The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We just came home from a road trip to the deserts of America. I don’t mean the barrios and ghettos of Yuma, Tucson, East L.A. The real deserts, cacti, gila monsters, border patrol. We drove through Mojave and now that we’re home I read today that the Flat Earth guy, Mike Hughes, strapped himself into his homemade rocket and blasted off for the stratosphere where, he told reporters, he would be able to look down at the planet and see a disc with its oceans held in place by ice at their edges.

I’m used to climate change deniers, folks who maybe never been in a greenhouse or even their own house when the sun was shining through the front windows, people who probably think they just inadvertently turned up the thermostat and forgot when the room got hot. Science wasn’t their subject in school. No doubt they majored in recess or football. Football without a helmet.

I think our boy in the Mojave rocket did actually wear a helmet. But as we learned this weekend, a helmet isn’t much use when the missile explodes in a fiery crash back on the flat earth seconds after launch. Tragic? Sure. A man has the right to follow his dreams, doesn’t he? We’re all guilty of stupid stuff. I’ve even managed my fair share. This week even…. But, c’mon, if I wanted to prove the earth was a flat disc, would I belt myself into a missile so I could take a picture with a camera to prove the ball we thought was earth was really a deep dish pizza? No, I would dig a hole to the other side, couldn’t take long, although the danger would be falling through into outer space. Probably make more sense to use the photos the astronauts have already but where’s the danger, the romance, the press coverage?

This same guy jumped over 100 feet in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limo, set a Guinness World Record even, probably because a flat earth’s gravity isn’t all that much to keep a limo tethered to terra firma.

A man, of course, has to do what a man has to do, but suicide by rocket is maybe pushing the envelope a bit too far. One small flight for man, one giant step backwards for mankind. Put that on his tombstone down there in the hot flat desert. Rest in Peace, Mike. The flat earth is your home forever.

Half our neighbors mysteriously leave the South End, some after Thanksgiving, some after Christmas, a slow but steady migration to points unknown. One year I asked Frank who lived across the road and was readying his 40 foot $200,000 travel trailer for what looked to be an imminent exit, where he was going. Arizona, he told me. ‘Kind of an expensive trailer for a road trip,’ I ventured. ‘Why not stay in some nice hotels?’ He told me his mizzus wouldn’t sleep on some strangers’ sheets.

Each, of course, to her own, I occasionally say, not always sincerely. But … the neighborhood sure quiets down in the winter and I’m all for that. Today we drove the length of southern Arizona, eventually reaching Yuma. Yuma, for you who have never traveled the southern border reaches, is where the Colorado River, once navigable by steamboat, is now a mere trickle of its tidal self where an outpost established over a century and a half ago still stands in a desert as forbidding as most any we’ve seen on this arid road trip. Bleak, flat, unforgiving. And yet … lining Interstate 8, thousands of my neighbor Frank’s trailer are crammed into ghettos of sun-worshippers who prefer the wall-to-wall existence of fellow exiles over a cold rainy Shangri-La back on the South End.

Promise these Bedouins in Behemoths a few months of sunshine in an implacably desolate and pitiless desert and they will be pliable putty in the hands of Machiavellian despots. FREE WINTERS IN SAUDI ARABIA – VOTE REPUBLICAN!! I guess living in air-conditioned seasonal comfort with windows facing an identical trailer 8 feet away may not feel like freedom so much as some kind of escape, a modern and humane penitentiary for the seasonally afflicted. Me, I’ll take the rain.

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.