The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

My brother once told me, late in our cups, I had the craziest friends he’d ever met. He’s from the extremely flat state of Wisconsin and was an attorney most of his life. HIS friends, he informed me, were boring and straight. Perfectly normal people, in other words. My brother thought maybe living on an island might be some root cause of abnormality.

The very idea of Wisconsin as the epicenter of Normality in the known universe is as risible as Compassionate Conservatism was around the time of the Iraq War, the Sequel. Show me a roomful of normal persons and I’ll bet just below the epidermis lurks weirdoes, psychos, wife beaters, shopping addicts, child molesters, oxycontin fiends, binge gamblers, superstitious astrology readers, philanderers, petty crooks, white collar criminals, religious converts and … well, you get the picture. Folks who believe in UFO’s and alien medical probes, hoarders, agoraphobics, conspiracy theorists, John Birchers, shoplifters, alcoholics, festishists, TV junkies, computer zombies, you name it, they’re in the room, waiting for the lights to go out.
Normality is what you got before the stool got kicked out from under you, before your wife had a miscarriage or your job was axed or your kid was arrested for petty theft. Reality slips a cog or two, then the world starts to lurch, the ground liquefies, assumptions no longer seem so linear and obvious, religion is an ocean with no bottom.

Maybe the South End IS a little closer to Escape Velocity, possibly very close to moving away from the Mainland with every tide. But the whole continent has set sail too — the tectonic plates underneath are piling up and the pressure is building. I like to think we islanders have already made adjustments. Although … I’m pretty sure we haven’t. Otherwise, well, we’d be normal.

Down here in the hortichuckled South End, we’ve been working tirelessly in our bio-tech greenhouses to get a leg up on the competition for artisanal medical nettle in preparation for full legalization.  The naysayer would add pessimism to persistent fogs, pests and piracy for our prickly perennials, but our agrarians won’t be deterred.  Certainly not in the face of hoped for profits when the crops are paroled when their many medicinal attributes overcome the fears of a paranoid anti-itch society.

Admittedly we have an uphill climb.  Anecdotal horror stories of recreational nettle users overdosed and overscratched back in the ravines days after their unsupervised experimentation still serve fodder to those without scientific understanding of our latest advances.  Superstition still surrounds the eight foot itching posts that darken the interior of the South End trail system.  Many of the neighbors assumed the Barefoot Bandit, like his mythic predecessor D.B. Cooper, had perished in the nettle jungles trying to escape the relentless dragnets of our inimitable law enforcement officers.  More likely he used the nutritious plants for survival and herbal remedy.

Thanks to our researchers’ unravelling of the genus Urtica’s genome, we’ve engineered strains of nettles scarcely irritable to a baby’s backside.  Now, hopefully with a healthy influx of venture capital from investors who can realize profits heretofore unimaginable, we can begin the P.R. campaign to bring Medical Nettle out from under its pharmacological reputation as the Bad Boy of Invasive Plants to a more reasoned and sane understanding by the general public. Nettleopathy, the gentle application of epidermal stimulation, may soon be as accepted a healing technique as acupuncture (without the needles!)  Fear and ignorant superstition will give way to scientific method and enlightened medical practice.  The Dark Ages, my friend, are over for the South End.  Artisan Nettle:  Better Living Through Genetic Modification.  And coming to a shop near you….

You live down at the far end of a skinny island, you learn pretty quick how important water is. Agua agua everywhere and not a drop to drink is no laugh down here. We’re surrounded by it and it’s salty. Dig a well and use too much, you pull saltwater and then it wants to stay that way. All of us are on wells. Me, I’ve got a hand dug 3 foot diameter hole in the ground that goes down 105 feet. You can push the metal cover to one side and look down with a flashlight to the water below. That 3 foot hole looks about the size of a silver dollar at the bottom.

Us oldtimers all have hand dug wells — although some have upgraded to drilled ones, usually deeper. The new folks have water associations, big holding tanks, pumps, purification systems, filters and lately, computers that calculate tide tables and the optimum time to pump so as to avoid pulling saline. Used to be, the neighbors all watered their lush weednfeed fescue day and night, but they got saltwater intrusion and boy howdy, they learned the hard way why all of us conserve water, not take it for granted. We’re all on the aquifers, although not necessarily the same one. Ours isn’t as deep as the neighbors – or as reliable, but at least I’m not punished for their landscaping dreams. Not yet anyway.

When we first came, we still had the 1930’s piston driven pump. Ka-chug, ka-chug, 50 year old oak rod sections connected to a foot valve down at the bottom, a heartbeat we always paid attention to and that always needed attention. Packings had to be replaced, foot valves too, pressure sensors regulated, tanks repressurized. If the power got knocked out, we could draw water by turning the flywheel by hand. Now we’ve got a submersible pump. 220 volts, no water if the electricity fails. The price we paid for modernization.

But … we don’t pay water dues and we don’t fight with the neighbors over association bylaws. Freedom sometimes is as precious as a glass of clear water. And as fragile….