The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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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Some years ago I had a new neighbor and her husband buy the old schoolhouse next to the fire station up the road. Cute place, nicely restored by a glass artist friend who wanted to move to Portland to seek fame and fortune in the big city. Not that we’re the official Welcome Wagon of the South End, but we invited our newcomers over for dinner, got to know them over the following year and were surprised when we saw the For Sale sign on the front yard and their furniture gone. They had had grand plans for establishing a Tea Shop for her and a furniture shop for him on the island.

Okay, people come and go on the turbulent South End, for various reasons ranging from lack of health care in their proximity to the long and dreary winters. The grass is definitely greener here but folks get tired of mowing it. I get that. But what I didn’t get was these new found friends picking up and leaving without a fare thee well or a wave goodbye. Kind of makes a guy like me wonder if my judgement of folks is a waffle or two shy of breakfast.

Jump forward a couple of years and we’re on Orcas Island, wandering the tourist town of Eastsound when we pass by a little tea shop called, interestingly enough, Schoohouse Tea, a little too coincidental for my place in the cosmos, so naturally I want to go inside and see who’s behind the register. And yeah, it’s our old neighbor, more than a little embarrassed to be ‘discovered’ but after a few hems and haws and muted apologies over their fast escape velocity from the South End, she tells us the island just wasn’t spiritual enough for her tastes. Orcas, well, they’re basically refugees from the 60’s and she felt a kinship there she never got from us back on Camano, the island without a soul.

All righty, I guess the South End wasn’t her cuppa tea. We said good to see ya, good luck with the shop and your life, we got to catch the ferry back to perdition. Now the story might have ended here … except … a year later who should roll back into our little hellhole, the one without spirituality, but m’lady from the Age of Aquarius, building a house half a mile south of us. And better yet, she’d become a real estate broker!

I don’t pretend to be a guru of South End spirituality but c’mon, selling off our Paradise parcel by parcel, helping to clog our neighborhood with new traffic, cutting down the forest for McMansions, earning a living this way, trust me, that is not on the roadmap to Nirvana. And if we lacked soul before, I doubt selling used cars or real estate is going to bring us any closer to Shangri-La-La land. Money talks, they tell me, but not as loud here on the South End. That, I think, might be the key to our spirituality, what little we still have.

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When I was a pup we were taught in school that the strength of this country was its diversity, the melting pot theory that different cultures blended together and the sum was greater than its parts. Course, looking back, what we were really saying was that immigrants were welcome from Western Europe. Third world countries, well, you could pick our fruit and vegetables for slave wages, we’ll turn a blind eye to illegal border crossings, got to have that labor force for the jobs the white kids won’t do any more.

Now we’re hearing that the Democrats want to homogenize the electorate, ruining the white Christian majority so they can win power pretty much for perpetuity, the reason being that foreigners won’t vote for the Republican Party, evidently because that party demonizes them as rapists and drug dealers and leeches on their society. Gee, ya think?

We got all kinds of names for this, white nationalism, Aryan Nation, racism, white supremist … but lately the nom de jour is the Great Replacement Theory. Sure don’t want a mixing of the races or the religions. White Christian country is what they want and watering it down with inferior people is their worst fear. And they know exactly who of us are inferior people. I’m not sure they really understand Christian values, but don’t tell that to them.

So much for the melting pot. So much for the slogan on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
No, we want to build a wall now and close that golden door. Maybe just another part of American History we won’t allow to be taught to our kids anymore. Along with slavery or Japanese internment or Jim Crow or Chinese deportations or … well, anything that shadows the idea of a lily white shining city on a hill. Making America great again isn’t making it white. It never was and it never will be. Jeez, give me a break….

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Maybe I’m preaching to the choir, that, or just venting my irritation lately about my weekly shopping trip to the local chain grocery store. Quite awhile back my store put in automated checkout stations, something you might think is a good idea during the Pandemic plague era, protect the employees, protect you. Course, if you have a full shopping cart like I always do, that self check is problematic, items spilling over off the weigh-in platform, the time it takes to look up my broccoli, weigh it, decide if it’s organic, c’mon, I have to get home the same day and cook the damn stuff.

So naturally I gravitate to the lines where the human being says hello and moves my stuff three times faster than I ever could on the automated line. The trouble is, my store has decided in its apparent cost-cutting profit model to keep the check-out personnel to a minimum. Last week I got lucky, only one shopper ahead of me. Course, she had a cart loaded to the ceiling and to make it more nightmarish, she hauled out a wad of coupons gleaned from her newspaper ads, a guarantee of a long wait for all of us behind her.

To make my torture positively fiendish, she and the checker knew each other so it was a fine time to catch up on the happenings in each other’s life. For minutes at a time the checkout would stop, the gossip continue, the line behind me grow more agitated, me growing hot under the collar and finally time just stopped. Completely. Call Einstein, time had ended! I jerked my cart out of the cattle chute, went over to the self check and yeah, time started once again. Very slow, very very slow.

Yesterday I got behind another semi-truck load of groceries, the only check out aisle with a human, no bagger, and once again, call the ghost of Einstein, time stopped. And I swear to god, then it started to reverse itself. I was back in the line I’m always in, the one with no bagger, a yakking checker, a cart with a year’s supply of groceries and a fistful of coupons. And you know, you know as sure as you know the Big Bang theory, just before it’s your turn, just as you’ve started to move forward, the customer will ask for a rain check on that item she had a coupon for but was out of stock. Oh yeah, the Big Bang is going to happen all over again. When my head explodes….

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“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” said Justice Barrett in a speech at the Mitch McConnell Center in Kentucky last winter. Oh boy, that was before the leaked Roe v Wade draft that would overturn 50 years of precedent, something most Justices declared would be settled law. After the leak whatever trust folks had in the non-partisan court was pretty much shredded. Can you spell Dred Scott?

At this point in American history, at least the one we’re still allowed to teach without the stuff that might make students feel uncomfortable with, you know, native genocide, Japanese forced incarceration, slavery, KKK, lynchings, minor embarrassments like that, the last institution of capitol D democracy was the Supreme Court. Above the fray, unbiased judicial readings of the law, considered opinions unclouded by partisan politics, right? Right?

The Court was made a political pawn when McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland because it was too close to the presidential election. The Democrats rolled over for this, always the pillow fighters in a political knife fight, but when Barrett was rammed through just prior to the next presidential election, well, it doesn’t take a Philadelphia lawyer to understand what court packing is all about. McConnell is a liar and a hypocrite, but then, all’s fair in love, war and politics, I guess.

So, Amy, to answer your assertion you made in a very partisan setting that the Court is not a bunch of partisan hacks, c’mon, who’s going to believe that now? You folks sold us a used car without the brakes and the wheels about to come off. Nice work if you can get it.

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