The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Maybe you missed the big news this week: physicists have observed gravitational waves, something Einstein predicted 100 years ago. Or maybe you heard, but you’re like me, wondering what I’m supposed to do with this breaking news, run out and buy a surfboard? A few years ago, okay, over a billion years ago two black holes ate themselves, distorting space and time just like Albert said they would.

You might be asking yourself, where do black holes go when they shrink and shrink and grow incredibly dense? Their gravitational pull sucks in even light itself. Hard to see the inside of these if no light is emitted. Telescopes are pretty much useless, sorry Hubble.

I wonder sometimes if the reason people don’t believe in science is that deep down we don’t understand it. Take quantum physics, for instance. Really strange behavior on the subatomic level. Particles behave different if they’re being observed. Don’t know about you, but this is mind boggling to me. How do you trust experiments if the experimenter affects the results just by watching?

The world we live in is beyond us now. Computers and lasers, microwaves and particle accelerators — I suppose they made Facebook possible and maybe that’s plenty for 95% of us. Gravitational waves, oh boy, let us see back to the Big Bang, sure, but will it give us better cellphones or 3-D printers? Those we can believe in, not the mumbo jumbo that contributed to ceating them.

Pretty soon our cars will do most of our driving, our machines will do most of our thinking. Satellites will spin in geosynchronous orbit and our TV reception will improve. Hopefully these gravitational waves won’t fuzz things up. We got some favorite programs to watch.

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Every once in awhile I get wind of another town that thinks it would be a good idea to arm the teachers in their schools. Having been a teacher for a very short career, I probably would’ve liked carrying a sidearm. Cut down on a lot of backtalk, for sure. And saved the cut-ups a long trip to the principal’s office. Course, when I think about it calmly, seems sort of harsh to inflict capital punishment from the front of a classroom. They are, after all, children.

I guess being Americans and all, the idea of a fully armed populace is appealing. You don’t hear many stories how some hijacker or bank robber met his match with a Dirty Harry packing heat, but that could change quick if we just advocated for universal ‘conceal carry’. Probably take some collateral damage, planes decompressing in a shoot-out at 30,000 feet, 7-11 customers caught with their Big Gulps in a withering crossfire. But it wouldn’t take long for us pacifists to realize we need to return fire ourselves, simple law of survival in the urban jungles of America.

We’ve maybe seen too many Westerns, all those cowboys with six shooters slapping leather on their hip and a Winchester in a scabbard beside the saddle. The folks down in Malheur rode in fully armed and they can’t understand why the Feds and the troopers and the sheriff won’t surrender. Or at least negotiate to give them the range land they say belongs to them, these folks up from Utah. Too many Westerns, like I said. Then, a month into their occupation, one dead and most under arrest, the remaining gang wanted amnesty before they left. Lucky for them the bureaucrats whose headquarters they liberated and whose jobs they disrupted didn’t take their own 2nd amendment rights as seriously. Be like letting the kids in my old classroom carry live ammo — for sure my odds would go way down.

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In breaking news this morning the Camano Commandos, our vigilante group concerned with porous borders and government over-reach, took over the Cama Beach ranger office and the old resort store. Dressed in camo gear and carrying hunting rifles and assault weapons, they barricaded the road down to the beach and the cabins, set up roadblocks near the entry station and demanded the tourists still vacationing leave immediately.

Walter Jorgenson, the Commandos unofficial commandant, issued a press release to the Stanwoodopolis Gazette demanding that the Park be returned to the People. Law enforcement, quick to respond to the potentially life-threatening take-over, shut down the highway outside the entrance to the park. State police soon joined forces with local sheriff’s deputies and two SWAT teams from Snohomish County. The FBI was reportedly on the way. Seattle news helicopters were already circling and mobile satellite vans were camped on the highway while the tense standoff had barely begun.

“We represent the People,” spokesperson Jorgenson said via Facebook. “We are sick and tired of these land grabs by the federal government.” He later clarified his statement to include state government as well. (Cama Beach, after all, is a state park.) By noon today the FBI and agents from Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco had set up a negotiating team via cellphone, although reception proved spotty most of the time. According to Vince Hammer, the FBI’s senior agent in charge, the Commandos’ demands were a bit vague. They wanted the Park ‘vacated by all government thugs’ and returned to the true owners, themselves. Mr. Hammer mentioned that, in essence, they already own the land. “It’s a state park, Mr. Jorgenson. You own it already. You drove right in, nobody stopped you. But now you’re preventing anyone else from the public sharing the park.”

The Commandos disagreed with this assessment strenuously. For the past two days the stalemate has stood. I met with Vince Hammer yesterday and offered a possible solution to the impasse. Hammer was reluctant at first but finally said what have we got to lose, we need to end this thing. Today I walked into Cama carrying a white flag (actually just waved yesterday’s underwear) and met with the Commandos who were obviously in serious television withdrawal. Walter’s first demand when I sat down at the old fir table was for a television to be brought in to the park. “Give it up, Walt, they don’t have cable here and I can tell you for a fact reception without a long distance antenna is zip. Maybe we could get you boys some videos from the library. Hell, Walt, if you’d been thinking, you’d have taken over the library.”

“What are you doing here, Skeeter?” one of the vigilantes asked. I said I was just trying to be a good citizen. “I got a deal for you men, something you might want to consider before the FBI decides to quit playing cat and mouse with you and goes ballistic.”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” Hank Griggs shouted, waving his double barrel shotgun in the air. “You got the safety on?” I asked. “You’re gonna blow your leg off if you’re not careful. But let’s cut the comedy, boys. I’m here to offer you a way out of this mess you got yourself in, let you leave without losing face. You can take it or leave it, but … I don’t think you’ll get a better deal.”

“Let’s kick his ass out to the highway,” Hank growled, still waving that 12 gauge recklessly. Walter growled back. “Let’s hear him out.”

And so it was that we traded Hutchison Park, the little county park no one uses, a five acre chunk of nettles and downfall I used to caretake as a volunteer, soon to be renamed Commando Corner. The boys surrendered to the FBI and were allowed to leave with their weapons and their pride intact. Me, I gave up my lawnmowing chores at the park and now they fall to the Commandos. I give it about six weeks of that and they’ll beg the public to take it back.

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We got a lot of folks on the South End making a living the hard way, meaning, they don’t work. In the pioneer days when I first scratched out a meager existence in these played out nettle farms, people survived on piece work here, odd jobs there, some bartering, some horsetrading, the usual indolent country skills. But the new folks, they do some of that, but mostly, due to some serious drug maintenance problems, they got more pressing issues. You want to maintain a heroin addiction, you probably aren’t going to commute to McDonalds and take a job as fry cook. No, it’s easier if you just steal what the neighbors got.

This is more or less what I left the city to escape. No, not jobs or employment. Neighbors stealing from neighbors. What was really sad back then was how the poor folks stole from the poor folks. Easier, I admit, to slip down the alley and come in a nearby backdoor than to drive up to the white folks’ suburbs even though the pickings would have made it more than worth the effort. Course then you have security alarms and motion sensitive cameras and a police force that patrols those tonier neighborhoods. Me, I had Dr. Gonzo.

Dr. Gonzo was a refugee of the Humane Society, part boxer, part hound of Baskerville, a fearless brute of a dog who had been abused by its previous owner who was, judging by her reaction to men, male. If you happened to be a black male, she ratcheted up her snarls about double the decibels. And if you were a fat male, she was nearly unmanageable. Frighteningly so. But if you were a black and fat male, she wanted to hurt you. She probably wanted to kill you. My assumption is her abuser might have fit that exact description and it might explain why she ended up at the pound. Her tormentor probably realized he wasn’t going to cow her and one of them had to go.

She was well known to my neighborhood. It was also well known my house wasn’t usually locked. Not with Dr. Gonzo inside. You wanted to walk in, maybe see if my TV was worth stealing, have at it and good luck. Men knocked on my door and I’d say, kicking a snarling growling Gonzo back behind me, come on in, why dontcha? “Naw man, let’s talk on the porch here,” they invariably replied. And invariably they would want to know if I’d consider selling Gonzo to them. “Maybe you’d like to get to know her better,” I’d suggest, opening the door a crack to let them see Gonzo trying to get her snapping jaws through and I’d say it doesn’t look as if she likes you, man. “How about you breed her, sell me the pups?” And I’d shake my head sadly, naw man, she’s been spayed.

I didn’t have much trouble in that high crime neighborhood even with the 10 units next door that were nothing but a breeding ground for drugs, gunrunning, sex trafficking and fencing. Still, it seemed, I don’t know, a corrosive atmosphere, a breeding ground for cynicism, a hard place to practice peaceful meditation. For both Gonzo and me. So we packed it in, bought a 1910 shack up here on the South End and made a new start, both of us. She died some years back, broke my heart. But at least she never lived so long she had to see the ghetto boys living next door once again.

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When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide berth too.

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