The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Half our neighbors mysteriously leave the South End, some after Thanksgiving, some after Christmas, a slow but steady migration to points unknown. One year I asked Frank who lived across the road and was readying his 40 foot $200,000 travel trailer for what looked to be an imminent exit, where he was going. Arizona, he told me. ‘Kind of an expensive trailer for a road trip,’ I ventured. ‘Why not stay in some nice hotels?’ He told me his mizzus wouldn’t sleep on some strangers’ sheets.

Each, of course, to her own, I occasionally say, not always sincerely. But … the neighborhood sure quiets down in the winter and I’m all for that. Today we drove the length of southern Arizona, eventually reaching Yuma. Yuma, for you who have never traveled the southern border reaches, is where the Colorado River, once navigable by steamboat, is now a mere trickle of its tidal self where an outpost established over a century and a half ago still stands in a desert as forbidding as most any we’ve seen on this arid road trip. Bleak, flat, unforgiving. And yet … lining Interstate 8, thousands of my neighbor Frank’s trailer are crammed into ghettos of sun-worshippers who prefer the wall-to-wall existence of fellow exiles over a cold rainy Shangri-La back on the South End.

Promise these Bedouins in Behemoths a few months of sunshine in an implacably desolate and pitiless desert and they will be pliable putty in the hands of Machiavellian despots. FREE WINTERS IN SAUDI ARABIA – VOTE REPUBLICAN!! I guess living in air-conditioned seasonal comfort with windows facing an identical trailer 8 feet away may not feel like freedom so much as some kind of escape, a modern and humane penitentiary for the seasonally afflicted. Me, I’ll take the rain.

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