The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A few years back I had a bank lady ask me if I minded telling her where the checks I infrequently deposited came from, inasmuch as they were fairly large sums and came from various government agencies. I told her I was a glass artist and these were 1% for Art project payments. The next time I cashed a check she informed me that — and she hoped I didn’t mind her frankness — well, she didn’t much care for the fact I made money that her taxes paid for. Waste of her hard earned money, she said.

I can only imagine how she might feel this year when the new Stanwoodopolis High School goes on-line, probably totally hacked off about whatever art project their committee will choose from the WA State Arts Commission roster, an absolute waste of her tax dollars. My bet is she voted against building a new school, the old one was good enough, just drag in some more trailers when needed.

But as I told her, I don’t think 1% for Art is a waste of money. Oh sure, we could build a cement block Soviet-style school, maybe skip carpeting and ballfields, cut out the performing arts addition, keep costs to a bare minimum and call it good enuff. Nevertheless, we’re the richest country in the world, maybe ought to build architecture that reflects our values and no, a warehouse for education isn’t what I think of as our values. Maybe our public buildings should inspire us, maybe reflect our best aspirations.

Art and architecture to some may seem more frivolity than necessity, but I beg to differ. Great civilizations are judged on their aesthetics more than just their wealth or the power of their military. We remember their sculpture, their music, their writing, their philosophies and yeah, their architecture. And the reason for that is that these represent their values and aspirations in a manner that is both aesthetic and ennobling. Good art tells us who we are as a community and as a society.

Great art and architecture does something more. They contribute to the creation of a public place in the true democratic sense, they give dignity to our workplaces, to our schools and our courthouses with the hope that we might, through the sheer power of a collective aesthetic, inspire in ourselves and our children a vision of possibilities and dreams and higher aspirations. Myself, I don’t consider that a waste of money. Course, I might be slightly prejudiced….

The past month I’ve been watching a pair of eagles down at the Head sitting on two eggs and finally seen those eggs hatch. Two white fluffy furballs, barely the size of a golf ball. The last week the two adults have been leaving the nursery more and more often, no doubt convinced the crib is safe so long as they keep an eye on it from their perches in the firs up above. Good spot for babysitting duties and hunting for food. Crab seems to be high on the menu.

Yesterday I stopped by with a camera and the parents were out of the nest up in the trees. This time I only spotted one chick. When the mom flew in with some rapid clicks, only one stumbled over to her, so I assume something happened to its sibling. Crows maybe or just starved to death, who knows?

Couple of days ago I went down to Cama Park to see the elephant seal pup sleeping on the beach. God only knows where the mom was, but the 500 pound seal was seemingly doing okay, cordoned off from the park humans so it could molt and finally slip back out to the sea. Nice to think of us humans being protective….

Today I was down by the garden and those pesky wabbits were hopping all over the yard. I hid behind a plum tree and caught an unsuspecting bunny by the legs. It screamed its bunny scream and immediately momma came loping around the corner, circled closer and closer to me holding her wiggling baby. I sat still, bunny in my paws, close to the ground, curious what she would do. I know, kind of a cruel experiment. You may think a rabbit is a cowardly creature, fearful, timid, but trust me when I tell you she finally raced over to me and gave the hand holding her kid a good bite. Served me right. I let her pup loose and the two of them went back to hiding in the garden where they could bite my beans and lettuce.

Last week I had found a hummingbird nest hidden in the bough of a cedar tree near our outhouse. For a few days I would walk by and the sitting adult would jet out of the nest and wait for me to pass. But one day I noticed no bird exiting. Or the next. Or finally the subsequent days after. I presume the parents were missing in action. Just left two tiny eggs in a nest lined with moss and lichen that would never hatch.

A couple hours ago I was back to the eagles’ nest. This time I spotted the second chick being fed morsels of a fish the parents had caught. Talk about relieved. I guess watching these guys for a few weeks had given me a keen paternal interest in their welfare. When I first arrived I found a fellow birdwatcher, a woman crouched in the brush. “Excuse me,” she called out, “I’m taking a piss.” I told her I was moving right along, no problem. We ended up watching the eagles together.

“You live around here?” I asked. She said she was living in her car. Her father had lived on the island, but he had died and her sister had sold the house and kept all the proceeds. Her sister, she told me, had run off with her husband and now her ex and her sibling were trying to have her committed to a mental institution. We watched the eagles for about half an hour, waxed philosophic about birds and cheating husbands, then bid adieu. I said good luck with all this. She said things would work out. I sure hope so, I said. But between you, me, the rabbits and the hummingbirds, I sort of doubt it.

Direct from the bully pulpit, our Fearsome Leader has some advice for the liberal women who think he ought to be impeached and put behind bars: Go back to the hellhole countries you’re from. If you don’t like it, if you don’t like your President, go home and take your #MeToo attitudes with you!! Great advice from the man who claims he wants to unite the country.

I have a bandmate who’s half Ojibway Indian. She was sitting next to a woman recently who was ranting about the tribes in our area building malls and casinos, renting houses on their reservations, taking half the crabs and clams and salmon and she was fed up. Sick of these redskins and their un-American ways. As she got wound up, the madder she got until finally, exasperated, she says to my bandmate: Why don’t they go back where they came from!

If ignorance is bliss, we’re living in Paradise these days. My friend pointed out, probably quietly, that they have gone back to where they came from. She probably did not tell the lady next to her to maybe go back where she came from. Trump, of course, He Who Never Apologizes or Admits Wrong, doubled down today when the four Representatives explained they were actually from here, a place we call America. To assume these four women of color were from what he’s referred to as ‘shithole countries’ smacks of xenophobic racism. Trump excoriated by tweet that these women still need to leave and furthermore, clean up their despicable language. I looked up shithole and sure enough, it still is a vulgar term.

Since three of these Representatives were born in America, the other a war refugee, I can only assume Mr. T is calling the United States a shithole country. Give the man another four years and I think he’ll be proven right.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/audio-jimmy-the-gyppo.mp3[/podcast]audio — jimmy the gyppo

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests.  The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property.  Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place.  The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert.  Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry.  Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information.  So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington.   He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way.  When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh.  That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away.  Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer.  The rich folks didn’t mind.  The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

Down at the forward thinking South End, we were New Age before it became Old Hat.  Herbal remedies?  You bet!  Nettle-opathy has been practiced in the hollows here since old Ma Wexler applied a poultice of the fresh stingers to her Erectile Dysfunctional husband’s non-working parts and boy howdy, things livelied up at the Wexler homestead after that, let me tell you.

Nettle-opathy is a country cross between acupuncture and herbal cure-all.  Apply a few fresh spring leaves to the correct chakra, you can cure everything from shyness to arthritis, halsitosis to insomnia, hair loss to memory loss, seasonal affective disorder to major depression.  You won’t have time to think of much else other than that panacea tickling your chakra.

We’ve been brewing medicinal nettle tonics about since Prohibition forced us to seek alternative medicines.  We got hefe-nettle, nettle stouts, IPA’s, nettle bock, all available in a handy 12 oz. dosage.

Aromatherapy?  Sure.  We got everything from burn barrel poly-blend to chimney cedar to compost leaf mulch/food scrap.  A few minutes of olfactory stimulation, you’ll forget most of those insignificant cares and woes that nag your good mood all day long.

Hypnotherapy.   You want a spell put on you, just wander down to the South End Hotel and belly up to the bar, listen for awhile to the whoppers these old time fishermen spin over a few bottle bass.  You’ll be buying Penn reels and downrigger gear and a boat and motor too — you’ll be broke but if fishing doesn’t cure what ails ya, god help you.

In all honesty — full disclosure here — this New Age stuff, old to us, is really mostly a placebo.  But then, isn’t that the New Medicine now?  And really, who cares so long as it works.  Not our fault the South End itself is really why we live longer, smile more, work less and basically just have most of the answers to life’s tough riddles.  Placebo?  You bet.

Well, sir, it’s just about that time of year again for old Skeeter to round up the boyz and journey up into the High Country.  I know what you’re probably thinking —- but you’d be wrong.  Mostly.  It’s time for our annual safari up into the snowfields of Roslyn for our 20th or 25th or umpteenth Beer Hunt.  Used to be more of us hunters, but time and domesticity have taken a toll.  We’re down to a motley crew of die-hard veterans, grizzled men who can travel for days on a subsistence diet of barfood, cheap hotdogs and canned beans.  Times have changed over the decades, but we haven’t.  Sadly.

We got a run-down packrat infested cabin near the Cle Elum River dam and reservoir right on the edge of Suncadia.  Suncadia is a 5000 acre high end mucky muck resort and retirement community carved out of elk country, clear cut and subdivided and over-developed for the 1%ers.  When they began bulldozing back 10 years ago, they chained off our access down the rutted dirt mountain road we always used.  Legal access, I might add.  So we did what any South Ender worth his salt would do, we cut the damn lock with bolt cutters and drove the usual easement 5 miles into the interior.  Kind of ruined the 9th green of their new golf course, it turned out.  Although it did get their attention in a hurry.

The boyz, I maybe didn’t mention, are lawyers mostly — how we all met, actually, back in their law school days and my slumming — and now one is a prosecutor for Tacoma and another is a judge in King County.  You want to tangle with folks over property easement rights, you couldn’t pick worse victims.  Needless to say, we now drive through the Guard Station, where they know us well, and they say hello, have a nice stay.  Stay means stay off the putting greens with our vehicles.  After the first trip in on their fine blacktopped roads, at least until the last mile or two, we use the trails to the dam or else bushwhack over to the rotten bridge across the raging Cle Elum to get to the sacred hunting grounds of Ronald and Roslyn and sometimes even as far as the Cle Elum, the town.

The damkeeper — shortly after 9-11 and the fear of Al Qaida blowing the dam — would threaten us with arrest.  The judge would apologize and we would be courteous, but we were crossing that dam like it or not.  After Suncadia’s megabuck tactics, the U.S. government held little to no fear for us Beer Hunters.  I admit we’re an older, if not wiser crew now.  We don’t look for fights any more.  Nope, we’re all business.  And that business is hunting the wild and wily ales.  Oh, some day we’ll probably ‘catch and release’ I suppose, but that day is a long ways off.

So  bear without old Skeeter a day or two while we’re traipsing the Cascades, stalking prey from the Brick to Old #  5, the Past Time to the Brewery, and maybe even a couple new waterholes along the trail.  Give you a break from all this moonshine wet powder wisdom.  You might want to do a little hunting yourself in the meantime….