The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Living here on the ‘Island You Can Drive To’, most of us only drive to the House You Live In. Kind of understandable, considering there’s no outlet malls or fast food franchises beyond our mailbox. Further on, there’s just more blacktop, identical mailboxes and, well, more of the same. Which I guess explains why most of our northern neighbors have essentially no idea whatsoever of what lies beyond their driveways to the south. You might think that commute to Stanwoodopolis and beyond would grow tiresome. You might think idle curiosity would kick in after the 1000th commute to I-5. What the hell IS down at the end of their island? Where do those other roads GO??

But no! We are creatures of habit, apparently. Whatever pioneer spirit led us to the end of America, we’re no Lewis and no Clark either. We’re like the Conestoga family headed west that took one glimpse of the fierce gauntlet of the upcoming Rockies and decided Kansas was plenty far enough. Better to take the easy way out than risk it for the improbability of a promised Paradise the brochures probably exaggerated.

A few years back we had some serious construction on the mainline down the gut of the island. Months of detours that forced the complacent shortest-distance-between-two-points-is-a-straight-line crowd to shunt over to the picturesque and historic west side. Believe me, to listen to the outraged outcry or read the vitriol in the letters to the editor, you’d have thought we’d routed them through the alleys of Hell or the horrors of Smokey Point. They wanted a detour on a blacktop nearby that was definitely not designed for heavy traffic and they wanted it NOW. Our commissioner, Bill Thorn, god bless his decisiveness, said no, it’s a temporary inconvenience and we won’t destroy a perfectly good road to make the GPS-averse electorate shut up their weeping and lamentations. Grow up, fer cryin out loud!

Next election, of course, the crybabies exacted revenge. Bye bye Bill. You can lead a horse to the South End, but he’ll thank you by kicking you half to death. Better, we’ve learned, just to tell em what they’re missing. No need to drive any further than necessary. Curiosity, after all, kills.

CLICK TO HEAR — peacock farming

I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that’s indescribable to my backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classinG up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.      Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t Discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.      Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.

I heard a study recently that said the poor are more charitable than the rich. On average they give almost twice as much of their income percentage-wise to those in need than their wealthier brethren. They also volunteer more for charities and non profits, service groups and outreach programs. Basically, if my sociology statistical studies are still in semi-working order, this proves, not quite conclusively but damn close, the South End is way more philanthropic than our neighbors up yonder ensconced behind their key carded gated communities.
I had a friend tell me in all seriousness awhile back (in regard to my bemusement over her financial plight at the time) that a million dollars just wasn’t what it used to be. What exactly do you say to a pronouncement like that? Do you work out the math of inflation vs. income? Do you shrug your overburdened shoulders and just agree? Or do you take pity and offer up a loan …. you know, to get her by until that devalued million dollars returns to its rightful place in the economy?
These are tough times. Especially, I guess, for the rich. Or, more aptly, the folks who no longer count themselves among the Gatsbys of Camano. Their stocks have slipped, the value of their two homes has dropped, their retirement funds seem inadequate now, even their hedge fund broker refuses to return their frantic calls — that vast chasm between Us and Them looks like a ditch, not a Grand Canyon. And if sacrifices must be made — and believe me, they must — a little less giving to the needy is definitely the order of the day.
Meanwhile, down here on the Lower Tiers, we kind of see we’re all in this together. So we still donate, we still volunteer and we still give. We don’t have much, but it never seemed too little somehow. Even though a hundred dollars isn’t what it used to be.

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 inside 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.”

Guitar Bob and I were sitting out with the dogs and couple of 6 strings, enjoying the last of what must be the warmest summer either of us have ever seen in our combined 70 plus years of living here in Pacific Northewest. The sun had set over the South End, traffic has slowed to a dribble, the hounds were lounging at our feet and a contemplative mood was descending on all four of us there on the porch while we played some blues and drank some beers.

Right before darkness settled in completely, the dogs set up a racket slightly out of rhythm with ours then raced to the fence on the highway to menace a passerby walking on the shoulder. Bob hauled the beasts back onto the porch and a voice floated across the summer lawn. “You mind if I play some guitar with you?”

I’d forgot Bob’s not partial to uninvited guests. Or even invited ones most of the time. So I mistakenly said, sure, c’mon in, the dogs won’t bite now that they’ve been fed. Bob hauled his guitar, his beer, his dogs all into the house and left me to play host. I gave the kid my guitar and he played something loud and a little troubling, but hey, music’s a universal language and he was doing the talking. My job was to listen.

He was, he explained when he’d finished his concerto, living down the road, trying to deal with ‘the auditory hallucinations’. He was a spiritual man, he blurted, but sometimes the spirits were intrusive. In the dark I couldn’t see his face or his expressions, just this voice explaining himself, his lack of work, loss of faith, those voices talking to him all the time. I asked if it helped to live down here all alone, end of an island, end of the world. He was thinking maybe he’d move back to the city. More work. More company.

After awhile I said it was nice talking with him, but I had to get on home. He got up and walked down the drive into a dark moonless night. Maybe voices were talking to him, I don’t know. I had the feeling they weren’t guiding him toward any light and I felt bad I wasn’t either. It can be a lonesome place, the South End, no worse maybe than other places, but when you lose your way down here, it can seem like a long ways back to the place you came from, the place you tried leaving in the first place….