The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

After three and a half years of public hearings, federal regulatory changes and zoning clearances, Camano is poised to break ground on its new and controversial 65 acre landfill. Angry residents made their voices heard regarding perceived exorbitant transfer station fees while complaints from the gated community of Island Hills concerning obnoxious summer odors wafting up from the odoriferous collection site made the decision all that much more urgent.

In a return to the past, Camano will no longer pay to have its refuse trucked to off-island dumps. Various sites for an intra-island depository were considered over the 42 months of head scratching by numerous county, state and federal agencies, but in the end, a panel comprised of health officials, citizens’ groups and local area water associations voted to purchase the 65 acre tract of ‘nearly useless’ land eight miles south of Elger Bay Store in the island’s virtually uninhabited interior. In a prepared statement, the Camano Recycle and Refuse Committee (CRRC) argued that “given the remote location and relatively non-utilitarian potential for economic development of the land, Camano would be best served if these tracts near the Camano Head were used for on-island disposal of indigenous trash”.

Some committee members, in a separate dissension, worried that hauling recycles from one end of the island back to the north would be exorbitantly expensive, given the distance from the current King County Recycling Station. They voiced concerns about inadequate drainage in clay subsoils as well as vandalism by nearby residents of the South End. “We don’t want to create a Little Cairo of dump pickers down there,” one committee member stated to this Crab Cracker reporter.

Nevertheless, the property has been purchased, permits have been issued and this May bulldozers will begin the arduous task of clearing old growth nettles, clandestine white supremacist enclaves, two abandoned meth labs, a remote county park used and maintained by one elderly volunteer, multiple bottle dumps, illegal residences and a tire dump.

The ad hoc group NOT ON OUR SOUTH END! vowed to continue their lawsuit to stop the new landfill, but Natalie Nimbee, group spokeswoman, admitted they were running dangerously short on time and cash. Their only hope now, she said, was that the Southendomish Tribal Council might weigh in, but so far, they seem reluctant. Chief Net’yl Skratchum stated on the record, “Same crummy deal since the Mabana Treaty of 1918 giving us 50% scrounging rights. Half of what the landgrabbers leave behind…. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Officials indicate the new landfill will meet strict EPA guidelines and should be fully operational by the end of 2015. The site of the current transfer station will be restored to its former natural setting and eventually converted to a county park.

Some of my builder buddies tell me they have trouble hiring the local graduates for their trades. I hear the same thing from pals in the restaurant biz. Jobs get advertised, but few apply and half those that do don’t show up for their interviews. I guess the jobs the kids want aren’t physical labor. Not when they could be video jockeys and computer cowboys. Why break your back and your neck framing houses, hauling concrete, doing lawnwork, cooking over a grill or serving dinners?

Me, I sort of went the opposite direction. I left academia, I quit my teaching job, I guess I dropped out …. to learn carpentry, woodworking, boatbuilding, mechanics, plumbing, all that stuff it takes to live closer to the land. Won’t say I got real good at any of them, but in a specialized world, it’s gratifying not to be specialized. I even learned a skill to make a living working with my hands. I’m not saying the kids are wrong — just saying there’s a satisfaction in making things, fixing things, building things. Oh, I know, you can do that in the virtual world. I work there too. When I have to ….

Course, there’s a lot of manual labor that isn’t too rewarding. You ask me, most labor isn’t, but then, you didn’t ask me. When I left the job force, I never expected to find anything that would pay me AND give me satisfaction. They seemed like polar opposites. So I count myself lucky. Blessed, if I can use a word so freighted with blissful la-la connotations.

The young folks I know struggling to find a niche in this consumer-crazed world, I tell em keep searching, don’t accept defeat, fight for meaning, don’t sell out or sell yourself short, you’ll find something you can invest your time and yourself in. Who knows, maybe it’s true if you believe it. I do. But then, I was willing to be poor. I don’t know many folks who would choose poverty over a soul-sucking job. Then again, they may get both.

Well, once again it’s St. Patrick’s Day, celebrating the patron saint of snake herders. Kind of the Blarney, a veritable green Bacchus. Truth is, unlike most holidays that cloak themselves in righteous symbolism or jingoist reverence, St’ Paddy’s is a drunkard’s dream, a celebration apparently created for the sole purpose of celebrating. Needless to say, it’s the National Holiday of the bibulous South End, Christmas and the 4th of July wrapped up in Presidents day and Labor Day, what we think of as the Real Thanksgiving.

Course, we treat ALL our holidays this way, but nevertheless, this one there’s no speeches, no symbolism, no prayers offered, no malarkey, no turkey, just bottoms UP!! And bring on the next glass….

Oh, I know, not everyone embraces Dionysian Day. The mizzus shakes her head, Pastor Roy down at the Little Church in the Ravine inveighs against bacchanalian excess, the Law puts on extra deputies —- all to little avail. Us South End hedonists look forward to St. Pat’s the way a Muslim yearns for Ramadan. We just don’t have to make much of a pilgrimage. And, of course, there are a few other crucial distinctions.

Every year I say the same thing: next year I’ll downsize our garden, maybe grow one tomato plant and a row of peas, toss in a row of greens for salads and call it Good. And every year, as sure as the plums blossom and the nettles rise up from the dead, I haul out the old rototiller and start planting two months too early. The pea seeds are gonna rot and the lettuce won’t come up, but I’ll plant again in a couple of weeks, about when the cherries bloom. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as every year since I moved here 37 years ago.

Who’s kidding who? I can buy vegetables WAY cheaper than most of what I grow. They practically give you potatoes by the time I’m digging ours. They even taste better than my scabby ones. Corn? I did quit corn last year. But I’m thinking maybe one token row would be tasty come fall. I can grow mutant squashes here to Stanwoodopolis, but I’m not real big on squash although maybe I should reconsider seeing’s how easy they are, sort of a fruiting kudzu.

And of course it’s a battle with slugs and snails, cabbage moths and cutworms, scabs and aphids, deer and rabbits, weeds and crows. We all want to eat, I guess. When they vote me in as God, I’ll do it different. Maybe just do it like the plants, grow on sun and air and water and dirt. Us animals turned Paradise into a Jungle. Tastes good, but kind of brutal at times.

It’s a lot of work, this gardening. But then, so is shopping. Bump cars with folks in a hurry, the parking lot mayhem, self serve registers trying to find the bin number for organic cauliflower not the Monsanto cauliflower, the bag choices, the plastic store card they swipe to track your buying habits, coupons and sales gimmicks. It’s a jungle in Safeway too.

And anyway, I didn’t move to the country to watch bad TV, I hope. I don’t kid myself — I’m not growing food here so much as I’m trying to get back to some Roots. I’ll have to share it with the vermin and the predators, the pests and the worms. Like always, I’ll have to learn to live with the neighbors, two legged, four legged, no legged or practically invisible. After all, we’re all in this thing together.

You can tell volumes about South End history by examining our garbage evolution, sorta like counting rings on an old growth fir or the layer of ice deposits in a glacier. Science, a powerful tool. Well, for about half of us these days….

I still find old bottle dumps on our place — and back in the woods there are ravines that have entire cars, bedsteads, wringer washers, complete antique stores if this stuff wasn’t all rusted half away now. Back in the disco 70’s, we still drove our garbage up to Camano Hill where Frank guarded the official dump, pulling out future artifacts he brought home south of me, most of which are probably still there in a strata or two beneath the 21st century. Quite a few South Enders I know like to keep most everything they ever owned — usually just outside the back door where the nettles and blackberries claim it all. It’s an archeologist’s dream, for sure, someday centuries hence.

When the county closed the dump and sent Frank into an early retirement, we got a couple of coin operated dumpsters at our present location about 1980. Drive up, drop your quarters in, a lid lifted and a piston crunched what you tossed into an oozing pancake. Okay for a few trash bags, but not for, oh, roof shingles or construction debris. Pretty quick we got scales and semi-trailer size bins.

We even got primitive recycle. This was when you could sell aluminum and bottles back in town … and a lot of us penny pinchers did. At the dump you sorted your glass by color and watched out for yellowjackets drunk on stale beer and wine dregs. You had to tear the labels off all your cans, cut off the bottom and crush em first. The trash Nazis checked, believe me. A lot of work to throw away your bottles and cans back then…. Now it all goes into the Omni-Bin, paper, bottles, cans, boxes, all of it sorted out somewhere, somehow, by someone or something.

Most folks now have garbage pick-up, big green Waste Management trucks stop in once a week by the driveway, curbside service, E-Z payments. Me, I like hauling my own litter, oh, about every few months. Otherwise, how would I keep tabs on the island civilization? History, after all, is about half what we take to the dump. The other half is still back in the woods.

Back in the days when we wrenched on our cars — NOT for the love of vintage automobiles, but because we were too poor to have someone else repair them — we had just come back from the Rez junkyard where we’d pulled an automatic tranny out of another ’64 Impala half sunk in the swamps. Muddy nasty work, but you do what has to be done…. By late afternoon we had that transmission cleaned off and bolted onto our own Chevy up by the barn, and now the moment of truth had arrived so we fired up the Impala, ignored the bucket of parts with the ‘extra’ bolts and nuts and do-hickeys, dropped it off its jacks and headed up the road.

For the first mile we drove slow, feeling for sloppy shifts, listening for odd noises. Two miles up we hit 50mph and now terrible noises rose through the floorboards so we pulled over and crawled underneath. Sure enough, a few bolts were missing where the tranny connected to the bellhousing, no doubt those ‘extra’ parts back in the bucket by the barn. We cursed, we spit, we finally laughed at our stupidity, stuck our thumbs out and waited for a ride.

Joe Frittitelli swerved to the shoulder in his big Exxon Valdez of a cruiser, said hop in, boyz, and we squeezed between Joe and his girlfriend, all four of us in the front seat the spaciousness of a Montana wheatfield. A mile later Joe had to urinate ‘like a racehorse’ and since the driver’s door was no longer functional, all of us slid out the passenger side and waited while Seabiscuit relieved himself, then we all rolled back in across seas of amber grain. He dropped us on the roadside by our place, then sped off in a purple haze of half burnt oil.

We retrieved the lost bolts, hitched back to the crippled Impala, installed them and an hour later we were back at the shack, Jack, celebrating with some cold ones. A month later I’m working my job as weekend graveyard orderly down at the Everett Pain Motel and run into Joe at 3 AM wandering the desolate hallways. “What’s up, Joe?” I asked.

Joe, it seems, had been cleaning his gun late that night, pulled the trigger and lo and behold, the unanticipated bullet in the chamber was now embedded in his girlfriend’s brain. I had just taken her to the Cat Scan but hadn’t recognized her. She was comatose but alive. It was, needless to say, a long night. The police were convinced he’d shot her intentionally. I was convinced he hadn’t. If he had, he deserved an Academy Award.

She stayed up in ICU on life support for two months. Alive, I guess, but not really. Last we heard they moved her to a facility that cared for the comatose. Joe was never charged. He got cancer and moved away, where, we heard, he died. And …. not to sound too cold hearted or unsympathetic to the victims here, our Impala died too. The tranny was no good and we didn’t want to waste time or money on another bad one. I don’t think we wanted to meet any more neighbors either. Maybe it wasn’t so much we were dirt poor back then — as much as life seemed just way too cheap.

South End society runs the gamut these days from Dot.com millionaires to meth-heads. You live down here in the tonier backwashes, you acquire a necessary degree of egalitarianism. That, or you move into the Gated Communities, rig up elaborate security systems and hope the unwashed masses don’t mistake the moat around your castle as a fancy hot tub.

One of our neighbors who went by the moniker of ‘Dawg’ married a woman south of me and immediately added 4 stepkids to his care. His ex was living over the mountains with two of his other kids and so, in the spirit of misguided parenthood, Dawg and his old lady hired an attorney to regain custody of those poor deprived children being raised by a single mom who’d taken up with an ex-con and worse, one on drugs. Dawg and his mizzus were also on drugs, drank heavily, but they had decided their parental skills would serve the children best.

And so they finally convinced a judge and child services to return the two teenagers to the stability and warmth of a South End home, to be raised by paragons of virtue and join the family circle. A year later Dawg and the mizzus split the sheets after she’d shacked up with an alcoholic loser on the north end and left him with 4 juvenile delinquent stepkids and his own 2 genetic ones. In the spirit of sacrifice and after considerable deliberation with myself and Jack Daniels, Dawg moved out too.

Lest you think Dawg was heartless, it should be stated he came down once a week to fill the fridge and ‘check on things’. “I just can’t be here all the damn time,” he told me. “And anyway, those kids of hers (meaning the mizzus’) hate my guts.”

The neighbors grew concerned when the parties lasted deep into the night, cars honked horns and tore out at 2 AM and numerous fights were continually breaking out. Chickens, dogs, cats, meth dealers and other animals came and went in the house whose doors were wide open day and night. The floors were urine and feces stained and the place reeked like a Texas porta-potty in August. Dawg told me his daughter — the one he’d ‘rescued’ from an abusive life — was now pregnant. She was 15, maybe 16. When she came, she was a bright and inquisitive kid. Now she could look forward to teenage motherhood.

There’s plenty of guilt to go around and I have some myself for not going to the police or child protection services or even calling some church. My mother used to tell us kids, “It takes all kinds to make a world.” And when we got to be smartass teenagers, we’d reply, “Right, Mom, that’s why it’s all screwed up.”

Dawg got fired awhile back from his job of 25 years. He ended up marrying his ex, the woman whose kids he took and ruined. It only lasted a year or so, then she hooked up with a biker from Seattle.  I ran into him the other day. Same old Dawg. Like he always said when he lived down here: No brains, no headaches. Dawg hasn’t got either.

You live on the wild wild South End, you know the Long Arm of the Law isn’t all THAT lengthy and the Reach of Rome isn’t either. Frontier Justice is what we got, more often than not, although I’m not saying I’m an advocate. Me, I’m like most of us down here at the end of the county road —- I just want to be left in peace.

Dan the Woodcarvin Man is of the same mind, maybe more so. He got a new neighbor on the north side of his 5 acres, pretty much out of sight through a stand of woods, although with the new hound that came with the new couple, not exactly out of earshot. It drove him a little crazy all that incessant barking, and he spoke with the couple finally when it chased his cat up a tree and it took two days to get it to come back to terra firma. The wife flat out told him their dog never left the property and slammed the door behind her when she stomped back inside. Dan and the husband — he thought his name was Jesse — stood there in awkward silence. Until Jesse’s sweetheart stormed back out and told Jess to get his ass inside and Dan to get his off her property.

Robert Frost said good fences make good neighbors. He meant it ironically. A week after being thrown off their property, a gyppo with a chainsaw the size of a Ditch Witch rolled in and in an hour, half a dozen huge firs and cedars were kissing the ground, two on Dan’s fence and his property, one was even his own tree, a prized old cedar. The nice couple, when he mentioned it to them through a half open front door after he got home to discover the clearcut backyard, told him the tree in question was theirs and his fence was too. Woodcarvin Dan wanted to be Headcarvin Dan for a brainbusting moment or too, but murder, even down here, WILL bring the Law.

I’m not gonna tell you Dan’s a pacifist, but he doesn’t look for trouble either. He had the property surveyed to prove his claim, left the stakes ribboned and ran a new fence two feet inside those. A week later he received a court summons that informed him his neighbors were suing him for trespass, for threatening to kill their dog and for his surveyor’s trespassing as well. Dan hired a local lawyer, legal papers went back and forth with their attorney, they went to court and the judge ruled in Dan’s favor. So far he was only out $6000. Justice occasionally prevails, but it doesn’t come cheap.

Last I heard, Dan had gotten another legal letter from his neighbors’ lawyer, this time that he’d threatened to harm their kid. Dan’s never talked to the lad other than one time to ask him NOT to play in his pond. And the Neighborhood Association, according to Jesse’s wife, was going to file an insurance claim for their shed half on Dan’s property his fence runs into the middle of. Dan, nearly berserk and rapidly going broke, asked me for advice. Which tells you all you need to know about his state of exasperation and desperation.

Quit hiring attorneys, I said. Let them pay the legal fees. They’re bluffing, I said. They’re obviously insane. They’ll be bankrupt by the end of the year, the place will go on the market, they’ll move to a new place to torment someone else. Dan asked, “You really think so?” I said, “How the hell would I know, Dan?”

So Dan’s living in Paradise with the Neighbors from Hell, the Hitler Family. You tell me, so I can tell Dan, what’s he supposed to do? Maybe better fences might not make the neighbors better, but he wouldn’t have to look at them. I don’t think Dan wants to build the Wall of Jerusalem over there …. but he’s thinking about it.

Afternoon banter down at Jolene’s Beauty and Boutique had swung over to the upcoming library bond end of this April, as contentious an issue as gay marriage had been last month, with pretty much the same sides lining up for or against. Ronald, never one to let a debating opportunity slide by any more than a juicy gossip tidbit, started the whole shooting match by announcing he, for one, would vote yes and “anyone who wouldn’t must be,” he said snappishly in mid-scissor, “an illiterate elitist.”

Well, Martha Figgelstein lit up like a Christmas tree at Hannukah, let me tell you. “If I wanted a book, Ronald, I can just drive a little further to Stanwoodopolis … and you can too. Save us a fortune in unnecessary taxes.” Before Ronald could tell Martha the likelihood of her checking out a book, much less reading one, was as plausible as growing that thinning blue hair back you’re shedding, darling, Jolene shot him a glance from two chairs down, nearly shorting out the dryer on Mrs. Webster’s perm. “And if you can’t afford the extra gas, Ronald,” Martha sniffed, “you can take the free bus I pay too much in taxes for too.”

Sheila, streaking Jenny Fletcher’s already magenta hair to make a virtual green contrasting Mohawk down the middle, opined that her daughters loved that library and if it closed for good if the bond was defeated, they’d be heartbroken. “Oh, they’ll survive just fine, Sheila,” Martha sniped as Ronald snipped. “Let them eat cake,” he snorted, not glancing in Jolene’s direction.

“Why do we need a library anyway?” Mrs. Webster muttered from under her dryer, looking like an astronaut on a spacewalk. “Everyone has a computer now. Everything I need is on the internet. Waste of good money, you ask me, to buy a building and stuff it with books that are obsolete.” Steam poured out Ronald’s ears and through the half dozen rings lined up on the lobes, but Jolene, ever the diplomat and peacekeeper, said she remembered when the island didn’t have a real grocery store or a pharmacy or schools, no health clinic or paid firemen or even a deputy on duty after midnight. “We’re grown up now. We’re our own place. Might be time we got our own library too, I think,” she said and Ronald clapped his hands, nearly gouging himself with the scissors.

If the Beauty and Boutique is any preliminary poll, this will be a close vote. Ronald says he’ll move away if the bond loses, but no one believes him. Although, it may cost Jolene a hefty raise to keep him.