The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Spring doesn’t come early to UpCreek. Too dark, too high in elevation, too impervious to Global Warming. Summer lasts about a month, less if you live on the north side of Daddle Mountain, not that many of us do ….

You won’t see gardens up here. Orchards either. Late frosts, early freezes. Folks who last more than a year or two usually come from the cold countries. Norway, Sweden, Minnesota and North Dakota. UpCreek seems positively tropical to them. They know what winter is like, although … they miss those hot summers, I don’t care if the mosquitoes ate them alive and the humidity was like a steam sauna. What we got is cold and clammy, perfect for moss and fungus and aggravated arthritis.

The UpCrickomish have 56 words for rain in their native language. They got everything from a dry mist to a gullywasher and 54 in between. The Eskimos got snow covered and the Hawaiians fine tune their lava, but the UpCrickomish have parsed their precipitation fairly fine. Us non-natives, we got one tenth that meteorological vocabulary, but we spice it up with four letter descriptors. Sometimes it seems like the boundary between rain and the rest of the world is too arbitrary, too ephemeral. We merge with the wet world the way dew is rain that quit falling.

Some of us old timers remember when the rain did quit falling, the drought of ’76. The rainforests on the Olympic Peninsula burned. In the winter! UpCreek burned too, over a thousand acres east of Otter Creek all the way to Pilchuck Pass. Biker Bob lost his cabin, so did a few others, fire burned right up the canyon before the Forest Service boyz got on top of it.

My cabin sits in a clearing so that year I was passed over. The meadow downstream the year after the burn was loaded with morel mushrooms, maybe not a great payback, but you learn up here to take what you can from hardship and disaster, it’s all this hardscrabble place is gonna give for recompense.

Biker Bob moved on. Last we heard he was holed up in Pahrump, Nevada. Got himself a little trailer and on the postcard he sent to the Otter Creek Trading Post for all of us to read, he said it doesn’t rain down there and there’s nothing to burn. He liked it just fine. A couple of the usual layabouts at the Trading Post said they might just have to go visit Bob some winter to escape for awhile, but we all know they won’t. If we wanted to live in the desert, we’d have gone long ago.

Love on the South End was never a bowl of cherries. You try to woo a prospective mate after she’s set eyes on 8 foot tall killer nettles menacing the front door, you’ll see what I mean. Course, the Rottweiler barking all night from its pen next to the neighbor’s travel trailer which no longer travels, the one Mr. Dog Lover lives in with the hound chained close by for affection or protection, that doesn’t endear new girlfriends to the neighborhood either.

Most of my single friends have about given up on the local scene. They’ve dated every yahoo, unemployed or otherwise, down at the Hotel Watering Hole and Dating Service, and those memories they’d like to forget. Or at least suppress. I know. I had to mail order my bride. She probably sensed the muted desperation in my throb-filled love letters, but she took pity, I guess, on an old hermit. I sure didn’t mention the banjos. Or the ivy holding up the shack walls. Or the well on its last legs with an ancient piston pump wheezing and gasping just to haul up a glass of water. Love, I knew, would overcome all those drawbacks.

Course we were younger then, still ‘marketable’. My friends, my single friends, have grown a bit longer in the tooth. Some are missing teeth. More than a few have turned to internet dating to meet future partners, figuring, I guess, the ‘pool’ around here has grown shallow with mostly only geezers fossilizing in the puddles. Now they got a pool of millions of prospective mates to choose from. Just sort through the criterion, run the data and preferences, make allowance for some creative exaggeration, then set up a date. “Non-smoker, loves to walk the beach at sunset, enjoys good literature, would rather snuggle than watch TV, loves puppies and quiet conversations.” True translation: psychopath, possible killer. “Fit, but could lose 5 pounds, enjoys an occasional glass of merlot, young at heart.” Translation: obese nursing home escapee.

Fat chance of finding an honest person in the era of Facebook selfies. The mizzus is counting her lucky stars, but our friends — Mr. Right is fudging the facts. He’s balding, morbidly obese, 15 years too old, drinks until he blacks out, watches any sporting even on TV day or night, eats exclusively Doritos and beer nuts and has the conversational equivalency of Cheetah the ape and a literary proficiency that stalled with Archie and Jughead. He wants mostly to get laid, then left in peace with his TV show. He is, if you haven’t guessed, 6 farts shy of being a heart throb.

Love is an elusive realm. It takes a lot of compromise to share a life, a whole entire life. With a person who has faults and idiosyncracies that have to mesh somehow with your own. And on top of that there’s the cultural overlay of physical beauty and … well, physical beauty mostly. And sex. Let’s not even go there, the rest is hard enough. Although for the guys, the rest is sort of superfluous.

I know this isn’t exactly an Advice Column and by now you know any advice I got is seriously suspect anyway, but … for those who still believe the AM radio bubble gum pop song notion of True Love, don’t give up. But DO keep in mind, bad love is worse than no love. I’ve had my vaccination of bad love. Loneliness usually won’t make you miserable. Or cynical. Or suicidal. But love gone south … love on the rocks … love turned sour and rancid and mean? Be choosy is all I’m saying. Be your own best friend. If that’s all you got, remember: it’s plenty!

I just learned the roadwork between Camano Island and the mainland that’s been going on for months isn’t actually a tunnel bypassing Stanwoodopolis like I’d hoped. Imagine — if you can — our disappointment down here on the ferryless South End. Another few decades of stop-and-go through the town that thinks of us basically as Trespassers. We cause the rush hour traffic jams, we crowd their stores, we clamor for art and culture when all they ask is some peace and quiet.

Used to be no stoplights or stop signs from the freeway exit to the South End. Sure, Stanwood had a Welkommen sign back then, but basically they hoped we’d keep on going over the sewer causeway and on to the Mark Clark bridge. If you stopped for gas or groceries, they weren’t particularly friendly. You were tolerated, but just barely. I always noticed a Welkommen sign wasn’t put up for those of us coming back. And we were all, unfortunately, coming back.

Times change, of course, and now there’s 5 stop light through Stanwood Town, 2 more than the island. Times might change, but not the Attitude so much. The big chains are friendly, but the old retail, good luck. Most of us South Enders keep on going. Mt. Vernon, Everett, Smokey Point. Those 5 stoplights about double the driving time.

So when that roadwork started digging down I saw my dream finally coming true: a tunnel under Stanwoodopolis, a subterranean bypass. A Big Dig. A win-win. For us and the fiercely independent tribesmen of Stanwoodopolis. Now those pretty dreams are dashed. The road isn’t descending, it’s rising. Down in Seattle and Gomorrah, Big Bertha’s broken and their dig is deferred indefinitely. No doubt this is why we won’t get our tunnel — the drilling machine won’t be available for who knows how long. My lifetime, I’m figuring. And probably 5 more stoplights.

I was up at a farm on the North End recently and a couple of us homesteaders got to swapping chicken stories. Roosters, mostly. You think maybe chickens are silly little cacklers scratching up worms and grubs for dinner or they’re benign little birds dropping eggs for your breakfast, you haven’t been properly introduced to the male of the species.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Cock of the Walk? That’s these bad boys. Vicious attackers of the unwary. Aggressive, fearless birds that come at you with beak and spurs. They’ll open you up before you can say chicken cacciatore. And you’ll never turn your back on one again, trust me.

Well, we swapped a few whoppers before Professor Bob mentioned he’d been up to Darrington for the cockfights awhile back, a couple hundred Tarheels betting their moonshine earnings on birds bred for vicious violence. When I first came to Camano Island, the cops were busy busting cockfighting rings in Stanwood and Gomorrah. I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this sort of bloodsport die out in the 1800’s? And the answer is apparently NO. Down south where I grew up, they fight dogs in Dixie. Yeah, it seems barbaric. But … we still got boxing and now we got kickboxing. And if you want mayhem, tune in some Sunday to NFL football. They’ll study us someday like we were Romans, professional gladiators. Only real difference is we figured how to make it profitable.

Maybe the cockfighters need to sell television rights. Line up some advertisers. Sell beer and hotdogs. Make it respectable for more than the Tarheels and a few UW professors. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t generate a mass audience. After all, we got politics now 24/7 if you like your violence vicious. Course, maybe they should sell beer and peanuts and advertising rights. Monday Night Congressional Cockfights. Probably take a few months to balance the budget with the profits. Think about it is all I’m asking.

Karen and I bought the little house next door to us. We know a bit of its history and the history of Ruby, the woman who built it with her husband Harry, a fellow vaudevillian. Ruby was a dancer. Actually, she was a burlesque dancer and more accurately, a stripper during the Depression. We even have a full size theater marquee of her we found in the wall of our shack back in 1978 where, it turns out, Ruby lived with her mom Mary and her sister Pearl and her brother Marion back as far as 100 years ago when the shack was built. In the 40’s she and Harry built the little house we just bought.

I think half the reason we bought it was because Karen is an historian and wanted to bring the two places back together, sort of the way it was originally, all in the family. She’s been searching websites, googling up Ruby and binging Harry and yahooing Pearl. She’s got folks down at the Historical Society sleuthing tidbits on burlesque queens and strippers to the point the FBI may have a sting soon on geriatric porno purveyors, a psychopathology that has received all too little attention in the media. Genealogists have joined the fray and fragment by fragment, some of Ruby’s life has begun to materialize. More than her dance outfit, that’s for sure….

But … you go searching into closets and crevasses, you better be prepared for what you uncover. People’s lives hold secrets and surprises. We don’t all have happy endings, even us South Enders. Maybe particularly us South Enders. This past month we were given an article from the Oct. 18, 1946 Sacramento Bee which reads as follows: “A suave and polite bandit raped burlesque dancer Ruby Reed, 28, at gunpoint yesterday morning while her husband lay in the same bed, tied and gagged.
The gunman, dressed in navy or merchant marine uniform, folded his coat neatly on a chair but did not remove his cap or mask.
Miss Reed and her husband, Harry Mayers, a burlesque comedian, woke at 4:30 A.M. to find a man pointing a gun and a flashlight in their room at 324 Hyde Street. He said: ‘This is a stickup. Never mind the money. Get back into bed.’ He tied Mayer’s hands with clothesline, gagged both of them and then raped Miss Reed.
Afterward, he rose, took his coat and left, remarking, ‘Thank you very much.’

This account leaves altogether too much to the imagination and raises serious questions as to where the plot will take us next. Part of me wishes we’d never delved this deeply. But the other part wants to know how the coming chapter will play out. I’ve always maintained that history is half mystery. I just hope it isn’t a murder mystery. Stay tuned. We are.

Back in the days before brie and merlot replaced nettle hardtack and homebrew, the South End was a wild and woolier frontier than its gated communities and statuary-riddled estates might lead a Sunday driver to believe. Laws weren’t so much meant to be broken as they were just ignored. Most of us scofflaws were pretty harmless, but you live in a place beyond the reach of Rome, you’ll get a nastier sort too.

Mountain Man Mike lived up behind me with only a vicious barrier of nettles and blackberries to hold him at bay. Mike thought he was pretty much the Law unto himself, like a lot of us, but Mike had a cruel streak and a violent temper. Mountain Man rode his horse and his dogs up and down the highway and backcountry through what trails we kept open into the salmonberry jungles. He hunted deer out of season all year long, shot them and anything else that came into view. Rumor was he made vats of fresh killed varmint and fed the stew to his hounds. Wasn’t long before the Bambi population reached near zero. I gripe with the best over deer grazing our gardens and orchards, but I didn’t want them exterminated. And not by Mike.

Mike shot our neighbor’s dog one year. John came around looking for it and I said I hadn’t seen the pooch for more than a week, maybe check up back with Mountain Man. Which he did and Mike said yeah, I shot the sonofabitch, it was messing with the chickens. Mike’s wife was standing there and she said no it wasn’t messing with the chickens, you just wanted to kill her. Mike said get your sorry ass inside and to Johnny get his off my property. The sheriff came out next, issued a citation for killing the dog for which Mike paid $500 and gave his mizzus a black eye.

A few months later a couple of dogs were found tied together with baling wire and left to die in a field near Mike’s. I guess Mike figured better to kill them on the QT than just blast away with his rifle. Or maybe he found a new form for his sadism. My neighbor untied them and they both lived. Lucky dogs!

Mountain Man eventually divorced his wife and he’s moved somewhere north where hopefully the neighbors fence their dogs and kids and where shooting a rifle out back will bring the Law and I mean right now. Down here, we’re not going to miss him. Mike is exactly why we have laws in the first place and why, even on the South End, we don’t believe in Anarchy, despite rumors to the contrary.

Somewhere just shy of the tail end of the Last Century, we built the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center and Art Park. Even won some architectural awards when we finished it. Got a post-modern building, a huge Matzke stainless steel sculpture, a Paula Rey sculpture, a Gunter painting, a David Maritz sculpture, another by Debbie Rhodes and a big-ass stained glass window. We planted trees and shrubs, laid a walkway, redid the signboard and map and striped a parking lot. We even managed to obtain 3.5 acres behind this for a continuation of our sculpture park. You want to know if something like that is inspirational, an art story where art wins at the end, I can tell you. It is!

A bunch of us artists spent a year on that project. Plenty of headbutting with the Chamber Board, mostly folks who felt like us artists had pulled a fast one on them, turning an information booth into a celebration of art. I finally had to join up myself so we could get the thing done, about as appealing a notion to me as signing up for the NRA. Half the Board wondered who the hell the guy in the hat was who worked every day down there 7 days a week all that spring and summer and into the fall. Some unemployed sucker, they probably thought, who we don’t need to know who he is or stop by and maybe say thanks for the free labor.

Fast forward a few years. Maritz’s sculpture was stolen for scrap metal. Debbie’s ‘Diver’ sculpture was stolen for the same reason. A decommissioned Seattle copper and bronze sculpture by Glen Alps we’d hauled up to reinstall was hauled off in the middle of the night by metal thieves. The stained glass window was riddled with bullet holes and broken by bottles thrown from passing cars. I got a call last week from the guy who’s going to rent that Visitor Center from the current Chamber now that they decided they’d rather set up an info booth around the corner in a trailer and rent the empty building at the most strategic location on the island for a few miserable pesos. I spoze I could’ve been pissy with him. I spoze I could’ve gone to the county and asked if maybe a commercial building meets their codes. I spoze I could’ve gotten on my High Horse and gone to the papers, see what people think of folks who take all our volunteerism and turn it into a cash register.

But … Don Quixote here has tilted too long at windmills, even if it’s one he helped build. I must be getting old and tired. I wish I was getting wiser. Although … if dealing with the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t smartened me up, nothing much will. Most folks don’t know the history of that Art Park and most wouldn’t care anyway. I like to think — and I certainly say it enough — all I want is to move on to the next project. The past, dammit, just is. Past. I can’t spend time fighting battles to save it. I’m not a historian, I’m a South Ender.
They want me to say it’s fine, it’s okay. Just a new wrinkle in the old Center. They tried to put the President’s retail shop in there back when we first built it. So maybe the way to look at it is we held them at bay for 15 years at least. But capitalism has won now, why not shout hurray! Join the Chamber. Salute the real estate offices. Pledge allegiance to Money.

But! For a brief time, maybe not forever, art won. I think maybe the battle is lost, but the war isn’t over on Commando Island, not by a long shot. We’re leaving a silver bullet on the table when we go even though they’ll smile and figure it’s just something they can melt down and cash in. Like an old pal of mine once said, “They don’t know what to make of me …. but I know exactly what to make of them.”

Je Suis Fred

Francophobe Fred was lecturing with a cold limp French fry to a few of us malingerers at the newly christened Leatherhedz Pub and Swill. Admittedly, we were deep in our cups, not quite ready to face the music at home, although … a few more flaccid fries with ketchup dripping noodled in our faces, anything would look better.

“They’re ALL terrorists!” he shouted. A fat splotch of ketchup put an exclamation point on Ralph’s Carhartt jacket. Another stain only added to the ‘worn’ look of it, but even so, Ralph rubbed at it as if it were acid eating through to his chest. “Jeez, Fred, watch where you’re shakin that fry! This coat’s American made.”

“The hell, you say.” And for a moment, I thought the invocation of jobs still in this country might swing Fred onto another of his favorite rants, illegal immigration and jobs going overseas. But no, he popped the accused fry into his mouth and said between chews, “A few more boatlads and they’ll ram Sharia Law through. The French won’t know what hit em til it’s too late. Maybe,” he wondered aloud, brandishing another greasy potato stick, “they’ll get the message now.”

Ralph was muttering. He’d poured part of his beer on a napkin and was furiously scrubbing the ketchup stain deeper into cotton grown in Bangladesh and sewn in Mexico by workers who hadn’t yet smuggled themselves north. “I’m getting the message, Fred. Jeez, settle down.”

“It’s about Free Speech, Ralph, can’t you see what’s happening?” Ralph shook his head sadly. “I see this ketchup isn’t coming out, that’s what I see, Fred.” Ralph looked like he’d been shot in the chest, blood oozing above his right breast pocket. Jerry, two stools down, laughed out loud. “He means that cartoon of Muhammed, Ralph. They got a right to make fun at someone’s religion, that’s what he means.” None of us waiting for Last Call were particularly religious.

“Damn right that’s what I mean! They don’t like it, lump it … or leave the country. All of em!” “Or what?” I asked, breaking off from watching Ralph washing his coat with Budweiser.

“Round em up! Send em home where they belong! Why the hell not?”

“Their free speech?” I asked. “Freedom to live where they want?”

Ralph stood up suddenly. Fred drew back as if expecting the worst. “I gotta go,” Ralph blurted. He lurched out of his booth. “I don’t want this to set. Maybe I can still soak it in cold water.”

“Soak yer head too,” Fred called after him, although not loud enough for Ralph to hear. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to call it a night. Facing the music looked like a real good plan. “Wait up, Ralph,” I hollered. “I’m right behind you.” Sometimes freedom isn’t at all what you think.

Those of you who think the Wild Wild West is gone from the gentrified South End, I’ll tell you a story. I got a call this morning at an uncivilized hour, something that the mizzus really hates, especially when it’s a threatening phone call, another victim of Skeeter’s satire taking serious umbrage. The Barefoot Bandit’s demented mom called one time while I was on a field trip and she didn’t sleep until I got home to take care of my mess, figuring, probably for good cause, someone might want to knock the door down to discuss matters. This call, however, was from a neighbor pissed off I had called him out in the widely circulated Crab Cracker for poaching crab. “You must have a guilty conscience,” I laughed in the pre-dawn hours.

Bingo. Sometimes Skeeter’s right on target. Rare, but it happens. My pal had been poaching crab, the police had been summoned and …. well, no point repeating the tale. I said I had someone else in mind, happened to use your given name, purely coincidental. He was unconvinced until I mentioned I’d written the story six months before his transgression.

“Well, okay,” Poacher Paul sez, still not totally sure I wasn’t conning a con. “But I got a better story for ya….” This, dear reader, is how reporters work. We develop contacts, undisclosed sources, ‘anonymous’ insiders. And then we wait for them to call us, why go hoofing around the nettlebottoms looking for leads? They’re dying to tell their story.

So maybe you remember the heroin addict up the road stealing from my neighbors I wrote about this past month? Or maybe you don’t. We got this yahoo addict living in the ‘hood, sheltered by a buddy’s neighbor. My buddy was robbed three times. He goes to see the neighbor and the neighbor won’t even talk to him. He sees the pilfering addict and the addict runs into the woods when he’s approached. It doesn’t take Perry Mason to figure who’s guilty here. But the cops can’t do anything but take reports and hope for a break in the case.

Down on the South End, we don’t like to wait for the break in the case. We like to be a tad more hands-on. So my neighbor and Poacher Paul and an ex-cop they bring along, go to visit our thief, ‘alleged’ not really applicable at this point. Did I mention it was 3 in the morning? And they brought a shotgun, a semi-automatic assault rifle and — my favorite part! — a video camera to record the whole thing. They commence to banging on the doors and bedroom windows, yelling to come out with hands up, guns drawn … and hear screaming that ‘they’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill us!’ If you’ve lived here as long as me and Dave, the guy now sheltering Needleboy, you would know the sheriffs shot a man to pieces wanted on warrants same time of night a house or two away back in the ‘80’s. Threw in a stun grenade, then shot him up like Bonnie and Clyde. He’d been seen firing his assault rifle on Bernie Road, a peaceful little cut-off to pretty much nowhere back then. We don’t cotton to that down here, I don’t care how much we seem to like firearms and the NRA.

Dave probably figured sleepily what his options were here and came out on his porch in his BVD’s blasting away with a sawed off shotgun. Events involving weapons have a way of getting out of hand…. By now my neighbor is in Dave’s house with his shotgun, waving it around like a can of aerosol air freshener. He wants his stuff back and he wants it right %$!!?**#@ NOW!

Course you know and I know that stuff is long gone, sold for peanuts and used to buy a few more fixes. I’m assuming our vigilantes knew that too, they simply wanted to put an exclamation on their point. Which was …? Well, hard, really, to say. I’m just a reporter, not a psychologist. But I’m guessing they wanted him to move up the line, maybe the North End. If you’re from up there, you might want to think twice before taking in boarders.

So okay, the terrorists are killing cartoonists and satirists. Make sport of them at your own risk, Monsieur! There’s definitely something lacking in a jihadist — a funny bone maybe?

Don’t ask me why, but you take folks real serious about their religion — any religion — and you poke a bit of fun at their beliefs, good chance you’ll need Kevlar clothing. Mix in some politics — and no, let’s not call that a religion yet — and you got all the makings for a full blown riot.

Now you might not believe this, but old Skeeter here pulls his punches. Religious idealogues and right wing Tea Partiers, I try to avoid poking my elbow in their eye socket. Too easy a target, maybe. Or maybe freedom of speech should have some self –imposed limits. Granted, I think those limits shouldn’t be imposed by the government — and definitely not by pissed off terrorists and North Korean chubby dictators. Bad taste is offensive but doesn’t meet the capital punishment test. Not only that, but the counter-reaction is going to be grim, nasty and violently incommensurate with the perceived grievance. You think a Fatwah to kill Salman Rushdie is ill advised, wait til the Europeans’ favorite hairstyle is Skinhead and the new Jew is Moslem. The joking’s going to stop real quick.

So forgive me if I skip the cartoon of you-know-who or the name-that-cannot-be-spoken or the politician-who-needs-horsewhipping-with-his-own-tongue. Short of a funny bone transplant, what’s the point? Their world is set in granite, nothing humorous is going to penetrate their idealistically pure forcefield. I’d poke fun at us satirists, but hey, we’re a little busy right now screaming First Amendment! First Amendment! in our building that’s not quite on fire. There’s no one left here except us trampled few….