The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I meet folks all the time who have jobs, careers, full employment, financial security, the whole economic enchilada …. but who don’t really like what they do. My parents called that ‘Reality’. Lucky for one of their rebellious kids, at least. I had a buddy’s kid tell me recently – at age 12 – he wanted to be an osteopathic surgeon. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? At age 12 I wanted to be a cowboy.

I mean, where’s the romance here? The adolescent will toward some kind of schoolkid passion? Some ideal of a calling untethered to adult notions of a proper career. Where’s the deep seated urge to … I don’t know, just do something fun, something for the helluvit? Mom, Dad, I got an announcement to make. I’ve been thinking pretty hard lately about what I want to do with my life. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head, you know, between updating Facebook and worrying about my acne, and I’ve finally come to a decision. Osteopathic Surgeon. Whaddaya think?

My folks might’ve been relieved I no longer aspired to Cattle Punching, but somehow I suspect they would’ve rolled their eyes and said, wait a few years, why don’tcha? You’ll find something you love. Course, trouble was, I did. I went through a number of career explorations. Restauranteur. Metro bus driver. Teacher. Substitute teacher. Dog pound kennel worker. Hospital orderly. Furniture stripper. School bus driver. Stained glass artist.

Oops. Stop the film. Rewind to stained glass artist. This is a career? This is what you went to college for? This is what you want to do? And expect to make a living??? Have you considered, oh, osteopathic surgery maybe. Or dentistry?

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather too. Sometimes life’s detours become an interstate. Occasionally passion will override the sensible and the safe and the sane. I know my friends who have impressionable children don’t want the kids near me for fear of contact contamination, but … I know this: life is way more fun, way more meaningful, way more worth living —- if you pick the life you love, the wife you love, the job you love, than if you choose the route that’s most lucrative.

Although …. I think those routes ARE the most lucrative — even if they don’t make much money. My folks might not agree, but at least they can rest easy knowing I didn’t become a cowboy. At least not a real one.

Only takes an hour to cross over the I-5 partisan boundary and another to leave the blue state altogether where Trump/Vance signs as large as small billboards still declare total allegiance. We’re in Winthrop, ersatz cowboy town where we ate our ice cream cones as fast as possible in 104 degree heat while sitting on saddles, not stools, overlooking the Methow River. A fellow tourist decided we were so cute on those saddles, me a Roy Rogers in a beat up hat and the mizzus a modern Dale Evans, that she asks to take our picture. America, land of anything goes. More or less.

We’re lodged in a cabin next to the city’s new library so I walked in to peruse the joint before heading to 3 Finger Jack’s Saloon to quash the heat and thirst of a day’s tire-melting drive up through the ‘dry side’. Nice enough library. Air conditioned. Friendly staff. The usual.

Drifting by the newspaper racks I looked for a Seattle Times maybe or a Spokane Spokesman Review, but the only one they had was the Okanogan Chronicle so I pulled my pony up to a hitching post and began to read the news of the day out here in the Great Outback. Their Grange getting a new HVAC was big news, top of the fold. Bigger was a million plus grant to build Okie a new library, maybe as nice as this one. By page 3 and 4 they’d covered some old local history and a few fluff pieces about flower arranging and other crafts. 5 and 6 had some generic state news and finally, near the back but before the comics and weather, two articles of national import, one, Sen. Cantwell hoping for more money to fund the Weather Bureau, this being the land of wildfires, and the other something of no significance whatsoever, near as I could tell.

I suspect Fox News rides the range all to itself out here and if PBS or NPR still exist, they won’t for long once the funding dries up. If even the library won’t carry subscriptions for the NY Times or WA Post or even a Seattle paper, it’s probably time to check our guns with the sheriff, stop kidding ourselves and skedaddle on home, we’ve lost the range war.

Pushing my loaded grocery cart up to the checkout aisle this morning, I bumped into an old neighbor from yesteryear hunched over his own small cart, no groceries, just cashing in some card for cash near as I could tell. The cart was for leaning on since he could hardly walk. “I’m all stoved up,” he said when the how ya been’s were over. “Got arthritis. Taking insulin for my diabetes. Hard to get out of bed in the morning.”

Keith’s three years younger than me, meaning, he’s an old man. Long hair, wild beard, pushing 300, 350 pounds, sleep apnea, quit drinking 10 years ago. He’s living in the duck shacks on the Skagit delta. Last time I was there, there was no power, water had to be hauled in, heat was firewood. What you got back along the dike was total privacy, a wilderness oasis only a couple of football fields from the highway and two or three miles from the interstate. He said his woman had left him and so had the subsequent ones. As he so eloquently explained concerning his now preferred bachelorhood, “the price of pussy has gone too damn high.”

Same old Keith, a happy redneck Norwegian, mostly angry at the world but at least able to laugh at his own miseries. His son, he said, died awhile back and when I asked how, he shook his shaggy head. “Heroin. Od’d.” The kid had been riding his motorcycle, evidently had spilled gas on his pants and the muffler ignited it. Burned him terrible and they medi-vacced him to Seattle, skin grafts and finally oxycontin for the pain which he became addicted to, subbing heroin and fentanyl when he was discharged, a too familiar story. His daughter lived not far away, north of Seattle, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years.

For half an hour we stood by the liquor lockup at the end of the checkouts and caught up the past 20 years, mostly a chronicle of friends and acquaintances who’d died. Heart attacks mostly. Most fairly young. Most bad diets, no exercise, too much boozing. Whoever said the good die young didn’t know our buddies.

I finally said I gotta get going and reluctantly he wheeled himself with the cart as crutch out the side door. A yellow lab pup was in the driver’s seat of a late model Toyota pickup, a leather muzzle mask over its mouth. “Chew’s everything. Steering wheel, upholstery, anything.” “Well,” I said, “good to have a companion.” “Yep,” Keith said, “I just wish he wasn’t a chewer.” “You can’t have everything, I guess.” Some of us, though, don’t have much of anything….

This past week I had a small argument with friends regarding the Tax Man, the Internal Revenue Service, no doubt universally hated and recently under orders from the Prez to drastically cut staff. Probably most of my fellow citizens are happy as punch those government workers will be getting their pink slips. But not me. I figure the less auditors looking at the returns of the ultra-wealthy and the corporations, the less revenue is pulled in and eventually us peasants will be asked to make up the slack. Call me cynical and send me to bed without my supper of gruel.

My friends’ point of view was more on the order that the IRS was a vast network of mindless computers searching for the mistakes the accountants they had hired had made, probably necessitating the dreaded audit. They asked, in fact, did I trust my own accountant. They no longer had faith in theirs, not after their last audit, and wondered if we’d ever had one ourselves.

Hell, no, I said, I don’t trust our accountant!! Our accountant is me. He runs the numbers for our personal taxes and for my business, fills out mucho forms, everything from Self-employment tax, Schedules B, C, D and X, the 1040, Schedule 1 and a couple more I don’t remember —– oh right, our rental property, no longer rented.

My friends were gobsmacked we weren’t red-flagged. I kind of am too, tell you the truth. But … here’s the thing. Nearly every year the IRS informs us we’ve made an error on our tax forms. And except for once, maybe twice at most where they billed us a hundred or two hundred bucks, we get a fat check back for a thousand here, 4000 there, 7000 last year and this year 1600. They even pay us interest!

So my take is that these IRS employees are looking after us, they’re definitely on our side. They could have kept their algorithmic mouths shut and we’d never be the wiser. Instead, they restored my faith in Government. Although … I can’t say it did for my friends. Like I tell em: do your own taxes — they’ll take pity on the ignorant, the math-challenged and the poor. You’ll be way better off and … you’ll have a new friend.

Given that there’s a dearth of tourism down at the South End, it was a gobsmack and a half when Bert and Betty Amundsen opened up their retro auto court two miles north of the Head, not very far from the Diner, but not far enough to escape the patrons’ sneering gossip. The Siesta Motel de La Sur opened for business the year of the gas shortages when Jimmy Carter advised wearing sweaters and turning down thermostats. Tyee Store only sold gas to its regular petrol customers and even us locals were told to take a hike. Good luck to the auto court crowd…..

Course, the auto court never got a crowd. The Flathead Vintage Car Boyz howled among themselves over black coffee and chicken fried steaks and eggs. “Shoulda opened a B&B,” Cadillac Fred would say and Studebaker Ralph would fire back “Sunset Motel de Muerto”.

The Diner could’ve used the extra business. Big Larry, the grillman, had been here long enough to remember the days of Cama Beach Resort, Camp Diane, Indian Beach and a lot of others further north, folks pouring in to fish big Chinooks and escape the fumes of city living. “Might be a shot,” he said. “Nothing else, we can put up the shirt-tail relatives who visit…”

Bert and Betty lacked what you call marketing skills in the dark days pre-internet. They put a listing in the Stanwoodopolis Yellowed Pages and tacked signs on trees all the way down the island. SIESTA MOTEL DE LA SUR 15 MILES. TEN. FIVE. ONE MILE TO SIESTA DE LA SUR! If you know where to look you can still see a weathered plywood board being digested by fir bark, maybe a ‘ESTA MO’, or a ‘SI TEL’, or just a mysterioso ‘5’. The four done bedroom cottages fell into disrepair and Bert and Betty fell into heavy drinking and serious debt. They lost the place to the bank and moved away without so much as an adios. Last I heard the old motel was being converted to rent to artists as studios. Most of us already got studios in various stages of disrepair. Still, hope springs eternal down here. Everywhere maybe but the Diner where comedy trumps optimism.