The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t get enough of these calls to re-open the Clinton e-mail investigations. If Lying Hilary hadn’t used a private server back when she was Secretary of State and letting the Libyan Ambassador be killed, poor Mr. Trump wouldn’t be under a cloud of suspicion right now by those despicable and petty Democrats. If she’d been Locked Up, Locked Up, we could move on to issues that need to be addressed in America the Great 2019. But no, instead we have the controversy of whether or not our Great Leader was guilty of obstruction of justice when, as we all know, he can’t be guilty of a crime to hide his guilt if there was no guilt to begin with. Elementary, Watson. Catch 22.

And how about Whitewater while we’re at it? The woman killed Vince Foster, everyone knows it, but we let her get away with it. Justice for all? Pretty obviously, we need to go back and dig a little deeper. Bodies are decomposing from Arkansas to D.C. You know it, I know it, the Republicans know it, everybody but those obsessed Democratic Donkeys know it. It’s a disgrace is what it is! A national embarrassment!

Thank God for Lindsay Graham is all I can say, a veritable Profile in Courage, both faces. The Senator is properly outraged. While his fellow senators called for Barr to resign, Graham called for investigations into those investigators of the investigations of Clinton, triple jeopardy be damned. Something fishy in Denmark, hethinks. Methinks I smell rot too.

These are partisan times, no doubt, but in the Heartland where hardworking Americans yearn to raise their families, keep their manufacturing jobs, heat with coal and go to church to worship their Christian God, they don’t want to hear about their President being badgered and baited, they want to know why their government isn’t getting to the bottom of this Hilary scandal. If it takes another investigation, well, sir, let’s have another investigation. And if that one doesn’t turn up some bones and bits of rotting flesh, by god, let’s get ourselves another shovel and let Mr. Trump do his job. We got ours.

The Presidential Election of 2020 should be a helluva mudwrestling venue if the latest tweets give us any indication. Should the Boston Marathon Bomber get to vote? Will those pesky Democrats take away your guns? Will the rich be taxed more than they can afford to pay? Is America headed toward socialism or fascism? Will we forgive student loans? Should college be free? Medicare for All? Drill baby drill?? Attack Iran? Build a border wall? Uncle Joe Biden entered the fray yesterday by declaring this was a race for the soul of the United States. I sure hope not but he may be right.

Like a lot of my fellow Americans I’ve grown more cynical than I’ve been since Viet Nam and Tricky Dick. Compassionate conservatism, if there ever was such a creature, died in the swamps of D.C. the last few years. The rich, like the saying sez, get richer … and the poor, well, someone’s got to pay for those CEO’s and hedge fund managers.

The great question of the next few months will be to impeach or not to impeach. Trump has declared he will let no staff be interviewed further, something about executive privilege, which in his definition covers everything and everybody. The Democrats have become the Scaredycats, afraid following up on Mueller’s injunction to investigate further might backfire, but it seems like the only way to require testimony from the Trump minions. The Republicans, as always, are content to watch from the sidelines while the Russians, needless to say, have been completely exonerated. Thanks, everyone, for a job well done.

Me, I’d impeach the GOP. Why not? We’ve thrown out the rules, the Constitution, common sense, science and any notion of right and wrong. We have a corrupt megalomaniac in the White House who isn’t afraid of confrontation, who isn’t afraid to break things that get in his way, who isn’t bothered by the nuisance of laws. And he’s backed up by a Party that would apparently turn a blind eye to most anything short of murder (maybe) if it meant they could fight on for oil and gas, deregulation, gun rights, a border Wall and abortion restrictions. At today’s hearings with the Attorney General being questioned about bias in the Mueller investigation, they used their time to demand further investigations into Hillary’s e-mails.

So yeah, mudwrestling it will be. Down in the pit and dirty as we’ve ever seen. Uncle Joe is probably spot on. This will be a fight for the soul of a nation that has lost its way. Maybe some of these candidates will take the High Road, but like Joe sez, the goal is to get rid of the cancer at the center of our country. I’m dreading the next year and a half, but the time has definitely come to take the gloves off. I’ll vote for whoever can rid us of this creep.

When I first moved to the South End, there were no eagles in the area. If I had company who asked about seeing a few of the national birds, I drove them 50 miles up north to Deception Pass where usually we could spot one or two working the channel with its whirlpools bubbling up baitfish. The first eagles to show up around me built a nest in the Tyee Store wrecking yard out back so they could hunt in the pond the store stocked with bass and trout. So much for the notion that eagles are xenophobic. They’re looking for easy food and if they have to nest in a Walmart parking lot, so be it.

A friend mentioned to me the other day that she had seen 19 eagles circling overhead above the beach. That’s more air traffic than an Amazon drone testing site. The eagles have definitely rebounded since lead poisoning nearly killed them off back in the 60’s. So when I was exploring a bluff a few miles south of here the other day, standing maybe 300 feet above the waterfront, I spied a lone fir tree below me and there, about 50 feet down was a new nest with an eagle sitting on her eggs in plain unobstructed view. Maybe you think big deal, so what? But ask yourself if you’ve ever seen the inside of a ten foot diameter eagle nest. We look UP at eagles’ nests and maybe if we’re lucky, across at one like the one that’s over at the state park the last few years.

But to have a view from above? C’mon, it is a big deal. Especially if you have a camera and are willing to come back every day to watch for when the eggs hatch and the parents bring in salmon or grey whales to feed the little tykes. Maybe watch them fledge, stepping off over the abyss and catching that first draft above Puget Sound. Needless to say, I’m going to keep the location to myself. I don’t need National Geographic or the Flathead Vintage Auto Club beating a rush hour path to the nest.

I probably won’t give the pair cute names and I won’t post photos of the hatchlings on Facebook. You three or four readers of this un-viral blog will be part of an elite coterie of eagle voyeurs. PBS, eat yer heart out….

The mizzus and me went out to investigate rumors that an old log cabin on the island was about to go up for sale, presumably one of the oldest ones still standing. The current owner and his siblings were interested to know if the Historical Society might be interested in buying it, maybe save them the hassle of a real estate deal, agents, subdivisions, onerous contracts and even more onerous commissions to be doled out. Since the place was a bit out of the bounds of the genteel gated communities, I went along as shotgun. You never know what sort of varmint are laying in wait back in the nettle swamps.

Turns out half the family was up there in the hollows, drinking whisky and sitting around a campfire, tossing flies on a fishing pole to the trout they’d stocked in a fair sized pond. Looked all the world like a scene from Deliverance without the kid with the banjo sitting on the porch. And sure enough, the old log cabin was standing after a century or more, parked on log rounds instead of footings, weathered as boom pilings and festooned with antlers and antiques hung from every nook and cranny in that dark little home. Judging by the antlers, they must’ve cleared out the deer population in that neck of the woods no time flat. The boyz liked their venison and their trout. And they liked to bullshit, which is why we came.

They regaled us with ragged memories, sometimes sharp, sometimes a little rounded from too many retellings. Jim, the Homer of the group, grew up in that cabin. Plenty of siblings, all crammed into about 4 or 500 square feet, one bedroom, different times for sure. Heated the place with a big camp cookstove, three times larger than the one there now. He told us about the military plane that crashed in the woods behind them, two airmen dead, debris scattered for the scroungers after the government carted most all of it off. Talked about their jobs at the Weyerhauser Mill, poker games in the cabin, keggers, the usual good ol boy tales.

We asked why they were selling. Well, they replied, here’s the deal: we decide to keep the place in the family, all the kids, the new generation, they don’t give a damn about this place, they don’t care about the history, they’d just end up fighting about the upkeep, who owes what, who did what, then finally sell the homestead and divvy it up, use it to go traveling instead of working or whatever the kids these days do. Naw, we’re gonna sell it ourselves, take the money, use it how we want.

I get it. Take a couple dozen kids, grandkids, wives and husbands, see how they like sharing the chores, the repairs, the utility bills, the taxes, the lawnmowing tree trimming brush cutting endless joint responsibilities and add them up until you get a splintered family tree. Interestingly enough the boyz figured the kids and grandkids would have little to no interest in the family homestead, just sell it and use it instead of working or’ whatever the stuff they do is called’, probably doing them a favor by not offering it up as a family inheritance.

And so another legacy bites the dust. Or sinks into the swamp. Or just gets lost to the entropy of rot and rust and ruin. A lot of history is like that here on the South End, nothing we don’t see all the time. Too many for the Historical Society to buy and maintain, for sure. But we took a few pictures, heard a little of the family sagas, wished em luck selling the place and hope the new owners will value the log cabin enough to keep it standing, not just bulldoze it under. Chances are they’ll bulldoze it under. In the future, no doubt in my mind at all the historians will mark this the Era of the Gated Communities.