The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Not quite a year ago we bought the little 1940’s house next door, mostly to keep it from being torn down and replaced with a 2015 McMansion on the hill above our gardens. Trouble is, now we got a house to deal with. I suppose we could board it up, let the mice and the rot have at it, or maybe use it for a woodshed or storage unit, but we figured, being citizen-capitalists, we maybe ought to ‘monetize’ it. We didn’t want to rent it by the month because for the past twenty years or so we’ve had to deal with the folks who rent the cheapest place on the South End. I mean, I like mean dogs, girlfriends who go off their meds and shoot up the neighborhood, heroin addicts and all the rest as much as the next guy, but we thought we’d try renting by the night, offer it up as a romantic get-away, bring in the honeymooners and the nostalgic, pay off the utilities and the mortgage.

This week we had the first paying customers, a couple who just got married, honeymooned in Vancouver and needed a few nights down at Viagra Falls here to fully consummate their wedding. Three nights would do it. The day before their awaited arrival they called to say they would be a day late, stay a day longer. Odd, but okay, we’re not your ordinary hoteliers. Yesterday, their new arrival date, they didn’t show up either. This morning we get a call to inform us they rolled in at midnight, took one look at the place and vacated. Spiders, they said. The place had spiders. They couldn’t stay in a place with arachnids. Just couldn’t, just wouldn’t.

I guess there’s a lot of reasons not to stay at our little bed and breakfast. Flies. Mice. Mealy bugs. Coyotes outside howling. Deer stomping through the yard. Raccoons peeking out from behind the shed. Birds making a racket at dawn. Trees menacingly swinging in the wind. Moles leaving mounds in the yard. Nettles growing over by the woods.

I maybe forgot to mention we live in the country. Or maybe they just figured the place would be a Super 8 or a Motel 6 nestled next to a suburban shopping mall. I don’t know.

In the end we gave them back their money, lost three days rental and probably the innocence we had when we embarked on landlordship. The mizzus feels bad about this and so do I. Me, I’m liking the idea of a storage unit or a woodshed. One more bad rental and I’ll start hauling in this fall’s alder supply.

Mermaid Jim used to live south of me, the closest person to the island’s Head, its southernmost inhabitant. I only encountered him infrequently and so he never remembered meeting before which meant I heard his stories numerous times. Invariably he would recount his mermaid story, and invariably I’d wait to find discrepancies from the previous tellings.

“I was scuba diving in the Bahamas,” he’d start in, apropos of nothing in our conversation and only moments from new introductions, how do ya do’s, where ya live? “I was down maybe 30 feet off the reef when she swam right up to me, talked to me like I’m talking to you, bubbles coming out of her mouth while she held steady with her tail. Her tail, man, her tail!”

“Mermaid?” I’d say after hearing the story the first time. “Right,” Jim would say, grateful I wasn’t rolling my eyes or calling 911 for psychiatric help.

“I saw her the next day and the next, every day I dove down there.”

“Whaddaya talk about?”I’d ask. “Nothing much,” he’d always respond.

I guess if I met a mermaid, I’d have some questions and maybe she would too, but Jim apparently didn’t and his sea princess was similarly uncurious. It made his mermaid story short and sweet but not particularly interesting. Still, he never embellished it. Never altered it. He met a mermaid, they talked, he went home. Simple facts. Extraordinary encounter. Worth telling everyone he met about it — mermaids exist, he’s seen one, he’s even talked to one.

Once I asked him if he thought she had a family, if maybe there was a whole undersea city of mermen and mermaids, if they had a watery civilization, if ….
“How would I know?” Jim answered, annoyed that his one mermaid wasn’t plenty as it obviously was for him. “I met a mermaid,” he said, “and she talked to me.”

Developers built four houses near Jim’s place maybe 10 years ago where there hadn’t been anyone for half a mile either direction. Jim told me, last encounter we had, he’d be leaving for over the mountains, maybe Mazama, where there would be less neighbors to bother him. I nearly asked why he wasn’t headed back toward water, maybe be reunited with his mermaid, but I didn’t.   I figure in a way he’s taking her with him.

Walter was recruiting down at the South End Diner this morning, looking for a ‘few good men’ to help him stand guard over the Army recruiting office in downtown Stanwoodopolis. The real recruiters were unarmed, he warned. “They’re completely at the mercy of any *%#@?!! jihadists! They can’t carry weapons and the *%#@#?! Government doesn’t give a damn!”

Anita, the current owner and security guard for the Diner, stepped from around the register and held up a hand in warning. “Clean up your mouth, Walter. And settle down. I don’t need a riot here this early in the morning.”

Ralph, our local wiseguy, was sitting at my table with me and Two Toke and I groaned when he turned with a smirk from his biscuits and gravy toward Walter, two tables over. “How many guns you think we’ll need, Walter? And how long will have to keep at this? I mean, the War on Terror’s nearly 15 years now. You gonna stick out out 15 years?”

It was Anita’s turn to groan. “Thanks, Ralph,” she muttered and went back to the register, thought better of it and headed for the kitchen to confer with Big Larry on the grill, her own brand of recruitment.

“Gonna take as long as it takes, Ralph. Gonna take ALL of us to protect the Homeland, that’s what it takes. Who’s in?” he asked us assembled freedom-loving breakfasteers. “Jimmy, how ‘bout it? Fred? You in?” Jimmy and Fred studied their coffee mugs with an intensity usually reserved for roadside wrecks.

“Apathy!” Walter shouted, his face red. “Apathy’s what kills!” Ralph chuckled. “I thought it was guns, Walter. You know what they say, when apathy’s outlawed, only ….”

Ralph sensed Big Larry’s shadow suddenly looming over our table and shut up mid-sentence. “Walter,” Big Larry growled, ignoring Ralph who was hunching himself into a small inconspicuous persona non gratis, “we ALL need protecting. We just don’t need yours. You vigilantes want to start a war, take it somewhere else. Don’t be messin’ around here.”

Walter stared into the greasy spatula Larry pointed at him, started to speak, then thought better of it. “Okay, Larry, okay.” I think we all knew, even Walter, the Diner wouldn’t be needing outside protection and God help any jihadists who ran into Big Larry.

It’s crabbing season once more, diminished now to a two month opening, five days a week. Ordinarily I walk the eelgrass jungles for the vicious beasts, but when the tides aren’t low, I do what the rest of us down here on the South End do, I use a boat and set pots baited with delicacies from Trader Joe or catered in by Brenda’s Catering and Chow. Everyone these days uses motorboats, but I’m still rowing my little aluminum scow, the one with my homemade oars. Because the State, in its scientific wisdom, requires pots to be pulled the fifth day, I had to row out for mine in whitecaps. Believe me, you pay attention to every stroke when waves are bashing the sides of your tiny tub.

I did okay going out, then managed to pull both pots without flipping the boat. I should maybe mention I’m about 400 yards, call it a quarter mile, out from shore in 75 feet of water. Nobody’s around and nobody’s going to call 911 if I go overboard. I have a lifejacket worst case…. I should probably carry life insurance too.

Going back, though, was harder. The wind had picked up and I was taking worse waves on the sides. My pots were cramping me up for rowing and the direction of the wind was anything but where I wanted to go. Sure, I thought to myself, a smarter man would’ve never come out today. A man with minimal brains would’ve turned around halfway out when the rowing became hard and the danger apparent. Even a dummy might’ve figured leave the damn pots and get his sorry butt back to shore. But … I’m a South Ender and by god, I was going to get those pots and whatever crabs they held even if it meant I had to risk life and limb. This is what differentiates a salty dog from a landlubber professor of economics, in case you were wondering.

Halfway back my left oar caught a wave and hung up a moment. When I got straightened out, I noticed a nut had fallen off the oarlock and next thing I knew the whole gizmo that attached to the oar was coming apart and sure enough, it did. I tried to find the nut down in the crab blood and bait water, but it was nowhere to be seen and last thing I wanted to do was get down and start a panicked search so a rogue wave could swamp me. Gordon Lightfoot said it maybe best in the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: Where in the world does the love of God go, when the minutes turn to hours?

All I know is I cursed myself for not tightening those bolts up good and tight. Nobody to blame but one sad sorry soon-to-be-saltier dog. Worst case, I’d be blown up to the state park at the point, five miles north, not drowned at least. I had crab so I had food. Raw, but survival skills demand a bit of compromise. Sure, I was a little wet, but not hypothermic. And … I still had that oar.

So I paddled one side, rowed the other. I don’t recommend this method, but in a pinch, I can testify, it works. From shore I’m sure it looks like a drunk with one bad arm, every stroke turning the boat about 45 degrees, the waves smacking it, then a paddle turning it back the other way. I finally washed up on the beach not too far from my original launch site.

Some call this recreational crabbing. Even on the South End, this hardly qualifies for recreation. All I know, those crabs are going to taste real good tonight.

We’re in a motel tonight, downtown Lewiston, Clarkston, near the Snake River. We’d planned to camp at Palouse Falls but … our annual park permit expired today and nobody seems to be around the state park to issue a new one. We could pay the daily, but why? Especially when we looked at the campground, a treeless hellhole of blistered desert, temperature at 100, no shade.

The next state park didn’t even offer camping … although it did have trees and a swimming beach and a huge boat launch into the Snake. Why put a campground here? So … we ended up here at this cheap motel. The first one we looked at was pretty much a rent by month, down and out auto court. This one seemed better but it turns out half of it is rent by month, down and out too. With a swimming pool and coffee in the lobby.

Our new neighbors next door, who we haven’t officially met yet, were just visited by the police. The mizzus is sporting a black eye and has two kids in tow. The old man is a mean little mofo, jawing on her since we rolled in. MY mizzus thinks maybe she’s tried to escape to this one room sanctuary and he’s found her. The cop convinced me she’s right.

It’s a mean old world, that’s the truth. We vacation, I guess, so we’ll leave our peaceful enclave and experience real misery firsthand. Sort of a vaccination — not enough to kill, just enough to build resistance. You know, the way the evening news does every night….