The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The mizzus and me are on a Retirement Road Trip. Tonight we’re hunkered down on the raging Salmon River which is over its floodstage and rising fast. Of course we’re in a cabin alongside it, a few feet from its bank-chewing edge. The mizzus is on edge too, since we booked this place for three nights on the assumption we wouldn’t be evacuated or swept downstream, a bet she’s not willing to take now. The Salmon, what some call the River of No Return, drains eventually into the Snake near Hell’s Canyon, digging canyons deeper than the Grand as it drops 7000 vertical feet from its headwaters.

Okay, I know, if you wanted a correspondence course in Geography, you’d have gotten one on-line and accredited. But hellfire, we’re parked here, the mizzus is chillin’ and I’m blowing up the inflatable raft — just in case.

The guy we rented from just bought these cabins, signs tomorrow. He was planning to retire himself but his buddy made him that offer he couldn’t refuse. You know the one. So good it can’t be true. He’s 69, Bob is, two years younger than me and he’d sold his own resort in Oregon a year earlier when this place came up and his pal ended up with Stage 4 cancer and supposedly practically gave this place to him. He’s been here all of 5 days now. We’re the first guests and yeah, the only ones.

We’ll see. Maybe his friend saw the 10 day forecasts. Rains, pestilence and frogs. Followed by the 100 year flood. River of No Returns, indeed! Fiscal returns anyway.

But … the mizzus is retired and her river affords no paddling backwards. We’ve visited friends and we’ve hiked places from our place to the Tetons. America is a beautiful country, like the song sez. Trump fired Comey, we heard about the same time as Comey, through sporadic reports and red state newspapers. No one much cares about some Saturday Night Massacre of the FBI director, they got a river rising and so do we. It’s roaring toward Hell’s Canyon and, well, so are we. Hang onto your hats and don’t look back, the rapids are at our front door. All our front doors….

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