The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you were to wander into half the South End’s garages or tool sheds or the artists’ studios, you’d find what a good entrepreneur would need to start a Second Hand Shop. Course most of that stuff came from the 2nd hand shops that flowered and wilted down here where capitalism came to die. Half of us layabouts and slackers were searching for a livelihood that required little or, preferably, no work. After all, we didn’t migrate here looking for jobs or careers. Telecommuting came a little late for us.

No doubt there are other backwashes, box canyons, dark sides of mountains and swamp country where dreams go to mutate, but hope springs eternal on the South End, nourished by the compost of failures lost and forgotten. If you know where to look, buried behind a nettle jungle or peeking through a blackberry barrier, you can still see a sign for DONNA’S KLASSY ANTIQUES, one for SOUTH END COLLECTIBLES, paint mostly gone and posts rotted, JERRY’S JUNQUE over a building gone to powder post beetles, collapsed into weeds and a twenty foot cedar growing through a hole in the roof.

Dirty Dan’s Trash Emporium opened last winter. Recently emigrated from the wilds of Tacoma, Dirty Dan is really Dan Vandiver, newly divorced from wife and job, a refugee from a past life same as the rest of us, figuring he can parlay his IRA’s against his alimony payments, maybe make a Go of things here in the outback of the island. Covid put a stake in the heart of that fantasy.

Timing, the philosophers will tell you, is everything. Location location, the realtors will argue, is everything. Luck, I will counter, is the joker in the deck of the best laid plans. Dan … well, Dan had three strikes against him from the start. A kindred spirit is what Dan is, no shame down here in failure. The graveyard here is filled with Dirty Dans. Welcome to the club.

My neighbor Fred is standing next to his 40 foot expandable travel trailer with his SUV hitched to its bumper as he’s venting his ire at the free transit bus that’s just gone by. “See that?” he asks, waving irately at the emergency lights flashing while the driver picks up another neighbor’s teenage kid, skateboard under one arm. I give him a fish face, not much meaning he can read, because I know where Freddie’s headed. He’ll start with the bus subsidy for all the freeloaders on the South End, then he’ll move on to taxes, most of them wasted, frittered away on government services he sure doesn’t want or need. He voted for our Tea Party commissioner, he’ll tell me again and again, in hopes she’ll ‘starve the beast’, what he calls shrinking government down to something the size he can flush in a toilet.

Freddie worked all his life at Boeing, bastion, he says, of a Free Enterprise system. I used to argue with him about all the military contracts and tax breaks, but Fred worked on 747’s , not cruise missiles. He retired a wealthy man after 30 years, bought a nice home, owns motorcycles and sports cars and travel trailers and about every piston driven device that he can fit in his driveway, the motorcoach shed and a three car garage. He’s got HIS and by god he doesn’t want a red cent going to someone who didn’t work to get THEIRS. Not directly and not indirectly. That free bus bugs him no end and it’s only one item on a very long list of Grievances.

No one says you have to be generous. Or magnanimous. Or take care of the needy or the poor or the infirm. Freddie doesn’t see any, not one, familiar face among the downtrodden and he doesn’t see it as his problem. More than half us South Enders and the island too don’t either. They got theirs and they can’t imagine losing it to bad health or a bad economy or just bad luck. They aren’t their brothers keepers.

“See that kid getting a free ride,” Freddie says sneeringly. “you just taught him he doesn’t need to work.”

“He’s 13 years old, Fred,” I say. “Too young to drive, too young to buy a car. He goes to middle school. You think he should pay tuition?”

Fred pauses a nanosecond. “Might not be a bad idea.” I expect he’ll write a letter tonight to our current commie commissioner.

You maybe read about the town that had its water system hacked. Some evil yahoo with a cellphone managed to instruct the city’s system to pump in extra poison, no problem at all for an amateur hacker bent on serious malfeasance. Imagine what the Russians could do if they were bent on an all-out water attack! But nobody thought it was those Russian trollers, they’re a little bizzy sending out misinformation for the right wing networks to pick up and air as if it were the evening news flash.

But … it got me to wondering in all my Covid lockdown spare time, if all these Qanon conspiracy theories weren’t the result of a multi-pronged, nefarious meddling with the water systems of every major city in the Land of the Gullible, Home of the Rumor, by hackers bent on destroying our very sanity, pitting Republicans against Democrats, blacks against whites, Jews against Evangelicals, artists against, well, everybody. Just a few keystrokes and slowly, pitilessly, demonically, the Kool-Aid seeps its poison into the chlorinated water of Chicago, the lead contaminated water of Detroit, the pesticide fouled agua of Los Angeles, the industrial soup of New Orleans and all the other cities across this once great land. Only the plastic bottle addicted citizens would be unaffected. At first. But who knows where that water in those polycarbonate containers came from. Not secret mineral springs from the caves of France, bet your butt on that. No, more probably they come from Kansas City, San Francisco, Philadelphia. They come contaminated with the same Kool-Aid toxin!!!

At first I thought I was safe. Our well water comes from one hundred feet below ground. We’re not on a community well with its simple controls any sixth grader could probably hack. No sir, pure, unadulterated, clear H20 from the bosom of the island, same aquifer as the neighbors. But then I noticed the neighbor’s sign still up TRUMP 2020. And another. TRUMP 2024. And just up the road STOP THE STEAL! And that’s when I realized anyone could slip into our wellhouses, dump the Kool-Aid and who would know???

I put a lock on the wellhouse door, of course, but now I’m afraid to drink the tap water. All I can say is thank god for beer. And … I notice the cereal is even tasting better these days.

Radio Free South End was the ‘brainchild’, or lack of, of Wolfman Chuck, once a DJ for KRAP, the alternative music station down in Seattle and Gomorrah back before the city morphed into Tech Town. He claims he was ‘let go’ for pushing the boundaries of even those leftist programmers who decried censorship, something to do, they told him, with violating all manner of human decency.

Not to be so easily cast off the airwaves of Puget Sound, Wolfman laid his plans, moved to the politically incorrect South End, recruited a few of us slackers for his Bandwidth Comeback and launched Radio Free South End, a laughably puny low watt FM frequency so low on the dial even the FCC would have to stoop to find us. This was the Year of our Lord 1999, slightly before podcasts and blogblasts, sort of Old School but without much emphasis on the school. Wolfman had a primitive transmitter — don’t ask me the technical — and a tower he erected over his trailer’s roof. All he needed, he said, were volunteers to be the DJ’s when he needed a break. Of course we asked if this was criminal and of course Chuck said Hell No! Freedom of speech, he told us, First Amendment, he claimed. So sure, we volunteered, why not, we had some things to say, even some music to play.

I doubt anyone further than 5 miles north of the island’s head could hear us, but when you consider most of the bloggers out there on internet podcasts get half the listeners Wolfman got, who really cares? Chuck wasn’t interested in advertising revenue, he just wanted what he called, reverentially, airplay. Chuck played old rock and roll, early blues, strummed his homemade mandolin, told off color stories mostly about us local yokels, even played the South End String Band every damn day, probably as thanks for half of us band members volunteering to DJ.

I can remember like yesterday the day our music died. It was my morning to fill the 10 am to noon slot only to find Wolfman slumped over his microphone, headset off one ear, holding up an official looking paper from some government agency or other.

‘We’re signing off today, Skeeter,’ Chuck told me as American Pie was playing, I bet for the 16th time that morning, the last song on KINK’s brief but glorious existence. A week later Wolfman was gone, the radio equipment too and his trailer had a For Sale sign out by the road. Camano’s infamous and only radio station had put a thumb out and hitchhiked into legend.

Rumor has it there’s a pirate radio station operating off the coast up in the San Juan islands, some DJ on the run from the Feds, still broadcasting to any and all in listening range. I’m betting it’s Wolfman Chuck. Every now and then I crank my radio up and run the dial north to south, hoping, I guess, to hear a crackly South End Blues coming out of Canada on the magnetic waves of an aurora borealis, Wolfman still howling into the wind, the last real DJ fighting the corporate mega-stations. And some nights, maybe too much to drink, I think I hear him and his tinny little mandolin. Godspeed, Wolfman C!!!

You don’t run into a lot of old loggers down here on the gentrified South End these days. Dangerous work and if you do it long enough, accidents you don’t anticipate happen with more frequency than you’d care to consider. Tree climbers, fallers, gyppos, chainchokers, toppers, well, it’s a young man’s job. Us old woodsmen, we count our lucky stars and are happy to tell tall tales from the safety of our rockers, just glad we’re still here, gimped but alive.

Yesterday I was over at the little park I maintain. Ranger Skeeter, garbage picker-upper, lawnmower, trail maintainer and tree removal guy. An 80 year old doug fir had uprooted on the south side perimeter where it had completely blocked two separate trails so my assignment that day was to lug in my big Stihl and see if I could buck it up without pinching the blade, clear the debris and open the paths. No big deal for a seasoned logger like myself, nothing too dangerous, just don’t let the sections fall on my foot.

I tackled the upper end of the tree first, still a large diameter section, made my undercuts and managed to cut a section out for trail passage, bucked up the thing and rolled huge bolts out of the way, then on to the second trail with a larger part of the tree. Once again I undercut the tree but this time I worried the sheer weight would suddenly split the tree and pinch my saw and since I hadn’t brought wedges with me, I really wanted to finish this and take that saw home with me, not leave it crushed under the tonnage of that fir. So I made a Vee in the top, figuring if the cut snapped shut when I reached the undercut, I’d have a chance of not pinching the bar.

You with me so far? Cause I wasn’t really sure this would work. And this is why guys like me should be paranoid back in the woods with a running chainsaw and just enough experience to make things even more dangerous than they already are. I put that Stihl on the Vee and started the top cut, expecting any minute the section would snap shut when my cuts met, but instead … holy moley, Smokey, the tree, instead of crashing onto the trail, sprang up into the air twenty feet above my head while the cut section stayed earthbound with me.

There is a moment in times like this when what is happening doesn’t just defy expectations, it beggars reality. Your mind doesn’t really accept the possibility a tree will right itself any more than time running backwards. Trust me, an old hand at the unexpected when falling trees, this boggled my mind. I scuttled backwards like a crab on meth, not sure what that tree might do, maybe come back down even, on me. But it didn’t. The cut end of the tree stood at 30 degrees above my head twenty feet up. The rootball had rotated halfway back into the cavity it had originally left, partly because another tree had fallen at the base of the fir and its weight, once the majority of the fir’s own weight was gone, lifted the tree semi upright. Logic, once I managed to calm myself, had returned.

You maybe think you’ve seen it all. But trust me, you haven’t. I left the tree, what was left of it, standing over the trail, a saw cut at the top 20 feet above, for hikers to marvel at. How in the hell did anyone make that cut? Did they climb up there and risk life and limb? Could anyone be that courageous, that utterly dumb? Let them wonder. Let them ask the Ranger, but he’s not going to tell them. Trails of Mystery is what I’ll tell them. Just another tall tale from the pioneers of the South End who survived to saw another day….

A few years ago Guitar Bob’s beater car gave up the ghost so he asked if I would drive him north to the used car lots to buy a replacement jalopy. Reluctantly, I said okay even though I had to go after my graveyard shift with no sleep. He was, after all, a friend. And one without wheels to get to work….

Walking into a used car lot is vaguely similar to driving the streets of Baghdad in an unarmored HumVee. It’s a landmine. You might make it back out, but you’re going to take incoming and there’s going to be casualties. At some point you’ll ask yourselves is this war worth it? Did you have an Exit Strategy? And who, in the end, is really the enemy? Or like General Sherman famously stated as he torched the South: car buying is hell.

Bob started out hoping to buy a vehicle for under $500. Not wanting to bust his bubble, I decided to forego the story of my last expedition into the minefields. He would learn soon enough. The Hard Way. The lot in Stanwoodopolis, just prior to closing its doors forever, showed him a $2500 wreck, bad tires, 175,000 miles on the odometer, a tranny that slipped, burned a little oil. Savvy buyers that we were, we moved on.

At a fly-by-night used lot in Burlington we found a nice little Honda, 200,000 miles, ran good, only $6500. Obviously they could rob you without a gun. Bob offered the nice salesman $5000 who said wait right here in his office while he conferred with the manager. Bob was concerned the nice salesman would think we were gay. I said you got way more to worry about than some yahoo with a bad toupee’s opinion of your sorry manhood. In a minute, you’re gonna meet the manager.

Which we did. The manager said we seemed like nice boys and he sure wanted to work with us on this deal, put us in that car, ‘but fellas, I have to make a little money too. I can’t just give this away at a loss.’ He showed us paperwork that proved he was rock bottom on that $6500. But seeing’s how we were nice boys, he’d take a couple hundred off and take no profit. Bob said let me think about it and the manager said sure, sure, but don’t take too long, this beauty’s gonna sell today at this price. Outside Bob worried he’d thought we were parnters. I said I’ll sit out the next negotiation.

By late afternoon I’m fading from lack of sleep and food. It’s late, we’ve hit every shyster and crook up and down the pike, nothing is even close to reasonable and the notion Bob is going to shop for a week or two sends me into adrenaline-fueled panic. I drop down in the Toyota lot and forgetting about promising to stay out of negotiations, march up to a salesman coming out of the showroom side door. “We’re looking for a Toyota or a Honda,” I rapidfire. “$5000 or less, under 100,000 miles. The salesman doesn’t blink, he doesn’t hesitate, he smells the blood in the water and he knows instinctively exactly what to do.

“Your lucky day,” he smiles. “Just came in, hasn’t been detailed yet, but you boys won’t mind saving on that, one owner I’m pretty sure and the boss wants to move inventory, make you a helluva deal.” He points us over to where we just came from, past a line of cars with prices on the windshields and in my sleep deprived fog I realize he’s pointing at MY car. “Give me a minute and I’ll grab the keys from the office. Be right back. Go ahead and kick the tires.”

I regret, even to this day, we didn’t tell him we found the keys in the ignition and take him with us for a test drive. “These two gay guys, see, pulled over on the shoulder …. I thought maybe we’d run out of gas. Then I thought, oh my God, they’re going to do unspeakable things to me. But no, they said get out. Here? I asked. Here, they said. I called the lot and told them to call State Patrol, report a stolen car, even gave them the license number…. Ya know, I always said I could sell snowballs to Eskimos. But those two gay guys, I couldn’t close the deal on selling them their own car. I’m good, but I guess I’m not that good.

Back in the late 20th Century the South End — and the entire island, really — was inundated by hordes of artists. We were like a sprawling refugee camp of painters and potters fleeing their hellish urban existence, so many in such a short time, old timers like myself worried that even the tides would be affected, all the pressure from artistic egos unleashed like a methane tsunami from thawing tundra.

Art, suddenly, was everywhere. Studios sprouted in barns and chicken coops, galleries sprang up in old garages, art tours became yearly events, even the Camano Chamber of Commerce was taken over by brush-wielding artisans bent on bringing culture to the unwashed masses. Sculptures appeared in the parks, murals were painted on buildings, blown glass balls were hidden in shops to entice customers.

Art was everywhere, it seemed. And yet, there was one glaring void. One corner of the once idyllic South End that seemed impervious to the onslaught of this artistic tidal wave. There was no school to train the next generation. We thought maybe, just maybe, the aging artists would slowly die off and eventually, by sheer attrition, the pastoral existence we had once known would return. That dream died the day the Mabana Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement opened its doors, offering course in everything from macramé to bronze casting. Some of the artists became instructors — some even enrolled as students.

Down at the Pilot Lounge we regulars held our heads, we moaned, we cursed, we wailed and we prayed the Institoot would go bankrupt. Why Lord, why us? Why inflict the locust plague on us? What had we done to offend thee?

Two Toke, ever the philosophical one of us, late in the evening of a mournful drinking bout the night of the Institoot’s Grand Opening, summed it up. “Boyz,” he said, sloshing his 7th or 8th pint onto our table, “boys,” he said again, momentarily searching for the lost thread. “Boys, you live in paradise and it was only a matter of time.”

“A matter of time for what?” Little Jimmy asked after it was obvious TT had slid into some kind of self-induced reverie. Two Toke clawed slowly back to the reality of our sopping littered table, all eyes on him, all ears alert, all of us eager for some hopeful chunk of wisdom.

“To have paradise,” he said, “ you have to accept its opposite.” And with that, he laid his head on the table, cheek to spilled ale, and passed out. The rest of us looked forlornly at this sad tableau. Finally Jerry broke the silence. “I’m gonna drive him home. Somebody want to help me here?” All six of us stood up, albeit wobbly, two under TT’s armpits, two grabbing his feet, two moving chairs and holding doors. Like pallbearers we hauled out our compatriot and our hopes. The Institoot still offers quarterly courses. And we still drink at the Pilot Lounge. Although … in much greater moderation.

As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues. Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race. And believe me, we disagree. On most everything. That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.

This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the question of same sex marriage. Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled. Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.

Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now. “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.

So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning. Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love…. And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows. On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

A man can only kill so many dogs and cats before he wakes to ungodly howls and screeches in the middle of the night. Call it a Human Society if you want, if it shields you from Nazi guilt over canine and feline genocide, but trust me, when you throw the unwanted creatures into an incinerator, excuses won’t cut it. Euthanasia. Let’s call that a convenient euphemism. Killing is pretty much killing.

So I left my minimum wage job at the Pound. Lasted 3 months, probably two too long. A metro driver job I’d filled out a forgotten application for popped up. Good money, three times minimum wage, drive these 40 foot buses all over the city of Madison, Wisconsin. I took a training course, learned every route, joined the Teamsters and got assigned to everything from school bus duty to fill-ins for sick drivers. When I kicked a mouthy high school kid off my bus miles from his house in sub-zero weather, my boss called me in and explained their insurance would frown on frozen juvenile delinquents abandoned along my route. I said I understood, but actually I didn’t.

We drivers were in the Teamsters Union, contracts for 60 plus hours a week, six days a week one day off. I asked the boyz — there were zero women drivers then — why on god’s green earth they’d negotiate slave labor hours … and they told me they’d get overtime pay. And the best part, they said, they wouldn’t have time to spend it. This, needless to say, was Incomprehensible to me! You work 6 days a week, 60 hours or more and see how long YOU last. Me, you guessed it, 3 months. I mean, if I wanted a career, I’d have gone to college. Wait! I did go to college. If I wanted a career, I would have taken courses Other Than literature, philosophy and poly-sci. Obviously, I didn’t want a career. Or a job that lasted longer than 3 months.

So when my boss, this gruff no-nonsense sort of drill sergeant, called me in again for another little sit-down, only to inform me that a passenger had complained about my humming — my humming! — and would I cease and desist my musical annoyance. Also — ALSO! — the passengers complained that I drove only 15 mph at the end of the route. Yeah, I said, if I drove the speed limit I would pass stops 10 to 20 minutes ahead of the printed times. You want me to sail by early, I asked. He said he didn’t want me driving 15 mph. Neither do I, I said. He said,
So we’re clear on this? I said, You want me to stick to the schedule or you want me to leave folks waiting at the stop when I’ve gone by 10 or 15 minutes early, subzero weather, remember that insurance policy you got. He said, I don’t want complaints about you driving 15 mph. Catch 22.

My boss asked, Are we clear here? Are we done here? I said, you bet. And gave my notice…. I am not — I want to be clear here — I am not a man who avoids burning bridges. I have always believed the best days of my life are the ones where I’ve quit my job. Freedom, baby, freedom at last! Course, the worst days are the ones shortly after, looking for the next crappy job.

So after the disillusionment of a short career in middle management as a Food Manager at the University of Wisconsin, I decided to take a job as kennel worker at the Humane Society next door to the Oscar Mayer hot dog factory which lent the area a fragrance of feral flatulence. The dog pound, every other day or so, fired up its Incinerator and burned the cats and dogs, kittens and puppies which Mike, our manager, had dispatched with an injection of phenobarbital, adding burnt hair and searing meat to the olfactory mix. We had ourselves an animal Auschwitz.

I had gone to the Pound to look for a pet, see if they had a little guy whose beseeching eyes thawed my wintry heart enough to adopt. I found a wiener dog, appropriately enough, a dachshund, and by the time I’d put the little fellow on a leash, I’d seen the sign Kennel Worker Wanted, applied for and been accepted as their new employee, start next day.

There were three of us on the crew working the pens and the outdoor runs. Larry sprayed down the pens, I was the puppy room guy and Mary Jean handled the cats. All day I cleaned the poop and piss, laid down fresh newspapers and talked to prospective adopters. My partner Larry had just gotten out of prison, served 16 months for selling LSD to a federal undercover narcotics agent, and this job was the only one he’d found where an ex-felon could get hired. Mary Jean had terminal cancer, she told us one day at lunch break, but she didn’t. She just liked the idea, I guess, of an early and tragic demise. Maybe too much soap opera in her teens.

I told myself shoveling shit was no worse — and maybe the same — as my last job, just slightly more literal. And maybe that was true. But I never killed anyone or anything at my dining hall or my grill or my ice cream parlor. Even though I did poison a few dozen folks with my toxic potato salad warmed to a microbial paradise under the heating lamps. But that, I told the cuisine cops who finally discovered the source for the rash of food poisonings, was accidental, the result of ignorance. Personally, I always like my potato salad a little on the warm side.

I lasted three months at the kennel. You can only kill so many dogs and cats before the toll on your psyche weighs on you with the tonnage of guilt no rationalization can lighten. To lighten the burden, I ended up adopting three dogs, maybe a bit too much atonement for a one bedroom upstairs apartment over a TV repair shop. But of course, that’s another story. One, for the time being, I’ll spare you.