The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests.  The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property.  Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place.  The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert.  Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry.  Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information.  So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington.   He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way.  When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh.  That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away.  Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer.  The rich folks didn’t mind.  The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

Well, sir, it’s just about that time of year again for old Skeeter to round up the boyz and journey up into the High Country.  I know what you’re probably thinking —- but you’d be wrong.  Mostly.  It’s time for our annual safari up into the snowfields of Roslyn for our 20th or 25th or umpteenth Beer Hunt.  Used to be more of us hunters, but time and domesticity have taken a toll.  We’re down to a motley crew of die-hard veterans, grizzled men who can travel for days on a subsistence diet of barfood, cheap hotdogs and canned beans.  Times have changed over the decades, but we haven’t.  Sadly.

We got a run-down packrat infested cabin near the Cle Elum River dam and reservoir right on the edge of Suncadia.  Suncadia is a 5000 acre high end mucky muck resort and retirement community carved out of elk country, clear cut and subdivided and over-developed for the 1%ers.  When they began bulldozing back 10 years ago, they chained off our access down the rutted dirt mountain road we always used.  Legal access, I might add.  So we did what any South Ender worth his salt would do, we cut the damn lock with bolt cutters and drove the usual easement 5 miles into the interior.  Kind of ruined the 9th green of their new golf course, it turned out.  Although it did get their attention in a hurry.

The boyz, I maybe didn’t mention, are lawyers mostly — how we all met, actually, back in their law school days and my slumming — and now one is a prosecutor for Tacoma and another is a judge in King County.  You want to tangle with folks over property easement rights, you couldn’t pick worse victims.  Needless to say, we now drive through the Guard Station, where they know us well, and they say hello, have a nice stay.  Stay means stay off the putting greens with our vehicles.  After the first trip in on their fine blacktopped roads, at least until the last mile or two, we use the trails to the dam or else bushwhack over to the rotten bridge across the raging Cle Elum to get to the sacred hunting grounds of Ronald and Roslyn and sometimes even as far as the Cle Elum, the town.

The damkeeper — shortly after 9-11 and the fear of Al Qaida blowing the dam — would threaten us with arrest.  The judge would apologize and we would be courteous, but we were crossing that dam like it or not.  After Suncadia’s megabuck tactics, the U.S. government held little to no fear for us Beer Hunters.  I admit we’re an older, if not wiser crew now.  We don’t look for fights any more.  Nope, we’re all business.  And that business is hunting the wild and wily ales.  Oh, some day we’ll probably ‘catch and release’ I suppose, but that day is a long ways off.

So  bear without old Skeeter a day or two while we’re traipsing the Cascades, stalking prey from the Brick to Old #  5, the Past Time to the Brewery, and maybe even a couple new waterholes along the trail.  Give you a break from all this moonshine wet powder wisdom.  You might want to do a little hunting yourself in the meantime….

I guess if you’re the kind of person who never reads, you can be forgiven if you muddy up your facts occasionally. Or always. Ignorance, after all, is bliss. But maybe when you take the stage to a national audience on Independence Day in a salute to the armed forces and especially their Commander-in-Chief, you might want to have the staff do a little fact-checking. That, or just order the Department of Education to go back and rewrite those faux fact history books. If you live by the teleprompter — and especially if you mock those who use one — and the rain blurs your speech, you die by the teleprompter. Or if you’re Donald J. Trump of the very big brain, the man who skipped Viet Nam with a bone spur strategy backed by buy-outs, you go Impromptu, arrogantly plunging into the Void full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. Saturday Night Live, you ought to be paying this guy a writer’s salary and laying off half your staff.

Here, then is some Presidential History, Mr. Peabody on Rocky and Bullwinkle couldn’t have said it better. George Washington, man, that guy, according to this fractured fairy tale, was certainly ahead of his time. He crossed the Potomac AND the time barrier, captured the British airports and won the Revolutionary War. Why they called it Revolutionary, I’m guessing, anybody has the vision to commandeer future airports. Probably sunk a few English subs too. And maybe shot down their drones. The man, like Trump said, was a hero. An American Hero. You don’t see British airports here anymore, do you? And those lunar landing bases, uh-uh, wiped out in a surprise assault. No wonder the Commander-in-Chief decries faux news! Today’s media look like a 3rd grade journalism class compared to what Donald can spin out.

For those who forget history, well, they’re doomed to repeat it. For those who never knew it to begin with, okay, just about anything’s possible. Turn off the teleprompter and let er rip. History, after all, is written by the winners and let’s be honest here, Donald Trump won that last election. At least that’s what he says….

Before the advent of circuit boards, silicon chips and computerized everything, us do-it-yerselfers took no little pride in fixing our broken appliances, our busted stereos, our crippled cars and even our dysfunctional lives.  Really didn’t have much choice given our fiscal challenges.  The washing machine quits, you have to weigh that $50 service fee just to drive down here.   Believe me, you’ll learn to diagnose a blown fuse or a broken fan belt yourself before you wait two days in your last clean underwear and then pay half the cost of a Maytag to keep the wringer washer working another six months.

My dryer quit this week.  Nothing new there — it goes on strike regularly.  But this time the little gizmo that held the blown fuse wouldn’t let go of the fuse.  No big deal — I went on-line, googled up the part, found it … and discovered it cost more than that service fee I’m trying to save.  Being a South Ender I balked at the rip-off price.  No way was I paying $54 plus shipping for a plastic toy fuseholder.  Next trip into town I scrounged the hardware store, found a reasonable facsimile and rewired the dryer to hold it …. And yeah, $5 later, I was fluffing up my dungarees.

Sometimes it pays to think outside the box, cornball as that expression is.  I bought an extra hard drive for my computer — and oh yeah, I got one — but when it came it wouldn’t fit inside the Tower.  A North Ender might send it back, see if there was a better fit.  But like I said, we like to think outside the box, so I cut a slot with a hacksaw in the tower side and slid that new blank brain right in and left its frontal lobe sticking out for better ventilation.  Sure, the missus shook her head sadly.  But the salient point here is that it worked and  MORE IMPORTANT BY FAR, the job was done.

The trick here is to show No Fear to these malfunctioning objects, even the ‘black boxes’.  They sense fear quicker than a dog or a tax assessor.  Open them up, grab a handful of wires, pull on em with authority, half the time they’ll respond positively when they realize unequivocally you’re the Boss.  When my VCR ate a rental movie, I eviscerated the aggressive little unit and when it still refused to function, I made an example of it to its electronic brethren and tossed it two stories out into the driveway.  I have put rocks through recalcitrant TV picture tubes and in one instance burned one alive, fully plugged in, begging like HAL in 2001—A Space Odyssey.  Some machines are incapable of learning.  You must be firm.  You may even need to be ruthless.  The worst mistake you can make is allowing one miscreant cyborg mutant monster to infect the rest.  Give em an inch, they’ll grab half of cyberspace.

For those who think it’s a brave new world, one where nothing can be fixed or repaired, cowboy UP!  Down here we aren’t going to be slaves to the machine.  Even if we have to destroy every damn one ….!

imes are tough these days down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop.  A lot of barnacle-bottomed boats moored idle at the docks, their glory days of fishing now just a dry-rotted memory.  Occasionally you’ll see one of the skippers doing a little brightwork on some faded trim or turning over an engine just to clear the cobwebs from the lines and the tanks, but time and overfishing have taken heavy tolls.

Used to be the fleet was the pride of the island, running from Mabana to Bristol Bay in search of salmon openings and halitbut catches.  We maybe didn’t have the widows’ walks the Narragansett boys had for their lonely wives to gaze forlornly out to sea scanning horizons for men returned from hunting whale, but it was an event nonetheless when captains sailed into view with full cargo holds and tales of Alaskan storms.

Sadly, those catches dwindled and the fleet turned to lesser dreams.  For a time they chartered for the tourist fishermen,  CEO’s up from San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Seattle, in search of trophy gooeyducks and the elusive free range oyster, but even those became uncommon, then finally rare.  One by one the Captains Courageous were forced to sit idle, swapping tongue-worn tales of the Big Catch of ’78 or the killer storm of ’82, mostly lies now, but better than constant complaining.   And far better than hanging out in the unemployment office.

Some of the skippers sold their boats for what they could get, just pesos on the dollar.  Hazy Jake ran Canadian Bud for awhile through the islands until the borders tightened and his nerves frayed worse than his lines.  You see the last of them down at the bait shop most days, those Ahabs whose Mobys disappeared, hunkered down  over big chipped mugs of thick coffee from the self serve pot, predicting tide and weather, predicting  everything except the future, a place they rarely visit now.

A lot of folks who don’t live down here ask me:   Skeeter, it’s hard to believe there’s really a place like the South End, kind of some Never Never Land, turn left at the first star by Terry’s Corner and keep on going until morning.  I admit, it does sound damn inviting.  A place where the law of physics and the law of Island County don’t hold much jurisdiction.  A place where jobs are not only scarce but that very fact is celebrated.   A place where maybe too many of us avoided adulthood but we don’t need daycare.

Oh, I suppose I could polish up the vision of the South End as a magical world,  shine it til it glowed like Aladdin’s Lamp that offered 3 wishes but you wouldn’t need more than 1 or 2.  But there is a dark side to paradise, one you might not notice in the brochures.  If I’m going to be the travel agency for Shagri-La-La, it’s only fair I give some warning.  If only to deflect future lawsuits….

Sure, we’re the Banana Belt of the island archipelago.  Judging by the uniqueness of the inhabitants, we’re really a Galapagos, cut off from the mainland and the mainstream.  You visit long enough and it won’t be long before you notice the distinctly odd genetic diversities.  I’m talking, of course, about our artist herds.     Turn over a rock or go down a laurel shrouded drive, you’ll find 200 subspecies of watercolorist, 50 oil painters, 25 sculptors and too many glass benders, fusers, blowers and breakers to shake a punt stick at.  They’re breeding in the nettle hollows, trading art among themselves, putting on studio shows, turning body shops and beauty parlors into ersatz galleries, filling up libraries and schools and fire stations with unsalable artwork, building art parks and sculpture gardens.  It’s as if the Garden of Eden had become an apple orchard, 500 varieties and new grafts every year.  There’s seemingly No End to it.  The inner child has been unleashed, unsupervised and is now unmanageable.

Some folks find an iguana-infested island interesting, I guess.  If you’re one of these, by all means, come and visit.  If the South End inspires you toward aesthetic ecstasy, fine —all we ask is that when you depart, take your inner child home with you.  We don’t need cross pollination from the outside world.  We’re having enough trouble with our native species as it is.  The day may be coming when a quarantine is required.  Not only to prevent contamination from the outside, but to prevent the contagion from spreading…..

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium. He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights. Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….
So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders. The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait. Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays. Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday. Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger. And … well, shure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.
My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture? Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency? Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy? Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?
All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation. The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

Folks are always a little surprised to learn that the South End is home to a school of higher learning, figuring, I guess, that a brackish backwash with virtually no commercial potential, with no public schools even, might be likelier to have a minimum security penitentiary than a college.  For awhile we had the Tucson School, an unaccredited mail order degree factory run out of Nate Benson’s basement for a few years before enough irate students complained to the state attorney general.  Nate did get his opportunity to attend a minimum security prison, but not around here.  He graduated in 3 years with good behavior and no one has seen hide nor hair since, but late at night I notice TV ads for university degrees that sound vaguely familiar.

The Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement has been training young artists for nearly 25 years now.  Half the graduates end up staying here and some become instructors themselves.  The pay isn’t great, but considering the graduates who don’t teach are making far less, it beats the options.  President Otto Vermouth runs a pretty tight ship, near as any of us unwashed masses can tell and nowadays you can find art plastered everywhere from Tyee Store to Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique.  Even the Marina and Bait Shop sports watercolors and bird sculpture.  It’s practically a Louvre down here, although sadly I won’t say most of us have really had our aesthetic consciousness blown up too large.  The Mabana Body Shop has an egg termpura of one of our more infamous graduates, Safari Jack.  Jack says it’s worth more than Roadkill Ronald’s 1964 Mustang convertible, fully restored, but right next to it is a 2003 girlie calendar Ronald must like as much as that egg tempura of the Clamdiggers.  Most of us like it even better, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Miss July 2003 fills the eye, believe me.

The Institoot has classes in everything you can want to study art-wise.  Right now they’re running Winter Classes.  I thought about taking something myself, stained glass maybe, but it cost a bit more for the supplies and anyway, I figured I’d lacerate a finger or an artery and my literary ambitions would be ruined.

Maybe in Spring session I’ll take Figure Studies, if they can squeeze another voyeur in.  Jerry Cochran’s wife models for the class.  She’s no Miss July, but it seems safer than stained glass anyway.  At least until Jerry finds out where she’s been moonlighting….

When I was a hothead radical in the 60’s, I thought the government was killing Black Panthers, spying on civilians, letting industry and corporations foul our air and poison our water and lying to us about the war in Viet Nam.  Turns out most of that was true.  My old man said if I didn’t like it here, I could move to the Soviet Union.  Four decades later the Soviet Union is broken up and I still live here.  The government still lies about wars, still spies on civilians. The President himself is a liar’s liar. And my old man is now the one sputtering about the damn government, never mind that he worked all his life in the public sector for the U.S. Forest Service.  The Republicans, now in full battle cry, denounce the EPA, the Post Office, most all government agencies as evil incarnate.  I guess this is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Round up the bureaucrats and send them to Dakota to farm sunflowers.

Social Security is now called a Ponzi scheme.  Regulations on businesses are job killers.  Taxes are a pox on the body politic.  Politicians, except the new GOP, are liberal bloodsuckers.  We have moved a long haul right of Richard M. Nixon.  And compromise, once the cornerstone of American democratic prinicples, has become a white flag of surrender to the anti-capitalist Democrats.
Hot talk radio, misinformation from the internet, corporate consolidation of the media — who the hell knows what is true or not anymore?  Demagoguery is winning.  Maybe it has already won.  I get my father’s e-mails of patently false vitriol, week after week, forwarded by his pals to millions.  They believe what they want to believe.  And they want to believe Obama is a Muslim, is a terrorist, is a communist and a traitor and a foreigner.  They want to believe the government is responsible for their unhappy lives.  They want to drink their Kool-Aid, turn on and tune out.  The Times, they aren’t just  a’changin, they’ve reversed polarity.  Oh, and Dad, if you and your cronies don’t like it here, why don’t you move to China!

Like about 23% of my fellow Americans, I watched the Democratic debates the last couple of nights. More of us interested than I thought since I thought maybe me and a couple of news junkies and most of the lying media would be the only ones interested enough to tune in. The rest, I figured, would just wait for the Russian trolling ads to waft through their Facebook feeds.

Interesting group of wannabes is my take-away. A third were women, one was gay, a couple were various races, some were very young and plenty were very old. What you’d call, for lack of a better word, diverse. Latinos, blacks, gay, straight, women, old and young, a pretty full rainbow of Americans. Kind of gave me hope for a country that lately seems dominated by white old guys. White old farts, really, who seem pissed off they don’t see themselves reflected in the American mirror. After all, aren’t they the fairest of them all?

The Supreme Court pronounced yesterday that they aren’t going to weigh in on gerrymandering. Go right ahead and use an algorithm to insure the Party in power can keep that power. McConnell probably threw a champagne party. All I can say is Democracy is still a dog fight. Money still talks and bullshit walks, as my old buddy Snooky used to say. But I’m heartened to hear folks talking once again about the poor, about immigrants’ rights, about income inequality, about something more compassionate than protecting the middle class, which is wall that I heard the last bunch of elections.

I’m not going to handicap this election. I’m not even going to predict which one of these 20 people might be the candidate. But I think I’m going to like just about any one of them for standing up for the poor, the defenseless, the downtrodden and the forgotten. Hopefully we’ve moved past the time when the beleaguered white guy is to be protected and the rich need more tax relief. Folks and their spokesman Trump will say the Democrats have moved left, that they’re now Socialists. I say about damn time….