The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My 96 year old dad and myself are holed up for the weekend in Northern Wisconsin, bullshitting and reminiscing, but mostly watching the leaves turn color and sky moving across the glassy surface of Silver Lake. Minnesota and Wisconsin, lands of more than 10,000 lakes, long ago ran out of names for all of them, having reverted to multiple uses for Pine, Fir, Birch and Silver, of which even Google Map couldn’t differentiate the multiplicity. There’s even an Archibald Lake, but near as I can tell no Lac du Skeeter or even a pond bearing that noble moniker.

The only movement this morning is the percolating coffee, a few bugs skimming the lake surface, one sparrow hawk sliding swiftly through the pines on the lakefront and nothing else.. The day, the lake, the woods, the world … all frozen in near perfect beatitude. Not even the loons break the silence. Thoreau, eat yer heart out.

Bruce, next door, a rough, tattooed, chain smoking, alcoholic ex-over-the-road truck driver, inherited his cottage from Petey, who lived hard and died harder. He’s lived on Silver Lake all his life, knows who lived where and how long. Petey called his live-in girlfriend ‘squaw’ but loved Bruce who looked after her when her health spiraled downward. Bruce, no stranger to xenophobia and racism, ignored Petey’s admonishes to shack up with his ‘own kind’, a kind of tolerance in itself, what gives him some small right to consider himself religious.

Soon, but after we’ll be long gone, the lake will freeze two feet deep, buried under snow, and the great north woods from Maine to here will empty out its summer vacationers, leaving only the real residents, hard scrabble folks who watch us interlopers with mistrust and for maybe some work repairing cottage roofs, frozen pipes, deck replacements, snow plowing driveways. They may think they will inherit this earth, but eventually they’ll sell their share.

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