The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center will host the second annual Small Craft Advisory Saturday and Sunday August 10th and 11th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 27130 102nd St. in Stanwood, WA.

Small Craft Advisory is an invitational exhibition of high end crafts featuring the works of 16 artisans. Their work runs the gamut from pottery to cigar box luthiery, garden art to weaving, stone carving to furniture building, boat building to ceramics, sculpture to mixed media, Native American art to fiction writing, banjo building to stained glass.

Our intention is to introduce the public to artistic and original works of craft. Are they art or are they craft? We think you’ll find a simple to answer to that age old and time wearied question.

www.smallcraftadvisory.net

Maybe it’s old age or maybe just the onset of senility, but lately I’ve been waxing nostalgic, remembering nearly lost memories from the long ago past, wondering sometimes if they’re accurate or simply how I’d like to remember them. A few days ago I was driving the backroads north of here, almost to Canada, when I found myself turning off on Mosquito Lake Road, a curvy stretch of blacktop I used to use getting to my old friend Melinda’s place. She and her biker boyfriend were living in tents and trailers while they built a rickety cabin board by board, added old doors and recycled windows, all one entire summer. I would drive up to help but Paul, her Hells Angel beau, mostly wanted to drink beer. Which we did.

Somewhere around early fall we put the roofbeam up and they finished the roof before the rains of autumn and winter arrived. Melinda had bought the land cheap after the loggers had clearcut her property and the hillside behind which now, with the rain, sprouted springs and creeks, making her homestead a muddy mess. Like myself with my shack and cut-over land, she loved the place, warts, stumps, mudslides and all. She cut firewood and lived alone when she caught Paul sleeping with a waitress down the road and she kicked his sorry ass out once and for all.

Every few years I’d journey back through time and space to visit, but eventually the trips ended and we communicated mostly by Christmas card, once a year, a few paragraphs, she’d married Robert, her mother had died, she got a job driving the Bellingham school bus, she’d built an addition, Robert was found dead in the river after fly fishing, she’d retired, she was pruning bud for a cannabis grower in town, stuff like that, but we kept in touch if barely.

I had a hard time finding the place now, maybe 30 years since the last time I’d walked the log across the creek to her Shangri-La, but finally I found a bridge she’d built, made me nervous driving onto it, but it held and there, tucked into the shelf between the woods and the creek, sat her cabin. A horse munched contentedly in its pasture, flowers filled the property with color, the cabin had been remodeled and looked like a pastoral dream with cedar shakes, paned windows, brick chimney.

Thirty years you can transform a muddy homestead into a reflection of yourself. Melinda certainly had. She squinted at me hopping out of my car, said who is this? and finally satisfied herself I was who she thought I was. We sat by the creek awhile, toured the property, caught up our lives, watched the hummingbirds and bumblebees work the flowers, savored for an hour or two the distances we had traveled. Nothing feels much warmer than old friends. And nothing brings a smile faster than knowing they did okay despite the setbacks. Melinda lives in paradise. And ya know, beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder, despite what they say, it is the beholder.

Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

Okay, so now that Mr. T has tweeted his opinion that those 4 Congresswomen should go back to where they came from and been informed that 3 of them come from the same place he does, well, time to focus on the Somalian who he claims hates America. Meaning, she has found some faults here that she, as an elected official in the United States Congress, hopes to address. For that she is labeled a hater, unpatriotic, possibly a felon and probably a terrorist. So much for tolerance in the Yew Ess Aye.

Today Rand Paul, another elected official, apparently comfortable with throwing stones now that others are throwing them first, stated that he would buy Rep. Ilhan Omar a ticket back to Somalia so she could learn what a great country we really are, kind of ironic considering the tone of intolerance of Sen. Paul. Criticism by someone born outside his country evidently doesn’t cut it for him. Best damn country in the world. Best damn country ever. How dare anyone who came from somewhere else find fault! Fly her back and he’ll pay the airfare.

Excuse me, but one of the things I happen to like about my country, and yeah, I was born here, is the right to free speech. Also the right to criticize. And absolutely the right to find fault and maybe even suggest ways to correct those faults. Call me unpatriotic, call me a terrorist, call me a Muslim sympathizer, call me late for dinner, but HEY, guys like Paul and Trump, they’re the threat to this country. They’re the subversives. They’re what scare the bejabbers out of me. Maybe Sen. P should go visit some totalitarian countries, the ones who squelch dissent and suppress opposition, to get a better sense of what makes this country great. Maybe we could all help him with the airfare. First class, of course.

So now we’re treated to crowds of yahoos chanting, not Lock Her Up, but Send Her Back! What part of the democratic process, if any, do these pea-heads understand? Me, I’ve had a dose of ignorance to last me a lifetime. Enuff, I think, to demand an end to it. You want to believe Obama was born in Kenya, I can’t help you. You want to doubt we landed Apollo 11 on the moon, fine by me. You think JFK was killed by aliens from Mars, have at it. But I don’t want you writing the history books, I don’t want you telling me your latest conspiracy theory, I don’t need you screaming en masse that if a person doesn’t agree with your angry imbecility they ought to be deported. I’m sick of it and I’m sick of you. Read a book occasionally. Educate yourself. You think every opinion ought to be treated with equal respect, forget about it. We might agree that you have the right to be stupid, but that doesn’t make your opinion right.

We live in the algorithm of ignorance these globally warmed days. Anger, resentment, bigotry, all combustible fuel in the forest of stupidity, just waiting for a spark or a match or a dogwhistle or two. I won’t say every person who voted for Trump was a racist or even deplorable. I have friends who voted for the carnival barker and yeah, they’re still my friends. But there are a lot of folks who voted for the guy who would just as happily have voted for George Wallace in the day howling about de-segregation, who would vote for Judge Roy Moore even when they knew he stalked under- age girls, who would vote again for Trump full knowing he was guilty of conspiring with Russians and guilty of covering up payments to porn stars and guilty of obstruction of justice. They’re mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.

Trouble is, they just don’t have much of an outlet other than to rage against the machine. Along comes a demagogue like Donald, pissed off 90% of the time, tweeting his outrage, venting his narrow minded wrath against Muslims and immigrants and liberals and the media, against most everything, even the foundations of democracy. The future looks dim to him and the mob. It was better when the country was white, when Ozzie loved Harriet, when the kids were heterosexual, when cars had huge fins and got 10 mpg, when TV didn’t have sitcoms with people of color or people who were gay or people who looked different than … you know, Us. We didn’t have crime, we didn’t worry about climate change, we didn’t have transsexuals, we didn’t have any problems.

Oh, sure, the Russians and that communism stuff. Maybe some nuclear scares. But Father knew best and the Brady Bunch were a nice wholesome American family. What happened to all that Norman Rockwell goodness? Was it the uppity black folks? Did the immigrants erode the culture? Maybe the women wanting equality? Drugs and the hippie culture and now heroine and meth? Was that it? The American Dream became darker and darker. Jobs paid less. The Mexicans took all the good jobs from our white kids, you know, picking cucumbers and framing houses or working at Motel 6 as a maid. The government maybe, telling us cigarettes were bad, the air was filthy, the rivers were polluted, always the government, the goddamn government telling us what to eat, what not to eat, what was good for us, what wasn’t. Like we were children. Like we were too stupid to know any better.

It’s hard to say, hard to put a finger on it, hard to find the reason things went to hell. But the jobs don’t pay, the kids are on drugs, the kids are hooked on their devices, the kids are addicted to Facebook, the kids don’t want to work manual labor any more, the robots are taking over, the cars are driving themselves, the country is a mess. Hollywood has perverted everything, the media lies about everything, nothing is true unless it’s on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Something went terribly wrong back when and now, who knows, maybe it’s too late. But along comes this guy, a billionaire TV star, maybe he can fix it. Maybe we got nothing to lose. Maybe he can turn things around. Maybe he’ll drain the swamp.

Well, I got some bad news for you deplorables. He is the swamp.

I might’ve been the only yahoo I know who watched the Mueller hearings yesterday, all 5 hours. Friends told me they didn’t watch, couldn’t watch, wouldn’t watch … and when I asked if maybe they had read the 450 page report, or even the summaries, they said no. There are Senators and Representatives who haven’t either, so they’re in good company.

If ignorance is bliss, welcome to the United States of Happy. Today the Governor of Puerto Rico announced he would resign after emails between himself and his cabinet came to light full of homophobic references, misogynistic attacks, snarky disdain for the survivors of Hurricane Maria, enough to send tens or even hundreds of thousands of islanders into the streets to demand he step down and go away. It made me yearn for a million Americans to march to the Capitol and demand this President of ours go back to his Tower and his golf courses. Course I live in the land of Hee Haw, the Garden of Fantasy, the sovereign nation of Fox watchers, where most of its citizens are merrily cherry picking facts and fervently hoping the next election makes moot the crimes of Donald J. Trump. Or just forgives them and offer him another 4 years.

Mueller didn’t offer much in the way of Netflix binge-watching, just answered questions in a stoic mono-syllabic manner more fitting to a courtroom than a House hearing of high drama. But what he did offer was testimony to prove obstruction of justice, high crimes and misdemeanors, collaboration – if not collusion – with the Russians and Wikileaks and a warning that the election of 2020 will be corrupted the same as 2016’s was. The only drama here was the repeated assertions by the Republicans that the investigation itself was corrupt. Where was the investigation of Hillary Clinton? What about Benghazi? Wasn’t Mueller’s team a bunch of partisans? Who leaked those reports?

Not one rebuttal, not a single refutation, not one defense of the facts laid out by Mueller that this President lied, this President had welcomed stolen information from the Russians, this President had met with them to further his financial gain, this President’s cabinet and staff were indicted and convicted, this President was guilty but could not be indicted himself while sitting in the Oval Office. Not one murmur of denial by these Representatives. No defense other than to attack the messenger.
Puerto Rico might have the right response. Trump may not understand they’re citizens of the United States, but they definitely gave us a lesson in democracy yesterday. We the people. Sometimes you have to stand up for what’s right and kick the bastards out. Obviously, their northern neighbors aren’t going to do it. It’s a shameful state of affairs.