The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Rowing Into the Past

A friend of mine about a month ago took me down into his basement/garage to show me ‘something I might be interested in’. We’d been knocking down some adult beverages and so I deduced that the ‘something’ would be maybe not as interesting as Chris thought I might think. When we got the lights turned on and half a dozen stray power tools moved out of our way, there sat a 12 or 14 foot wood rowboat, old style, bent ribs on the floor and cedar hull fastened to those. Old paint and varnish were flaking and some of the seat wood was missing. The bowstem had rotted up top, but for the most part the boat was intact.

My buddy said he’d had that for a couple of decades, figured he’d fix it up, put it back in seaworthy shape, but you know, time slips by and now the ‘something I’d be interested in’ is jamming up his shop and garage. He avowed as how I might be just the person to finish that unfinished task. After all, I’d built boats with his brother back when we were a tad younger, about 25 years ago. “What do you want to give me?” Chris asked. I set my beer on the bandsaw table and took a little harder look at the boat.

Finally I said, “How much you give me to haul it out of here for ya?” He snorted wine out his nose. We’ve known each other about 30 years. “Okay” he finally shrugged, “it’s yours if you want it.” Yesterday I drove up north to pick it up, shoved it in the bed of my pickup and drove it home. The mizzus is gone this week and you can be sure she’ll be excited when she sees this ‘project boat’ on its sawhorses by the garden soon as she gets back. I figure she needs something to do in her retirement years.

Turns out the boat is a classic rowboat built by the Davis family up on some island in southeast Alaska. Probably about 80-90 years old, all Alaska yellow cedar and supposedly a very fine boat. One just got restored at the Wooden Boat Center here on the island and donated to the Alaska State Museum. So since the mizzus is a historian, I figure …. Well, you know what I figure.

So now I’m going to have to learn how to steam bend wood to replace the worst part of the boat, its bent interior ribs which are rotted or are already broken. I always say we should keep learning, but damn, I have avoided steaming wood for a long time. Not that it’s really all that hard, but it takes setting up all kinds of rigamarole, lighting fires, making steam boxes, experimenting, starting over. But this is a nice old boat. And if you’d ever rowed my aluminum one, you’d maybe understand why I’d prefer a more handsome ride over some crusted aluminum can. Trouble is, I have a 12 foot aluminum boat coming in this week soon as I pick it up. Boy howdy, will the mizzus love our new boatyard.

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I’m taking care of the neighbor’s chickens while they’re vacationing in Europe. Actually, I’m taking care of their hens while their usual chicken babysitters are vacationing in Oregon. The chicken coop, a veritable Trump Tower of a coop/aviary, sits right beside our joint property line so it’s no big deal to wander over and check the water, toss some chicken feed, gather up the eggs and cross back into my woods. The boys who usually handle this asked if I would check the house too, see if burglars had been prowling or were living in the mansion.

Some years back, shortly after the house was finished, the new owner was sunbathing in the privacy of her back yard and someone caught her sans swimsuit out on the lawn. That trespasser, she figured, being an amateur Sherlock Holmes, must be me since I live right next door. This created a bad start for our neighborliness as you might suspect. Nobody really wants to be accused of being a peeping Tom, but my neighbor kept asking friends of mine if they thought I was capable of this. Hell if I know what my friends probably told her, maybe worse than that. But she wouldn’t let it go and that dark cloud hangs over our mutual backyards like a constant threat of rain.

So I said no, I wouldn’t be caught dead or on video surveillance camera snooping around their house, just wasn’t worth the potential trouble to play security guard for them while they were vacationing on the Oregon coast. Michael mentioned that the owner had recently asked about me, whether I was a liberal or a redneck, a libertarian or a banjo whacker, a …. whatever? ‘What did you tell her?’ I asked. I’ve only lived next door to them for, oh, 15 years or so, how would they know what I was like, right? Admittedly they’re absentee chicken ranchers mostly, come up on holidays or a few special occasions, probably check on the trophy house, see if my buddies mowed and trimmed and pruned their fruit trees correctly. Rich folks. The kind of neighbors I love the most, especially the absentee part.

‘I told her you were a story teller,’ Michael said. We were next to the coop, chickens hopping up and down the escalator to the pen from the motel room style appointed laying bins. They were doing their cackle thing. A story teller, I repeated. What the hell does that tell her? A story teller is like, for her probably, a congenital liar, faux facts, Trump supporter, who knows what would run through her suspicious head?

I don’t know either what that means. A story teller? Well, okay, let’s roll with it. Stay tuned, is all I can suggest. If my chicken ranching neighbors have video cameras tuned to that chicken coop and find me prowling around their pen, I suspect we’ll have a sequel to this little story. If not, I get some free eggs and chicken shit on my boots. Life on the South End in these modern times … it’s never what I expect.

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NEVER GIVE AN INCH, you might as well declare as the motto for this current administration. Kellyanne Conway, on the heels of Spicer’s departure and the arrival of the hedge fund manager now Communications Director, Scaramucci, evidently decided six months after her Alternative Facts fiasco to just go ahead and explain herself. And the Trump Team. And how more has been done in this Presidency than we give them credit for. More jobs. Record stock market. Peace on Earth. Intergalactic reputations. All that stuff you maybe missed paying too much attention to possible Obstruction of Justice, Collusion with a Foreign Government or Lying Under Oath and/or Tweet. Partly sunny, see, partly cloudy. Variable. Neither here, but not actually there. Not really one, but not the other….

I see partly cloudy with a hint of thunderstorms and raining of frogs. But, of course, I’m listening to the lying media. Time, maybe, to tune into Breitbark and Fox. Sunnier weather, no doubt. See which way the wind blows. Right to left or left to right. Kinda both, see, partly cloudy, a little sunny. Alternative facts, who can really say? You muddy the water, spin the data, shake and stir, well, sir, you got something nobody can say for sure, take your pick, roll the dice, flip a card, check with yer astrologer, it’s too close to call….

Me, I appreciate clarification like this. For awhile I thought the Trump administration was trying to justify lying to me, thought maybe I was dumb as a box of ballots, figured they could sell me some snake oil or nutritional supplements and I wouldn’t know the difference. But partly cloudy, sometimes sunny, well … I can sure see which is which, facts are facts and bullshit is bullshit. I think so anyway. Or perhaps partly factual, partly b.s. Hard to say, except for the administration’s communication people. Anyway, thanks, Kellyanne, for clarifying that. Maybe thanks, maybe bite me. You know what I mean.

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It’s only been six years since Inauguration Day. Oh, wait, six months. That feel like six years. And already the Comb-over-in-chief is examining whether or not he can pardon his family and friends and possibly himself for the inevitable verdicts that are coming down the pike faster than jobs are leaving the country. You have to keep pinching yourself to see if this is all some weird dream, something you’ll wake up from and find Hillary Clinton in the White House. Benghazi Benghazi, the war chant of the same folks who can’t find it in their conscience to demand much of anything when it comes to Trump’s malfeasance. Lock her up! Lock her up!

Keep pinching yourself, it isn’t Hillary who’s headed for prison. And yeah, the guy who will be is already looking for his escape route. You can lie all you want selling real estate and name brand to the money boyz in New York and Moscow, but lying under oath, especially to the FBI and the Special Prosecutor, good luck with that. Ask Bill Clinton. Sexual dalliance is one thing, but lying won’t cut it. Give him credit, though, he never planned to pardon himself. That tactic is reserved for the doomed and Bill was never one to see himself as the victim. Donald, oh yeah, he sees himself as something he never dreamed, the recipient from a thousand bullies’ attacks. So unfair! Bad!

The noose is tightening every day and you can hear the screams of anguish from the White House at 4 a.m. every morning clear out here on the Left Coast. The legal beagles he’s hired evidently didn’t counsel him to stay quiet on the subject of executive pardons. He might as well stop tweeting now and plead the fifth, ditch the attorneys and save some time and money. Nobody who is innocent would be considering pardoning himself, let’s quit fooling ourselves. A written confession might be slightly more damning, but in the absence of that or Mueller’s future indictments, I think a jury of his peers will need pardoning too, but for the jury of us citizens, the only question now is the sentencing.

Personally, I’d be okay with a pardon. Just leave office in Abject Shame, the Trump brand forever synonymous with Lying Loser. Send him back to his gold palace and ban him from public appearances for the rest of his self-absorbed days. Put an asterisk in the history book in the blank space for 43rd President of the United States. * Unindicted Co-conspirator. Pardoned by Himself. No Memorable Legislation.

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