The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Sometimes I lose track of time. Not just the days of the last week. I forget how old I am, all those years behind me. I’ll be looking at one of our Doug firs and think, my god that’s one bigass tree, neglecting to consider that it was fairly large when I came here 47 years ago. You stop and think how much difference half a century made the first half of last century, then how accelerated change was the second half, trust me, future shock is real.

We live down here in the backwash South End of Camano. What was a fairly desolate tail end of the island is now filling in with Boeing and Weyerhauser retirees, Dot.comers who cashed in early and refugees from California whose house back when it cost a couple hundred grand now makes them multi-millionaires up here. I suspect if we sold our homestead we could probably be the Nuevo royalty in Kansas or upstate Alabama. But then who wants to be King of the Louisiana swamps or Duke of the tundra in Upper Michigan. I already left those places — sure don’t want to go back just to own more acreage of swamp or snow drifts.

But … you stay put, the world doesn’t. I’ve resisted change ever since I parked my hippie ass down here, just wanted to be left the hell alone, good luck to the rest of so-called civilization. Still don’t have a cellphone but the mizzus does. I finally had to learn how to use a computer, got one on my desk up at the house I built 30 years ago. All those homesteader skills I learned, everything from plumbing to electric, carpentry to woodworking, they’re all mostly anachronistic now. 3-D printing, Artificial Intelligence, 5-G networks, drone warfare, hundreds of satellites orbiting, electric cars, social media, driverless vehicles, gene manipulation, not all of it bad, just the relentless push of progress, technology ascendant, all of us wired, connected to the Hive.

My father, recently deceased at 100 years old, told us boys on one of our Huck Finn Mississippi River houseboat trips back through the Wisconsin/Minnesota and Illinois/Iowa cliffs, he thought he’d lived in the best of times. Despite the Depression and World War Two. I think maybe I’ve lived through the tail end of those times. What’s coming next will be totally, unpredictably, different. Personally, I’m glad I’m old.

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