The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

With garden planting already under way, I’ve been searching for seeds. Usually I roll into the nearest hardware or grocery or garden supply store and load up on whatever seeds I need, plenty to choose from, some organic, some not. This year I found the display racks pretty much empty. So I did what any modern gardener worth his manure would do, I went online. I found some of what I was searching for, not all by any means, and the price was at least double what it would be ordinarily. After a few days of letting my fingers do the walking, I let my credit card to the talking.

I recalled back in those early plague days long ago when not just toilet paper was being hoarded, but yeast and flour too. I’m a bread maker so it was more than marginally disconcerting to discover some of the basic ingredients were unavailable, although I already had a large supply of wheat berries, seeds, grains, molasses and flour stored up. The other day a friend who sells us beefalo called to let me know he’s swamped with calls from desperate people wanting him to sell them meat. Another buddy mentioned that freezers were selling out all over. You could order one, but hell might freeze over before your meat got frozen in a new cooler.

The latest tactic to avoid food shortages in these End Times seems to be the purchasing of baby chicks. Wait a few weeks and you got eggs by the dozens and even fricassee once you’re sick of omelettes. You can use the chicken droppings on the garden, double your lettuce production. E-I-E-I Oh! We’re all going back to the land, maybe buy a couple calves, build a barn behind the garage.

What are we to think? Are folks expecting the plague zombies to surge into their grocery stores and clean out the shelves to the last loaf of white dead bread? Are they planting gardens, growing food, storing meat and pizzas, baking bread and fermenting homebrew? If the internet goes offline suddenly, you can bet your crop of zucchinis that panic will ensue within minutes, gun safes unlocked, doors bolted, a siege mentality spreading across the Home of the Brave. Only those with guns and cans of pork and beans will survive. Looters will decimate the sad little backyard gardens and no freezer without a kryptonite lock will keep the hordes from emptying their booty.

I give it a month before the rabbits munch down the lettuce and the carrots and the neighbor dogs feast on the chickens out in the crummy pen thrown up by the sandbox. Maybe two before the bread making experiments and the brick-like loaves stop seeming worth the trouble. Three before the bathtub gin starts poisoning entire neighborhoods. Believe me, we’ll clamor for an end to the quarantine. Death by virus might seem a welcome relief.

These are tough times in the Land of the Free Home of the Brave judging by the reactions to legitimate protests and illegal rioting across the country and, really, across the world. Oh sure, we could make this a political statement, accuse the antifa or the boogaloos of fomenting further divisions in this already partisan land, but really, why bother when the divisions are already Grand Canyons without any zipline for entertainment?

This week the town of Snohomish, antique mall central, went on full alert after the police reported that left wing looters might be driving up from Seattle and Gomorrah to smash, loot, pillage and rape. Antifa, oh no! Vigilantes drove in to offer their guns and their patriotism to the city police department and then about one hundred of the good ol’ boys with assault rifles, pistols, shotguns and who knows what heavier armaments guarded the business district. The fact that some were drinking gave the new Alamo a definite festive flavor. I know there’s nothing I like more than a good vigilante tailgate party, assault rifles and liquor always a recipe for fun. Throw in a Confederate flag or three during a protest against white supremacy and the recent killing of a black suspect in Minneapolis by a white cop, well, sir, now we’re talking a real good time, southern style. I’m betting folks brought a rope just in case the opportunity arose for a good old fashioned lynching.

The KKK is still alive and well in America. Along with dozens of other white supremacist variations. Nice to see them linking arms with our local gendarme, full blessing of the police chief and the mayor. Just good citizens helping out. No need to wear a white hood these days, much less a plague mask. You get these uppity blacks demanding equal opportunities, well, somebody’s got to protect the mansions and the country clubs. And the women, don’t forget the women. Apparently a lot of us are still living in 1880.

If I wanted to prove the protesters correct, this is about all the evidence I need. Racism isn’t easy to eliminate, may never be, but we can certainly tell those good ol’ boys to take their guns and their rebel flags and their open containers home. Nice to know the sheriff thinks they’re okay. Hell, he didn’t even have to trouble himself to deputize them.

The yahoo with the MAGA hat who put a hand on the front grill of Recon Ron’s grocery cart in the organic food aisle probably didn’t know Ron was a Green Beret in Viet Nam from ’66 to ’69, not with that belly sticking out of the Grateful Dead T-shirt and the gray ponytail poking out in back under his Boston Red Sox cap. Ron’s gone a bit native down here on the South End, hangs out with Two Toke Tom most evenings and plays a mean hand of poker with our Wednesday night crowd, mean because he bets without caution and we never know his bluffs from an inside straight. No, the guy who put the brakes on Ron’s half full cart would’ve thought here was some lardass gone-to-seed retiree, not a Marine with a bronze star.

‘Wuzzup, Dog?” the smirking fellow without a plague mask asked. “You one of those people afraid of viruses?”

Ron was wearing a white bandana. Apparently his interrogator interpreted this as a flag of surrender. To the germs. “Minding my own business here, dog. Being careful. Something bothering you?”

“Oh yeah, man, something’s bothering me. All you people wearing your stupid masks, closing down the stores , the bars, everything, yeah, that bothers me. “

Now Ron is not a mellow fellow. I’ve seen him go rogue and it’s not something I want to see ever again. But this was, after all, a grocery store, not a tavern. He asked the guy, “You don’t believe there’s a contagion out here?” to which the guy said, “Hell no! Just a flu, man, just a boogie man. I don’t buy it, not one bit of it.”

Ron said, “100,000 people have already died from it, you thank that’s a cold? Lemme ask YOU something — how many Americans died in Viet Nam? You heard of that war, haven’t you?”

“People die, man, that’s why it’s called war.”

Ron pulled his bandana down, sighed and said, “100,000 in four months, friend. That’s nearly a thousand a day — if you believe in math.”

“Like I said, man, people die, the way it goes, ya know?”

“Oh, I know … man. Believe me, I know. It wouldn’t kill you, though, to put a mask on. Hide that ugly face a little. But if you don’t let go of this cart …” Ron let that threat hang, gave him a steely stare and pulled his mask back up.

“Oh, okay, tough guy. Buy your little fruits, hide out in the cereal aisle, why don’tcha?”

Ron shoved the cart slightly with a quick hard push. The kid let go of the grill. “Live in fear, man.”

“Morons like you, what choice do I have? Beer cooler’s on the other aisle — in case you get lost with your head up your ass.”

Some other time, some other place, this might’ve gone bad. The kid seemed to consider that route, maybe thought about consequences, but in that moment of hesitation Ron turned his cart and walked away. Like I said, we could never tell if he was bluffing.

I got a friend, Green Thumb Barry, who has an incredible garden and arboretum over on the east side of the island, plenty of sun, lots of compost and chicken manure, everything plants love. He grows exotic stuff. A banana tree stands near his cabin, even has small bananas some years. Sure, he wraps it in the winter. I know we live on the banana belt but even they need protection in the monsoons. You walk around his grounds and you spend half your day asking what is that little flower or that strange shrub or this odd fruit out in the orchard. He plants South American root crops, Australian ferns, white kiwi, hybridized peonies, rare irises and unusual rhododendrons. The place is riotous with flowers and foliage. Yesterday I was tripping through the tulips, photographing what I’d never seen before and he wondered out loud why he went to all this trouble.

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked, bent over shooting some delicate little bloom I asked the name of but forgot immediately.

“Nobody ever sees this,” he said glumly. “What good is it if no one comes here?”

I capped my camera and stood up. Vines hung from overhead on trees he’s planted long ago. Hummingbirds scrabbled in the Chilean fire tree that was living up to its name with a thousand deep orange flowers that drew them to its nectar. Bees buzzed and birds yammered, practically his own temperate jungle, arboretum and nursery all in one. The living roof of his his new greenhouse was even blooming, everything fecund and spreading as far as we could see. Maybe Adam and Eve felt like Barry. All that paradise and no visitors. Kind of a living hell, I guess Barry would think.

“You kidding me?” I asked and he shook his head sadly. “What’s the point? I’m the only person who sees this most of the time. Look at this,” he said and under a tree peony I could just barely see a delicate little striated frond with a tall spike of yellowish flowers starting to open. “Nobody will ever see this. Just me. ”

I said, “I don’t know, Barry, you want to sell tickets, start a garden show, set up as a nursery? You got kind of a paradise going here, enjoy it.” Barry just muttered and shook his head. Maybe Eve felt the same way, took a bite of the snake’s apple and figured it might change her luck. I guess it did. Might have been easier to change your way of thinking, seems like to me. Paradise is hard to find for a reason, apparently.

Things are heating up in Covid-plagued America. Friday night the Racist-in-Chief spent some time in his underground bunker where Secret Service agents entombed him, ostensibly out of fear for his life when protesters stormed the White House perimeter, but possibly to keep him from making any further statements about … well … anything. Radicals outside were already tossing gasoline, why add more fuel to the flames? Two days later and presumably out of the bunker, the President has yet to urge calm or call for healing. Instead he twitters his little rhyming threat that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Probably should have stayed in the safe room below without his smartphone. Hopefully the SS agents learned their lesson.

Enough is sometimes enough. The video of the cop killing a handcuffed, prostate black suspect by taking a knee the way Colin Kaepernick did on the football field to protest exactly this sort of injustice was plenty enough to jolt a sleepy populace to wide awake nightmare. Kaepernick paid a price for his prescience and this white cop will pay one too. The rest of us, some on the burning streets, some watching safely from our self-imposed isolation, we will too.

I suspect, though, the message will be fairly muddled. One placard I saw read THE REVOLUTION STARTS NOW! Right, Comrade. I was in Madison, Wisconsin during the Viet Nam riots after the assassination of King and Kennedy, tear gas, smashed storefronts and University buildings, looting, mayhem, call in the National Guard. We thought the revolution was starting back then too. Ho ho. Nixon went on to bomb Cambodia, the country went its merry way and all us protesters ended up with families and middle class jobs. So much for our little rebellion.

Fast forward fifty years, half a century. Racism is endemic, income inequity is pervasive, corporatocracy rules. The divisions in this country are as wide as they were back in the 60’s. The economy may come back after this pandemic lockdown, but I suspect the jobs for a lot of folks won’t. Stockholders will be okay, but not the people who make minimum wage, not the folks whose jobs are outsourced to robotics. There’s a smoldering rage just under the surface of sunny America and we’re watching it live on TV or on the streets.

Maybe it is the beginning of the revolution. Back in the summer of 1970 the Armstrong brothers and two cohorts bombed the Army Math Research Center and killed an intern in the Pharmacy building next door, pretty much putting the knee on the throat of that revolution where it died with a small whimper. I was wrong then about the optimism for change and I’m probably wrong now. But it feels like, once again, it’s hard to breathe.