The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Karla’s Kut Above sits below the WindyRear real estate offices right across from the fire station. We don’t have much commercial on the South End so space is limited and rent is astronomical. Karla does okay, despite the overhead. She has a couple of stylists who rent chairs, Billie and Veronica, neither from around here, which keeps the gossip almost under control.

Veronica kept saying Camahno for Camano the first year, but tomahto, potahto, who cares? One of the recent candidates for Island County Commissioner pronounced it Camahno too. Who knows, maybe Veronica styled his hair? Actually we do know cause he said he’d never been here before. It’s an odd name for an odd island. Billie called it Commando Island and still does.

Karla figured she’d get to experiment a bit on styling, become the tonsorial artiste she’d dreamed of being. Course, mostly she does perms and blue hair touch up for our more geriatric crowd. It pays the rent, but she would be the first to tell you it doesn’t exactly set her soul free, but hey! life isn’t a chick flick.

Veronica plans to move on soon, so she says. Set up a salon herself closer to Seattle and Gomorrah, maybe draw a hipper, younger clientele than here. Course, the competition is worse, rents are even higher and there’s that whole nuisance of accounting, advertising, payroll and hiring, stuff that sort of ruins capitalism for her. Me too, if you want to know….

Billie’s my stylist … although maybe that’s not the most accurate description. I get a Lop Job about once every 9 or 12months, depending on my need to look halfway respectable at finalist art presentations, what you might call job interviews. The rest of the time I wear hats in various stages of decomposition. Hair style is pretty much moot. I know Billie’s been at the Kut Above a long time because she’s cut my hair 3 or 4 times. Might explain why she never remembers me. Well … at least until I put the hat on over her tonsorial artistry. Also explains why I always leave a generous tip.

Sorry to leave you all in the lurch  …   but, I have relatives visiting and we’re going to make a quick exodus to the coast.  I know what you’re  thinking — we’re running from Ebola.  Truth is, we’re running from the media coverage of Ebola.  It’s time to take a Time Out.  Isis, Ebola, Al Qaida, the Ukraine, Gaza,  the midterm elections, pick a hot topic.  I’m sick of it all.  Gonna go out to the ocean and see what the winds and the tide have to say….  Probably nothing, probably everything we might consider profound.  I promise I won’t come back in a few days with seashell philosophizing.  I’m not looking for answers, just cosmic riddles.   Like Bubbhism sez, for those who ask no questions, there are no mysteries….

WELCOME TO RUBY’S !!
You are staying in the fabulous 1940’s house of Ruby Reed, burlesque queen of Camano’s roaring south end, Her mother, mary mayers, owned the house just to the south of here you can see across the garden next door and sold ruby and her husband the land this house is built on for ten dollars in 1944.
We bought mary’s house in 1977 and in the course of remodeling it we found a full size theater poster of a rather risque woman behind the walls. RuthLathrop, our neighbor at the time who lived in this house, said it must be ruby. “I told you she was a dancer.”
“A dancer?” we asked. “This is a stripper!” “Well,” Ruth laughed, “she was a burlesque dancer.”
History sometimes comes back to haunt us in unpredictable ways. Ruby lived in both her mom’s house and later this house. We know she danced burlesque in seattle and we know a bevy of dancers partied hearty here on the south end. Later ruby taught ballroom dancing and tap dancing in Stanwood.
What we don’t know for sure is if the theater poster is really ruby. I think it is. My historian wife needs more provenance. You can make up your own minds, of course, but meanwhile enjoy a small mystery of history. If you hear tapping in the night, it’s just ruby working out one of her routines. You’ll get used to it ….

So we decided to buy the land next door that came up for sale 25 years after it last went on the market. Back then we lived in our shack a few hundred feet away, but there was No Way we could’ve afforded it, no lost sleep over that then. This time we’ve been through a quarter century of rental neighbors. We’ve had school ma’arms and deadbeats, milkmen and veterinarian assistants, Navy guys and glassblowers, couples with kids, men with dogs, folks with breeding cats, people we never set eyes on for years and people we wish we hadn’t seen at all, one that died, one that lived in the house with curtains drawn without power or heat for a month who I figured had moved until the day he stood at the power box beating on it insanely with a hammer, I guess to see if electricity might return.

Probably the lowest rent on the island, this little house. There’s a converted chicken shed a mile north that rents for $250 a month more than this place next door. So we’ve had a parade of short term neighbors, pretty much not interested in the neighborhood or us, just folks hoping to move UP in life. Meaning, a job closer to town. Someday they’ll regale their grandkids with tales of killer nettles and night crawling blackberries, 5 day power outages and artist neighbors while the kids listen in wide-eyed, open mouthed horror.

So we took a long deep inhalation … and bought the place. I guess so we could NOT have neighbors up there. Sure, we could rent the place, AirB&B it, but that sort of defeats our logic. Nothing new there, but lately it’s been quiet here. Peaceful. Hell, almost pastoral. I’d like to say you can’t put a price on that. But believe me, I can. Right down to the nickel.

Well, it’s that time once again on the South End when every walk through the orchard or back in the woods or out to the outhouse is a face full of webs. Sometimes WITH the spider. Sometimes without. We don’t have enough insects to feed them all, I know that. So it worries me …. WHAT are they catching, these godzillian spiders, that they can survive and breed and return again next fall?

I had a Big Boy in my face this afternoon, dragged in along with his sticky net, crawling up my nose, past my ear and onto my hat. I tried to slap him away, I threw my hat on the ground, I reached over my shoulder … but no arachnid sightings after he’d landed. He’s probably working his 8 legged way down my skivvies, just waiting me out hoping I’ll grow complacent, then CHOMP, some fanged bite that will grow infected, knock me back, fester, then ultimately kill me faster than Ebola. He’ll roll me up in a gauzy nightmare cocoon, chow down on me over the winter, snack when he’s hungry, take me to potlucks, who the hell knows?

Sometimes when the fog is thick and the sun is struggling to break through, you can look across the nettle savannah and every stalk, every stinging leaf is enmeshed in a dewy glisten of web. No bug has a prayer. Not one chance in hell. The spider’s rule.

I only hope they DO find enough to eat. The last thing in this carniverous world I want is some evolutionary leap forward where the webs are strong as Velcro and the arachnids are the size of pitbulls. I like being on the top of the Food Chain. I sure don’t want a predator scarier than an ISIS terrorist. Not in my backyard. On my side of the border.

I was listening to some talking head today describing the kids entering the Job Market. They wanted to work at home, at their own computer stations, alone. Skip the co-worker interaction, they really haven’t learned social skills. Unless you count Tweeting.

I got friends whose kids never make eye contact, who never look up from their X-Box, who have no need to say hello, who live in a digital suburb of my reality but never find a reason to wander over for a Look-See. The gulf between us is huge and growing rapidly into a cultural chasm.

My folks always believed us kids were better seen, not heard, but they made sure we said hello to guests and answered a few perfunctory questions before we scurried to our rooms or the den. The kids — and especially the grandkids — of my pals, they’re beyond social graces. I suspect the workplace of their future will forego watercooler banter and co-worker etiquette. Might just as well let em work at home in their bedroom and send their reports at the end of the day.

The only problem I have with all this is that us Boomers still have to deal with them. When we’re gone, they can tweet and twitter to their hearts’ content, they can social media long distance, they can avoid face to face human interaction and lock into video games, stream Netflix and update their Facebook. But meanwhile I still have to stand next to cellphone users and my buddies’ kids playing video. When we’re gone, they won’t even notice. But it’s going to be a different world, a lot less personal, way less intimate. I suspect they’ll enjoy the peace and quiet. I’m trying to do the same….

Some years Halloween comes early to the South End … and some years it never seems to leave. Down here in the nettle regions the kids get driven north to the Stanwoodopolis Suburbs where the candy flows like bottled mineral water and the sodium lights force phantom predators into the shadows. This season we just got the fright-filled statistics from studies that show philanthropy by the wealthy dropped by nearly 5%, wealthy being those who made over $200 K a year.

I guess the candy jars are going to empty a tad earlier when our little ‘Takers’ roll up to the festooned front doors of the Tricklers. Forget that trickle down theory of supply-siders, I think the drought of charity may be a prolonged one. And no, it probably isn’t the result of Global Warming…. Next year we’ll probably see moats around the castles and the gated communities will add spikes to the fences. Treats for the beggaring poor? Fuggedaboudit! When times get tough, some hearts get harder.

In the same study they found that the poorer folks had actually increased their charitable giving by as much as the wealthy had decreased theirs. I suspect when you belong to a community, you think of neighbors as real people struggling with the same problems as the rest of us. We don’t think of folks who can’t afford health care, folks who lost a job, folks who had their house repossessed as vampires feeding on the Body Politic. They’re us. They’re not who we ‘Unfriend’ when they need help the most. They’re who we look at in our own mirror.

It would be way too easy to demonize the rich. Sure, we could send the kids out this Halloween in tuxedoes and Armani suits. Wearing fangs. But charity, like our mothers said, begins at home, so maybe we should trickle down some to them. And no, I don’t mean give them another tax break. They already got Christmas 365 days a year.

So three of us yahoos decided it was High Time to go over to Pt. Townsend on the Peninsula and attend the Wooden Boat Festival there, us being South End boat builders and all. We had a 12 foot Pelican sailboat, plenty sound enough for the shipping channels of the Straits, we figured, so provisioned with a box of donuts, we set off in the fog. We could hear the container ships booming past but couldn’t see them — and worse, I’m sure they couldn’t see us either, even with radar. The Trident nuclear sub surfaced close by, way close enough to see, an evil black fish that no doubt hadn’t picked us up as anything more than flotsam.

By afternoon the sun had broken through and we found ourselves near the lighthouse of what we thought was Fort Worden, just outside Pt. Townsend, so we sailed south and came upon another lighthouse and now we realized we’d mistaken our location so we continued sailing around Indian and Marrowstone Islands well into the afternoon and finally arrived at Pt. Townsend way late. With a return trip yet to come …. And the fog threatening to descend again.

We ditched the boat on the beach and hoofed into the marina. Whereupon we come upon a Pelican in the show, the homeliest boat moored up, so naturally I asked what the hell kind of duck is this thing you got berthed?? Which prompted a lively response from its proud owners and after they’d settled down a bit, I asked what was it they liked about an ugly scow like this? The water was frothing at near boil but one of the sailorboys said, “I’ll tell you what’s great about a Pelican. It can’t be sunk!”

“Can’t be sunk?” I howled. “Can’t be sunk?? Really?” And he proceeded to tell the tale of a Pelican that had capsized the last summer off the coast of Lummi Island in a storm and when help arrived, two men were rowing it while it was completely full of water! Captain Larry was practically dancing a jig on the dock pointing at me and smirking. “That was him! He flipped his boat up there last year. It’s him. It’s him!!”

“Will you pipe down a minute,” I commanded, realizing my fun with these buccaneers was over and we were embarked on different seas of mirth. “What color was the boat? Where exactly? How’d they get to shore?” To which they pretty accurately recounted my sad little nautical escape that previous summer and so I fessed up. “But,” I said, “we basically sunk. We were completely under water. More flotation under the decks,” I advised. “And a motor that won’t drag the transom down like mine did.”

Well, it’s a small world apparently, and we might have stayed for some partying and sea shanties and late night sailor lies, but the fog had returned and we still had to head back out into the shipping lanes. We went to the marina store for supplies, ascertained we had $8 between all three of us and now, a Hard Decision needed to be made. Should we buy a navigational chart? A compass? Something to eat? $8 leaves not a whole lot of options.

Being the Salty Dogs we were, we made the Hard Choice, the one a less experienced crew might eschew, the one not in the Sailor’s Manual. We grabbed a 6 pack of beer and sailed into the sunset — well, if the fog hadn’t blotted it out —three mariners moving darkly into wooden boat mythology, fearless as idiots in a dangerous dream, never to be seen in Pt. Townsend again. No doubt they recount that voyage yearly at the Festival. “Aye, the lads are out there still,” they whisper in hushed voices around the beach campfires, “ sailing in the boat that cannot sink. God rest their souls….”

Biker Bob rides with an odd assortment of outlaws. He’s got a Honda he’s tricked out to sound like a Harley, meaning he’s got a glasspack muffler you can hear from Tyee Store to my shack, a ferocious rumble that belies the pussycat bike he can barely keep running. I had a bike once, a beat up 350 ready for the scrap heap but scary enough to give me nightmares of highway wrecks, skidding sideways down on gravel and blacktop, legs scraped to raw meat, my football helmet exploding plastic into my brainpan.

You want to ride, Biker Bob will tell you, you need a death wish. I didn’t have one so shortly after I got my street license, I sold it. $100. Cheap life insurance is how I figured it even if I paid someone to take the suicide ride off my hands. That was 40 years ago and I’m still alive with two legs and semi-functioning brain.

Bob’s a good guy, at least when you’re one on one with him. You get around his outlaw pals, his loyalty is with the Pack. If things go bad — and they invariably do with this crowd – he doesn’t recognize friendship when the dogs go hunting the weak and infirm. This is not good news when you realize you’ve become the prey. I try very hard not to antagonize the pack, but there are lines you cross without recognizing them until it’s too late.

I don’t see Bob much these days. He had a cabin I helped build up in the foothills, sold his Harley to help his ‘lady’ out, a woman who was a schoolbus driving friend of mine from the city days. Bob kept a little dirt bike at the time for off road fun, but one night he took it down to the local watering hole off Highway 9, stayed a few too long, then hit the highway late, no lights or license, just a dark run for home. The county sheriff did a U-turn when they passed each other at 50 miles an hour, hit the bubbles, but Bob didn’t see much sense in pulling over and as he explained later, thought maybe he could outrun the deputy. Yah, he said, I was pretty drunk.

A mile before the road to Bob’s cabin the deputy could see he wasn’t going to pull over so he did what most county cops would do under the circumstances: he rode up alongside the little dirt bike and came into Bob’s lane. Bob hit the shoulder, lost control and sailed over a ditch and into a field where he crashed and burned. Being drunk as a skunk, he survived without much damage, spent a night in the Bellingham jail and came home a couple days later. For a few weeks, anyway, Biker Bob was bikeless. Too bad he couldn’t stay that way….

My old roommate Chicago Larry and I lived in a HUD house down in the ghetto in Seattle, two white boys gentrifying a mixed neighborhood not very much interested in being gentrified. Larry was a city boy and I was his chucklehead country sidekick. Our neighbors were pimps and gunrunners, white slavers and drug salesmen. Larry said, “They don’t know what to make of me, but I know exactly what to make of them.” Me, I didn’t have a clue what to make of either.

The lot next to our house was vacant, one of two or three on the block, overgrown with blackberries and bushes, weeds and garbage. A house had once stood there, but all that was left to indicate a prior civilization was the foundation and a couple of old fruit trees. In spring the cherries would blossom in a showy junkyard display and brighten our days. We didn’t get many cherries, not once the birds noticed them ripening up.

The day the guys came with a chainsaw to cut the cherry, Larry was home since he drove cab at night. The whine of the saw next to his bedroom window woke him up in a bad mood. He pulled on his pants and walked out the door to speak with these urban Paul Bunyans. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked. They said they were cutting the tree down. “What for?” Larry asked. “Sell for firewood,” they said. Their saw was dull and hadn’t made much headway into the trunk of the cherry. “This your tree?” Larry asked. “This yours?” they answered.

Larry said no, it wasn’t, but he didn’t want to see it cut down either. He said he’d pay them what they’d get for the firewood. The loggers said, in their best getto-lingo, to go away. They called him a Honky, started their reluctant saw and went back to work killing that tree. I won’t say Larry’s an unreasonable fellow. He prefers negotiation to violence. Up to a point. Past that point, Mr. Hyde steps into view.

He went back in our house, got his .38, the one he carried for protection in his taxi and went back outside. He tried to make himself heard over the shrieking chainsaw, but the two loggers refused to look his way. Larry pulled the trigger and everything stopped immediately.

Larry suggested they put their saw in the truck and leave now. It seemed like a good idea to them as well. Five minutes after their departure, the police arrived. Reports of gunfire, they said. Did Larry know anything about this? “Indeed I do, Officer,” he said, more than happy to tell them his side of the story.

“Do you own the tree, sir?” the younger one asked. “Do you still have the weapon?” Larry retrieved the .38, stood at the bottom of the stairs, answered a couple more questions, all the time gesturing with the gun in his hand, explaining his position with the tree muggers.

Finally the older officer stepped forward and asked, “Would you mind giving us the weapon?” There was a long moment when all three pondered the reality of him holding a loaded pistol, no doubt still a bit adrenalined up, obviously a person of some volatility, waving a pistol for story-telling effect. Larry smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.” The old cop took the gun. Everyone relaxed.

They cited him for discharging a firearm in city limits, confiscated his gun and warned him about further violations. Larry bought a new gun next day and hid it in the ceiling where he forgot it when he moved. No doubt it’s still there. The cherry lived. It oozed sap for a year, but it lived. Last time I drove by our old house a three story town house filled the vacant lot. They’d cut the cherry down to make maximum use of the space. Gentrification, I guess, has its price….