The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Nancy came out of Jolene’s Boutique and Salon’s breakroom in a foul mood, snapping the plastic apron on her chair back with a loud retort that sent Ronald’s client upright underneath her dryer. “Whoa,” Ronald said, “someone’s in a crispy mood.”

“Don’t get me started, Ronald,” she growled and grabbed her broom to resweep her area. Ronald shook his tinged hair, clucked his tongue and said, “Girl, you’re gonna wear out that linoleum, couldn’t be any cleaner.”

Finally she put away the broom and dropped into her chair with a defeated sigh. Her next customer wasn’t due for 10 minutes and Mrs. Anderson never came on time anyway. Never one to let angry dogs lie, Ronald said, “You been listening to Jolene’s hot talk radio station, I’m betting. You don’t have enough stress with those kids of yours and the cost of daycare?”

“I know, I know, I …” She trailed off. For a moment she just clicked her scissors in the air, slow cuts, slicing nothing at all. She stared at herself in the half length mirror running the length of the salon, touched a finger to one cheek and frowned at herself. “Doesn’t it feel like us women are supposed to back to the kitchen?” she muttered.

“Oh, honey,” Ronald replied, walking over to lightly drape an arm over her shoulder in sympathy. “I’m supposed to go back to the closet, not the kitchen,” he whispered out of range of Rita Jorgenson who had stopped reading her Woman’s Day magazine to watch the two stylists with considerable interest.

“It’s hard, Ronnie, really frickin hard, rising two kids, paying most of my earnings for daycare. Maybe I should go back home, quit knocking myself out. Dan wants me to. But … I don’t know, maybe if he didn’t keep getting laid off.”

Dan, as Ronald well knew, didn’t get laid off, he got his ass fired. Usually for drinking on the job. So much for bread winning, Ronald told her when the café that hired him as morning cook sent him home after he screwed up multiple orders.

The front door jingled and Patricia Anderson walked in early. Ronald pulled away abruptly and Nancy welcomed her client. Rita Jorgenson tossed her magazine on the side table, shook her curlered head and said over the dryer, “You just hang in there, Nancy. It wasn’t us women who screwed up this world but it’s gonna be us who fix it. So hang in and don’t ever give up.”
Ronald gave a whoop and a small holler. “Damn right, Ms. J, damn right!” Patricia Anderson took off her coat and parked in Nancy’s chair. “Did I miss something?” she asked.

“No,” Nancy told her, “the revolution’s just getting started.”

When we bought our 7 acres and its accompanying shack back in 1977, we first saw the place at night. The smell of cookies baking in a 1920’s Majestic wood stove, the soft glow of oil lamps, a fire crackling in the parlor stove — sure, I thought I’d died and gone to Hippie Heaven. A thought that evaporated by daylight the day we signed the paperwork, at least for the mizzus who sat herself in a corner of the vacated shack and cried her eyes out.

What we didn’t discover until spring was a clearcut woods that by May was an impenetrable jungle of stinging nettles 7 feet high. These days they’d qualify for required disclosure on real estate forms, same as contaminated wells, leaking roofs, buckling foundations and black mold behind the walls. Trails had to be cleared constantly just to enter the dreaded stinging domain and we were constantly struck by toppled nettles that penetrated even the thickest dungarees.

In some parts of the country, pioneers dealt with predators, arctic winters, poisonous snakes and insects, dust storms, hurricanes and hostile natives. So if my curse was only hostile neighbors and stinging nettles, I counted myself semi-lucky. You can eat nettles and I’ve made nettle beer with the itching bastards. The hostile neighbors, well, we had our differences. And still do. But there’s never been any violence. So far.

For 30 years I made my peace. With both. But awhile back I decided enough was really enough! One spring I took a sickle and cleared acre after acre of these monsters. And when they sprang right back up, I hit em again. And again. Each spring I attack the fresh recruits with extreme prejudice … and each spring less and less of them come back. The cedar and fir seedlings I plant now have sunlight reaching them where earlier they withered and died beneath a dark canopy of nettles.

The old growths are gone now, just a few stumps, a memory of early times here on the South End of the island, a myth maybe to the neighbors with their weed’n’feed manicured lawns. But when I’m gone and my sickle hung up for good, little doubt in my mind the roots of these stingers, patient all these many years, will return with a vengeance. I wish em luck…. The neighbors, I mean.

During the enforced hibernation of the Covid Plague, Techno Tom and his wife took in their son and his wife plus their two kids. No big deal considering Tom and Rachel’s house here across the road from us was a two story, 4 bedroom, 3 bath Cape Cod with a 3 car garage and another for the 40 foot travel trailer that rarely left its shelter. Tom and Rachel didn’t mind the return of their prodigal son, but Jason and his wife Marie viewed this as a personal catastrophe, lost job, their own house underwater, the kids forced to uproot and attend school here in the boondocks, just paupers accepting the charity of parents who they figured might have other plans for their Golden Years than an empty nest filled back up.

Jason, once the quarantines lifted, enrolled in a Coding Boot Camp, something Tom explained to us techie imbeciles that had something to do with creating software programs. Good paying jobs, he said, and sure enough, Jason was hired at a start-up in Seattle and after a couple of years in South End purgatory, made his family’s escape. Tom and Rachel fronted the kids partial down payment on a modest house in the city, the children enrolled in new schools — again — and the future looked rosy. Again.

Until this week when Techno joined our table at the Pilot House, not with his usual beer but a double shot of scotch on the rocks. ‘Wuzzup?’, one of us finally got up the courage to ask after 5 minutes of silent and serious drinking until the tension proved too much to wait on Tom to break the dismal mood.

“My kid,’ he moaned. ‘They laid him off yesterday. Said they didn’t need a coder now that AI can do the same thing ten times faster and twice as well. Plus, nobody’s hiring coders now, same damn reason. He’s screwed. What’s he gonna do now?’

Now, you have to understand, Tom’s audience were maybe not the best choice for eliciting sympathy, most of us having spent our ‘earning years’ in frivolous pursuits, odd jobs, artistic detours … and, well, just basic indolence to be honest.

But we bought the next couple of rounds, declared that the Tech Billionaires were scum, cursed AI and mumbled pathetic aphorisms like ‘when one door closes another one opens’, not altogether helpful in raising Techno’s despair. He declared the American Dream dead and finally Two Toke drove him home. I imagine pretty soon Jason will be joining us at the Pilot House where we can all give him the benefit of our collective sage counseling.

Rhonda was nursing her glass of red merlot when I rolled into the American Legion with a buddy who’d ‘guested’ me into the inner sanctum of the Stanwoodopolis military speakeasy, a windowless, no frills lounge catering to those in search of cheap booze, generous pours and dollar off beers. We’d just come from the No King protests up north with our fellow left wing terrorists who hate America and want to burn our cities down. La Conner was still intact, not a town that looked like Gaze, buildings just rubble and the river townspeople sheltered in tent encampments along the dikes.

Rhonda was the lead blocker for the South End Slammers, our roller derby squad, not a far cry from her detachment in Iraq 2, but a hamstring pull tangling with the Burlington Bruisers the week before had put her on injured reserve. She was recuperating at the bar where we joined her, taking the last two stools available.

“How you doin?” my pal asked her and she just grunted. “Not great, thanks for asking.” Then told us her play by play that led to her injury. “I’ll be back on the rink in a couple,” she said. And being the joker chucklehead, I asked, “Couple more drinks?”

“Weeks, you asshole.” Which prompted a hasty apology and the offer to buy the next round. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m just grouchy today … but I’ll take another glass, thanks,” and waved to our bartender with her now empty glass.

In the adjoining room a cornhole tournament was underway with beanbags flying, scores tallied, drinks close at hand. Spectators sat at tables in the bar watching half interested. No King protests meant nothing to these folks. Rhonda either when conversation got around to it, Larry mentioning our antifa escapades at some point.

“So what’s the idea?” she asked. “The guy’s a jerk but he’s no king. Maybe we need a jerk instead of the usual mealy-mouths.”

Since I’d already proven myself a jerk, I decided to sip my beer and shut up. Larry, a regular here, maybe he’d take a shot at explaining what we were doing at the protests, what the point was. Instead he said, “Maybe you’re right. I sure hope so. Next round’s on me.”

They say the country is polarized. And probably it is. Okay, definitely it is. But for a couple of hours we watched cornhole and talked roller derby and the Iraq War and crazy politics. Nobody got mad and none of us got hurt. No bean bags were thrown in our direction. The last round was on Rhonda.

Some of you crusty old timers out here tonight might remember when Camano was such a sleepy little backwash, we didn’t have deputies on patrol after midnight. Crime was pretty much limited to marijuana growing —- you know, BEFORE it became a medicinal herb — and a few break-ins down at unoccupied beach cabins, probably OFF-islanders sneaking in by boat. Any criminals that were caught, well the sheriff’s department had to haul them over to the hoosegow in Coupeville, kind of a long drive, deliver the miscreant, then drive back here. In the meantime we were left vulnerable, defenseless and unprotected. To be honest, most of us never noticed….

Somewhere in the 1980’s some entrepreneurial South Enders … well, okay, some desperately unemployed South Enders thought the time was ripe for a Private Security Agency, sign up the absentee landowners and go check on their unattended dwellings. You know, cruise by and see if the front door was still on its jambs and lights weren’t on when they were supposed to be off, maybe get out and check the locks, walk around with a flashlight, wear a special agent badge South End Safeguard, something catchy, something official looking in case the neighbors wondered about us prowling the back yard late at night. Admittedly, we looked a little rough. Okay, we looked like the guys we were supposed to protect folks against. But hellfire, man, this was the South End and back then we all looked a little ragged around the edges. Remember, this was BEFORE the great migration, the one where the Dot.com’ers took their suitcases of cash and bought up the bluffs and hauled in stuff WORTH stealing.

That’s the trouble with rich people, you see. They bring valuables. They bring expensive toys. They bring, if you follow my reasoning here, CRIME. Simple as that. When we were all poor, why would we steal from each other? We left our doors unlocked, the keys to the truck in the ignition. You wanted to steal MY truck, chances are I’d find you broke down about half a mile north of me. I’d probably have to apologize to YOU for loaning you a beat up rig you’d have to repair three times to town.

Well, the South End Security and Surveillance Agency was a little ahead of the curve. So they finally called it quits. Before the incoming tsunami of wealthy neighbors brought their big suburb crime to our pastoral paradise of poverty . We got 24/7 deputies from Island County finally and for awhile we could drop off captured criminals, alleged captured criminals, with the Stanwoodopolis Police, save them hours of scenic transportation and get right back to the scene of our crimes.

And then, before we could regroup our patrol cars and security agents, along came the Civilian Patrol. Free of charge. Official. Nice lettering on the side of the vehicles instead of that ratty plastic sign we had that fell off more than a few times and even got Two Toke Tom pulled over for littering. He got off with a warning, but it rattled him so much he resigned and turned in his patrol badge, worried, I think, littering might lead to some sniffing around his grow sheds up by the South End Diner. And that was his sole livelihood, so he didn’t want to jeapordize that.

Well, anyway, I’m sort of rambling along here about the history of crime-fighting on Camano and I haven’t even gotten to Colton yet, but …. I think maybe I better just wrap this up and move on to subjects that won’t interfere with dessert digestion. But I do want to say to you crimefighters, thank you! Not so much for ending crime down by me as for saving me that job in my truck patrolling the rich folks’ houses. If I’d really seen how they lived, how much they had, how nice they had it, who knows, I mighta turned to a life of crime myself with all that temptation. Lucky for me I stayed stupid and poor.