The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in the 70’s when everyone else in America was putting on leisure suits and rocking out to the BeeGees and disco, I headed north up to a Polish homestead in upper Wisconsin. Had a farmhouse and the old summer cook shed, a smoke house and a barn. We pumped water from a well outside and we did our business in an outhouse we had to build to replace the rotted original one. It was primitive living, but you ask me, better than disco by a country mile or two.

I guess I went whole hog on this going back to the land thing. We put in a big garden over the old pigpen, laid in wood for the winter that was going to come soon and hard, made homemade bread and tried to steal honey from the bees in the barn who taught me a vicious lesson about theft and the need for better bee helmets. Somewhere during that idyllic summer I decided to become a hunter. My father-in-law gave me a .22 semi-automatic rifle and so I wandered into the oak woods across the road to pursue my luck at squirrel hunting.

Maybe you never shot a semi-automatic rifle before. If not, let me explain that it’s made for folks who don’t intend to be marksmen. You sort of point it in the direction of your target and start shooting. It fires as fast as you can pull the trigger, a couple times a second. You don’t really need to aim, just watch the bark peel back as you zero in on that poor little squirrel who really has never seen anything like that in his woods before. Needless to say, Davy Crockett here came home with plenty of varmint for dinner those first couple weeks of autumn.

We skinned em, we tanned the hides, we ate stews, we fried em, we put em on the grill. It took a couple or three to make a meal. A squirrel is really more of an hors doeurve than a meal, but you have to kill a few mammals to fill your belly. It started to seem, well, cruel. I mean, I know I was going back to a hunter/gatherer ethos and all, but a lot of squirrels were dying to satisfy my pioneer dreams. After all, this was the 1970’s, not 1870.

My last hunt I shot a little gray squirrel, knocked him off his limb and he managed to hang on to another on the fall. I shot him again and he stayed put. I put another couple of slugs into him and he finally dropped in a heap to the leafy ground, but then he hauled himself into a hole in the trunk of the oak. I had to pull him by the tail out of that shelter and dispatch him mercilessly with one final shot. I still remember that moment and I still remember that little squirrel, riddled with my bullets, dying for what would be a morsel to me. Call me squeamish, call me a bleeding heart liberal, call me a squirrel lover … but don’t call me a hunter. I put the gun back in a closet and never shot it again.

When I moved out here, I threw the gun in the Conestoga along with most of our possessions, but that first few months I traded it for a 5 string banjo. Which can fire a note as fast as I can pull the trigger. So … I guess I’m still inducing unnecessary suffering on innocent creatures. But at least no lives are being lost….

I was contacted recently to participate in the annual Christmas Bird Count. I’m not all that curious about bird censuses, but hey, maybe it’s time I paid a little more attention to my feathered fellow companions here on the nettled South End. After all, we all flock together most days, bumping into each other or giving each other plenty of space. We’re what is called a Backyard Habitat, what I used to call my woods. The birds don’t care what we call it so long as the fruit and berries, seeds and nectar keep them on task. We got so much food these days the hummingbirds stay for the winter, altho … hell if I know how they live through the freezes and still find enough to eat. Probably the neighbors who put out hummingbird feeders with sugar water and apparently anti-freeze when the temperatures drop into the 20’s….

So I wander out for a gander … or at least a look-see. I wander around the yard, down through the orchard, around the shack, back into the woods, back out and up the hill. I hear, but don’t see, two crows exchanging gossip so I diddle around by the rhodies, back through the yard and into the garden, then retrace, slip by the pond and hike up the back way to the house. In twenty minutes of paying a little attention to the bird life around me, I realize there’s no bird life whatsoever around me. None. Zilch. Nada. Zip.

It’s not like we live in the South End Sub-Sahara. It’s not semi-arid or desert. Although it appears to be deserted. All aviary existence has ceased! The birds are gone! It’s like a reverse Alfred Hitchcock, instead of billions of the feathered beasts gathering for the final assault against mankind and those killer cats that prey on them constantly, they’ve simply disappeared. It’s obviously a die-off. I think DDT. Might be. Or a radiation cloud. Those quirky North Koreans at it again, this time killing our birds. Or all those microwave towers, maybe they upped the voltage. Who knows? Who’s investigating? And then I realize, I haven’t seen a car go by. Or a neighbor out in their yard. Or heard a chainsaw in the distance. The world has ended, just me and those two crows left and they’re not talking to me. Or are they?

And of course that’s when it hits me: the birds are like illegal immigrants when the census people come knocking, they don’t want to be noticed, much less interviewed and counted. They’ve hidden in the bush, crawled into their nests, stopped flying, stopped foraging, stopped period. They’ve become invisible to us. They don’t want to be counted!!

Today the count is over. My tally was apocalyptic. Noah could build a pretty small ark if the Flood comes back for my sinner neighbors. I went outside to prune fruit trees today and … well, the birds are back, busy as bees. But wait! Where are the bees????

The South End has always been a refuge for us scofflaws and scalawags, con-men and con-artists, ne’er-do-wells and downright losers. I admit it. I even prefer it to the manicured fescue estates behind remote controlled gates further north. Until they start figuring it’s easier to steal from fellow denizens. Which is exactly why I removed myself from the ghetto I found myself in before coming here 37 years ago.

Taking a walk up to a little park I tend on the east side of the island, a neighbor asked if I’d had any break-ins lately. No, I said, you? Three, he said. Know who it is? I asked and he said yeah, the twenty-something heroin addict staying two doors down at John B.’s. John B. won’t talk to my neighbor and the kid in question ran off into the woods when he tried talking to him. I said I guess you know who your culprit is. Fat good it’ll do him….

An hour ago, after chainsawing up a few downed trees in my park, I stopped in to see my old pard Guitar Bob just down the road. He was hauling wood in from a huge cedar that fell in the storm, but we took a break to catch up on news. His news concerned the neighbor woman who kept stopping by to use his phone. She doesn’t have one herself. What she has is a hard luck story for G.B., no car, needs a ride to get meds in Seattle, has cancer, undergoes dialysis, kid is in a halfway house, can’t work, doesn’t have any money. Bob, a hardened urban character, street-wise before they made cobblestones, also has a soft heart. He takes in stray cats and unwanted dogs—he took my junkie neighbor’s hound – and he gives to about 42 and half charities what little he can afford to give.

So he ends up taking her clear to Seattle one night to get a prescription filled for meds she desperately needs. Two hour drive one way. They go, not to a hospital 24 hour pharmacy, but downtown to some seedy apartment in Belltown. He waits in his jalopy and she goes up to get her ‘meds’. I know, you’d think the lights would come on for a streetsmart character like Bob, but … he felt bad for her, you know, dying of cancer and needing dialysis and well, at least she wasn’t selling a bridge.

Long story a lot shorter, she gets lots more rides, stops in frequently to use his phone, wants to borrow money. You might even say they’re developing a rapport, if not a relationship. He does think it odd that the calls she makes are from his bathroom rather than the livingroom, but hey, maybe she needs some privacy. A week ago she takes the phone into the privy and he notices his wallet is missing from the counter where he always keeps it. So when she comes back he asks her for his wallet back. She says she didn’t take it.

There is something broken in a junkie’s head. I’m not a counselor and I don’t play one on TV, but … I know this: somehow they think the rest of us are way stupider than they are. And they are seriously intellectually challenged folks. That, or desperation just takes over and they will try anything, no matter how ridiculous. Guitar Bob can see her holding his wallet inside her jacket and he says you can give me my wallet or I’ll call the cops and we’ll sit here together until they come. She reluctantly hands him his wallet. Of course the money is gone. She probably figured he wouldn’t notice.

Okay, he sez, I’m calling the sheriff. If you don’t call the cops, she sez, I’ll give you a blowjob. Now, I’m no expert on these things having lived too long down in the desolate wilds of the South End, but maybe this actually works on some guys. Bob had 3 dollars in that wallet. Don’t ask me what fellatio goes for in the city, but I’m betting more than 3 bucks. Bob, being Bob, takes Total Offense, this isn’t, after all, the plot to a porno movie. He tells her he’s not calling the police, but that money is going back in his wallet and she’s going back to her hellhole house and she can never darken his doorway, he doesn’t care if her blood is toxifying to sludge or her meds are waiting at the local pharmacy.

If you think this is where the story ends, like Bob does, I suspect you’ve never been around addicts. I wish to hell I hadn’t either, but apparently, they’re living in the neighborhood thick as the deer that eat our apples. At least the deer are cute little buggers….

Little Jimmy, a buddy of mine who’s almost exactly the same old age as me, was reflecting on what he’d like to do when he retired. He’s a glass artist – same as me – and so I know, even if he doesn’t, the kind of retirement he’s dreaming of is just that, a pipe dream. There’s as much likelihood of golden years in a hammock beside a South Seas Lagoon as winning American Idol with a tin ear and laryngitis, but like most folks who gamble on a lottery ticket, the fantasy trumps mathematics.

He’s the kind of guy who itemizes his day, schedules his week, plans itinerary into the coming months and can tell you, by rote, the exact steps he’ll take into the coming years. I can no more imagine him poolside with a Cuba Libre beside his sunglasses on the cabana table slathered with tanning lotion reading a novel than I can see him winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Little Jimmy’s a List Maker. An organized, tightly scheduled Planner. He knows far ahead what he needs to do not only this morning but the morning Tuesday first week, next month. He’s the guy who made an outline before he wrote the essay in 12th grade history class and got an A+ with the teacher’s comments: well organized. I don’t need to look in his dish cabinet to know the bowls and glasses are neatly arranged by size and color. Chaos, to him, is MY cabinet, one step shy of disaster, mayhem and death.

Little Jimmy pulls out a tape rule last visit and shows me 80 inches. “See that?” I shrug in incomprehension. “What’re we measuring?” I ask. “Time left,” Jimmy declares. “If I live to be 80, slightly longer than the average U.S. male … and I’m 64 (he puts his finger at 5’4”, then this is all you and me got left, buddy, 16 inches.” He shakes his head sadly. “Time’s short now.”

Unlike most of us and me in particular, Jimmy’s hit the End of his Calendar. No more days no more months no more years. Just inches. He wants to get more done, he’s got to speed up the Line, blow more glass, sell more stock, finish 2018 by 2017, squeeze into that retirement before the tape rule hits 80 inches. They say dogs don’t understand death. I think dogs are like me — they get the idea, all right, they just don’t carry a tape rule strapped to their collar. I guess we’re a little too busy scratching fleas.