The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It’s been raining here in the land of rain, the Pacific Northwest. Even here on the banana belt of the South End, the rains are biblical. Water is coming off the hillsides, down driveways, off the bluffs, over our clogged gutters. The gutters, well, they’re not really unusual since I’m a little slothful when it comes to keeping them clean. The bonsai trees seem to thrive up there, if nothing else. But the bluffs, not ready for this kind of constant deluge, they’re slip-sliding away.

I just put the finishing touches on the new oars I built for a rowboat I found escaped from its moorage in one of last winter’s storms. It had a 1979 Arizona registration number so we could, if we wanted, surmise it had journeyed through deserts and over mountains, blown by sandstorms and avalanches, all the way to Puget Sound where I found it washed up a mile north of my beach. It kind of looked like it had had a rough voyage, but hey, any boat in a storm, I say, so I hauled it back to our bulkhead, patched it up and used it for crabbing last summer.

My new oars needed one final fitting before I attached the oarlocks so I was taking them down to the beach for a tryout … only to discover a landslide of trees, blackberries and a million years of sediment layers had sloughed off and buried the bulkhead stairs and smashed my twelve foot dinghy into a four foot crumpled tin can. So much for fitting oars for that compacted aluminum scow. Easy come, easy go, as the philosophers say.

I stood there awhile in stupefied wonder, staring at my wrecked rowboat and at the naked bluff where water was still seeping along a clay layer, threatening further mayhem, maybe even treating me like it did my boat. A watersogged peninsula of sand hovered precariously 50 feet above me, ready to let loose any minute, so I decided to abandon my nautical dreams and just get myself and my oars out of harm’s way.

The weather folks are predicting rain for the rest of the week. I’m predicting landslides. The neighbors on the bluff are suddenly alarmed, I guess just now noticing that the banks aren’t stable. My second prediction is that by next week we’ll see a new crop of FOR SALE signs across the road. That, or maybe I’ll have beachfront property soon if the monsoons don’t stop.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2017 at 2:40 am and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.