The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I was a kid in Georgia, first grade until seventh. We moved there from the North Carolina Appalachians and we’d moved to North Carolina from the pine forests of central Mississippi. Y’all can still hear some of my Southern drawl even 55 years since I moved back into the North. But when I moved to Georgia, what they heard was Yankee. And what I heard from them was nearly an incomprehensible foreign language.

I took a mandatory year of Georgia History in 6th grade. Mrs. Crabtree taught it and Mrs. Crabtree thought 90% of Georgia History was the Civil War. We didn’t study much U.S. History, probably to my school it was more like World History. Mrs. Crabtree was pretty adamant that the wrong side won the War Between the States, the Yankee Invaders. Me, I was definitely on the Wrong Side, story of my sorry life.
You folks who haven’t lived awhile south of the Mason-Dison Line, you maybe think the North won that war. What you don’t understand is that the Confederacy never really surrendered. Oh sure, Gen. Lee surrendered to Gen. Grant at Appomatox in 1865, but most of the South didn’t sign those documents. They still haven’t. You maybe think slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, but like I said, you haven’t lived down there. The KKK still runs rural towns, blacks weren’t slaves, they’re sharecroppers, voting rights are systematically undermined by Jim Crow and now voter suppression laws, the South still flies the Confederate flag, the South still reveres Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the rebel generals who fought to save their ‘culture’.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re tackling that thorny issue of whether we should be celebrating the folks who fought to preserve slavery. One hundred and fifty years later we’re fighting the same war Lincoln did. Most of this country thinks the statues should stay put. Sort of like Grant letting the rebels take their horse and their guns and their white privilege home — you know, in the spirit of Yankee generosity.

Me, as a former Yankee in Jefferson Davis’ Court, I say it’s time to declare Victory once and for all. Take the statues down, remove the Confederate flag and give blacks equal rights. If this seems harsh, if this seems like we’re disrespecting Cracker Culture, get over it. We let this go for a century and a half. And Mrs. Crabtree, if you’re still alive, I got some news for you. The right side won.

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The mizzus came in today from collecting the daily papers down the hill on the road and said it was eerie. Eerie? I asked. Eerie, she said. No birds chirping, no birds making any noise at all. This afternoon I was up island with a friend watching an owl land in her backyard cedar tree. No crows came flying in to hound it half to death. No robins slammed their bodies up against it. The woods was, well, eerie for lack of cacophony.

My friend mentioned what Karen had said, the birds weren’t chattering away, they weren’t twittering or tweeting, they were silent. It was as if the internet had suddenly gone Dark. The aviary e-mails weren’t rolling in, the news feeds had gone dead, the social network had shut down. It was, okay, eerie.

We’re in a weird meteorological vortex, the high pressure cell off the coast is dragging hot weather up from far down south with temperatures hitting three figures by tomorrow or the next, about 15 degrees above normal, plus, the fires up in British Columbia are raging and now we’re pulling the smoke down here. We can’t see across to the Olympics anymore and Whidbey Island, a mere three miles away, is barely visible. The smell of woodsmoke is everywhere. I wonder if the birds and everything else in the woods is waiting to see if the conflagration is coming.

I tended bees for a short time. If you went into the hives, you smoked the entryway. This sent the honeybees into a fire drill of grabbing up the babies, scooping up honey, guarding the queen and in general, getting ready for the holocaust. Smoke, I imagine, sends a vestigial message to all of us critters out here in the wilderness. Fire is coming. Get ready. Shut up and pay attention.

Course, I don’t really know. Faux science on my part. I could set up some experiments, burn the back woods and see what the creatures behind me do. Run a few double blind studies, crank out the analysis, submit the data, posit a theory. Get some grants, apply to the U.W. science department for some research assistants, see if I could get some sponsors in the corporate world.

But you know I’m not gonna do any of that. I’m going to watch and listen awhile. I’m going to see if the birds stay silent so long as the smoke darkens the sky. I may keep my mouth shut myself. Like Karen sez, it’s eerie.

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I guess it’s news worthy to report each and every professional athlete who decides to make a political statement by refusing to stand up for the national anthem. Personally, I’m still trying to figure out what the hell spangled means. Splattered maybe? My handy dictionary sez it’s plastic or metal objects that are shiny. I guess Betsy Ross’s old flags might have had sewed-on plastic stars, but I kinda doubt it. Not that it matters, it’s a song, not a Magna Carta.

When I was a teacher, the school where I taught always played the anthem every morning through the loudspeaker in each classroom. My kids would dutifully rise and put their little hands over their hearts and listen half heartedly to the words, probably no idea they came from the War of 1812. Me, I’d sit at my own desk. The kids didn’t know quite what to think of this treasonous act and were too timid to ask. And I didn’t feel it necessary to give them my reasons. My business, my class. Freedom in America.

When I was a kid myself in Georgia, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and then one of us would read a verse from the Bible. Even as immature as I was, something about this smacked of tyranny. When my turn came to pick a verse, I picked the shortest one in the New Testament: ‘Jesus Wept’. Short and sweet and it always got me a trip to the principal where I was treated like an atheist communist sympathiser. Mr. Crawford would sit me down in the little room outside his office and explain to me, a Yankee intruder in his Confederate fiefdom, that insubordination would not be tolerated. When I tried to explain that I had met the terms of my assignment by reading a Bible verse of my choosing, he glared down at me like I was the grandson of William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who burned a swath through the state in the Civil War, and said ‘You know what I’m talking about here, Little Man.’

Indeed I did. Indeed I do. These folks who won’t stand up for the Star Splattered Banner do too. You think it’s a free country, think again. The herd makes its demands and you pay a price for ignoring them. But like the weekend armchair patriots like to say, freedom isn’t free.

Jesus wept.

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A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

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Yesterday the smog index for pollution particulates here reached a number where air quality advisories were issued to the region’s asthma and emphysema sufferers. I hafta admit, the smoky haze on the South End looked worse than the days of burn barrels when everything from plastic to rubber was incinerated in 55 gallon drums. Now that the drums are plastic, the neighborhood pollution is way down, score one for polycarbonates!

We’ve just set the record for the longest drought in history here in the Pacific Northwest and we still have a month of typical drought to go. British Columbia is burning and the fires are only starting here in America and I’m not talking political partisanship. The smoke from those northern blazes has been pulled down here, giving us red ball sunsets but obscuring the Olympic Mountains all day long. Beijing was one tenth the pollution level we were. Another day and we’ll all be taking our hikes in surgical masks if we dare to venture outdoors at all.

If you walk through our back 40 you can see the remnants of the fire of the 1880’s. Charred cedar snags rise out of the nettle canopy and the stumps of old growth fir show blackened bark even to this day. My former neighbor used to pile brush and debris on our side of the property line and when I asked him about it, he told me it was a fire break. You know … for his property, not ours. Changed my opinion about him 180 degrees. Good fences might make good neighbors, but not fire breaks.

Nature, in case we didn’t know already, can turn on you fast. Some folks are muttering already about global warming — and of course it may be partly or mostly to blame — but even the cyclical explanation isn’t any comfort. Me, I’m just hoping those burn barrels are definitely a thing of the past.

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