The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You know it’s a dangerous world when driftwood becomes a deadly predator, but I suppose it’s best to stay on guard at all times. You just never know what lurks around the corner! Beach logs lurk around my corner this morning. Seemingly benign but … waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting.

Kalaloch. No doubt a Hoh tribal word for Killer Dead Trees. Fortunately it’s pouring down rain this morning, no chance we’re venturing down to the beach where the logs are piled high. We watched a sea otter hump out of the tide and directly into the waiting maw of those logs, last we’ll see of it, I bet. Let his demise be a cautionary tale for us visiting humans. No wonder the sea otters nearly went extinct, they’re obviously slow learners.

Kalaloch beaches are strewn with dead razor clams, crabs, sand dollars — all no doubt victims of beach log attacks if my scientific acumen is accurate. And I think you know by now it is. Of course there are other warnings on the National Park kiosks. Sneaker waves. Rip tides. The dangers are plenty. Falls off the bluffs. Slugs the size of pythons. Antibiotic resistant mildew. Maybe we made a mistake coming here. It was supposed to be a mellow vacation, not a jungle safari.

If we’re smart, we’ll play it safe and stay put, forget venturing down onto the sandpits. Although coming in, I did notice the signs warning about tsunamis. Evacuation Route, they said. Maybe we should just start now….

I’m about as anachronistic as any old geezer I know. I hate newfangled gizmos so much that can track my every move, my every purchase, my every tweet, my every everything, it almost makes me a certified Luddite. I don’t want a cellphone attached 24/7 to my person, I don’t want a refrigerator I can adjust the temperature with the cellphone I don’t own, I object to GPS devices in my truck, my car, the mizzus’ laptop or the baby carriage. Don’t want surveillance cameras monitoring the shack. I don’t want to be on Facebook or Instagram or any other social media platform to keep myself informed about conformity. I don’t watch Fox News or MSNBC for my ‘news’, I just buy a couple of newspapers. I don’t plan to be an integral cog of the Borg Hive. Just sayin.

But … I do think the folks who believe coal is coming back, that fracking is perfectly safe, that oil will power our future, well, these folks are the real anachronists. These folks who lobby for pipelines and more refineries, who pine for regulations that allow car companies to lower MPG’s, who think global warming is liberal bullshit, who love the Drill Baby Drill rant and think we should keep burning fossil fuel until the last oil drum is hauled up out of the earth, these folks make me look like a visitor from the future.

Somebody needs to give them the news: the planet is warming up, buddy, and that ain’t fake news. I get it, you don’t want to drive an electric car. You don’t want to use the sun to power your entertainment center. You don’t like the look of wind farms and you don’t care for tidal generators. You like gas, check. You like a car that pollutes, check. You think ‘clean coal’ is ready for a breakthrough, double check. You think natural gas power plants are the future, bingo. You believe what you hear from the GOP, that climate change is a hoax and all those scientists are wrong, happy days for you!

Wake up, pal, the future is calling you on your cellphone. Your kids are starting to sweat, just in case you didn’t notice. They think maybe something needs to be done and done pretty quick. Check your engine light, pardner, the one blinking red on the dashboard. It’s time for more than an oil change. It’s time for a complete overhaul. Wrap your pointy little head around it, the revolution is coming.

Well, the bad news arrived this week and no, it wasn’t about our favorite President or Global Warming. It wasn’t even about the buildup of arms near Iran or the launching of intermediate missiles in North Korea. Venezuela was even pushed off the front page. Not that these aren’t all definite or even existential threats, but a United Nations science report was released warning us that if we do not wise up as many as a million species on this planet will become extinct in the next hundred years.

I know, faux science. So what if 20% of the earth’s species bit the bullet over the last century, you’re thinking. We got plenty more where those came from and probably even some brand new ones incubating in the jungles even now. Ebola, AIDS, swine flu viruses, hey, they’re rolling in to replace the ones dying out, right? Hopefully we’ll lose a few pests, poison ivy, mosquitoes, antibiotic resistant fungii, the cold virus, Herpes and the Trumps, all those questionable species that make our lives a living hell. Nettles too!

Course that isn’t exactly how it works, is it? We got this whole interdependency thing going, this Web of Life, that means when one species dies, plenty of others suffer, kind of like losing the Democrats and now look what we got. But I digress. As usual. My apologies. Take mosquitoes instead. There’s always folks who want to introduce sterile male Anopheles into the environment to put a stop to Zika or the black plague, but how many birds live on eating mosquitoes? What happens to them? And if those particular birds die, what dominoes are next?

You get rid of Trump, maybe you end up with Bannon or some other alt-right dickhead. Okay okay, I’m off subject here again. Sorry. My point is this. I was up on my roof the last two days, scraping sixteen species of mosses, lichens, small
bonsai trees in the gutter, an entire universe of mushrooms, alien byrophytes, plus all their attendant bacteria and god only knows what else munching merrily in the flora that makes my roof an interdependent world of decomposing fir needles, leaves and windblown seeds. I argue with the mizzus every year that we need to let this live in peace, that we must learn to coexist, that science is now on my side on this.

But I’m always outvoted one against one. So if a few hundred species died the last couple of days, don’t point an accusing finger at me. And anyway, there are 999,900 left. Although … I may have unintentionally set off a dire chain reaction. With a little luck maybe the Trumps will be the next victim in a domino of extinctions. Wishful thinking, I know, but a man can dream, can’t he?

The Southendomish was a proud tribe, versed in the ways of the salmon and the whale before their numbers diminished to squat. Members of the tribe were scattered to the four points of Puget Sound, denied tribal rights given the others by treaty and left to scrounge what few clams and mussels and crabs they could. When the whales became scarce and the hunting grounds crammed with vacation homes, the Southendomish were nothing but a fading echo back in the nettle ravines, a myth now to the locals where once their canoes ruled the waters.

History, even for the white invaders, is continually lost to rot and rust and ruin, but for the Southendomish, little remains of their culture, not the language or the customs or their fishing skills. Oh, a few clam middens here and there. An old carving in a tree on the bluff at the Head where dozens were killed by a landslide below. An occasional stone weight for sinking their woven nettle fishing nets. But there are no photos, no oral histories, no living memory of the tribe.

So when the good city of Everett found a dead whale beached on their waterfront, the folks down there, unaware and uncaring of the noble history of the Southendomish, decided to tow the bloating beast to the former hunting grounds of the island here, a fresh indignity to the legacy of the natives, to decompose into a putrid and incredibly obnoxious smelling pile of rotting blubber not even a starving crow would approach. It arrived two days ago in an isolated cove near the Head, forty feet long, who knows how many tons. The South End evidently has been designated an unofficial cetacean burial ground, a compost pit for the NIMBY’s across the water far from the olfactory hell that now emanates from down at the beach. Thank you very much. What’s the next gift, smallpox?

If we could gather enough concerned neighbors, we would happily return the favor. Haul down our own unwanted compost waste, our sani-can pumpings, our poopscoop collections, our seafood leftovers, our dirty Pamper diapers and dump them on the waterfront of the privileged rich, a fair trade. But in the end, don’t think the Southendomish will be avenged. They won’t, not by a long shot.