The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Saturday night at the End of the Road Tavern, Big Larry was pounding the weathered fir table he and Ed Grabowski, a newly unemployed log skidder, were sharing as they finished up a dinner of Donny’s Hot Wings and a plate of curly fries. Big L. was exercised over the Big City liberal weatherman calling the upcoming storm the result of Global Climate Change. “My global ass!” Larry roared. Ed seemed more inclined to drink away his recent lay-off than encourage environmental debate. As he got up for his 3rd or 5th or whatever bottle of Budweiser, he said to Larry, “Who the hell cares? The weather’s the damn weather. It changes. So what? Hit me again, Donny, willya?”

Donny slipped a hand into the cooler, corralled a Bud and knocked the cap off with a practiced expertise, then slid it two feet down the bar. “I dunno,” he ventured, “they might have a point. Heating up like a greenhouse, gotta change the winds, probably the ocean too.”

Larry wasn’t having any of it. “Aw, what next, Donny? We gonna quit cutting trees? Quit drivin our trucks? We gonna live like Afghans cause we’re afraid the weather’s too hot?”

Trapper Charlie suddenly came conscious at the end of the bar where he was watching college basketball between two teams he’d never heard of. “Ain’t like it’s gonna be all bad. We might become the new California.” Big Larry avowed how he’d rather get sent to Lake View Nursing Home down river than live in a new California with all those wine-sipping yuppie yahoos. Charlie said we’d still be the ones living here and Larry said he’d be damned if he’d live here then!

These are meteorologically interesting times, I guess, and we’ve debated this many a rainy night at the End of the Road. The scientists seem pretty much in agreement and the Hot Talk Radio folks are in total disagreement. I can tell you this — and I know it’s a small sampling poll — we aren’t going to do much else about it but argue, at least up here in UpCreek. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we change our minds or our habits. Donny says to no one in particular, “Maybe I should start stocking up on a higher class of wine. You know, just in case ….”

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I guess most of us have asked ourselves the Big Cosmic Questions. We’ve traveled our separate paths looking for Answers. We’ve read the holy scriptures, we’ve chanted OM until we’re blue in the face, we’ve sat in quiet meditation or done yoga poses, mindful of our breath, listening for the First Sound. We’ve wanted something to believe in that seems, well, More. Physics maybe, maybe the Bible, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Koran. Maybe poetry or a sign held up by some mendicant on 5th and Jefferson that says Will Work for Food God Bless.

Maybe something is missing. Maybe something in us just likes a Spiritual Journey…. We go to Tibet up 15,000 feet to eat rice and sit at the naked feet of the monks. We seek a swami who hasn’t spoken in 20 years in some jungle Hindu cave. We listen for Clues in AM pop songs and signs in the numerology of license plates. We envy the natives who seem Closer to something important. We see Jesus in the stain on a box of Cheerios. We read Carlos Castenada and watch for Omens, we’ve smoked ganja, we’ve eaten magic mushrooms, we’ve consulted psychiatrists, we read self-help books.

We’ve searched for the Wise Man, the Guru, the Priest and the Monk and come up short. We thought Happiness was an answer. Or Wisdom. Or all you need is Love, yeah yeah yeah.

I’ve lived 74 years in this body, in this mind, and I have yet to meet anyone that might come close to that Enlightened Person. I sat once with the Head Honcho of the B’Hai. Nice guy. Something to be said for that, I thought at the time, and still do.

The world is a riddle and maybe the riddle is the world. There comes a time, at least for me, when the paths seemed … oh … dead ends. That the questions themselves were wrong. That the seeking itself was the problem. That the mysteries would always be mysteries. That this life is just exactly what you think it is. That the universe is exactly what you experience. If there’s More, what does it matter?

So be careful, I guess, what you think this life is. Down here on the unenlightened South End, it seems plenty. And try to be good to your neighbor, it might be me.

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You might find it hard to believe, but the South End used to be a Destination Spot. The whole island did. The island you could drive to, one developer in the 80’s called it, but 50 years before that, the resorts promoted it the same way.

Camp Grande, Diane, Tyee, Cama, Madrona, Indian Beach, Camp Lagoon, Sunset Beach, Utsalady Beach, Camp Comfort. The poor miserable sweltering city folks could escape their sizzling apartments and rent a cabin for the week. All day long the menfolk would do what menfolk have done since Cro-Magnon dropped their tails and descended from the branches of the nut-trees. They’d sit on their butts and drink. Course we modernists call it FISHING. Which is really a euphemism for Drinking.

When the boat was full of empties and dead salmon, the boys would pull up on the beach and wobble up to the mizzus with their trophy salmons and do what menfolk have done since the 2nd day they hit the ground. Order the womenfolk to cook up the catch.

Back then they had these cute pioneer woodstoves in every cabin. Women must’ve really liked this. Their menfolk, being he-men, could split up the firewood with an axe, probably whacking off a couple of fingers and toes, and she could stand over a 500 degree stove in a cabin with all the doors and windows open and the kitchen about 400 degrees, and she could fry up some smelly fish for the whole squalling family. Later she could wash the burnt-on skillets and the rest in water boiled on the stove. She probably had the time of her life playing pioneer mizzus.

The resorts are all gone now, end of an era on the South End. Some say the fishing dried up. I say the women finally got fed up.

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There are islands and then there are islands. Manhattan’s an island, but the real estate agents bulldozed down its palm trees long ago. A lot of islands are isolated, a bump in the sea. Some islands hang out together. Geologists call them an archipelago. The islands by us didn’t get invited into the San Juan Archipelago Club. I think they knew we’d put bridges up and drive right on like we weren’t proud to BE an island. Naw, we wanted an umbilical to the mainland.

A Real Island sneers at the idea of the Mainland. A real islander doesn’t commute to a job back on the Mainland. A real archipelagist doesn’t shop at the QFC on the Mainland. An honest-to-God rock huggin, brine snorting, bent back barnacle covered island hermit doesn’t jump on a ferry every chance he gets so he can stand on Terra Firma in the Wal Mart parking lot.

A Real Islander is hoping deep down in his seaweed filled boots that the Tectonic Plates are moving him OUT past the Straits, out past Dungeness Spit, out past Neah Bay, out past the 3 mile territorial limits. A Real Islander came, not so much to Come to an Island, as to LEAVE the Mainland, physically, spiritually and meta-damn-phorically. They’re Escapists. They’re refugees from Real Life.

Our island hedges its bets. Way up at the cold north end, folks hardly know they’re ON an island. Down at the equatorial jungles of the South End, we’re unemployed, the drive just to the bridge is too horrible to contemplate, the only fast food we got is growing in our gardens and TV reception’s poor.

When the earthquake knocks down Camano’s puny little bridge, we’re gonna have some folks real surprised to learn they’re gonna have to make a choice finally. Course, when they build the South End Bridge to Everett, we will too.

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Louisiana just legislated the 10 Commandments be put in every schoolroom in the state. Doesn’t bother them that the Supreme Court has already ruled on this, might as well spend some tax dollars on defending that decision. It is, after all, the Word of God. Well, at least the God of the Christian Louisianans. Not so much some other religions’.

When I was a pup in the school system of Georgia back in the early ‘60’s, we had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning first thing and then one pupil would be required to read a verse from the Bible at the front of the class. I must have been in 5th grade at the time but even then I resented being forced to listen to Bible passages. Much less have to read one myself out loud. When my turn came around I read the shortest passage in the King James version: Jesus wept. Then sat down. Some of my audience snickered but most assuredly my teacher was not amused. Even though I had kept to the exact requirement she had laid out. And so she sent my Yankee ass down to the principal’s office, I guess to teach me some sort of lesson I hadn’t gleaned listening to my fellow classmates’ recitals from the Good Book.

It did teach me a lesson, although not one Mrs. Gilroy might have hoped I’d learned. It taught me I didn’t want the Bible or any other religion shoved down my throat. And so, back around 1980 when I heard the Stanwoodopolis high school was bringing in a Creationist speaker to argue against Darwin and that evil theory of evolution, I went to my one and only school board meeting to protest. I mentioned the Supreme Court decisions and argued that this school administration was wasting us taxpayers’ time and money pushing an agenda that was sure to end up in court and cost plenty in attorney fees. Gary, another concerned citizen, echoed this sentiment.

So naturally the following day I found religious brochures stuffed under my shack door and Gary, caretaker at the time for Cama Beach resort, woke the next evening to a carload of Chapel highschoolers apparently intent on intimidating him, honking their horn and spinning gravel down the long drive. When they arrived at his cabin, Gary was waiting in the shadows, shirtless, sawed off shotgun in hand and in no mood for these shenanigans. He tapped his shotgun against the driver window and asked to have the window rolled down. Please. Which, suddenly quieted, they did.

Gary explained that he was going to be merciful. This time. But next time …. He whacked the barrel of the shotgun on the bottom of the window frame and suggested they ought to get on home. Gary ended up getting fired from his caretaker responsibilities, a heavy price for self-protection, you ask me, but it did send a message. Some folks value their freedom. Thou shalt not take it away. Without a fight. Jesus may have wept.

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