The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Bob the Baptist lives up the hollow where the dirt road south of me dead ends in a swampy cul-de-sac. You look hard you can see past the abandoned cars, rotted boats, rusty appliances, kids’ toys, broken furniture and busted machinery to where Bob’s shack leans into the last century. Just to be sure nobody will steal this stockpile of valuable rusty corroded parts from his junkyard covered with leaf mulch and blackberry vines, Bob has nailed handwritten signs every few hundred feet: NO TRESSPASING POSTED KEEP OUT!! PRIVIT PROPPERTY, like anyone would venture into his place. By the driveway or entrance or whatever it is that isn’t maintained and is overgrown to the point any vehicle trying to drive in would be scratched to bare metal by berry thorns and cedar limbs and lost equipment, he’s nailed a plywood plank painted black with white words: JESUS IS COMMING SOON!!

These are the End Times, Bob tells us neighbors. South End Times, anyway, if Bob’s place comes under scrutiny. It looks like Armageddon hit yesterday. Windows are broken out and covered with plastic that’s now tattered. Doors hang off their hinges, usually open winter or spring. The first time I went back there looking for my dog who’d wandered off, I walked through an open door with books and magazines strewn everywhere, thinking it was an anteway or a porch … until I realized to my horror I was deep into his house. Believe me, I backed out of there fast as anything, expecting a shotgun blast from Bob the Baptist. He walked up a minute after I’d exited his home sweet hovel and demanded to know who I was, what I wanted, why I was there. “Lost dog,” I mumbled.

“We’re ALL lost,” he fairly howled. “We’re all lost and we don’t even know it!!” Tobacco stains ran down his matted beard and his eyes bulged like King Lear in a room full of psychiatrists.

Bob’s okay, actually, reasonably harmless and even sociable occasionally. The neighbors hear him once in awhile, exhorting whatever demons drive him day in and day out. Apparently the demons aren’t listening. Awhile back we heard he used to be a minister over the other side of the mountains. Heard it from one of his flock. Bob had had an affair with the local TV station’s weathergirl and his wife had run off with the church’s deacon. The weather lady moved up to a megawatt Atlanta station and Bob was banished to the wilderness. I guess it makes some sense he ended up down here. Although … Bob still hasn’t figured out most of us don’t think of this as punishment or penance. Hell, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder too.

By now you’ve heard the bad news: Island County Transit will cancel all routes this summer in hopes of bringing fiscal responsibility to the beleaguered service. The five person Transit Board making the decision — all from Whidbey Island — voted unanimously to bring costs in line by curtailing service here which purportedly cost twice as much per mile per rider than on Whidbey. When questioned on how that figure was derived, a spokesman said it was obvious since Camano is twice as far from the county seat as any place on Whidbey. “Truth is,” the spokesperson declared, “only one of the Board has ever been to Camano, it’s too far to hold meetings.”

Another recommendation by the Board was to rename the bus system Whidbey Transit, presumably to reduce confusion over here in Tijuana that bus service might still be county-wide. A board member who spoke off the record argued that since most Camano riders didn’t own a vehicle, traffic would not be appreciably impacted. “Plus,” she added, “it should actually decrease slightly with less buses plying the Camano routes.” When asked how those vechicle-less riders would get to their jobs, she said they could always move to Oak Harbor. “Rents are cheaper here in town, I’ve been told.”

Needless to say, the South End Economic Council refused to take this lying down. Plans are in the works to create a South End Shuttle Service serving rideless residents. “Kind of an Uber-bus prototype,” Ralph Flatulenz, current president of the council, was quoted. “Course, we would probably have trucks and SUV’s, not buses. We’re still in preliminary planning. Maybe we could share school buses,” he said. “Be good for the kids to have some extra adult supervision. Although I hear rumors that school buses might also be taken out of circulation on Camano. Stanwood has its own budget problems, same as Whidbey.” Or maybe we could just stop sending Camano kids to school.

My buddy Sam lives in a dilapidated house down by the newly opened Katmandu Kite Shop and no, it isn’t a kite store, it’s a recreational marijuana outlet. Sam’s place sits back in the nettled interior, down a dead end dirt road near the old trout pond that once held trout but got dredged back in the early ‘80’s on one debauched weekend that ended my trout fishing on the South End.

Sam’s been living the bachelor life since his wife left him. She’d grown weary of the power being turned off for non-payment and the back taxes on the place reaching critical mass and since neither of them were willing to work, they played ‘chicken’ with each other, hoping the other would swerve first back into the job market. No way was Sam going back to wage slavery so ultimately Bobbie packed her things, left a short and not-so-sweet note and headed back down to an old boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon who at least worked part-time driving schoolbus.

Sam says he never saw it coming. I believe him, not because all the signs weren’t pointing inexorably toward a dissolution, but because Sam doesn’t have peripheral vision. He would have to hit a sign head-on. In fact, he didn’t find Bobbie’s kiss-off letter until four days after she left. Which isn’t as myopic as you might think. Sam is a Hoarder. His house is like one of those ant farms I had as a kid, nothing but tunnels, stuff stacked along the paths head high, trails leading to the bed or the bathroom or through the kitchen to the stove on one side, the fridge down a different path.

Bobbie kept the piles slightly more passable, but now that she’s gone, the tunnels have narrowed. Nothing much gets thrown away, but stuff apparently is coming in constantly, at least by my observation after not seeing Sam for a few months. The folks who dreamed up ‘planned obsolescence’ never counted on the Sams who keep the broken crap and live in their own midden. Another year, I figure he’ll run out of room completely. I don’t know how many Sams are out there, but I have to wonder if this isn’t why Sears, after a century, is going broke.

audio — bring back april fools day

I remember as a kid coming down to my sad breakfast of gruel and grits and our mom asking me and my brothers if we’d heard? “Heard what?” we’d ask groggily. “School was canceled today,” she’d say. “All right!” we’d yelled, visions of morning shows on TV and neighborhood ball games in the afternoon filling our dumb little heads. School’s out, school’s out, Teacher wore her ruler out! A surprise free holiday, oh boy!

And then at the height of our Cheerio euphoria, she’d drop the hammer. April Fool!!!! If there’s a special holiday for sadists to prey on the weak and the gullible, this is it. Cruelty as comedy. Our mother would laugh until she had to sit down, then when the Old Man stumbled to the table, she’d regale him with our sad stupidity and we were humiliated all over again. You know, before we had to go to our school that was still holding classes for boneheads like us.

By the next year we’d have forgotten what April first was — and so fell once more into our mother’s traps. She had plenty. I think she worked 364 days to get the next one ready. Nowadays, it’s April Fool 365 days, no days off. Viral e-mails, the internet, Fox and MSNBC, all 24/7. If you know what’s fact and what’s fiction, good work! Just don’t send me the news on my e-mail anymore. I’m not 6 years old and I don’t believe a word my mother says now, which are mostly pronouncements from Fox News.

We live in the Digital Age where ‘facts’ are cherry-picked by the unseen hand of a computer algorithm. If we believe everything we read now, it’s because we only read what we want to hear. What fun is it if we fool all of us who’ve fooled ourselves all of the time? This May 15th the FCC is going to shut down the internet for 24 hours for a much needed de-bugging for malware. I know we won’t, but maybe we could turn off the TV too for a little Cranial Cleaning. Maybe next year we’d have a chance to reinstall an authentic April Fools Day again. That, or add an app to our newly virus-scrubbed computer, a Prank Alert.