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.

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I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

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