The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Road leads to many destinations — as I don’t need to tell you. But … it also leads to a few box canyon dead ends, washouts and … well, Final Destinations. I have a pal who drove his camper to Moab, then to Blanding, Utah after a spat with the Moab trailer court slumlord, then on to who knew where when the camper died and was towed to Big Puddle. Big Puddle, a dry hole in the exact middle of nowhere, will be where my buddy dies, trust me. Not saying it’s a bad place, this Last Stop in the desert, but it truly is the end of the road, population pretty near zero.

Today we drove from Saguaro National Park to the town of Dragoon, Arizona to visit an old artist buddy who moved from the South End to the end of the world here. He’s built himself a two story box with one window in a desert that fries lizards in the summer, has two semi-box containers to store his possessions along with a shed or two plus a couple of trailers filled to the rafters. Desert chic. A van, a car, a truck, a couple of lowboy trailer frames, a yard full of construction debris, lawnmowers, all strewn across the property. The neighbors’ places look worse, but not by much. Unlike back home, it’s hard to hide what you hoard in the desert.

On the way out I felt a kind of pity for my friends’ hermit ways, living on social security, far from civilization, both slipping quietly into the landscape of an America more and more digitized, anachronisms as lost to modernity as prospectors up a dry gulch far far from the reach of Rome. Course, now that we’re crossing the Sonora Desert, heading slowly home, it did occur to me that maybe, just maybe, their homes are more similar to the South End that I came to more than 40 years ago than I care to admit. End of the road, end of an island at the end of a continent. We don’t always recognize the Final Destination, I guess, when we arrive.

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