The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m parked in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport waiting my turn to fly the friendly skies, reading a little, writing some, watching my fellow passengers checking e-mails or their stock markets or whatever else they monitor on their ‘devices’. I’m going home after a week on the River with my old man and my brother, a bunch of geriatric Huck Finns searching for childhoods thought lost, our raft a small houseboat we navigated through 10 Lock and Dams over 250 miles between Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Mississippi River valley where the eons have carved through limestone bluffs hundreds of feet high to create canyons we wove our way past in channels surrounded by islands and swamps, estuaries and sandbars.

We passed old river towns, rusted railroad bridges, interstate overpasses, dredging barges, parks and wilderness, steam paddle wheelers, flocks of white pelicans and cormorants, eagles’ nests, fishermen and tugboats pushing 1000 foot barges. We slept on sand bars and the occasional marinas, docked at historic towns, biked on river roads, kayaked the backwashes, swam in the muddy Mississippi. The sun set red from the haze of western wildfires and the moon rose a red fingernail in starry nights. If I paint a romantic adventure, don’t let me underestimate the journey. The Old Man told stories of his time in the Maine woods one cold winter with his dad, running a logging camp in the Great Depression where he went in in the fall and came out when the river ice melted for the spring log drive downstream.

Lots of stories of life in the American Past, told and retold, probably soon to be lost, another history slipped unnoticed beneath the river’s current. We’re all old men now, refugees of another era clinging to our own sentimental past and knowing they’re the same dreams as the pioneers and loggers and bargemen, legends now only in our own minds. Tell the androids, why don’tcha, we were here. Tell the machines what came before them, who imagined them. Tell them they’re welcome, the ingrates. It’s their world now. And be sure to tell them they don’t have a freaking clue … and never will. Oh, and ask them – nicely – if they’d take care of the forests and streams, the oceans and the air. Be good karma for them if they did.

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