T.T. tweeted a few dozen pals who showed up en masse to clear the rest of the shelves and then a few of us capitalist vultures parked at the table for a couple of cold ones with Don, the manager who presided over the post mortem of the late great Tyee Store, now officially shuttered, possibly forever.  The neon beer signs went dark, the coolers were turned off, the framed South End posters came down, the place went quiet and dark as Tut’s Tomb.

We didn’t have a lot to say.  Brick mortar gives way every day to digital shopping and maybe Tyee had outlived its terminal prognosis.  Patti came by with her kids, one not even born when she first hired on as clerk some 16 years ago.  Sad to say, but the Store was the South End’s largest employer all those years.  Minimum wage, no benefits.  A lot of us worked there.  But nobody longer than Patti….

So we drank a few toasts to Ted and Ellen, the original owners, to Jigs and Ruby, to Dick and Sandy, to Don and Helen, all the owners.  I tried to remember the names of a few of the help, but time has taken its toll and those beers didn’t refresh any brain cells.  I finally said, as usual, it was time to go home and face the music.  We all shuffled out and into the night, solemn as casket bearers.  And another Mom and Pop store closed its doors and went dark on the backroad of an America receding in the rearview.

The South End wasn’t always the Backwash Dead End far flung terminus of Camano Island.  Back in its heyday, about 1915, it was a thriving port with a 1000 foot wharf jutting proudly out into the storm tossed Puget Sound.  The Atalanta and other mosquito fleet supply boats moored up for deliveries and mail 2 or 3 times a week, dropping shipments and taking on passengers.

Mabana—– crown jewel of the Saratoga Straits.  The Seattle classifieds advertised 5 acre parcels perfectly suitable for chicken ranching.  So the Roaring 20’s on the South End were more like the Cackling 20’s.  The wharf, of course, sticking out into the full fury of the Sound, got whittled down to the piling stumps you can see today at minus tides, stubby footprints leading far out to Davy Jones’ Locker and away from the Lost Civilization of Greater Metropolitan Mabana.

Oh, we still got a Port of Mabana, a one lane road sloughing its way toward obliteration.  And we got 3 Port commissioners, ditto, a kind of vestigial South End government about as pertinent to our lives as the Island County regime that’s barely conscious of Camano much less our South End.

But as always, we seem to manage, if not quite thrive.  History is like the tides, an ebb and flow, or in our case, an egg and flow, and what WAS might easily be reduced to rubble and ruin.  Or pilings and rebar.  The South End rose once toward soaring heights, Chicken Capitol of the Far West.  And if that grandeur is lost now, we can take some small comfort in knowing, once, in a lifetime not that long ago, in a place not too greatly changed, we raised the cholesterol level of the world a notch or two.  Not much to crow about, I know……. unless you’re a South End chicken farmer.

The gravevine was primitive but effective.  Nowadays we got the hive mentality, happy Borgs one and all.  Wouldn’t want to watch a movie if our ‘friends’ didn’t watch it.  Wouldn’t dream of going to a restaurant if our ‘friends’ didn’t recommend it.  Wouldn’t buy a Ford if our ‘friends’ hadn’t bought one too.  I don’t crawl out of bed unless I’m absolutely 100% positive everybody else had already got up too.

Conformity is apparently IN.  If nothing else, it SELLS.  And in the New Religion called Capitalism, that’s all that matters.  The South End — always a tweet or twitter behind the times — just never figured out that folks would pay for gossip.  If Jolene had analyzed how her patrons would not only pony up for a perm but then zero in on their preferences, she’d be dumping the Salon on the open market for a billion or two.  And Tyee Store would still be open…..   Just not bricks and mortar, except maybe their fancy outhouse.

I been noticing lately down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop, a lot of loose talk from the lay-about skippers how the fishing industry — meaning THEM — has been pole-axed, or at least gill-netted, by these damn government regulations.  Closures one day, openings 60 miles west another, zone 8-12 one week, you can crab, but not in zone 7.  How in Blue Hell you gonna make a living motoring to Hood Canal Tuesday then up to the San Juans Wednesday and back down to Camano Friday?  It’s enough to drive a sailor to drink!  Even more….

The days of the great salmon herds are gone the way of the buffalo, that much is true, but the why of it, well, the Ahabs blame everything from the Southendomish tribe to the spotted gooeyduck.  They’d even blame the eagles if it didn’t seem positively unpatriotic.  I don’t say too much when the fleet is drydocked like this, too much land under their boots and too much rotgut under their gills.  But occasionally I’ll hazard the opinion that the salmon have gone the way of the old growth nettle forests, over harvested, ill managed and maybe we got our own selves to blame.  If I brought the rotgut, they tolerate this —- if I’m drinking on their dubloon, it gets a lot dicier….

Truth is, they’ve tried everything from charter fishing to eco-tourism, hoping the CEO’s of San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Smokey Point might be satisfied with a couple of less-than-trophy sized flounder if the flasks flowed freely and the only whoppers were the tall tales of a bygone Puget fishery.  It wasn’t long before the only reservations for once proud bottom fishers were for birthday parties for Weyerhauser exec’s kids.  Trust me, they swallowed more than their pride.

Fishing on the South End is more endangered than naked mermaids.  Their kids will be lucky to fish for perch with a pole and a bobber.  But hard times make men desperate.  We’re no stranger to desperation but desperation is no mother of invention.  The other night, sitting on the poop deck of Coho Bob’s trawler as it slowly gathers barnacles and we quickly gather liquid courage, the talk turned loose and Pete, a one-time tug captain, mentioned he’d been watching the oil tankers idling off Anacortes the other day.  Ripe for the picking, just like the Somalians, he said quietly, maybe hoping nobody would remember tomorrow.

This is what it’s come to.  Poverty, alcoholism and now….. piracy.  Hard times make desperate men and you can take that to the bank … even if the tellers won’t deposit it.  All I can say is Anacortes needs to take precaution.  And Hat Island.  Well, you’ll need more than your uppity signs….