The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was driving past the Plaza IGA — our ‘hometown grocery’, meaning, I guess, a monopoly for higher prices — when the transformer blew in a windstorm. The rest of the drive down to the tail end of the island was dark except for my headlights casting wild beams on tormented branches and roadside bushes come to life like amphetamine goblins. It would be a long time before PUD got around to us, that was a given.

Slipping off the grid for a few days hurtles us back to the early years here. Ordinary life comes to a sudden stop. No more TV, no more internet, no phone calls, no e-mails. The world shrinks inward, lanterns come out, candles are lit, the homefires are kept burning. All those devices we amuse ourselves with to ‘pass the time’ are put on the backburner, the one that operated on electricity but doesn’t now.

Most of the neighbors have invested in generators. Fifteen minutes after the power blows, the ‘hood here sounds like a hornets’ nest hit with a baseball bat. For them the diversions halt briefly. For us, it’s a few days of nostalgia, memories of wild howlers, crashing waves, trees toppled, neighbors comparing damage, the whine of chainsaws up and down the highway.

We read books we hadn’t finished, play instruments that sat for too long, stoke the stoves, carry water, talk, go for walks. It’s 1977 down at the wild South End once again. A time before cellphones and computers. A time only 40 years or so ago. But the world has changed. Not the way it did with our parents or grandparents. It changed completely.

Me, I like knowing no matter how inexorable its march into a digital future is, it can stop dead in its tracks, if briefly. But it feels like time has stopped and the natural world has reasserted itself. Today, I spoze, we’ll go back to the Future. If nothing else, we won’t have to listen to a dozen damn generators.

The temperature hit 60 degrees today, a couple weeks before the vernal equinox. 60 degrees, for any of you who live in less temperate climes, is basically a summer day here, what we call unseasonably warm. On days like this we drop what we’re doing and we get our butts outdoors. Which I did. Which is where I am right now, sitting at our picnic table, pen in hand, beer at the ready. I know, it’s a tough life … but save your pity for those poor souls who have jobs, indoor jobs anyway.

Seemed like a good day to wander into the Pea Patch so I did. Cut up potatoes and planted them in mounds. Sowed seed for salad. Hauled the scarecrow over to a new spot. Roto-tilled. Put up the pea fence. Gentleman farmer, that’s me.

Every year I say I’m going to cut back, grow only the stuff that grows well with our cold maritime nights. And every year I plant the whole she-bang all over again. Corn that barely ripens, artichokes that have heads the size of a pingpong ball, tomatoes that stay green. If I didn’t, I’d think I was Backsliding. And when you reach my ripe old age, you want to keep any forward momentum going even if it’s de-accelerating faster than reverse glacial accretion. It’s the same with woodcutting. I think, gee, maybe I’ll switch to propane heat. Save hauling 10 or 12 cord of wood out of the back 40, just hit a thermostat when I’m chilly. But I know it’s a slippery slope. And that slope leads to a Laz-y-Boy and a channel changer.

What I think is you have to see the future as Potential. As Progress. You have to have something to work Toward. And don’t mean tonight’s PBS programming. Me, I’m growing dinner. I’m splitting my heat for a warmer winter. I came to the country so I’d be tuned into the seasons, I’d till the land, I’d plant orchards and I’d make firewood. Sure it gets harder every year. Damn right it does. But not near as hard as the day when I sit here looking at an overgrown garden gone to grass and weed again because I can’t bend down far enough to poke seeds into the ground.

But today feels like spring and as we say on the South End, hope springs eternal. My salad days aren’t over yet and my woodsheds are nearly full. I’m even betting this will be a good tomato year. Like I bet every year….

Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. He kept on digging the hole he was digging. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl, the night bartender, will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

You live in a remote backwash like we do, you might think life is passing you by. But even for those of us sitting still, the world keeps spinning. Live long enough and you’ll have a book or two of stories, I guarantee you. Even Little Billy.

Little Billy lives in the While-a-While trailer park that Ralph Wissmach set up back in the ‘70’s, not really zoned for it, but that was back when the South End was a little wilder and regulations were flaunted with impunity if not relish. Ralph owned most of the single wides, hauled them in as rentals, then leased them PLUS added power and water surcharges. If Ralph hadn’t acquired a ferocious taste for blended whiskies, he might have done okay, but he drank most of his rent money and neglected upkeep in the park. By the turn of the century the While-a-While was a ghetto, tenants made payments only occasionally and the sheriff steered clear if possible.

Little Billy’s castle was the trailer at the end, leaning partly into the woods, curtains always drawn. The adjoining trailer was vacant, curtains fluttering tattered out its broken window, allowing Billy even more privacy. Cats by the dozen came in and out at Billy’s through a pet door he had cut into the fiberglass back door of his abode. His neighbors saw more of the feline herd roaming the park than they did of Billy.

The Trouble began when the Carter brothers rolled in one windswept monsoonal day late in November, off-loaded their rust-eaten 4×4 trucks, then, over the next week, were joined by their kin and girlfriends until the trailer was wild with metal rock and constant fighting. Strange cars and grungy people came night and day. Billy kept an imperious silence through the next couple of months. Except for the cats the Carter clan would’ve suspected his place abandoned.

Then, one drizzly night after New Years, the Carters decided to amuse themselves by shooting at Billy’s cats with a couple of .22’s. By the time Billy stepped out on his rickety porch step, three of his felines were dead or bleeding next to the trailer. Billy stood stock still, just a silhouette in the backlit doorway, and watched silently as Joel Carter, drunk on Jack Daniels, stoned on grass and cranked on meth, lifted his rifle to his lips and pretended to blow the smoke away. Before he laughed and went back inside.

What went through Joel Carter’s empty head when Billy came knocking, nobody will ever know. “Wuzzup, asshole?” he muttered to Little Billy who was standing on the porch with a .38 in one hand and a bleeding cat in the other. When he saw the pistol, he smirked. “What now, Wyatt? We gonna shoot it out at the OK??”

Billy, apparently not much for light banter, put a slug in Carter’s kneecap, eliciting a howl that could be heard out to the highway. He watched the backrooms of the trailer erupt into activity, the entire tribe now gathered and shrieking like deranged Banshees. Billy held his gun up for silence and got it immediately. Then he shot a writhing Joel Carter in the other leg, brought the weapon to his lips and in an ironic gesture lost on the assembled trailer trash, blew smoke off the end of the barrel.

In the novel that won’t be written, Billy might have driven off into the night, never to be heard from again. But this being real life and not Hollywood, the sheriffs arrived 15 minutes later and took Billy away. He gave no resistance and the only words anyone heard him speak was when they shoved his head down before he was put in the back seat of the cruiser. “Someone needs to care for those cats.”