Southendomish Casino celebrated its Grand Opening last week. The ‘Big Hearted Little Casino” advertised itself as the gambling emporium with the most generous slots in Puget Sound. Unfortunately, a typo in the Gazette brought unwanted scrutiny from the Sheriff’s department and the gambling commissioner, but the next issue’s correction cleared the air. SLOTS. Probably a lot of disappointed johns … but it IS a gambling joint, not a brothel.

Even so a small group from the Little Chapel in the Ravine, led by Pastor Paul, picketed noisily in the parking lot until Casino Security asked them to protest somewhere NOT on their private property. Trudy Hawkins and her husband Bobby lobbied to stand their ground against the Devil’s Playground, but Pastor Paul argued for setting up at the highway where their placards would be just as effective where cars turned in to the casino’s fresh blacktop entry. WOULD JESUS GAMBLE HIS PAYCHECK??? DON’T BET AGAINST HELL! An hour of marching in circles on the shoulder, Trudy needed to use a restroom and so did Wanda Jenkins, but damned if they were going to go into the casino to relieve themselves. Pastor Paul, always the mediator, reckoned they’d made their point anyway so the little band of righteous warriors broke for a potty stop. By then the Casino parking lot was crammed with their neighbors and friends hoping to cash in on generous slots and inexpensive bar specials.

The South End doesn’t have a patent on Sin, but we sure welcomed a place to house it. At least the first few days….. Generous or not, the casino always won over time, although plenty of folks happily tell me they’re lucky at the tables. The Laws of Probability don’t apply apparently, or else their bookkeeping is sloppy. I don’t think the Southendomish are going to get rich, not so far from the freeway. But I’m betting they’ll do okay even WITH the folks who never lose.

I know some of us moved here when prices were low, cheapest waterfronts in Puget Sound. I sure did, bought a shack with 7 acres for the grand total of 24,000 bucks, what our last new car cost. And some of you more recent arrivals came for the view and the natural wonders, still less expensive than Seattle and Gomorrah and a tad less crime. Most of us islanders probably griped about the lack of services, long drives to the nearest hospital, county administration back not long ago on Whidbey Island, few businesses, spotty cellphone coverage, unreturned phone calls from plumbers and electricians and carpenters. But … this was rural living, what did we expect?

Times change. Cellphones are ubiquitous, we all have computers, Artificial Intelligence is here way ahead of predictions. So maybe we were kidding ourselves that our pastoral island living would stay forever. Or at least our lifetimes. Sure, we managed to keep WalMart out of Stanwoodopolis. And rumors of a Microsoft campus on the farmlands of the North End proved to be only that, just rumors.

But just when you least expect it, along comes the future. If you haven’t been reading the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, you probably missed the headlines this week that Google has applied to Island County for permits to build an AI data center on 100 acres between Cascade Lumber and our little international airport above English Boom. Big deal, you maybe think, just a few computers teaching other computers how to think. Or a few hooked together to answer your Google AI questions. Or a bunch of terminals ‘mining’ cryptocurrencies.

If you think that, you’ve been spending too much time on Instagram. These data centers use more power than all us Facebook addicts combined. And the water needed to cool the bazillion miles of circuits, you better get ready for some aquifers to dry up. Maybe all of them. Or else Google will build desalination plants, just need a few more kilowatts to run them.

It’s one thing to block a WalMart, quite another to stop Google. Write to your commissioners and legislators if you think it will help. Me, I’m contacting a realtor before our place is worth what I originally paid for it.