The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine the congregation is gearing up for the End Times. Pastor Paul comes from the Cotton Mather School of Preaching, meaning, he intends to scare the holy bejabbers out of his flock, wake them up before it’s too late and lead them into the nettle-less valley of righteousness. He’s offering Salvation, take it or leave it. Woe unto those who don’t take it ….

Jimmy the Geek’s mizzus listens to these sermons Sunday after Sunday. She recently volunteered to minister to the Little Lambs of Jesus, the youth group that meets an hour before the late service, and Jimmy, an electronics engineer down at the Boeing plant, is at a complete loss what to do about her evangelical fervor. “She wasn’t like this when we got married,” he told our decidedly profane group of sinners gathered at the booths beside the pool table in the Pilot Lounge. “I’m not real religious, ya know, but I agreed to go to church with her. It’s almost a cult what they got down there in the ravine. I didn’t know we’d be drinking Kool-Aid instead of grapejuice.”

“Armageddon, man,” Two Toke pronounced over a tough 8 ball side pocket. Which he missed by a country mile …. Chalking his cue thoughtfully, he commiserated with Jimmy. “Scary stuff, Revelations. Mark of the Beast. Four ponies of the Apocalypse. I been listening to midnight radio lately. Biden’s the anti-Christ and the Middle East is heating up. The Russians are coming in. The Pandemic is the Sign of the Second Coming. Anytime now, they say.”

“Pastor Paul predicts Iran will get the bomb in a year and that’s the End. Jenny believes this stuff,” Jimmy blurted. He waved his empty pint glass at Vic, tonight’s fill-in bartender. Jimmy wasn’t going home soon, it was obvious to all of us and by god we were going to stick with our pal til the glasses were broken or the bar closed. South End Sinner’s Code. “What am I gonna do? I already said I won’t go anymore and now she’s teaching Sunday School too?”

Robbie stopped mid-shot, pointed with his cue and said solemnly, “Call her bluff, buddy.” Jimmy shook his head. Robbie continued. “Give her a year for the End Times to happen. When it doesn’t, time to reassess. Check and mate, dude!”

Jimmy took Vic’s refill the way a pilgrim clutches sacrament. Robbie slammed the 6 ball into the corner pocket with a bang, left himself an easy 2 ball on the side. “That’s what I would do,” he declared.

Two Toke could see his own End Times if Robbie hit the 2 ball. “Easy for a man with no wife, Rob,” he smiled, maybe put a little Doubt on the table. “Faith’s a funny thing. Hard as hell to argue it …”

“Damn, Tom, you want Jimbo to start stockin food and guns?” Robbie eased the 3 into the side with a soft sweet stroke. The 8 ball waited, hard cut, but Robbie was hot, all the confidence in the world. Two Toke groaned, leaned on his useless cue. “No,” he muttered, “I just want him to save a marriage.” Jimmy nodded mournfully. Robbie cut the 8 ball and we all watched it roll half a mile down a long green to the far corner pocket, hang for a breathless second, then drop with a dull clatter.

“End Time, Tom” the shooter laughed and Two Toke slapped a new set of quarters on the felt. If any of us thought we’d solve Jimmy’s problems tonight, it would take more beers than Vic would serve.

A couple days ago I was wandering the garden, something I do a lot more now with the pandemic lockdown, and caught sight of a weirdly shaped bird nest in last year’s bean trellis. Elongated with an offest hole at the top, what I took to be an oriole nest. Having never seen an actual oriole nest, I was pleased to find one and planned to keep it with a few other nests collected over the years. One, a hummingbird nest with two very tiny eggs, I took after realizing the parents weren’t coming back. This oriole nest I carefully cut away the twigs holding it to the bean fencing and mounted it in my shack near the hornet’s nest and a few other museum pieces.

The next day we were inside the studio and Karen kept asking, what is that noise? I didn’t hear anything but she kept asking anyway and finally I went back into the room she was standing in and holy orioley, the noise was chirping coming from that nest! I’d stolen the nest AND the babies! I not only robbed the cradle, I took the cradle too. Orioles are fairly rare in these parts so I felt terrible, guilt-ridden over probably bringing them to near extinction, something akin to killing the last pterodactyl. I felt bad. I felt like an idiot. The nest looked old and I’d just assumed it was last year’s nest. What a moron. What a fiend! Nature is cruel, it sure doesn’t need help from me.

Without much hope of success I took the nest back to where I’d stolen it, reattached it to the bean trellis and hoped, without much reason to have any hope, the parents would return to their offspring. I’d always heard if a bird nest was disturbed the adults wouldn’t come back to it, probably something I heard on Fox News or Breitbart, but what else could I do? Put a notice in the newspaper: Lost Oriole Chicks, Need Good Home? Probably get some coronavirus survivalist who would take them for food, one more layer in the new freezer filled with locker meat.

Well, I went out the day after I’d rehung the purloined nest, not expecting much, but … sure enough, out hopped the mom and I noticed the pop jumping limb to limb in the fir tree behind her, both watching the creep who’d stolen their prodigy, maybe see if he was monstrous enough to try it again. He wasn’t. I don’t suppose they appreciated a parents’ day off while I babysat the kids. No, I don’t suppose they did.

‘If you decide to leave civilization, expect to live without its comforts.’ I don’t know who said that but they were absolutely right. We live down at the bottom end of a skinny island 17 miles from the bridge that connects it to the mainland and all things modern. Shopping malls (before they started closing), restaurants and taverns (before Covid shut them down, schools (before they went virtual), theaters (before the plague hit), all those amenities folks took for granted until the Coronovirus Epidemic of 2020.

I feel sorry for folks, I really do. But … we got our own problems. Down by us we live across the great digital divide. Meaning we finally got DSL internet, not the old dial-up, but because our ‘provider’, and I use that phrase loosely, doesn’t deem it worthwhile to provide better fiber optics this far from Rome, we have very slow internet. Better than the old dial-up, okay, but nothing like you might have expected from the promises our provider made when Ma Bell was broken into Baby Bells. If we try to watch a movie streaming over Netflix, the buffering is nearly as long as most commercials on TV. A two hour movie becomes three hours. Plenty of time to make popcorn, grab another beer (or three), check our email (which is now even slower), use the restroom (even mop and clean it), do the laundry, wash the dishes and take out the garbage. We get a lot done watching a movie we probably won’t even like.

The mizzus ran into the ‘provider’ yesterday, some guy in a truck from the new outfit that bought the old outfit, now called Zipley. What a name! You just know the service will improve. Fast internet? Sure, zipley. The name says it all. She wanted to know, confronting this poor schmuck with the toolbelt laden with every electronic gizmo hanging from his waist, when we’d be getting better internet. He was busy, he told her, hooking up ‘cross cable’ and didn’t really know when, if, why, or how faster internet would be coming to the wild South End. And … he was a little too busy cross cabling to chat with her further. So much for anything remotely resembling zipley.

I don’t know doodley about most things technical. If I can’t fix it with a wrench or a screwdriver or just pounding it on a table or throwing it on the floor, I have no real comprehension. Black boxes are just that to me. Magic electrons, ethereal waves, wifi, routers, servers, providers, very large monthly bills. The mizzus knows this stuff and believe me when I tell you she didn’t like some macho yahoo with a toolbelt talking down to her like she was the little woman at the service desk of a car repair shop telling her her whatchamacallit was acting up and maybe she should sit quietly in the waiting room and read a woman’s magazine until the repairmen had finished. Somebody was cross cabled all right. The trouble was, it was probably us. If you think Zipley implies something speedy, forgetaboutit. It really means zip up yer lip, Lady.

I call my old man every day who just turned 97, about 40 years since his date of retirement at 57, to check in, see how he’s doing. When I ask him what he did today, he invariably says Nothin. He reads a little, watches some news, naps, takes his daily mile walk, makes himself meals and watches movies at night. It’s enough for him, no complaints, no depression and no whining. Life is what it is and he’s not a man with regrets and he’s not someone in search of ‘meaning’. Those who say an unexamined life isn’t worth living haven’t met my old man. Those who say that, you ask me, are full of shit. And I’m one of those who does examine life. I just don’t think it raises me to some higher spiritual plane — if anything, it just overly complicates things.

Today he asked me, as always, what I did today. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘pretty busy. Pretty important stuff.’ He perks up, never really remembering I pull this on him half the time. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, ‘you working on that new glass project?’

‘No, no,’ I reply. ‘That’ll wait.’ He’s talking about a mural I’m supposed to be designing for a Washington Art Commission 1% project. ‘No’, I told him, ‘I was building a scarecrow for the garden.’ This flummoxes him, like usual. ‘What for?’ he wants to know. I say ‘I don’t know. Something to do. The garden needed a watchman maybe. Liven the place up if nothing else.’

My father and I share pieces of our world every day — as does my brother who lives near him. We all 3 look at it differently, maybe everyone does. But what we have in common is that this is what it is. If there’s something More, fine, write back when you find it. But this is plenty. Personally I suspect folks would be happier if they made a scarecrow once in awhile and let the philosophers decipher the rest.

How long, Lord, how long? We’ve been quarantined in this hellhole of the South End now for, who knows anymore, how many weeks, months, possibly years. Same old same old, rinse and repeat. The world has shrunk to an area about the size of a dog’s fire hydrant loop. Trail to the beach, walks back in the woods, the weekly drive to the grocery store with masks on and empty aisles, my path to Tyee Store that’s now closed. Last week I whacked the blackberries back and mowed down a barricade of snowberry bushes, sickled the nettles and salmonberries, all to keep that trail open, you know, just in case the Tyee Megastore ever opens its shuttered doors again. It’s a Sisyphean joke on myself is what I think, but … it adds another mile to the perimeter of my confinement.

Today in a burst of energy, spurred on by a need to Escape, I hacked my way into the back of our property. We only have 7 acres of prime nettle territory, not what you might call an estate, certainly not a vast area of unexplored terrain. And yet … there are places that we rarely traverse, fern shrouded, blackberry brambled wildernesses we just leave for some future shopping mall or an array of condominiums when we depart these mortal coils. Don’t ask me why I decided today was the day to open a path into that heart of darkness. Blame it, I guess, on the Covid. If I can’t go anywhere but here, then by god, what we need is more here.

I started with a sickle, whacking and slashing fern fronds nearly head high, mowing down elderberry and salmonberry and nettles, bucking up old deadfall with a chainsaw, moving logs with a peavey. Inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard, my freedom expanded into the jungle. I felt released from my Covid chains, if only by a short trail. I was in unexplored habitat where not even the deer ventured. Lewis and Clark hadn’t passed this way and who knows, maybe not even the natives.

I’m still cutting trails, a couple more already. Eldorado awaits possibly. Or the remains of a deceased civilization. Possibly a blackberry shrouded temple. So far, though, I’ve only stumbled across an old bottle dump, the Barefoot Bandit’s lair and a family of illegal immigrants. I suspect I’ll make important archeological discoveries when I start tunneling. Probably next week. Hopefully I can use the illegals for most of the gruntwork.