The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was a kid in Georgia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wasn’t real sure how far we were from Havana, but some of the neighbors were real sure the commies were going to nuke the bejabbers out of our locale so they put concrete block fallout shelters in their basements. Malcom, the father of my friend Anita, kept his hunting rifle by the door and told me, when he gave me the tour of this subterranean future home, how he would have to shoot me and my family when we came begging to get in when the bombs began to fall.

At school we did the nuclear drill, the one where we got under our desk. Don’t look at the blast, we were instructed, you’ll be blinded. I’m not sure if my desk was sufficient to stop radiation, but hey, any port in a storm. Now that I’m an old geezer and managed to live through decades without having ICBM’s landing in the neighborhood, it’s a little like deja vu to have all this talk of Korean missiles landing in our backyard. I’m expecting half the neighbors to start digging their fallout shelters any day. The news, gotta love those folks, like to keep the drumbeat going.

Me, I’m too old to excavate for our shelter. The neighbors probably think they should keep a hunting rifle next to their door to keep me and the mizzus out when the nukes rain down, but I plan to reassure them. We have an old school desk next to our front door, usually for sitting on when we put our shoes on to go outside. I figure if it was good enough in 1962, it’s good enough now. We just have to remember to keep our eyes shut when the mushroom cloud shows up down the road….

A lot of you readers out there maybe didn’t know you were part of a national conspiracy of radicals bent on violence and the destruction of the American Way, did you? I sure didn’t. Here I was, minding my own bizness, trying not to get wound up by every tweet my Commander-in-Chief sends out, a little troubled by that riot in Virginia maybe over taking down that statue of Gen. Bobby E. Lee, but c’mon, what with the Korea nuke scare and the end of civilization as we know it, what’s a small re-enactment of the Civil War?

Some Nazi nutcase runs down a few folks, well, who’s going to defend him, right? The authorities caught him quick enough, the courts will handle the rest. Call it domestic terrorism, call it murder one, call it a sad day in the USA, but nobody in their right mind would cut this guy slack. He is, after all, a Nazi and nobody likes Nazis except maybe other Nazis.

But now I’m learning that those liberals, meaning you and me, don’t kid yerself, are just as bad. Extreme violence, inciting mayhem, protesting methinks a bit too much. Alt-Left. Dangerous, radical, menacing and un-American. Folks who want those statues of the brave white men who fought so valiantly to keep slavery alive in their cotton picking states taken down along with the Confederate flag flying over state capitols and county courthouses. Just as bad as the Aryan Nation crowd. Just as dangerous as the white supremacists. You didn’t know that? Well, ignorance is no excuse. Not these days….

Now, I’m like you probably, sort of confused. But before we run out and lobby for a Hug-A-Fascist Day, let’s just try to calm down, get our priorities straight and, if possible, join the Mainstream. Try some daytime TV or binge on Netflix. If you think you’re part of the solution, wake up, you’re really part of the problem. Sorry to hafta tell ya.

For months now the lamestream news, desperate for something to report other than the President’s latest tweetstorms, has been hyping the lunar eclipse. “Life changing,” some of the folks interviewed claimed, one guy having gone to 8 or 9 around the globe. I guess his life needs changing the way my truck’s oil needs changing. Regularly and often.

Down in Oregon where the total eclipse will be visible along a track stretching from this coast to the Atlantic ocean, traffic is already starting to back up out in the rural areas where folks have reserved every motel, airbnb and cabin available. Needless to say, the laws of supply and demand are in full force. Hotel rooms run into the thousands of dollars, camping spaces go for hundreds. Good luck finding a porta potty, the rumor is there are none to be found at this late date if you were contemplating renting your backyard to a few dozen sungazers. Gas prices are shooting up and now the stations report they’re completely out of fuel. Life changing? I’m starting to see the truth in that observation.

Up here we’ll get 90% of the eclipse. I was going to offer up our airbnb rental at 90% of the going rate down in Nowhere, Oregon, but I was a little late getting a jump on the capitalist action. You snooze, you lose. I could feel sorry for myself, you know, knowing my life will not change with this astronomical event of the decade, but I plan to be out in the eelgrass Monday morning chasing Dungeness crab around. I’m hoping when the daylight suddenly goes very dim on these primitive creatures, they’ll freak and come out of their hidey holes. Me, a modern boy fully versed in the laws of nature and the orbits of the moon, will be waiting for them. I know in these post-modern Trumpian times, knowledge can be a useless weapon sometimes, but the Day of the Eclipse, I’m figuring the Light’s going to come back. Call me an optimist.

I was a kid in Georgia, first grade until seventh. We moved there from the North Carolina Appalachians and we’d moved to North Carolina from the pine forests of central Mississippi. Y’all can still hear some of my Southern drawl even 55 years since I moved back into the North. But when I moved to Georgia, what they heard was Yankee. And what I heard from them was nearly an incomprehensible foreign language.

I took a mandatory year of Georgia History in 6th grade. Mrs. Crabtree taught it and Mrs. Crabtree thought 90% of Georgia History was the Civil War. We didn’t study much U.S. History, probably to my school it was more like World History. Mrs. Crabtree was pretty adamant that the wrong side won the War Between the States, the Yankee Invaders. Me, I was definitely on the Wrong Side, story of my sorry life.
You folks who haven’t lived awhile south of the Mason-Dison Line, you maybe think the North won that war. What you don’t understand is that the Confederacy never really surrendered. Oh sure, Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant at Appomatox in 1865, but most of the South didn’t sign those documents. They still haven’t. You maybe think slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, but like I said, you haven’t lived down there. The KKK still runs rural towns, blacks weren’t slaves, they’re sharecroppers, voting rights are systematically undermined by Jim Crow and now voter suppression laws, the South still flies the Confederate flag, the South still reveres Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the rebel generals who fought to save their ‘culture’.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re tackling that thorny issue of whether we should be celebrating the folks who fought to preserve slavery. One hundred and fifty years later we’re fighting the same war Lincoln did. Most of this country thinks the statues should stay put. Sort of like Grant letting the rebels take their horse and their guns and their white privilege home — you know, in the spirit of Yankee generosity.

Me, as a former Yankee in Jefferson Davis’ Court, I say it’s time to declare Victory once and for all. Take the statues down, remove the Confederate flag and give blacks equal rights. If this seems harsh, if this seems like we’re disrespecting Cracker Culture, get over it. We let this go for a century and a half. And Mrs. Crabtree, if you’re still alive, I got some news for you. The right side won.

The mizzus came in today from collecting the daily papers down the hill on the road and said it was eerie. Eerie? I asked. Eerie, she said. No birds chirping, no birds making any noise at all. This afternoon I was up island with a friend watching an owl land in her backyard cedar tree. No crows came flying in to hound it half to death. No robins slammed their bodies up against it. The woods was, well, eerie for lack of cacophony.

My friend mentioned what Karen had said, the birds weren’t chattering away, they weren’t twittering or tweeting, they were silent. It was as if the internet had suddenly gone Dark. The aviary e-mails weren’t rolling in, the news feeds had gone dead, the social network had shut down. It was, okay, eerie.

We’re in a weird meteorological vortex, the high pressure cell off the coast is dragging hot weather up from far down south with temperatures hitting three figures by tomorrow or the next, about 15 degrees above normal, plus, the fires up in British Columbia are raging and now we’re pulling the smoke down here. We can’t see across to the Olympics anymore and Whidbey Island, a mere three miles away, is barely visible. The smell of woodsmoke is everywhere. I wonder if the birds and everything else in the woods is waiting to see if the conflagration is coming.

I tended bees for a short time. If you went into the hives, you smoked the entryway. This sent the honeybees into a fire drill of grabbing up the babies, scooping up honey, guarding the queen and in general, getting ready for the holocaust. Smoke, I imagine, sends a vestigial message to all of us critters out here in the wilderness. Fire is coming. Get ready. Shut up and pay attention.

Course, I don’t really know. Faux science on my part. I could set up some experiments, burn the back woods and see what the creatures behind me do. Run a few double blind studies, crank out the analysis, submit the data, posit a theory. Get some grants, apply to the U.W. science department for some research assistants, see if I could get some sponsors in the corporate world.

But you know I’m not gonna do any of that. I’m going to watch and listen awhile. I’m going to see if the birds stay silent so long as the smoke darkens the sky. I may keep my mouth shut myself. Like Karen sez, it’s eerie.