The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Naw, guns don’t kill people, insanity and hatred kills people. Or in the words of one Ohio state representative, trans and gays were the real culprits in this weekend’s mayhem and mass murder. One Congressman claimed it was video games. Another pointed the finger at drag queens and marijuana. Former Arkansas Governor and Fox Gadfly Mike Huckabee says it’s a lack of thoughts and prayers. Me, I’m gonna go out on a long limb here, call me crazy, call me gay, call me an atheist, dress me in women’s clothes, and say it was guns. Yup, I think it was guns.

I grew up with Roy Rogers, cowboys and Indians, shoot-em-ups, all those wild west westerns where a 6 shooter kept the crooks from taking over everything but Boot Hill. I’ve owned guns, still do. I’ve hunted squirrels and rabbits and deer until I got in touch with my touchy-feely side and couldn’t do it anymore. I still kill crab but I don’t need a gun to do it. Touchy-feeliness only goes so far and I draw the line on Dungeness.

And trust me, I don’t have the solution to gun violence in America. There are more guns than people and there are people who like their guns better than they like other people. I just don’t think they ought to use their guns on the folks they don’t like. But now we got assault rifles, military weapons, more firepower than the police. We got folks like my bipolar buddy, Fast Freddy, who flew back to his home state on his last visit to buy a titanium .44 pistol and an AR-15 assault rifle. He was more manic than an amphetamine monkey but the gun shop sold him both. Something wrong with that picture if you’d seen Freddy at the height of his departure from lithium. Only picked up 32 times by the local police on his long trek out to our place. They knew he was off his rocker, I bet the gun store clerk did too.

Happiness may be a warm gun to some, but there are plenty of families who would beg to differ. Suicides, spousal killings, mass murders, accidental shootings. Gee, you think we should do something about this?

Let me assume for a South End minute that we actually do have the right to bear arms. I can’t keep a rocket launcher. I’m not supposed to have an automatic weapon. So is it such a far reach that we could outlaw — I know, I know, only the outlaws — assault rifles and military weapons? Maybe put some restrictions on dum-dum and armor-piercing ammo? The answer, if you’re not an NRA true believer, is fundamentally yes. Nobody’s taking ALL your damn guns, Bubba. Keep more than one by all means.

But sometime, somewhere in this fairy land we call America, we have to face the fact that blood is in the streets, in a community near yours, and people are dying, families are devastated, the carnage is real. And here’s some news for my Republican apologists. It ain’t the trans, it isn’t the gays, it isn’t violent video games, it isn’t insanity and hatred pulling that trigger. And no, Mike, it’s not a paucity of prayers. It’s guns. Wake up and smell the cordite.

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The rigor mortis tortoise, I heard someone call Moscow Mitch the other day. I’m not really a fan of 3rd grade name calling, but I gotta say, what’s good for the goose is certainly good for the gander. Back when Obama got word from Comey and the Deep Staters in the FBI, he came to Mitch to see if they could, in a bipartisan way, make the case to the American Public that our election was under assault by the Kremlin. Mitch, always a good patriot, said hell no, he’d play any move by Obama to warn the states that their voting booths were potentially being compromised, as a favor to Hillary and the Democrats. This, from the guy who refused to bring Obama’s Supreme Court nominee to the Senate floor. Patriotism? You be the judge.

Now it’s turnabout and I say fair play. Bill after bill to protect voting credibility get shot down by Moscow Mitch. Mueller’s only sign of life at the last hearing was an animated pronouncement that the Russians and probably other state actors were still attempting to manipulate our votes here in the Yew Ess Aye. This from the guy who only said yes, no, could you repeat the question or that’s in the report. He made it clear the electoral process was Under Siege. Everyone in that committee room wanted to cry out He’s Alive! Everyone in D.C., maybe, except McConnell.

Now, to be totally fair, I don’t think Mitch is a Russian asset. I think he’s a guy who would do anything to stay in power and to exert that power and if anything got in his way, God help them. He will violate the Constitution, he will say and do anything no matter how hypocritical, he will sacrifice the good of the country for himself and his party. Does that make him a Russian asset? No, but the Russians must love him anyway.

And the Republicans must too. But … let’s be clear here, the tide will turn and some election in the future, the Republicans will be at the wrong end of the barrel. Nobody wins Russian Roulette, not if they play long enough. Except maybe the Russians….

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This past weekend I drove upriver into the foothills east of Bellingham to visit my old friend from the Seattle days when we were both young and drove bus to the same elementary school. She and her biker beau had built a cabin on the Nooksack and I had even helped put up the roof. Funny how we both ended up living in shacks far off the beaten path, but then again, probably why we were friends in the first place.

Melinda lived in my ghetto house for a few months, about the time I hit the road for the island but before the house was sold. She came with her golden lab and I left with Dr. Gonzo, the fiercest dog I ever met and the beast that kept our larcenous neighbors from acting on their urges in regard to breaking and entering the two years or so I lived there. I didn’t bother locking doors back then, not with Gonzo on the inside.

But we left and Melinda stayed. She was mid-bath one afternoon when she heard a crash down below the upstairs bathroom and heard voices yelling at her lab which had started barking wildly. So she grabbed a bathrobe and scooted downstairs and out the front door while the intruders were helping themselves in the back to whatever they could find, not much in that house, trust me. Her plan was to barefoot it over to the hospital catty-corner, find a phone and call the police.

Which is exactly what she did. But when she headed back outside, a nurse asked her where she thought she was going. Home, Melinda told her. And the nurse, shaking her head, called a couple of orderlies to prevent that from happening. You aren’t going anywhere, she told Melinda, except back to your room. Now, what Melinda didn’t realize in her haste to get to a phone, was she’d flown into the cuckoo’s nest, the psych unit of Providence Hospital and there was no way the good custodians of the mentally ill were going to allow her to just waltz out of there barefoot in her bathrobe.

She tried explaining there was a robbery underway back at her house across the street, she told them how two intruders had hurled a potted plant at her dog on the stairs, she even mentioned she had been in the tub, why she was dressed in a bathrobe and no shoes. But these folks had heard it all before, they weren’t falling for that old line. No, ma’am, you need to get back to your room. Probably need an extra couple of sedatives.

Well, in the end Melinda finally convinced them she wasn’t totally crazy — and if you knew Melinda, you’d know how hard that would be — and by the time she got herself released from the mental ward the police were at the house and the thieves were long gone. Nothing much was stolen, not too much damage done, her dog was okay and the only thing hurt was maybe her pride. I brought the ferocious Dr. Gonzo back down to prevent repeat psych ward incarcerations and shortly after got the house sold. You ever wonder why I left the city, and Melinda too, maybe that was exactly why….

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The Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center will host the second annual Small Craft Advisory Saturday and Sunday August 10th and 11th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 27130 102nd St. in Stanwood, WA.

Small Craft Advisory is an invitational exhibition of high end crafts featuring the works of 16 artisans. Their work runs the gamut from pottery to cigar box luthiery, garden art to weaving, stone carving to furniture building, boat building to ceramics, sculpture to mixed media, Native American art to fiction writing, banjo building to stained glass.

Our intention is to introduce the public to artistic and original works of craft. Are they art or are they craft? We think you’ll find a simple to answer to that age old and time wearied question.

www.smallcraftadvisory.net

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Maybe it’s old age or maybe just the onset of senility, but lately I’ve been waxing nostalgic, remembering nearly lost memories from the long ago past, wondering sometimes if they’re accurate or simply how I’d like to remember them. A few days ago I was driving the backroads north of here, almost to Canada, when I found myself turning off on Mosquito Lake Road, a curvy stretch of blacktop I used to use getting to my old friend Melinda’s place. She and her biker boyfriend were living in tents and trailers while they built a rickety cabin board by board, added old doors and recycled windows, all one entire summer. I would drive up to help but Paul, her Hells Angel beau, mostly wanted to drink beer. Which we did.

Somewhere around early fall we put the roofbeam up and they finished the roof before the rains of autumn and winter arrived. Melinda had bought the land cheap after the loggers had clearcut her property and the hillside behind which now, with the rain, sprouted springs and creeks, making her homestead a muddy mess. Like myself with my shack and cut-over land, she loved the place, warts, stumps, mudslides and all. She cut firewood and lived alone when she caught Paul sleeping with a waitress down the road and she kicked his sorry ass out once and for all.

Every few years I’d journey back through time and space to visit, but eventually the trips ended and we communicated mostly by Christmas card, once a year, a few paragraphs, she’d married Robert, her mother had died, she got a job driving the Bellingham school bus, she’d built an addition, Robert was found dead in the river after fly fishing, she’d retired, she was pruning bud for a cannabis grower in town, stuff like that, but we kept in touch if barely.

I had a hard time finding the place now, maybe 30 years since the last time I’d walked the log across the creek to her Shangri-La, but finally I found a bridge she’d built, made me nervous driving onto it, but it held and there, tucked into the shelf between the woods and the creek, sat her cabin. A horse munched contentedly in its pasture, flowers filled the property with color, the cabin had been remodeled and looked like a pastoral dream with cedar shakes, paned windows, brick chimney.

Thirty years you can transform a muddy homestead into a reflection of yourself. Melinda certainly had. She squinted at me hopping out of my car, said who is this? and finally satisfied herself I was who she thought I was. We sat by the creek awhile, toured the property, caught up our lives, watched the hummingbirds and bumblebees work the flowers, savored for an hour or two the distances we had traveled. Nothing feels much warmer than old friends. And nothing brings a smile faster than knowing they did okay despite the setbacks. Melinda lives in paradise. And ya know, beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder, despite what they say, it is the beholder.

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Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

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