Skuke – Are you one, too?

I never thought I’d be called a Skuke. Hell, for the longest time I didn’t know the term. Few people do. I only happened upon it by chance.

This all started at a football game some years ago. I was tailgating with friends when I noticed a pickup truck sporting a sticker that designated our town by the shore. It’s a small little place so I went over and said hello to one of the NFL revelers.

After a brief exchange I walked away and overheard, “Who was that?”

“He was a Skuke,” was the response. I remember the tone. It was very factual.

I made a mental note, but like other such notes it was lost for a period of years. It did ultimately reemerge. The date is easy to recall. The Red Sox were on the verge of winning the 2007 World Series and I was in a local bar. Or should I say, a bar of locals.

By the third or fourth inning I was into a lengthy conversation with the man on my right who was telling me all about his early days in our agrarian town by the sea. Ours is a community where even today it’s not uncommon to pass a tractor on the road. But the story I was hearing was even more rural, one that featured boy who trapped and skinned mink, mailing the pelts to some faraway place for a buck or two a piece.

(Sharing the road by the sea.)

By the seventh or eighth inning the noise level in the bar rose as the championship drew closer to realization. Sometime at that point my old memory bank clicked. “Hey, by the way, what’s a Skuke?” I asked.

His eyes moved away from the world series game for a moment. There was the briefest pause. “A summer person.”

“A Skuke?”

“Yeah, someone who doesn’t live here year round.”

I nodded. “But what is it? What’s in the name, what’s the term Skuke come from?”

My friend at the bar turned from the game again. “They call summer people Skukes because of the planting season – people who are here between the Squash and Cukes season.”

Oh, I thought, and we refocused on the game, the exchange being one more entry into the memory bank.

Fast forward closer to the present when I found myself with a friend who happened to grow up in this same coastal town. Being an author and all I rolled-out the above story.

“Well, not really,” my friend told me.

“Not really what?”

“A Skuke. It’s a type of bird.”

“A bird?”

“Skukes are birds that move into another bird’s nest, use it, crap in it, and then they leave.”

My thought went back to the football game, the casual comment, “He was a Skuke.” I thought, too, to my bar room buddy who gave me the sanitized version of the term. Ouch.

I am sure locals can document numerous examples of how their community has been abused by others, but they may not be alone – I chuckled when my brother Frederic recently sent me the below David Sipress cartoon from the New Yorker.

It seems there are more Skukes among us than previously thought.

Perhaps we should just re-start our thinking, withhold judgement, and jointly confess the Skuke-like habits we all exhibit. Maybe then we can begin taking better care of this nest of ours.

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