The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I moved to the wilds of Northern Wisconsin as a high school kid, the Big Deal was to letter in sports. They had, for a school out in the swampy boondocks, a reputation for winning teams, particularly swimming and tennis. Maybe there just wasn’t much else to do for us future paper mill workers.

A buddy of mine was a helluva swimmer. Won state championship when he was a junior, set records when he was a senior. We all figured he’d go on to collegiate swimming, probably try for a shot at the Olympics. Every morning before school, every afternoon after, he’d be in the pool. The kid was half porpoise. The future, through his swim goggles, looked bright. After graduation we both went off to seek our destinies, John to win awards, me to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life, a 50/50 proposition. It pays, in case you hadn’t noticed, to decide on directions early then stick to it. Tiger Woods started at 3, kids nowadays probably are doing laps in the womb.

A few years after leaving for our separate colleges, I ran into John. “Still swimming?” I asked, expecting new gills and a long rundown on trophies, awards, scholarships, endorsements from nose plug sponsors.

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I quit it. Gave it up.”

“Seriously?” I asked, wondering if he’d been hurt maybe, but no, he said, just wanted to live a life, not just live in chlorinated pools, training for a shot at the Olympics.

The Olympics are going on this week in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s best athletes competing in beach volleyball, ping pong, target shooting, side pocket pool, mudwrestling, horseshoes, every sport imaginable. I’m betting John and I are two of the few who don’t follow the Games. He’s a professor now in Idaho, I’m still wondering what to do with my life. But … I suspect our lives are more interesting than the ones of those dedicated to some sport only the very few will ultimately succeed at. It’s easy enough to be a Loser in this specialized world without taking on the longest odds possible. John, well, he’d be surprised to hear it, but he’s always been a hero to me, a man who could walk away while he was ahead.

Amid rumors that our commissioners have decided to divest the county of its parks, the South End Environmental Koalition (SEEK) has begun a campaign to Save Our Parks (SOP). Ginny Davis, the newly appointed president, spoke at the South End Chamber of Commerce, arguing that parks mean tourism and tourism means dollars. Ralph Hinshaw asked if she thought our little 5 acre park —Hutchison Park — really brought tourists into our ‘economic sphere’.

“Seriously, Ginny,” he asked, “who the hell comes to that park except teenagers doing drugs and having sex? You think they’re going to fuel the economy down here?” Ginny realized she’d maybe gone down the wrong cul-de-sac, citing economic growth where economics barely existed, but Harry Walton, owner of Tyee Megastore, stood up and declared he sold a lot of ice cream bars to the bicyclists who stopped at the store and he’d seen more than a few eating popsicles at the picnic tables down at the park an eight of a mile north.

Ralph avowed how he’d never seen a soul down there much less a motorcycle gang with sweet tooths. Ginny, who didn’t catch the humor in that, asked, “What do you think, Ralph? Sell the park for a building lot? Not much revenue in a single house on a lot zoned for 5 acre rural residential.”

The South End only has this one park. Course it only has one store. One diner. One hair salon. And two art galleries. Which are extraordinary if you’ll allow me to play art critic. We got plenty of art studios, some good, some not, but they all add to the mythology of the fabled South End, if not, admittedly, to the tax base.

Personally, I think the park should stay. I don’t give a fig or a fart if folks throng to its short trails and its unused BBQ grills or notice the flowers or idiosyncratic sculpture. Some day when this is an art mecca for weary urbanites, they’ll have a place to pull in and check the GPS for how to get home. Meanwhile the teenagers got a place for backroad sex.

Right next door to our Shangri-La-La sits an old 1940’s bungalow, a small one bedroom, low ceilinged place perfect for one person or two people very much in love. Over the years it’s been a low income rental, one of the cheaper rents on the island. I got a buddy who rents a chicken house a mile north for $200 more per month than this place charged. Not to insinuate that cheap rent equates to low life renters, we have had our share of heroin addicts, malcontents and obnoxious neighbors roll through that place the past couple of decades.

The best neighbors were usually single women, two of whom we practically never laid eyes on the couple of years they rented the place. Barry, the Navy guy, wasn’t too bad, but his dog would come down by the garden and snarl at the mizzus, who, never growing up with the four legged pets, mistrusts the barking beasts. Something to do with bared teeth rattles her. I finally had to wander over to Barry and ask if maybe he could keep his mutt from coming over to menace her. He said his dog never left the property. O … Kay, I said, I guess this conversation is over. I made it pretty clear what would happen to him, not the dog, if the dog that looks like his and growls at us shows up once more. Barry moved on a few weeks later.

We had the guy whose girlfriend went off her meds and her head, then chased him down the highway with his rifle, angry about something or other, alarming us neighbors with gunfire in the night. Three SWAT teams arrived, 50 police cars and who knows how many officers before finally talking the girlfriend into surrendering herself.

The two gay junkies who parked in there for years were usually broke. They borrowed tools and lawnmowers, gas and whatever else they needed, usually without asking. They sent their pals over to the orchard to pick fruit. And their vehicle was usually out front, hood up, another breakdown. When one of the partners died, the remaining junkie took the inheritance and bought an SUV, a hot tub, a motorcycle and all manner of goodies so that over the next few weeks we watched the repo folks come to take back what Jeff didn’t bother to make payments on. PUD turned off his power and for months we thought he’d moved on, but no, he lived in a heroin haze in the dark and cold until finally Lisa, his landlady, kicked him out. Actually, she basically paid him to go, helped him pack, brought the boxes, paid for a storage unit. I should’ve chipped in.

The last guy, a nice enough fellow who kept to himself mostly, drove the mizzus crazy calling for his cat incessantly. She called me over to the garden one day and asked, what is he saying? Here Girlfriend, Here Girlfriend, over and over. I admitted that it sounded strange but it had to be, god help us if it’s not, the name of his cat. I never really saw a cat, but the alternative was too grim to contemplate. Either way, the mizzus was disturbed by this and started to avoid the garden completely.

So when Lisa came up to do what seemed like more than touch-up after Girlfriend’s owner packed up the Conestoga and headed over the mountains, I asked if she was thinking of selling the place. She replied that yeah, the rental biz was starting to wear her down. I said it was wearing us down too, truth be told. And so, that is how — and maybe why — we ended up buying the place. Privacy, it turns out, unlike when we first came out here, is a pretty expensive proposition.

You maybe have been a little too busy lately with texting and Facebook updating, Google searching and e-mailing, to pay attention to the world accelerating at the speed of algorithms. You probably don’t remember exactly when you got your first calculator (I got one back in 1975) or your first computer (we got one in, oh, I’m guessing, 1988 or thereabouts). The point being, not that you can or can’t remember the date, but that it happened in recent history, it happened in our lifetime. And in the few intervening years, it became an integral part of modern living. It changed everything. It is, just as the invention of the spinning jenny and machinery was, a revolution. The world will never be the same.

Now we take it for granted. Only took a decade, maybe two. Future Shock, just as Toffler predicted, is here, picking up speed, faster than we Cro Magnons can possibly adapt to the changes. Oh, sure, you can send twitters, you can e-mail, you can download movies on your TV, easy as pie. And if it’s hard, the kids can show you how. My parents, not so much. They’re a bit too calcified in the Industrial Age to manage much more than the basics. Try to explain trickier navigations, they’re boggled immediately. The old man keeps a set of directions for operating his TV that his grandson wrote down for him five years ago. Oh yeah, he uses it every time he wants to switch from cable to DVD.

Everyone now, except me and two other Neanderthal knuckle draggers on the planet, carry a cellphone or a tablet or an I-pad everywhere they go. They’re ‘connected’ to the hive in ways that were unimaginable ten years ago. I don’t know if the world has shrunk so much as it has become denser, jammed with data and information, more coming in at the speed of light. If our attention spans have truncated to about 20 seconds max, it’s little wonder, we have to move on to the next new incoming. The world, once external in our early years, is now internal, virtual, digitized and flying at us at incredible speed.

If you’ve been around kids the past decade or so, you know they no longer live among us. They might be in the same room, sleep in the beds upstairs, mumble occasionally when they enter or leave the house, but no, they’re already gone. The Pied Piper of PC and Apple have taken them to a different place, one where you and I won’t be going. You might have learned a few tricks, but they’ve internalized the circuitry. They learned from the machine and the machine is how they think now. Eventually they will add chips to themselves, apps, all that stuff they carry in a box now but will soon be inserted into their physical body. You think tattoos or lip rings are invasive, you’ve got some shocks coming. It’s a brave new world, old timer, and we’re the last of the humans.

Just when you thought you’d dodged the swine and bird flu pandemics, along comes another black plague to end civilization as we know it. This disease, spread by the usually suspect mosquito, comes with a twist. It doesn’t kill its victim outright, it destroys the fetus it carries, something right out of a science fiction movie. Every day the media reports the northerly spread of the disease in America. Today the numbers hit, get ready if you’re not already sitting down, 30.

30. Not 30 million. Not even 30,000. Not 3000. Not 300. Thirty. Two and a half dozen, if my math is correct. More people were shot in Chicago yesterday than Zika has infected all year. But … I don’t live in Chicago and Zika is spreading!!! Well, okay, it’s mostly in Miami. Not really close to the South End, Miami. Chicago is a thousand miles closer. And even in Miami it’s sort of in a small area. BUT!!! It could be here any day now, what with air travel and all. You know an infected Typhoid Mary could get off a plane at Sea-Tac then get bit by a mosquito up here and before Yahoo News could sound the alert, half of Puget Sound would be Ground Zero for Zika.

AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT!!!

Well, you could maybe not be pregnant. And you could stay indoors. And if you had to leave the bunker fortress of your house, you could maybe wear bug spray. I don’t know about you all, but I’m for bombing Miami, get rid of the threat before it reaches Ft. Lauderdale or Tampa. Or the South End!!!! I know, it sounds harsh, but these are desperate times, judging by this year’s election speeches. If we’re feeling a little squeamish, hey, we can use a drone to do the dirty work. Collateral damage, I think it’s called. Millions of lives are at stake here. Decisions have to made. Think about it, but not too long.