The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Upcreekomish, once a proud nation feasting on the yearly salmon runs, wanted for nothing.  Their hunting and fishing prowess was known up and down the coast, their art was envied, their canoes admired.  They traded with the coastal clans, but for the most part they kept to themselves upriver.  When the whites settled nearby, trapping and mining, the Upcreekomish shook their collective heads but maintained peaceful relations.  Who knew they would lose everything to these men with shovels and saws?

The Otter Creek Trading Post — at least according to Three Finger Bill, a hapless logger who made it back out of the woods before he started whittling away toes and feet with his 40 inch chainsaw — claims the Post was the old Grabbinrun Mining Company’s general store back in the late 1880’s.  The Upcreekomish traded furs for canned food, salmon for bad hooch and various totem carvings for tobacco.  Was it a bad trade?  Three Finger will tell you he’s got a cedar chest ornamented with a beaver totem the professors down at the University offered 6 figures for, about the number of his fingers still usable.  Bill tells me he doesn’t need the money and besides, he uses the box to keep his bad hooch, cigarettes and canned Spaghetti-O’s in.  Sometimes life comes full circle.

Bill’s uncle Walter ran the store after the mines closed and the company script ended.  A few salty dogs kept panning, built small cabins and settled in for an early Depression.  The store survived, but like the miners and the Upcreekomish, just barely and not much to recommend the life.  Tourism brought a few fishermen and backpackers through, and the store, ever adaptable, supplied them with high priced rods, reels, fishing supplies and the ever popular corn dog and microwaveable burrito.  Mostly the store makes its profit on tobacco and alcohol, plus Lotto.

I guess you could say the locals are still getting the short end of the stick, but if you crave Spaghetti-O’s, maybe you don’t mind.

Back when the neighbors had dairy cows, we used to get our milk direct from the udder. Unpasteurized, no growth hormone, no antibiotic whole milk. Course, back then we were told by the FDA and the food scientists that this would increase our chances of heart disease and diabetes. But …! If we took a baby aspirin a day, we could lessen those chances. Sort of like driving over the speed limit but wearing a seat belt. You get in a wreck, you might survive.

You’re as old as me, you maybe remember 5th grade food pyramids. Meat and poultry up at the top, high in protein, fruits and vegetables down toward the middle, candy and pop taboo. In the 60’s we learned sugar was poison and alcohol too and so was red meat and ditto on salt. We started drinking skim milk, substituted saccharin for sugar and oleomargarine for butter. Skip the eggs, pass the fiber.

This week I read a study showing that people like myself who drink high fat milk have decreased heart disease and less risk for diabetes. Fats, it turns out, aren’t all bad. Aspirin a day, so they tell me now, isn’t maybe so good for you if you aren’t already at risk for a heart attack. Butter is better for you than margarine. And too little salt, well, you need salt. You want to live longer, drink a glass or two of wine every day. And even if you don’t live longer, you’ll be happier.

I got friends who won’t eat fruit unless it’s in a pop tart. Some others wouldn’t eat broccoli or cauliflower unless you waterboarded them first. My brother thinks 1% milk is cream and it would kill him in a week. I know folks who won’t go within a country mile of an egg, might as well be lobbing grenades to the heart. Food, I think more and more, is a faith based religion. Easier just to eat Cheetos and Snickers bars with a couple of vitamin supplements, all the nutrition you need right there in a pill.

Me, I always figured the fresher food was, the better. The more natural, the better. I like my food grown on a tree or coming up out of the ground. I like meat that grazed in a grassy pasture and I love fish that swam wild in a river and I’m crazy about seafood that wasn’t farmed. Hell, I like all kinds of food, at least the kind that isn’t dried out, chopped up, reprocessed and flavor enhanced with enough preservatives to last past a nuclear war. Is it good for me? I think maybe so. The doctors and the health specialists, the scientists and the FDA, well, some years yes, some years no. Hard to say for sure anymore. So I’ll just stick with the tried and true, food made by nature, not by labs. Call me old fashioned. Call me outdated. Call me past my expiration date. But … call me for dinner.

Malcolm was practically ranting down at the Diner the other morning at breakfast for the Flatheads, nothing too out of the ordinary for the car guyz but still … he was positively hair-on-fire. “Hundred, maybe thousands of em! All over New Jersey, what the hell?? UFO’s, drones, nobody knows, nobody cares!”

Fairlane Fred put down his forkful of scrambled and asked “What are you talking about, Malcolm?”

“I’m talking about an invasion, Freddie. I’m talking about … see, this is what I’m talking about. You guys don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s kept under wraps, under the damn radar. We’re being kept in the dark!”

Little Jimmy said, unperturbed by the pre-dawn outburst, “Well, it IS almost the shortest day of the year, ya know.” Which send Malcolm into another spasm of outburst. The breakfast crowd, seasoned socket wrenchers all, accepted Brenda’s refills, probably hoping she wouldn’t ask Malcom, no need to induce a coronary before the boys had finished their chicken fried steaks, hashbrowns and sides of white toast heavily buttered and slathered with jam from those little plastic coffins.

“Can’t you see?” Malcolm asked. “It’s a conspiracy to hide the truth.” Little Jimmy, back to his eggs, asked “what’s the truth, Malcolm?” “I don’t know. None of us know. That’s the goddamn point!”

From my perch at the corner table, a not so innocent bystander over these many years, it seems like we’ve entered the Age of Anxiety. Climate change, immigration, inflation, Trump, the Deep State, nano-plastic poisoning, the coming Plagues, pick a subject, everything is a conspiracy. Lights over New Jersey, UFO’s in Oregon, nano-trackers in the vaccines. All politics are toxic. The enemy is everywhere except us.

Malcolm finally settled into his biscuits and gravy after sputtering to a stop. He probably figured Big Larry on the grill had doctored it. Who knows, maybe he had ….

More and more of us South Enders are losing their religion, don’t ask me why. I just read a survey that showed a quarter of us don’t believe in a Supreme Being, too bad for Donald Trump. That’s way up since the last survey. But here’s the odd part: the number of us who don’t believe in God but believe in an afterlife doubled. Faith based Heaven, I suppose, or maybe just bad logic, a trend that seems to be more and more prevalent.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine, Rev. Paul makes it a point most every Sunday to exhort his flock to eschew sin. Live a holy life, he preaches, and if you mess up, ask the Good Lord for forgiveness. Believe on the Lord, he says, or surely Hell will follow.

Now, I may be mistaken here, but I’m guessing most of the folks who believe in an afterlife are talking about Streets of Gold, not Beelzebub’s BBQ. You don’t believe in a deity, you probably won’t buy the quaint notion of the Devil. And if you think Heaven is waiting for you no matter what, why not enjoy a little sinning while you’re waiting for the Pearly Gates to open? No punishment waiting, no purgatory for the wicked. Believe me, Pastor Paul doesn’t pound that pulpit with his ragged Bible to tell parishioners they got nothing to lose if they covet their neighbor’s wife. Go right ahead, cheat the other guy on that used car you said was running great when you know damn well the engine isn’t getting oil up in the cylinder head. You can make a little extra money and still get a reservation in the Angel Motel after your last breath.

Shirley, my neighbor who runs the Pampered Pekingese Pet Grooming service, claims she’ll be reincarnated. As a pup. The Hindu believe the Wheel rewards those who do good, but I guess now we think we get what we want, not what we deserve. Shirley better hope she doesn’t end up at the pound with all the other unwanted pets. Not everyone gets pampered in this mean old world.