The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Learning to Fly

How does the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song go: you, who are on the road, must have a code, you can live by? Being on the road the past couple weeks reminds me of earlier trips and nearly forgotten adventures. Not that I necessarily had a code to live by back then….

The summer of ’76 I was hauling up the east coast seaboard out of Florida when I picked up a hitchhiker with his thumb out. He tossed his backpack in the truck bed and opened the door of the Chevy’s cab. ‘Where you headed?’ I inquired and he answered ‘Nirvana’

“Not sure I’m headed that far,’ I said, ever the comical cynic, ‘but hop in, you can travel til you see a sign.’ My little boddhisatva was, I realized soon enough, not so much on the Path to Enlightenment as he was searching for acolytes, folks who would acknowledge his Journey and hopefully find in him a Guide and a Way. Me, I wasn’t headed anywhere really, just a lost puppy but happy to wag a tail occasionally, a boy searching for America, not satori. The Outer Banks, however, beckoned and I took a ferry to get there, my would-be Guru tagging along, maybe thinking at Kitty Hawk he would learn to fly.

Once on the ferry he opened the truck door and whacked a spiffy new BMW with it, springing the irate owner out of his bucket seat, leather contoured, probably heated, the seat and him both. My rider, unchastened, muttered something vaguely and insincerely apologetic and got back in the truck … only to decide to exit and once again whack that polished and gleaming BMW on its once immaculate door panel. The driver, now furious, came out screaming. My guru seemed oddly unfazed. ‘Hey man,’ he intoned, ‘it’s just a car. Chill out, why don’tcha?’

Chilling out was NOT on this guy’s mind and his car was WAY more than just a car. I think he thought it might be — for a moment anyway — a license to kill. Code or no code, I decided the time was ripe for my own self to intervene. ‘My hitchhiker,’ I said, making it clear legal action would not involve the owner of the culprit truck, ‘said he was sorry. I think he’ll be more careful from now on. And besides, the damage is cosmetic, not really worth violence. Just my opinion, of course ….’ And then I walked away to watch over the side the deep blue Atlantic. The dogs could fight it out if they wanted, but without a referee.

My guru and I camped two nights on the Outer Banks, but on the 3rd day I announced I was packing up, heading north. ‘You’re welcome to ride along,’ I told him, to which he replied I was making a huge mistake leaving. He had, he said somberly, a lot I could learn. ‘No doubt,’ I said, ‘but I don’t mind learning the hard way, on my own.’

I still remember my almost Guru standing next his pup tent, the wind moving sand across the road, not even a wave goodbye. Like a lot of folks you meet on the Highway of Life, who knows where their path eventually led? I’m betting, though, he never thinks back on me.

Road Tripping

We’re on the road, me and the mizzus, one destination in Arizona to meet up with old friends in Sedona, the rest … well, like I said, it’s a road trip, side trips welcome, kind of the way the mizzus and me fell in love, on the road, a backpacking trip that ended with premature snow in the Big Horns then morphed into a Mexico detour..

We stayed on the Columbia River Gorge last night next to an incredibly weathered Indian church and houses, a village, I guess, browned, tilted and barely standing, its own museum next to the Bonneville lock and dam. South and north were two fishing platforms where the tribe netted salmon before the dams destroyed their harvests, a skeletal reminder of a slow genocide most history books omit. Traveling the byways is an unfurling history lesson. Especially if you drive with an historian riding shotgun.

We’re running the east side of the Cascades, dodging snow, high plains drifting, cutting east across roads a mile high with no traffic or services for vast distances. You want to know what I think America is — Clue: it’s not Trump, it’s not politics, it’s not the Japanese internment camps we passed in Tule Lake — it’s this wilderness that stretches beyond anyone’s view, this sea to sea purpled majesty, a continent that rolls and heaves and manages after centuries to remain wild and free. Yah, corny stuff. Until you hike it or drive it … or simply stand in awe of it.

I love this country. Let me say it again. I love this insane country. People ask me why we don’t visit Paris or Beijing. Why we don’t travel the world. My answer is I want to see Death Valley. I want to go to the Everglades. I won’t be happy til we’ve gone to see the ancient bristlecone pine forests. I don’t care so much to stand in line to see the Parthenon or the Louvre. Sure, they would be great, fabulous, swell. But … I’d rather see the Appalachians in the fall. Big Sur anytime. Mt. Rainier again soon.

You can have your cities, all of them. I have a love affair with America, the land. We’re on a road trip to see what we haven’t seen before and a few places worth returning to. It’s a second honeymoon, a third, maybe a 25th. The mizzus is with me and I’m in 7th heaven. Heaven, I hope, if I believed in fairy tales, will look a lot like this.

Luck’s a funny thing.  Some folks don’t much believe in it – or don’t want to – since they think they’re the Captains of their own Destiny.  Me, I’m easily seasick on the storm tossed waters of my life … so I put more faith in luck than my own crummy navigational skills.  I guess living on the South End had a lot to do with it.  You find yourself on an island on the edge of a continent, you think it’s a short walk before the next move is a wet one.   I came when no one had heard of Camano, few people lived here and most of the cheap land was far down at the South End where I stumbled in one dark and stormy night.  Luck had pretty much run out, jobs were scarce and a bad marriage had foundered on the rocks thanks to the aforementioned maritime skills.
I bought a shack and 7 acres for the princely sum of $25,000, everything I had down, $225 a month for the next 15 years.  Sound cheap?  Well, I had a hard time meeting that mortgage the first few years.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the poorhouse.  Corny as an A.M. radio pop song, I fell in love, got married to my old sweetheart and fell in love too with my place, the South End and my life.  Lucky?  You bet!!
We take forks in the road all the time.  I know buddies who always wonder where the other road would’ve take them.  I don’t look back.  I don’t use the rearview mirror because it takes all my attention to drive the road I took, the one with the NEXT fork and the unexpected curve.  You ask me — and I know you didn’t —luck is part being ready for it.  It’s not a lottery ticket, it’s that small opening, that slim opportunity, that sudden chance that may not come twice, the one that veers up out of the headlights and offers, for those who are ready for it, a new game, a fresh start,  a brand new road.  Luck, I’ll admit this: it does take some skill.

What with all this global warming this year, the South End’s been inundated with snowstorms, monsoons, windstorms and bad craziness – all of it culminating in power outages that last for days.  The neighbors who didn’t snowbird it to Phoenix or Baja are about half deranged breathing generator fumes and cursing the PUD, the government, God and the day they retired to a backwash like South Camano. 

     I try to reassure em, being the Good Samaritan I am.  I tell em about the good old days where we lost the Grid for even longer, even more often.  I tell em how the missuz came to my love shack in ’81 in a raging storm.  Power out, trees down, tide lashing the beach, practically had to cut our way home to a dark shack she’d, fortunately, never set eyes on. 

     I tell em, think romantic.  Think oil lamps and candlelight, quiet conversation, flickering shadowplay and the haunting strains of a banjo gently weeping.  Think, this is how it once was.  The wind strumming the fir boughs and the world vibrant and pulsing in a way TV pretty much dulled.  Think of that old lovelight rekindled and warming like a cookstove, the dreams rising once again, yeasty and full of glutinous potential. 

     That’s how this old codger thinks of the South End.  And if I have to be reminded of it every storm, every power outage, every candled memory, well, it’s a welcome few days.  And Ma and Me, we think of em sort of as anniversaries.  Course, after 3 or 4 days, we’re ready for TV.  Or divorce.  Or maybe just a generator of our own.