The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Me and my neighbors gear up for crabbing season the way my old ones in Wisconsin did for deer hunting season. Well, we don’t put out salt licks and no, we don’t jump in a boat to ‘shine’ our prey with headlights, but we do start talking about the hunt and we do gather up all the regalia and make sure the lines are good, the bait is ready and the boat motors start. In my case I check to see if my oars are rotted or the oarlocks rusted. Crab fever is an annual pandemic around here. Covids come and go, but crab fever, it’s like the common cold, it comes every year.

The past couple of seasons we’ve had trouble with poaching. You can expect some of that, maybe a kid just checking your traps, seeing if he could catch an easy dinner, or guys like Poacher Paul who poach deer and crab both, no license necessary. But I’m not talking about the casual poacher here, I’m talking about organized crime. Up and down the Camano coast the crabpots are hauled up and the crabs stolen. Just out front of me, we’re talking hundreds of crabs every day or night, and if you add in the rest of the island, think thousands. Multiply that by over ten bucks a pound, and no, we’re not figuring this guy or these guys are eating all these crustaceans themselves, we’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars, probably more like six figures every season. This is grand theft crab! This is a major felony.

But … no one in fish and game seems to be too interested in catching our poacher. One of the neighbors called in the boat license of a suspect rifling his pots to the Washington Fish and Wildlife folks only to be told they would need to see the theft themselves. Nevertheless, the nice man on the phone said they would send an agent down to the Everett boat launch and see if the suspect put out there. Oh, right, like he might just have his own dock or he might be launching just about anywhere in Puget Sound? Couldn’t go to the trouble to look up the owner of said boat, maybe wait in his driveway, see what was in those multiple coolers? Nah, that would be police work. That would be, I guess, work.

So we crab hunters are left to fend for ourselves, looks like. A buddy suggested a vigil on the bluff with binoculars and a deer rifle, maybe add a little vigilantism to this year’s crab season. But I reminded him of the guy a few years back who watched from his bluff a guy pull his pots out in the bay, pulled out his 30-30 Winchester and shot a few times in the general vicinity, which, you might have guessed, sent the miscreant fleeing. Course half an hour later the doorbell rang and there was the game warden, plenty pissed at being targeted checking our shooter’s pots for regulation violations.

Just goes to show, it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. I’m trying to decide which one I am this season.

The times we live in, this fresh start to the 21st Century, seems, at first glance, to be a cauldron of craziness generated by the internet and the tribalism of every media out there. From politics to pandemic, there’s no shortage of whackiness. Science and logic, who needs em? We got superstition and magic to cure the anxiety and dread of this era. Sometimes it seems as if we’d barely left the caves of the Dark ages, just clung to whatever amulets and spells that gave us comfort against the marauding mastodons or the horror of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pundits and the talking heads lament the internet, social media, cable TV, consolidated radio and the cynicism of our politicians. Bullshit passes for alternative facts and insanity gets you elected. Oh me, oh my, what’s gonna come of me boys, what’s gonna come of me?

We like to think we live in an Enlightened Age, one where reason and logic reveal the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. The internet ruined that, we think. Social media made a mockery of that, some say. I say the internet and social media probably just pulled back the curtains on all those folks who have always believed more in superstition than science, more who think they might win the lottery despite the statistical odds or that supplements will cure what ails them, more who take comfort in unprovable beliefs than facts that make them squirm, more that find faith in the unknowable more compelling than the angst of the knowable.

The Dark Age denizens never really left, they just didn’t have an internet to give them a microphone. We just under-estimated their numbers. And we over-estimated our own. Age of Enlightenment? Don’t kid yourself.

A friend asked me recently if I was rich. Maybe you get asked that a lot, but trust me, I don’t get inquiries like this too often. Kind of caught me by surprise. My family never talked finances, didn’t announce their bank account balances, really didn’t tell us kids much of anything about how they were doing. And if they never told the family, you better believe it was unwritten gospel they didn’t talk about it in public, with friends or relatives, with anybody. Ever.

So I was caught off balance, checking account and equilibrium both, to be asked point blank if I was rich. You could imagine that the answer, assuming you deigned to reply, would depend on the person asking. If my pal Bill Gates asked me, I’d say, ‘gee, Bill, I’m bumping along, but no, my hedge fund isn’t one of the top 50 or anything, not really even in the top … actually, I don’t even have a hedge fund right now, sort of embarrassed to tell you.’ If one of my pals trying to make ends meet during the Covid shutdown asked, well, I might say ‘Don’t even think of asking me for a loan, you slacker!’ Wealth, you see, is fairly relative.

You ask most folks if they’re rich and they’re going to tell you no. But … if we considered that we’re in America and we’re on the South End to boot, hellfire, by nearly any standards you pick, we’re the 1% of the world. We’re rich. You don’t think so, take a trip to Cambodia, Mexico, Costa Rica, just about any third world country and then tell me you’re not wealthy. You are. Period. Don’t argue with me, I won’t have ears for it.

But my friend wasn’t interested in philosophic fiscal discussion, just wanted to know if I was rich. Asking an artist that question is akin to wondering if I might be vacationing this year with Bezos on his moon rocket, mostly a flight of fancy. I said yes I am, rich. And honestly, I consider myself rich, I really do. We have our house paid for, the one we built ourselves without a loan, without a 30 year mortgage. We pay cash for everything we have, car, truck, you name it. We live in paradise, we live modestly but we want for nothing. We still work, but not because we need the cash but because we like what we do. Even without that money, we feel enriched by working. And we have each other. We lived in a dilapidated shack for 13 years together, scraping by, tending our gardens, learning our trades. We’re growing old together. And that’s just fine too. Are we rich? You’d have to be nuts to ask….

I’ve always wondered why folks climb the Himalayan or hike solo across Antarctica or want to be the first ones into space. Jeff Bezos is headed up and now Richard Branson plans to beat him to the punch. “Asked about what his kids and wife thought of his attempt to be the first tourist in space and how his family reacted to the news that he would be on the flight, Branson said his children are adventurous, but it’s clear they get that quality from him.
‘As a family, our motto is, ‘The brave men don’t live forever but the cautious do not live at all.’ And so, as a family, we love to say ‘Yes.’ My wife is the sort of person who would be terrified on a Virgin Atlantic airplane. She’s the last person who would want to do something like this. But she’s known me since I tried to balloon across the Atlantic or the Pacific or around the world, and she still seems to love us.’”

I guess what the Great Adventurer is saying is that his wife doesn’t really live at all. Bezos wife took half his billions and said adios. I suspect she’s living pretty high on the hog, at least by most folks’ standards, maybe not Branson’s. Evidently there are folks who need the adrenaline rush of near death to help them feel alive. Trust me, I’m not one of those people. I’ve taken a few chances in my 71 years that might have ended badly, might actually have killed me, but they didn’t make me feel alive, mostly made me glad I was. When I hear people of my generation say they never thought they would live past 30, I want to laugh out loud. It wasn’t that we thought our lifestyles were so dangerous, it was more that we just couldn’t imagine the future.

Or that the future seemed so banal and boring we refused to contemplate the house in the suburbs, the less than romantic marriage, the squabbling kids and the career that seemed so much smaller than the dreams of our youth. Me, I figured on living to a ripe old age. Given enough time, there would be plenty of room for course corrections. Getting crippled in a fall into a crevasse on Mt. Rainier wasn’t part of the Plan. If you want thrills and chills, try walking the tightrope of unemployment without a safety net, try making a living being an artist. It’s enough danger for me and chances are it won’t kill you. Make you crazy, maybe, but it won’t kill you. And I’m pretty sure if you take life with a degree of caution, you’ll be just fine too.

Rockets Red Glare

I never cease to be amazed at the amount of money folks are willing to spend on fireworks for the 4th of July. Every year we hike on down to the bulkhead on the beach and watch the celebrations up and down Whidbey from the Head to Greenback halfway up to the top of the island, plus we can see a goodly portion of the South End here on Camano. Sure, the fire danger is extreme and occasionally some enthusiastic patriot will set the bluffs ablaze, menacing the mansions above, but in America, we still think freedom means the right to burn the neighbor’s house down if it was done to celebrate 1776 and the intention was strictly impassioned nationalism. Jingoism and extremism in defense of bottle rockets and liberty is no vice. And apparently not a crime either.

The year of the Great Recession I noticed an appreciable drop in the volume and length of the displays up and down the coast. Money was tight, folks were under water with their mortgages, collection agencies were banging on doors late at night — even patriotism takes a back seat to bankruptcies. But since then the duration and extravagance of incendiary proof of the American flag waver has gradually increased to something akin to mortar battles in World War Two, tracers flying through the darkness, dogs howling, babies screaming, the rest of us just watching the show from afar. Like I say, I walk down every year, my small patriotic duty.

So I’m a little troubled this year at what, at first glance seems like a diminishment of how much my neighbors are willing to spend to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, more or less on the 4th of July back in 1776. I know we’re a divided nation this year and yeah, none of my socialist libtard cronies would spend a farthing on a bottle rocket or even a sparkler or two, but c’mon, where are the folks who support the local church’s fireworks stands and Boom City down at the Tulalip tribe? The economy is cranking back up after Covid, but maybe the year of Lockdown took the heart out of the celebration. I don’t know. I sure would hate to think jingoist celebrations are on the decline. Or worse, my neighbors are financially strapped to the point they’d rather buy food than M-80’s. Or ammo instead of Roman Candles.

Course, I went down alone this year. The revelers at our picnic packed it in before dark, possibly hoping to evade the sheriff patrols for impaired driving, so it was a lonely vigil for yours truly. All I can say is patriotism isn’t what it used to be. But after the election and the assault on the Capitol, maybe you already knew that.