The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s been chilly here in Paradise the past few weeks. Burning wood the way a train fireman shovels coal, trying to keep warm. Back east the Bomb Cyclone has descended and friends and relatives send desperate missives concerning frostbite and frozen pipes. I’d like to help, but as you know, the Lord helps those who help themselves. I guess we have to assume the Lord is a Republican.

No, we’re going to venture out of our comfortable little cocoon here on the South End and head down to Central America. We got a buddy who works with the turtles there and he plans to rub our noses in how slow we’ve been to come on down where he has a hacienda on the Pacific slope of a mountain overlooking Tambor, then he’s going to vacation with us around his Costa Rica.

We’ve never been very south of the U.S./Mexican border. Oh, a couple of times we slipped across. Once we had a carload of empty cerveza bottles lying around the floor of a ’62 Chevy Impala we’d driven across the desert before accidentally, in our inebriation, found ourselves in four lanes of traffic, apparently crossing back into the Yew Ess Aye, not a ‘welcome back’ for four gringos trying to explain those empty beer bottles to the nice Mr. Customs Man. Once we’d ascertained the immediacy of our Situation, we acted swiftly and jettisoned that evidence. Sadly, we probably created flat tires and heartache for our fellow returnees. C’est la vie, as we say in Tijuana.

Another time I ventured down Baja when the State Department had issued warnings for us Americanos to leave, much less arrive, while the getting was good. That time I had a ’64 Chevy Belair, bald tires, pretty much on its last legs, and I had planned to donate it to the Mexican Department of Transportation when the machine gave up its ghost. It didn’t, I returned stateside, only to have it die in front of my ghetto estate in Seattle. I haven’t been back to Mexico since. Or anyplace further on….

So it’s off to the jungles for a couple of weeks. If I come across a howler monkey with a laptop, I’ll post a blog or two. But I don’t really expect the little primates to loan theirs out to a chimp like myself. Which means, once again, you get a reprieve from these trenchant malcontented observations intruding on your pastoral computer surfings. Now you’ll find out what you’ve been missing. No need to thank me. Thank the howlers instead.

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