The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m flying the friendly skies once more. For a yahoo who hates to fly, I sure seem to be doing a lot of it lately. Someday … probably sooner than later … historians will look back at jet travel the way we look back at big fin Cadillacs, giant carbon footprints. Political correctness will dictate that Frequent Flyers be denigrated for the culpability they share for turning the planet into a hellbroth of CO2 and acid rain. Meanwhile, I have to get to Utah.

Down here at South End International I’ve passed by the sniffer hound, a couple of TSA agents and managed to get through X-ray. X-ray is the government’s tactic to irradiate frequent flyers, thereby inducing various cancers and reducing multiple future flights. I’m sure there are already folks who believe this implicitly. Has the same result so I guess the government strategy works.

Security, even though I’m traveling more often, is amazingly fluid. We have now a TSA pre-check, which means somehow, probably random, the air passengers selected can keep their shoes on and dispense with fluid checks and various other scrutinizing. Apparently the traveling terrorist will not receive a TSA pre-check. I’m sure there’s a mathematical calculation on probability PhD’s have worked out on government super computers.

Today I took my shoes off but kept my belt buckled. The lady in front of me could leave her laptop in her bag. Last time she had to take it out. But she had to take her belt off. My pocket debris had to be stowed in my pack — no plastic tray in my line. Sometimes my handkerchief has to be taken out of my pocket, sometimes not. A recent test of TSA security found that knives, guns and explosives hidden to check the agents’ effectiveness, went through about 90% of the time, meaning, I suppose, terrorists would be thwarted in at least 10% of terror attempts. Statistics don’t lie, mister!

What I deduce from this is that if they would succeed 90% of the time, there must not be much terrorism being attempted. After all, why risk it if there’s a 10% chance of failure? I wanted to run that by a couple of this morning’s agents … but, I do want to get to Utah this week sometime. I might slip a gun through, no way I’m sliding a wisecrack by ….

We don’t have many rules down here on the anarchic South End. Don’t need em, don’t want em, won’t obey em anyway. But there IS one unwritten one, maybe not something Moses brought down from the Mountain, but if he were around today, he’d probably make it the 11th Commandment: Do NOT do plumbing prior to arriving guests.

Plumbing looks easy. Seems like you take off a coupler here, exchange a faucet, replace a gasket, nothing to it…. If you think that, you’ve never done plumbing and you don’t live down here at the butt end of an island where the nearest plumbing parts are 10 miles away and the nearest SERIOUS plumbing parts stores are 40 miles away. Plumbing Repairs for the Complete Idiot states emphatically: no repair project requires LESS than 3 trips to the hardware store. It is a Law of the Universe, right up there with E= mc squared. It is inviolable. I know, believe me, I know.

I got company coming tomorrow. Don’t ask me why, but … yeah, I broke the 11th Commandment. I thought it would be a no-brainer, a piece of cake, a walk in the park. Just pull our old pitted pedestal sink and replace it with my new 100 year old mint-condition porcelain beauty, a $12.50 score at the RE-Store. All I had to do was disassemble the brass fixtures, put em on the new one and voila’, a Martha Stewart golden moment.

Course, the old parts, being 100 years old and corroded beyond belief, proved a bit recalcitrant, but I patiently worked with pliers, screwdrivers, vise grips, monkey wrenches, hammers, hacksaws, spit, curses and pitiable prayers to the implacable gods of plumbing. Half a day later I had the old sink literally in pieces. The pieces, of course, didn’t match up to the new sink. You can trying mating disparate parts of corroded brass with stripped threads in multiple arrangements, but … guaranteed, they won’t mate up, not in an hour, not in a day, not in the puny time left to you and me in this human lifetime.

So I went to the hardware store. Not once, not twice … you KNOW how many if you believe in PHYSICS. Meanwhile, our company is en route. I guess they can wash up with the outside hose. I suppose they’ll be understanding. Or … maybe this just a South Ender’s strategy for shortening their visit.

Haul out the champagne and shoot off some leftover fireworks!!! Tyee Store reopened!!! They got lotto, they got white bread, they got cheap beer. The world, according to this South Ender, has tilted back into proper orbit. Oh, I know, the fly-by of Pluto was a pretty big deal and maybe more cause for celebration for some, but unless they sell cigarettes and catfood on the mini-planet, let’s try to keep one foot on terra firma.

Tyee Store is back and so what if NASA didn’t send an unmanned satellite to record the event? I sent myself, sickle in hand, through the salmonberry thickets and the nettle jungle and the blackberry barricades that had, for the last few storeless years, grown monstrously wild. I felt like when Lewis and Clark hit the Oregon and Washington coast and the Chinooks paddled up to them in the miserable little cove they’d taken shelter in from a wild storm. Gale force winds didn’t stop the natives from rolling in for some serious bartering and a mile of menacing overgrowth wasn’t going to stop me either. Tyee Store was open again and so was my trail to it. The explorers who made it to the North and South Pole, trust me, they didn’t leave a trail for the next folks.

I know, some of you maybe think, so what? A little mom and pop grocery has reopened after a couple of years, gonna sell some popsickles and camp supplies, some Pall Malls and Bud Lite, big whoop! But for us refugees down here at the end of the island, Tyee Store is the Real Deal. It’s our crackerbarrel, our gossip central, our cultural center and our trading post combined. We’ve gone a long time hauling supplies down from the North. The sled dogs are tired, the transit bus won’t come clear down here, the isolation is wearing on all us pioneers. You think cabin fever is bad, try it when the jerky is gone and the last can of Spam is being held for the next Christmas dinner. Tyee Store is a godsend, let me tell you.

I know, some of you northerners and off-islanders will never set foot on the South End, much less in Tyee Store. Big bunch of nothing down here for you suburbanites and city dwellers. But someday, mark my words, the Tyee Store will be a museum and a visitor center for a time when the Costco’s and the Walmarts hadn’t sent their ubiquitous tentacles into the hinterlands yet, where you couldn’t always get what you wanted, but you got what you needed. And when you did, when you walked into that far-flung outpost of experimental retailing, when you saved yourself that hellish trip to the Plaza or Elger Bay Store, when you walked across the island through a tunnel of brambles, sure, it cost a little more. It maybe cost a lot more, but this was our store, all of us down here, and we’re ecstatic to have it back.

Course, in a week we’ll be belly-aching about the prices and the selections. But … we always did and we always will. It is, after all, the South End.

Back when I first moved to the wild South End, I worked graveyard weekends at the Pain Motel in Everett, Everett General Hospital. We had maybe 3 or 4 emergency rooms in the ER, what is now 65 rooms. Most weekends were pretty quiet, good for sleeping if you were the orderly, which I was. But occasionally we’d crank it up, holidays especially, but we could never predict.

My first year there was an eye-opener. A lot of blood, plenty of horror, none of it for the squeamish. I guess you can get used to about anything. But that first year I wasn’t used to the shock yet. My job was basically gopher. Run fluids to the lab, look for missing medical records, deliver supplies, take the dead to the morgue, deliver patients to the wards, you name it, that was my Job Description.

Bout a month after I started we had this motorcycle gangbanger come into the ER. Drove himself in after he’d put his hand into the moving chain. I ran bloodwork and paperwork on him to the lab and eventually I was called on my beeper to go get him in the ER and take him to his room. He was sitting up on the gurney and said he could walk okay, but I said we got rules and one is he had to get driven by gurney. “Okay, man,” he said, which is biker talk for ‘bite me’, but he said, “Let’s ride.”

A nurse ran up to me with a cup and said deliver it to the desk on the 5th floor when I got there. The biker said, “You got my fingers in there, man. They’re gonna sew em on in the morning.” I took a peek and yeah, there on ice were three fingers a bit worse for wear.

“They told you they’d sew them on tomorrow?” I asked. He said, yeah, no problem. Well, maybe not to a drunk biker, but you know and I know, if you’re going to reattach missing body parts, it’s kind of critical to do it sooner rather than later. I said, “Hey, man, talk to a nurse when we get up there and tell her what you told me. They’re not planning to sew these on you, c’mon, think about it.”

Our hospital, being a public funded hospital, took in everybody, insurance or not, no small thing really, but I learned that night not everyone receives the same care. Somewhere along the line, maybe on an adjoining barstool, I’ll probably meet an old biker, 2 finger Fred, and we’ll have a beer and maybe a laugh over this shared memory. Well … the beer, probably not the laugh.

Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

So I get this e-mail, see …. My buddy Captain Lawrence Baum has had some yahoo drop off a derelict 5th wheel trailer on the frontage road to his business. He’s pissed, but he also sees a golden opportunity to tweak old Skeeter about South End riff raff, cc’ing me along with his screed to the Crab Cracker, our quasi-literary/newspaper/calendar of all local events. Rather than summarize, here’s the text:

 
HAS THE SECESSION OF THE SOUTH FROM THE NORTH BEGUN ANEW?
Jumpin’ jehoshaphat and criminently, Folks. I do believe a new civil war has begun and can secession of the Southenders from the Northenders be far behind?
I mean, what else can explain the sudden appearance on the doorsteps of the peace-lovin’ businesses south of our beloved Camano Vet Clinic, of what has to be the quintessential and classic abode of those red-neck, moonshinin’, nettle-wine drinkin’ folks led by (and I suspect egged on by) Skeeter Daddle and his ilk. Sometime in the wee hours of Thurs July 16, most likely between 5 and 7 am, a decrepit, falling-apart, partially-wheeless 30-foot or better 5th wheel trailer was dumped on the easement road serving all of the businesses from Camano Sail and Jon-Sue Mirror all the way north to the Vet clinic. And with nary a fare-thee-well or request for permission. I mean these folks have to be “well endowed” if you get my drift. It would have been nearly or all the way daylight with going-to-work traffic whizzing by. And the towing vehicle would not have probably been some little wimpy car. Egad, I mean we have “dumpers” all over this Island, people who are too cheap or too lazy to take their garbage to the dump, as we used to call it before it got all fancified to “Transfer Station.”
Well now, I knows that them is fightin’ words so how do we know it came from the south, you may well ask. Well, we done fingered that out by the deep scratch marks left in the pavement by a dragging part of the trailer (still visible if you care to look) that begin a few hundred feet south of the Camano Hill/E. Camano junction, and swerve very nicely and definitively into our common driveway and down to its current resting place.
Now, it will be moved one way or ‘tother because the last owner of record lives on this here Island. He claims he sold it but can’t find the documents to prove it, and so, under the law he may be on the hook.
But that is really not who we are looking for. I’m pretty sure the last owner of record did not dump the trailer there. But someone did and we would dearly love to find that “someone.”
If anyone recognizes this pig and can tell us where it may have come from, there is a small cash reward waiting, and I mean really small, $50-small.
Call in privacy and confidence and tell us what you think you know. If the info checks out, you get the bucks.
425-314-9824.
(and my apologies, Skeeter; put your double-barrel away, please)

NOTE: the Salty Dawg runs a charter boat and sailing instruction business on our Beautiful Island and gets just down right bent out of shape by people who dump their garbage on our roads and yards and our beautiful waters.

Here, in its entirety, is Skeeter’s response:

Okay okay, Cap’n! We just thought this would make a nice B&B up there by the dump. That, or a Motel 3, some place a little more affordable than the Camano Inn. And yeah, we might’ve neglected to get the necessary permits and maybe we didn’t meet county commercial codes, but us start-up entrepreneurs ought to get some breaks; after all, we’re the job creators. Admittedly we should’ve washed the rig, but c’mon, we’re conserving precious groundwater. Think Eco-Tourism!

We already have August and September pretty nearly booked so I’m hoping we can find some common ground here, Lawrence, maybe cut you in on part of the rental income. We sure don’t need negative publicity and if you would consider maybe 10% of the profits after deducting our heavy advertising campaign (soon to come), we would be happy to give you naming rights. How does Baum Bungalow sound to you??? Kind of has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Personally, I was advocating a meth lab in that location, but my partners pointed out the proximity to the sheriff’s shack, a building not a helluva lot nicer than our 5th wheeler. Worst case, I guess we could go head to head, no pun intended, with the Bud Hut. But I think you’ll agree, given the aforementioned 10%, the Baum Bungalows (yes, plural, once we get a few more rentals in there) would be a better fit for the touring public. Our attorney, Bubba Frisk III, will provide you with all the contracts and paperwork at your earliest convenience. If you have any further questions or concerns, contact me through the Crab Cracker, our lead advertising agency. Sincerely, as always, Skeeter
Now, the sad part — or maybe the hilarious part — I thought I recognized that 5th wheeler. So when I saw one of my band mates, I asked, nonchalantly, did you get rid of your trailer? “Yah,” she said, “I put it on Craigslist and some guy from up island came for it. Free. But he had to bring spare tires, the old ones were rotted down to the hubs.”

The sheriff found the old owner, but he’d never transferred title and neither had my bandmate’s boyfriend, so now the trailer was legally abandoned off the highway. I’m sure Cap’n Lawrence is worried he’ll inherit the hulk, but I don’t think so. The guy who hauled it off had a buddy and when they were scrutinizing the trailer, purportedly for scrap potential, his buddy whispered, “This is way better than yours.”

On the South End we call this Recycling. Up Island, they’re treating this as a crime. I admit, I’m torn whether to contact the sheriff, but I may let the Skipper know to just hang on, our boy is looking for fresh tires so he can get it back to his place. In the end I suspect everybody’s gonna win.

Not quite a year ago we bought the little 1940’s house next door, mostly to keep it from being torn down and replaced with a 2015 McMansion on the hill above our gardens. Trouble is, now we got a house to deal with. I suppose we could board it up, let the mice and the rot have at it, or maybe use it for a woodshed or storage unit, but we figured, being citizen-capitalists, we maybe ought to ‘monetize’ it. We didn’t want to rent it by the month because for the past twenty years or so we’ve had to deal with the folks who rent the cheapest place on the South End. I mean, I like mean dogs, girlfriends who go off their meds and shoot up the neighborhood, heroin addicts and all the rest as much as the next guy, but we thought we’d try renting by the night, offer it up as a romantic get-away, bring in the honeymooners and the nostalgic, pay off the utilities and the mortgage.

This week we had the first paying customers, a couple who just got married, honeymooned in Vancouver and needed a few nights down at Viagra Falls here to fully consummate their wedding. Three nights would do it. The day before their awaited arrival they called to say they would be a day late, stay a day longer. Odd, but okay, we’re not your ordinary hoteliers. Yesterday, their new arrival date, they didn’t show up either. This morning we get a call to inform us they rolled in at midnight, took one look at the place and vacated. Spiders, they said. The place had spiders. They couldn’t stay in a place with arachnids. Just couldn’t, just wouldn’t.

I guess there’s a lot of reasons not to stay at our little bed and breakfast. Flies. Mice. Mealy bugs. Coyotes outside howling. Deer stomping through the yard. Raccoons peeking out from behind the shed. Birds making a racket at dawn. Trees menacingly swinging in the wind. Moles leaving mounds in the yard. Nettles growing over by the woods.

I maybe forgot to mention we live in the country. Or maybe they just figured the place would be a Super 8 or a Motel 6 nestled next to a suburban shopping mall. I don’t know.

In the end we gave them back their money, lost three days rental and probably the innocence we had when we embarked on landlordship. The mizzus feels bad about this and so do I. Me, I’m liking the idea of a storage unit or a woodshed. One more bad rental and I’ll start hauling in this fall’s alder supply.

Mermaid Jim used to live south of me, the closest person to the island’s Head, its southernmost inhabitant. I only encountered him infrequently and so he never remembered meeting before which meant I heard his stories numerous times. Invariably he would recount his mermaid story, and invariably I’d wait to find discrepancies from the previous tellings.

“I was scuba diving in the Bahamas,” he’d start in, apropos of nothing in our conversation and only moments from new introductions, how do ya do’s, where ya live? “I was down maybe 30 feet off the reef when she swam right up to me, talked to me like I’m talking to you, bubbles coming out of her mouth while she held steady with her tail. Her tail, man, her tail!”

“Mermaid?” I’d say after hearing the story the first time. “Right,” Jim would say, grateful I wasn’t rolling my eyes or calling 911 for psychiatric help.

“I saw her the next day and the next, every day I dove down there.”

“Whaddaya talk about?”I’d ask. “Nothing much,” he’d always respond.

I guess if I met a mermaid, I’d have some questions and maybe she would too, but Jim apparently didn’t and his sea princess was similarly uncurious. It made his mermaid story short and sweet but not particularly interesting. Still, he never embellished it. Never altered it. He met a mermaid, they talked, he went home. Simple facts. Extraordinary encounter. Worth telling everyone he met about it — mermaids exist, he’s seen one, he’s even talked to one.

Once I asked him if he thought she had a family, if maybe there was a whole undersea city of mermen and mermaids, if they had a watery civilization, if ….
“How would I know?” Jim answered, annoyed that his one mermaid wasn’t plenty as it obviously was for him. “I met a mermaid,” he said, “and she talked to me.”

Developers built four houses near Jim’s place maybe 10 years ago where there hadn’t been anyone for half a mile either direction. Jim told me, last encounter we had, he’d be leaving for over the mountains, maybe Mazama, where there would be less neighbors to bother him. I nearly asked why he wasn’t headed back toward water, maybe be reunited with his mermaid, but I didn’t.   I figure in a way he’s taking her with him.

Walter was recruiting down at the South End Diner this morning, looking for a ‘few good men’ to help him stand guard over the Army recruiting office in downtown Stanwoodopolis. The real recruiters were unarmed, he warned. “They’re completely at the mercy of any *%#@?!! jihadists! They can’t carry weapons and the *%#@#?! Government doesn’t give a damn!”

Anita, the current owner and security guard for the Diner, stepped from around the register and held up a hand in warning. “Clean up your mouth, Walter. And settle down. I don’t need a riot here this early in the morning.”

Ralph, our local wiseguy, was sitting at my table with me and Two Toke and I groaned when he turned with a smirk from his biscuits and gravy toward Walter, two tables over. “How many guns you think we’ll need, Walter? And how long will have to keep at this? I mean, the War on Terror’s nearly 15 years now. You gonna stick out out 15 years?”

It was Anita’s turn to groan. “Thanks, Ralph,” she muttered and went back to the register, thought better of it and headed for the kitchen to confer with Big Larry on the grill, her own brand of recruitment.

“Gonna take as long as it takes, Ralph. Gonna take ALL of us to protect the Homeland, that’s what it takes. Who’s in?” he asked us assembled freedom-loving breakfasteers. “Jimmy, how ‘bout it? Fred? You in?” Jimmy and Fred studied their coffee mugs with an intensity usually reserved for roadside wrecks.

“Apathy!” Walter shouted, his face red. “Apathy’s what kills!” Ralph chuckled. “I thought it was guns, Walter. You know what they say, when apathy’s outlawed, only ….”

Ralph sensed Big Larry’s shadow suddenly looming over our table and shut up mid-sentence. “Walter,” Big Larry growled, ignoring Ralph who was hunching himself into a small inconspicuous persona non gratis, “we ALL need protecting. We just don’t need yours. You vigilantes want to start a war, take it somewhere else. Don’t be messin’ around here.”

Walter stared into the greasy spatula Larry pointed at him, started to speak, then thought better of it. “Okay, Larry, okay.” I think we all knew, even Walter, the Diner wouldn’t be needing outside protection and God help any jihadists who ran into Big Larry.

It’s crabbing season once more, diminished now to a two month opening, five days a week. Ordinarily I walk the eelgrass jungles for the vicious beasts, but when the tides aren’t low, I do what the rest of us down here on the South End do, I use a boat and set pots baited with delicacies from Trader Joe or catered in by Brenda’s Catering and Chow. Everyone these days uses motorboats, but I’m still rowing my little aluminum scow, the one with my homemade oars. Because the State, in its scientific wisdom, requires pots to be pulled the fifth day, I had to row out for mine in whitecaps. Believe me, you pay attention to every stroke when waves are bashing the sides of your tiny tub.

I did okay going out, then managed to pull both pots without flipping the boat. I should maybe mention I’m about 400 yards, call it a quarter mile, out from shore in 75 feet of water. Nobody’s around and nobody’s going to call 911 if I go overboard. I have a lifejacket worst case…. I should probably carry life insurance too.

Going back, though, was harder. The wind had picked up and I was taking worse waves on the sides. My pots were cramping me up for rowing and the direction of the wind was anything but where I wanted to go. Sure, I thought to myself, a smarter man would’ve never come out today. A man with minimal brains would’ve turned around halfway out when the rowing became hard and the danger apparent. Even a dummy might’ve figured leave the damn pots and get his sorry butt back to shore. But … I’m a South Ender and by god, I was going to get those pots and whatever crabs they held even if it meant I had to risk life and limb. This is what differentiates a salty dog from a landlubber professor of economics, in case you were wondering.

Halfway back my left oar caught a wave and hung up a moment. When I got straightened out, I noticed a nut had fallen off the oarlock and next thing I knew the whole gizmo that attached to the oar was coming apart and sure enough, it did. I tried to find the nut down in the crab blood and bait water, but it was nowhere to be seen and last thing I wanted to do was get down and start a panicked search so a rogue wave could swamp me. Gordon Lightfoot said it maybe best in the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: Where in the world does the love of God go, when the minutes turn to hours?

All I know is I cursed myself for not tightening those bolts up good and tight. Nobody to blame but one sad sorry soon-to-be-saltier dog. Worst case, I’d be blown up to the state park at the point, five miles north, not drowned at least. I had crab so I had food. Raw, but survival skills demand a bit of compromise. Sure, I was a little wet, but not hypothermic. And … I still had that oar.

So I paddled one side, rowed the other. I don’t recommend this method, but in a pinch, I can testify, it works. From shore I’m sure it looks like a drunk with one bad arm, every stroke turning the boat about 45 degrees, the waves smacking it, then a paddle turning it back the other way. I finally washed up on the beach not too far from my original launch site.

Some call this recreational crabbing. Even on the South End, this hardly qualifies for recreation. All I know, those crabs are going to taste real good tonight.