The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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It’s a dangerous world, anybody who listens to Hot Talk Radio can tell you. Yesterday I read EHS was far more prevalent than I suspected. EHS, for you folks comfortably uninformed, is short for Exploding Head Syndrome. So okay, I hadn’t heard of it either. But geez, what images that diagnosis would conjure up! “I’m sorry, Mr. Daddle, but you have EHS and we’d like it if you paid immediately and left the building,” my doctor might say once he confirmed the test results, no need endangering the unwary patients in the waiting room.

The article I read told me 1 in 5 students surveyed in a University study suffered from this gruesome malady. Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of Ichabod Cranes walking headless around campus. I can only assume their GPA suffers, but the article never cited statistics on diminished academic performance. As I read further, I was informed EHS was characterized by loud bangs heard in the night. Imaginary bursts of noise, sharp enough to awaken the afflicted from a sound sleep. 1 in 5! Explosions in their dreamy heads.

On the South End we got a lot of folks with odd ailments. We have actual gunfire frequently, but I guess that doesn’t count. Normal incendiary reports. At least I think that that gunplay is real. Now I’m not as sure. Now I’m starting to worry. I was chatting it up with Mudflap Mike today and I noticed he didn’t seem to be following our conversation, kept glancing at his cellphone to check messages, took an incoming and text messaged twice. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, reading articles on newly discovered pathologies, but I swear Mudflap was its EHS’s newest victim. All I know is a part of him wasn’t there, the part above the shoulders. And now that I think of it, that’s true of a lot of my friends. My god— we may have a pandemic on our hands!

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Just this week a researcher looking for a substitute antibiotic found a thousand year old recipe for eye balm, no doubt one of Merlin the Magician’s potions passed down witch to witch. The formula for this consisted of garlic and herbals and bile from the belly of a cow. I think eye of newt was optional. The whole concoction was aged in a brass or copper vessel for exactly 9 days, full moon or not. Our intrepid researcher followed directions precisely and at the end of 9 days, applied the ointment to petri dishes of various strains of disease-causing bacteria. To her surprise, the stuff killed MERSA, the staph infection nothing we have in our medical arsenal can touch. Killed it 90% dead. If we can keep from adding it to chicken and livestock feed, or prescribing it to every patient with a runny nose or a mild headache, maybe we can stop MERSA for a few years until it develops immunity to fermented cow bile.

Down here on the pharma-centric South End, our labs will soon be scouring medieval manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, shaman’s diairies, sorceror’s journals and Sumerian tablets for the lost cures of our less advanced civilizations. Jimmy the Pestil is working out in his detached garage with puddle water growing strains of fungus gathered from his clogged gutters. He claims it kills lots of things, but nothing like SARS or E-bola. His cat nearly died drinking some nasty vetch with floating fungus, but that didn’t stop his neighbor’s wife Sarah from ordering up the recipe in hopes it would, in small but regular doses, cure her husband Hal’s erectile dysfunction if she added it discreetly to his coffee every morning.

Why not? If our scientists have to resort to alchemy and the potions of wizards back in King Arthur’s time, what have we got to lose? Bubble bubble, boil and trouble, put a fire under the iron kettle and start stirring in nettles and the saliva of wild rabbits, let it age a few days, take notes and give it to the neighbors for their ills. Every night on the Boomer News, the pharmacies are offering their own remedies for everything from twitchy toe syndrome to roving eye disorder, then they spend a minute or two warning us of the side effects, everything from psychotic episodes to jaundice to death. If ever the cure was worse than the disease, half of these are. Let’s face it, Jimmy the Pestil’s potions couldn’t be half as bad. Plus, with a little blind faith, the placebo effect should cure most of what ails us. I know Sarah thinks so, judging by her smile lately, and that’s good enough for me. The rest of you, go ahead and consult a physician. Or your local sorcerer.

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The ill-fated Nettle Festival was conceived as the kick-off to Rev. Ralph Fisher’s tent revival for the Little Church of the Ravine. THE END IS NEAR, his readerboard sign announced months ahead of the scheduled event, THE SOUTH END REVIVAL IS COMING! The congregation might have known what was slouching toward us, but the rest of us down here were bemused or amused, depending on our degree of what the good reverend referred to as ‘heathenism’. The South End was in mighty need of missionary work itself, he was fond of preaching, but their puny tithing went instead to saving the natives of New Guinea and east Africa. I figure they were easier to convert than us locals who were fairly content to wallow in our puddles of iniquity.

The Nettle Festival itself wasn’t such a bad idea. In fact, the Tyee Store tried to revive it a few intervening years after what was referred to as ‘the tragedy’. But even today there are members of the congregation who break into sobs over their coffees when mention is made. And this is 35 years after ‘the tragedy.’ I speak of it now in hushed tones and never around Mildred’s family who still live down the road. Some events in this mean old world aren’t meant for sarcasm or ridicule, although you would have to admit, even the pious among you, that Rev. Ralph overdid it with the Nettle Maze, his Labyrinth of Itching Hell.

Stigmata wipe-off tattoos are one thing, but the Nettle Maze crossed the line. By the weekend of the Revival, the Little Church had erected a tent worthy of Ringling Brothers. Churches from as far away as Sedro-Wooley and Darrington had come in converted school buses and rickety vans, hauling the Believers and their children from far and wide for a day of righteous fun and old time religion. Pastor Philip of Pentecostal fame arrived the night before from his circuit riding, prayed with Rev. Ralph and his long-suffering wife Mildred and slept the peaceful sleep of the Godly before that morning’s first sermon of fire and brimstone-laden admonitions blistered the varnish off the old pulpit.

By afternoon the sun came out like a prophecy and the festival cranked up its volume. Chainsaw carvers sent cedar chips flying and the face of Jesus appeared in chiseled log sculpture. Stigmata wash-off tattoos made the teenager giggle, 666’s on foreheads being by far the favorite of the boys. Glossalalia crossword puzzles didn’t work out so well, but the Biblical action figures of Moses in combat with John the Baptist and Jesus himself down by the firepit were a huge hit with the younger kids.

And of course there was the Nettle Maze. The Labyrinth of Itching Hell itself! Half an acre of loops and turns and dead ends so intricate not even Jimmy Randall, the church caretaker who’d carved the trails over the past three weeks, starting when the plants were three feet tall and he could see over them, could navigate safely. Now, of course, they were higher than the tallest man’s head and impossible to survey beyond the impenetrable wall of stinging stalks that held each entrant locked into the maze. Dozens were wandering hopelessly lost in there when a foul wind came up like the cold breath of Beelzebub himself, the one Pastor Philip of the Pentecost had predicted only half an hour earlier in fiery prose. Hell had come to the South End or surely would arrive soon, the unsuspecting crowd had been informed and sure enough, a mighty howl rose from the ravine like the thousand laments of the Lost. The sun blotted out behind dark and treacherous clouds and that cold wind became a tempest and the circus tent became a shaking thing, alive and monstrous, tearing at its ropes, sending one and all running for the safety of the field before the cords tore loose and the canvas tent set sail like an ungodly wing, flapping into the distance before it shrouded the chapel itself and caught on the belfry where it ripped itself to pieces on the steeple. Torn asunder, Rev. Ralph would tell of it for years. Torn asunder!

But those inside the Maze had nowhere to turn. Children and adults alike wheeled and fled, down paths that went nowhere, flayed by the wind-whipped stalks of stinging death. Well, not death, literally, but who knows what went through those terrified minds besotted with brimstone stories? Their screams reached the field beyond, but what could we outsiders do except listen in horror. One by one the survivors stumbled out into the raging storm, rashes covering their faces and hands, tears streaming down their pockmarked faces. The Little Chapel opened its double doors to lead these blinded sheep inside, to calm them and offer balm, to offer shelter from the storm. Pastor Philip was in 7th Heaven, finding in the calamity further proof of the Scriptures. He was in fine form, everyone agreed later.

But it was later Rev. Ralph realized Mildred was missing. He went from person to person asking if they’d seen Mildred. No one had. A boy sporting 666 on his forehead said he’d seen her go in the Maze. “Are you sure,” the congregation cried, nearly in unison. He was certain. Rev. Ralph led the search party. The wind had abated nearly as quickly as it had come up. Down at the Labyrinth the nettles had been laid down in haphazard rows as if the horn of Jericho had blown and there, in the exact center, stood Mildred, stone still, a strange statue of a woman staring into the sky, not moving, not crying out, just frozen in time and space. Between Heaven and Hell, Pastor Philip would say more than a few times in the following days. Only Rev. Ralph dared approach and he did so with the utmost trepidation as everyone watched in dread.

Mildred was never the same. Some say she wasn’t quite right to begin with, but that’s uncharitable. She spoke in tongues a day later. Unintelligible garble, strange utterances, ugly curses. But I’ve never heard that from anyone who was actually there. I do know it’s hard to be with her even now. She doesn’t actually engage and looks right through you while she perpetually scratches at her arms. It may be she’s lost forever in that maze. It may even be, as the Bible thumping Pastor Philip would say, we’re everyone of us lost in that maze.

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