The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The desert is a menacing place, I don’t care if you’re a native or a moss-backed tourist on safari to the dive taverns of Arizona with names like Jackass or Burro or Sidewinder. The boyz and me were hunting beer down in the flashflood washes and arroyos from Phoenix to Prescott. We’re old hands at this beerhunting, having gone every year for 30 years. We know the drill. Walk to the bars, do not drive. Drink, if not responsibly, at least semi-moderately. Eat. Even if it’s greasy bar food, put something in your belly to soak up alcohol. Try to maintain a modicum of control. Do not disturb the snakes or the natives, especially the venomous ones. The point is to hunt with passion, but also to bring ourselves back alive.

We made reservations in Bisbee a short walk from the historic Silver Dollar Hotel and other weathered historic taverns, but … our fellow slayer in Phoenix had asked his son and his son-in-law, confirmed golfers, along on the Hunt. These boys, nice guys in their 40’s with wives and two children each, decided to cancel our reservations and make them adjacent to the golf course in Prescott they intended to tame. None of the grizzled and seasoned Hunters had a say, but being get-along go-along yahoos, we acquiesced with subdued mutterings. In hindsight, we did not offer the sage counsel professional Hunters should have offered these tenderfeet.

The first warning sign was when they pulled their vehicles into a bar back in the hinterlands that had yet to open but did so in 5 minutes. While we sipped coffee, they threw down shots. Obviously the kids thought they were young and invulnerable. Beer? Not for them. They opted for the hard stuff. It took three or four roadhouses to wind our way up the canyon to our basecamp. By then they were feeling no pain and the day was young. Day two, they had tee times while we hiked the cacti lined trails nearby. They were throwing down shots for breakfast. Midafternoon we rendezvoused at the Palace Hotel, one of the ten best historic bars in America, downtown Prescott. Jerry was dragged in like a dead buck between the other two, blacked out from one and a half bottles of tequila. They laid him into a chair where he slumped from his wounds, unconscious but alive. We ordered another round of beers.

Hunting is not all that difficult if done correctly. Done with disrespect for the Rules, it is a nasty business and leads to all manner of vicious and unforeseen mayhem. By the end of the second night we had turned what should have been an exotic beer hunt into a morass of criminality, fear and abject self-loathing. The police finally intervened, pulling a carload of cocky amateurs onto the shoulder, hauling the intoxicated driver to jail and impounding the car. At three in the morning we went to retrieve our contrite fellow Hunter at the hoosegow. At eight we received a call that the Mex’s wife was in a Seattle hospital, under induced coma, intubated and possibly dying of what appeared to be opioid overdose. By noon we were driving him to the Phoenix airport. A definite chill had settled over the Hunters.

We’re back now and so far no lives have been lost. Next year, count on it, we’ll hunt in the Cascades once again, trespassing on the dam access patrolled by Homeland Security since Nine Eleven who threaten us or crossing the dangerously rotten old bridge high above the Cle Elum River to get back to our cabin. We won’t be inviting the kids. They can drink at home.

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