The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The desert is a menacing place, I don’t care if you’re a native or a moss-backed tourist on safari to the dive taverns of Arizona with names like Jackass or Burro or Sidewinder. The boyz and me were hunting beer down in the flashflood washes and arroyos from Phoenix to Prescott. We’re old hands at this beerhunting, having gone every year for 30 years. We know the drill. Walk to the bars, do not drive. Drink, if not responsibly, at least semi-moderately. Eat. Even if it’s greasy bar food, put something in your belly to soak up alcohol. Try to maintain a modicum of control. Do not disturb the snakes or the natives, especially the venomous ones. The point is to hunt with passion, but also to bring ourselves back alive.

We made reservations in Bisbee a short walk from the historic Silver Dollar Hotel and other weathered historic taverns, but … our fellow slayer in Phoenix had asked his son and his son-in-law, confirmed golfers, along on the Hunt. These boys, nice guys in their 40’s with wives and two children each, decided to cancel our reservations and make them adjacent to the golf course in Prescott they intended to tame. None of the grizzled and seasoned Hunters had a say, but being get-along go-along yahoos, we acquiesced with subdued mutterings. In hindsight, we did not offer the sage counsel professional Hunters should have offered these tenderfeet.

The first warning sign was when they pulled their vehicles into a bar back in the hinterlands that had yet to open but did so in 5 minutes. While we sipped coffee, they threw down shots. Obviously the kids thought they were young and invulnerable. Beer? Not for them. They opted for the hard stuff. It took three or four roadhouses to wind our way up the canyon to our basecamp. By then they were feeling no pain and the day was young. Day two, they had tee times while we hiked the cacti lined trails nearby. They were throwing down shots for breakfast. Midafternoon we rendezvoused at the Palace Hotel, one of the ten best historic bars in America, downtown Prescott. Jerry was dragged in like a dead buck between the other two, blacked out from one and a half bottles of tequila. They laid him into a chair where he slumped from his wounds, unconscious but alive. We ordered another round of beers.

Hunting is not all that difficult if done correctly. Done with disrespect for the Rules, it is a nasty business and leads to all manner of vicious and unforeseen mayhem. By the end of the second night we had turned what should have been an exotic beer hunt into a morass of criminality, fear and abject self-loathing. The police finally intervened, pulling a carload of cocky amateurs onto the shoulder, hauling the intoxicated driver to jail and impounding the car. At three in the morning we went to retrieve our contrite fellow Hunter at the hoosegow. At eight we received a call that the Mex’s wife was in a Seattle hospital, under induced coma, intubated and possibly dying of what appeared to be opioid overdose. By noon we were driving him to the Phoenix airport. A definite chill had settled over the Hunters.

We’re back now and so far no lives have been lost. Next year, count on it, we’ll hunt in the Cascades once again, trespassing on the dam access patrolled by Homeland Security since Nine Eleven who threaten us or crossing the dangerously rotten old bridge high above the Cle Elum River to get back to our cabin. We won’t be inviting the kids. They can drink at home.

When Sheila’s husband got laid off a month ago from the outfit that supplies thingamajigs for Boeing, she hired on at the IGA up north as checkout clerk. “I haven’t rung up groceries,” she said, “since I was 17 and still in high school. Back then we didn’t have scanners, we had to ring every item up on the register. What a difference!”

The other difference, she says, is how much less friendly the shoppers are in our “Friendly Hometown Store”, not like the A&P back in her small Ohio town in 1966. “I guess everybody knew everybody. These days half the customers don’t say hello, they’re busy talking on their phones. I might as well be a robot.”

“You will be soon,” I offer over a cup of coffee while Earl watches TV in the livingroom, probably glad of an early retirement and a wife willing to go back to work. “Hon!” she yells, “can you turn that down a little?” From where I sit at the kitchen nook counter, Earl fiddles with the remote, but instead of turning his game show volume down, he changes channels. Sheila shakes her head and rolls her eyes. Earl takes a hit off his Budweiser and settles into a talk show.

It’s 9:30 in the morning. In a few minutes she’ll leave for her 10 o’clock shift, work until 6, then drive home to cook dinner for Mr. Wonderful. “I don’t mind going back to work,” she tells me. “Good to get out of the house.”

I bet. We used to drive school buses together, Sheila and me, back in the good old days when we were both single and poor and new to the South End. Sheila married Earl and that finished our friendship until recently when I met her, where else, in the checkout line. We have an occasional coffee, but pretty obviously this won’t work for long, not judging by the volume blaring from the livingroom, a loud hint.

“Good to see you, Skeeter,” she says at the door. The TV noise follows us outside. “Thanks for the coffee,” I say and she says, “No problem,” when we both know there is.

Well, buckaroos, it’s that time of year when old Skeeter provisions up and heads for the hunting fields on our annual Beer Hunt. Usually we head up into the Cascades, but after 30 years or so of these hunts, the herds are thinning and so, being the good conservationists we are, we decided to mosey down to Arizona, see what wildlife is to be had in their border wall state. No, the beers aren’t likely to be as savory, more likely warm as spit too. But in this era of anti-EPA, anti-Green, someone has to step it up a notch or three.

So as always in these difficult times, break away from the lying press awhile, forget about the N. Koreans and the Trumpster, stop worrying about WW3 and economic Armageddon, just sit back and scroll to the bottom of these 2000 plus blog reports for the Good Old Daze of those times when the world seemed so full of promise and we thought we had the filthy oligarchs where we wanted them. No, not jail, but at least at arm’s length and worried about prison time. I know you won’t … but hey, it’s your ulcer, not mine. I got beers to hunt. Vaya con Dios!

I just saw where 40% of Trump voters this last election got all their news from Fox News. This is the station that just paid Bill O’Reilly 25 million dollars to stay on permanent vacation and leave the Fox women alone. Who knew, other than Trump, being a serial predator could pay so well? Okay, maybe Roger Ailes.

Hard to imagine most network news surviving this kind of top down malfeasance. But Fox, well, fair and balanced doesn’t necessarily include integrity. Or even truthfulness. Probably a lot of folks left feeling that Bill was treated badly. Misunderstood. A victim of political correctness and those liberal proponents who think women shouldn’t be treated to sexual harassment. Like the president said on camera, grab em by the crotch and they’ll do your bidding. And Fox, being, you know, fair and balanced, while all the other lying news media covered Bill’s untimely exit, they pretty much left it untouched, barely a mention. See? That balances the other networks who did cover it.

The Marines are posting photos of their favorite female nude soldiers. Great for morale. The few, the sexist, the Marines. The folks who think racism ended a few decades back probably couldn’t see sexism if it grabbed them by the cojones. Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump sure aren’t troubled by it. You might not either if they paid you 25 million or made you King of America. But it does make for a contentious work environment, whether it’s the Fox newsroom or the Foxholes in Afghanistan or Iraq. I realize these habits won’t change overnight, that sexism is pretty ingrained in a lot of us boyz, but c’mon, is it political correctness run amok to say we ought to treat women with respect? Personally, I’m glad the Marines are training them to use an assault rifle. A few of those at Fox News in the hands of Bill O’Reilly’s victims, we might’ve saved 25 million dollars.

Greg Gianforte, candidate for House of Representatives from Montana: “Clearly they’ve never shot a prairie dog,” he said. “They don’t know how much fun it is.”

Well, Donald Trump Jr. hasn’t shot prairie dogs either. Not many burrowing in at Trump Tower evidently, but maybe he’s trapped New York rats or poisoned mice down in the Tower basement. I suspect we’d all enjoy a good p-dog massacre if we had the opportunity. And what better way to say Republican than putting on a National Rifle Association hat and taking up a shooting iron even if you’ve never done either in your lifetime? Think Dick Cheney with a shotgun blasting away at ducks and his hunting partner.

These are difficult times for GOP candidates. Apparently some folks who voted for Don Trump Jr.’s dad are realizing they were misled. The others probably think Don Jr. IS the man they voted for. The press corps will no doubt troupe out to the buttes, watch from afar as the safari winds its way to the DMZ separating farmers from prairie dog village and chronicle the shootout for the evening news on Fox. PRESIDENT’S SON DECLARES NO WALL NECESSARY FOR PRAIRIE DOG INFILTRATION. KILLS HUNDREDS OF THE ILLEGAL RODENTS.

Who knew how much fun it would be. Just some good old fashioned killing for the sake of killing. Buffalo hunting probably was way fun too. Leave the carcasses in a pile and move on to the next herd. The natives who needed those for food, well, that was part of the plan. They fought back so starving them was a tad easier, if not quite as much fun as killing them.

I suppose for the folks who dream of the day when the EPA is dead as a doornail, indiscriminate killing of a species won’t seem to be connected to the web of life. If it garners a few more votes for Greg, all the better. Later he can dose the village with agent orange or DDT. Save on bullets, but way less fun.