The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.

Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.

Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.

Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.

“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.

If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chased Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

I saved a life today. I usually like to think these blogs save lives every day, but let’s be honest here and assume I’m not running for president. Truth is, well, the truth is…. At least I’m not taking lives with these blogs. I don’t think.

But today I was down by the toolshed turning off the water to the garden. I’d turned and headed back to the glass factory when a funny noise caught my ear, a strange sound but not the usual menagerie of cacophony in the orchard, something that made me stop and listen harder. Sure enough it was odd and it seemed to be coming from near the spigot. Then I heard splashing and that same squeaking sound, weirdly troubling.

I got to the spigot and then I noticed the large tub we use to catch water off the toolshed roof was where the disturbance was emanating and when I looked inside, there was a small beaver swimming circles in there, treading water, half drowned. We don’t have a lot of beavers that do the dog paddle so I recalculated and realized it was our little red squirrel, the guy who sits in the plum tree and chatters at us while we putter around. He seems to be a talkative little rodent, maybe a little too chatty, but we talk back and he listens. Not that we’re learning each other’s lingo, but sometimes it’s important to attempt communication. Like I say, I’m not running for president.

The language he was using in the tub wasn’t hard to understand. He was down to the last breath, exhausted and cold and probably thinking it would be okay to just let go, sink into the water and drown. There was no way he could scrabble up the plastic sides of the tub and who knows how long he’d been swimming for his life in there, maybe a helluva lot longer than I would’ve and I have to say, I was impressed at his will to live.

I pulled him out and laid him in the sun where he looked for all the world like a drowned rat, fur matted to his convulsing body, tail flattened, eyes rolled back barely noticing me. I didn’t really know if he’d spent himself or taken water into his lungs or what … and I don’t know squirrel CPR. But I stayed with him and moved him once in awhile to a warmer spot and after half an hour of shivering and hopefully resting, he wobbled up, ran between my legs and hightailed it for the woods.

I drained all our buckets and tubs. I hope both of us learned a couple lessons here. And I hope next time he’s parked on his favorite limb of the plum tree, he doesn’t cuss me out for leaving that tub there. But I wouldn’t blame him.

In the digital world where no kindness goes uncriticized and no act goes unjudged, it’s maybe not surprising to you that the mom of that kid who managed to slip into the gorilla’s cage last week is under more crossfire than a Marine in Afghanistan. The zoo shot the gorilla in a scene right out of King Kong and the Twitter Universe unleased its full and unadulterated outrage. At the mom.

Now I love gorillas as much as the next South Ender. Supposedly they’re endangered elsewhere, but not so much here. We got plenty down this end of the island, mostly guys who beat their wives and spend far too much time watching ESPN on the cable TV they really can’t afford. But then, they don’t snap up wayward kids who wander into their unmowed junk strewn yards. If they did, we’d bring in the SWAT boyz and the TV crews and the internet trolls looking for fresh targets to vent their pent-up rage on. Pity the moms. Pity the gorilla. Pity the poor schnook at the zoo who had to make the decision to shoot Kong.

But pity is a hard commodity to locate these days, especially if you’ve been following presidential election politics this hunting season where pity is deemed fit only for losers. We’re growing sharper claws and longer teeth. We’re molting our old skin and growing a tougher hide. Pity? Forgiveness? I don’t think those words live in the new vocabulary of grunts and shrieks. When the weak stumble, they become prey.

I guess it’s the anonymity of the internet. Used to be you could flip off a fellow motorist from the safety of your one ton automobile or your two ton Hummer fighting machine, pretty much drive off feeling smug and righteous, but now, behind the screen of a laptop, you can lob missiles with no fear of retribution. Nice to think the worst in us comes rising up, the toxins we held in check out of politeness or fear or peer group pressure, what we once thought of as civilized societal norms. You know, before the internet jungle hid us in its strangler vines.

I’m going to miss that gorilla I never even met. I like to think he was protecting the little toddler, maybe even planned in a simian sort of way to raise him up in gorilla values. I’m real glad he didn’t hurt that kid who I hope will grow up to be kind to animals, even the human ones. He’d be almost a hero if he did, just not in the Twitterverse.