The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the O-Zi-Ya Body Shop, the Debating Society was going at it hot and heavy concerning the underground economy. Deadhead Davy was leaned over the fender of Ralph Stankowski’s prized ’67 Cobra, gooping bondo with a putty knife into a nasty dent from a run-in with what Ralph told his mizzus was a deer. Us boyz knew better … and she did too, but for the sake of South End civility, plus the insurance claim, we all put our orders in for roadkill venison.

Ralph was jawing on Davy about deadbeat illegals, under-the-table con artists and losers on food stamps. “Leeches on society,” he proclaimed. All Davy had said was he wished he didn’t have to pay the same sales tax as the rich folks, meaning,
Ralph figured, Ralph. “You people,” Ralph practically yelled, even though we were all within ten feet of each other, “you think we OWE you a living. You smoked too much of that LDS, Davy. The 60’s are over and you missed the next few decades. Time to catch up.”

It’s a tough crowd at the Body Shop. Too much paint sniffing, too many insurance scams. That paint job for Ralph would cost half again what you’d pay. Sort of the opposite of healthcare without insurance.

“I pay taxes, Ralph,” Deadhead was protesting. “I just want em to be fair.” “Fair??” our deerslayer was asking. “Nobody should pay much taxes, you ask me. Wasted on bullshit. Wasted by the damn government. My money should be my money. I earned it. Good luck to the leeches.”

“Like Boeing?” I asked, pulling open Snap-On drawers just to admire the array of wrenches, sockets, drivers and all the rest in immaculate order, accessible at a glance. “Don’t start THAT, Skeeter, all that class warfare crap,” Jimmy said from over by the grease pit. “And quit fiddling with the tool chest. Big John’ll have a fit if you get something out of place.”

“Davy pays more taxes than Boeing, Ralph. Hell, I pay more than Boeing and General Electric put together and I don’t pay doodley-squat. What do YOU call it? Job creator subsidies? I call it Corporate Foodstamps.”

Ralph spluttered like a clogged windshield washer. “I sold insurance for 35 years, paid way more taxes than you two clowns, don’t tell ME you pay your fair share.”

“I sure wouldn’t try to tell you much of anything, Ralph! I’m saying we pay More than our fair share. Cause we let you Fat Cats off the hook. Money to buy vintage cars and wreck em. Motorhomes. Vacation houses. Half the country works for minimum wage. How fair you think that is??”

And so it went. Just another day down at the Body Shop where the dents get pulled and the scratches buffed out, where order is restored and everything is kept in its proper place, where the universe spins nicely on its greased bearings while the rich get richer and the poor get bitchier. Poor Davy. With friends like me, who needs Ralph?

I got a pal, Chainsaw Sam, who, like a lot of us, works for himself. He lives pretty much hand-to-mouth, gets paid under the table, probably won’t ever receive Social Security. He’s a hard worker, does everything from tree removal to deck building, gives an honest day’s labor for pretty much minimum wage pay. Sam doesn’t complain … but then, I don’t think it’s hit him yet that there will never be what most of the immigrants to the island have: a retirement.

 
So when ObamaCare hit the ground limping last fall — the health insurance half of the country doesn’t call by its actual name, the Affordable Care Act — I told Chainsaw he ought to check it out. With his income he probably would get affordable health care coverage. Sam, being a natural born libertarian who mistrusts the government, banks, politicians, newcomers, traditional medicine, the media and dogs that are pedigreed, wasn’t sure he would. Maybe, maybe not. Not real sure he needed insurance, Sammy said. I said they’ll give it to you nearly for free, whaddaya got to lose? “Yeah,” he said, “that’s what my mom sez too.”

 
Great. So now I’m in the same category as his nagging mama. “Look into it,” I said. “You’re who they had in mind when they dreamed this bill up — all you uninsured yahoos. We got to pay for you anyway, so sign up, man.” Chainsaw protested he’d barely been sick a day in his life. Clean livin’, brother. Clean Livin’.

So of course two days ago I get the message he’s fallen off a ladder, a little six foot tumble. Shattered wrist, broken elbow. Emergency room. Ambulance. Medics. No insurance. Operations scheduled. Rehab. Meds. Doctors. Nurses. The lady with the alligator purse.   The Lord, it’s said, helps those who help themselves. Even the government tries. I tried. His Mama tried. If ignorance is bliss, okay. Let’s see if poverty is too…..

I was talking with my neighbor today. He drives milk truck. Home delivery. Glass bottles. Old school. It’s like having a time warp drifting around in the back yard. I’m expecting the Iceman soon on the other side of me. Big tongs dropping blocks in my 1910 icebox that sits on the porch for decoration now, you know, the present, before the century turned back. Why not? Might be time to save on the electric bill running that old Frigidaire we got back in the future.

The milkman was telling me how he’d gone to Minnesota to go icefishing. 20 below zero. Couple feet of snow. Half a mile out on some lake near the Arctic Circle above Minneapolis. Heaven on earth. I asked what YOU would: why? He’s a dedicated fisherman and he just wanted to experience it, he said. Part of his Bucket List. I was afraid to ask what else was on that list.

I went icefishing once. 1966. Northern Wisconsin. 10 below. Nice wind freshening up the crusty snow. My brother and I trekked out like deranged Zhivagos across a frozen desolate God-abandoned expanse, lugging an ice auger, some ice fishing ‘jigs’ and a little bait. We drilled a 2 foot hold through the ice, slapping ourselves to keep warm, then set the jigs to pop up when some sluggish fish floated by in a state of half-hibernation and got a sudden appetite. We stood there, two primitive people hunting food. The wind swept snow around our feet and the water in our fishing hole began to close up with slush. We didn’t talk much. The jig didn’t move. Time itself was freezing up.

I looked at my brother. He looked miserable. He looked at me. I know what I looked like. Without a word, we pulled our lines up, packed up the jigs not very carefully, grabbed the auger, our pride, our fishing fantasies and trudged back to shore, half frozen. Let’s just say — Ice Fishing would never have to be on our Bucket List later in life.

I asked my milkman how HE liked it. “Just wanted to experience it,” he said. “And Minnesota too, in the winter. I’ve heard about it. “ “You catch anything?” I asked. “Naw, just a small walleye. Twice, I think, same fish.” “Probably the one we didn’t catch,” I mumbled.

The rest of you anglers, give that poor walleye time to grow before you trek across the tundras in search of Antarctic fish trophies. They grow slow under the ice.

You want to learn something about Failure, ask an artist. We been there, we done that, we’ll probably do it again. Some folks think failure is an excuse to quit, chalk it up to hard knocks, move on to something else. Artists, we have ourselves on the line. We’re painting, we’re writing, we’re singing something, integral to ourselves. We can’t sell it, we can’t get approval; we can’t make others see what it is we see, the beauty of it, the truth of it, we can’t just walk away, shrug it off, pick up a hammer and become a carpenter. If we do, the house we’re building becomes the art. And I bet you dollars to Degas we aren’t going to become bond traders next.

The trouble with failure for us artists is we’re forced to make sense of it. It’s not really external, some quirk of bad luck, even if, for awhile, we rationalize it. We live in a market place society, for good or bad. We live and die by the cash register. And that society doesn’t much care about any art other than Mass Commercial Art. Odds are pretty certain, you’ll fail. So you have to ask yourself, why go on?

I had two gallery owners on the island tell me their definition of art was simple: it’s what sells. The Van Gogh earlobe ‘myth’ of a guy killing himself with only one sale to his name, then becoming discovered, was hogwash, they said. Sales, that’s the measure, darling, that’s the bar to reach if you want to be a success.

I know too many South Enders who are fine artists who don’t rack up sales. A couple are great artists and they make the least money. I would cry out loud and flush my credit card if they quit because revenues were paltry. We do what we do out of a need to recreate the world, to make it over to resemble ourselves, to make manifest that inchoate yearning we feel and need to express in some way or other. On the South End this is fairly normal — most other places, this a definition of failure. No need to tell you, but …. I sure don’t plan to move any time soon.

I got a slug of amigos moving away. I don’t think it’s necessarily because of me … but the statistical odds of it being just a coincidence are shrinking fast as glaciers for global warming deniers. Their reasons are many and varied. A couple of em, the cost of living here in Paradise is too dear.

Some have got in over their heads and they’re now ‘under water’. Banks are foreclosing, bankruptcies loom, time to beat a hasty retreat, start anew, hope for better days. Some are just looking for … well, something. New friends, new places, warmer climes. A change in latitude, a change in attitude. I get it. How I got here Back When.

Some are just Dead Ended. Jobs are scarce, times are tough, life seems short — so take a new tack, sail somewhere else. Go back to school, retrain, move in with friends or relatives, start over. Works for me.

It’s a mobile world. Although … I thought the South End was sort of stable. Calcified, actually. Mostly I thought we’d all ended up here mostly by happenstance, then never had the wherewithal to leave. Apparently, that was a poor hypothesis.

My other theory was that nobody chooses to leave Paradise. The grass isn’t greener than here anywhere, at least literally, but apparently not metaphorically. The Southwest seems to have a particular draw. The grass isn’t greener, but the sun shines longer. All the fescue lovers need is water.

I’ve moved two dozen times in my life. Lived in eight states, both coasts, New England and the Deep South, the Midwest and the Northwest. California. Michigan. Who knows, we might pony up the conestoga and do it again someday. Life, as the philosophers say, is Change. All you pilgrims hitting the road, good luck! I bet what you’re searching for is Out There. But … if it’s not, we’ll keep the drawbridge down and drain the moat. The road runs both ways.

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

Well, it’s a sad day down here on the South End for many of the faithful congregation who worshipped every Sunday with the man we called Father Freddy. Father Freddy was summoned home far too early to the Halls of Heaven this week and his sudden departure was a terrible shock to his many followers, many of whom have held vigil at the make-shift church that once was the Tyee Grocery. Candles flickered in the old concrete block store, giving a mournful reminder to traffic out on the highway that one of our own has passed.

Father Freddy died the way he lived, doing what he loved. He was what the press called — with so little real understanding — a Nettle Handler, one of those men who believed that the Word of God could be divined through manipulation of the dangerous weed. Every Sunday, as his congregation held their collective breaths, Father Freddy would grab those eight foot stalks of Itching Torment and squeeze Testimony from each and every one as the congregation moaned and swayed and sang and prayed. Every Sunday, until this last, Father Freddy would wrassle those stinging stalks to their Rightful Place, prone against the homemade pulpit of stacked Coca-Cola crates left over from Tyee Grocery’s halcyon days.

“Get thee BACK, you poisonous serpents,” he’d yell, wrapped in their toxic embrace. “You hold no fear for those assembled here!” he’d holler, soon to be victorious. And as One, the entire flock, exhausted from exhortation, would wail their Hosannahs on High, their faith once more confirmed and restored.

Last Sunday, Father Freddy succumbed to the hideous stings of a 10 foot monster he’d grown under halogens in the nettlearium behind his trailer, a greenhouse filled with stingers of every size and variety. Parishioners wanted to call 911, but Fred avowed that his faith would sustain him. Horrified, they watched him slowly scratch himself to death. Services will be held this coming Saturday in Father Fred’s special grove of wild nettles back in the ravine behind the church. Gloves are recommended. Donations can be made to the Nettle Survivor Network in the name of the Nettlecostal Church. Father Fred, I know, will be Sorely missed!!

Most of our crime on the South End is local. You got basically one way off the island, even most criminals can figure out how easy it is to put up a Roadblock by the bridge. But occasionally we get Outside Trouble. Rare, but it happens. Last year one of my old band members, who rents his castle a little to the south of us, dropped by his tenant where he planned to meet his realtor so he could discuss why his house hadn’t sold in, oh, four or five years.

His tenant, when he kocked on the door and finally shouted inside, came down the stairs in a state of disrepair, having been tied up, pistol whipped and shot in the shoulder by two ‘friends’ from Seattle who’d purportedly come by at 7 or 8 in the morning to, what she claimed!, give her some money they owed. Instead, I guess they decided to keep the money and take hers. Happens all the time …. Just not a whole lot on the South End. Did I mention our victim denied being shot?

It’s probably lucky for us that most criminals think the police are as dumb as they are. If not decidedly dumber….

My ex-band member — I did mention EX band member, didn’t I? — believed every word, even if the deputies who arrived later were somewhat more suspicious. Still believes she wasn’t shot, last time I talked to him, even when I asked about the hole in her shoulder, entry and exit. Probably doesn’t believe the Band 86’d him either. So when she gets released from the hospital, he takes pity on her and lets her stay rent-free until she can get back on her feet.

About two days later he gets a call from another ex-band member, neighbor Jim, who informs him there’s a box truck loading up in the driveway and maybe he ought to come on down and see what’s what. Which he does. Only to find two guys busy loading his artwork and furniture into the truck. He politely tells them this stuff belongs to him and they apologize and say they’re helping his tenant load her stuff and didn’t realize. All a misunderstand, an honest mistake, see? He puts his stuff in the garage so they won’t misidentify it from hers, goes home satisfied that things worked out, and of course, they load up all his paintings and furniture and hit the road, where, since he’s a trusting sort, no roadblock awaits them at the bridge off the island.

If there’s a moral to this story, hell if I know what it is. Other than to say, if you’re ever starting your own Band, be sure you audition your prospective musicians.

I went up with a couple of friends to see a sawmill up in the middle of the island. We’d heard it was a one man operation, but it could handle logs bigger than a baseball bat at least. Truth be told — and you know me by now, I always do — I expected some giant skilsaw on steroids, maybe a rusty old blade wobbling on a warped arbor, chewing up 2×4’s into pickets for fences. The days of sawmills on the island, I figured, are pretty much relegated to photos in the South End Historical Society.

But I needed a ‘playday’ so I tagged along. We drove up north, took one of those cross roads no commuter has ever visited, then cut back into the interior where it felt like when I first arrived here off the turnip truck. We drove down a winding drive and there, barely visible through a heavy fog or a dense dew, was a homemade 3 story house right of the hippie-dippie 60’s. Time had turned backwards.

Still, I figured okay, so we got an old hippie hiding out up here. Cool house and worth the drive, but we came to see the mill, man. And Jack came out to do just that….

Up above the house, overlooking the pond, sat the mill. Open sides, lumber ricked and stickered, machinery everywhere. Forget the 60’s. We’d turned the clock back further than that. Cables ran through pulleys, chains ran through gear teeth, belts ran through reducers, a slant 6 Dodge engine powered the whole she-bang. Jack fired her up and peaveyed up a 2 foot diameter log section on a moveable track, hit a lever and down the conveyor came the log through a 52 inch blade, snickerty-snack and a 2x section fell off to the side. Back came the trolley and another 2x piled beside the first. And a third and a fourth…. Until the log was lumber.

I stopped thinking Big Skilsaw. My jaw had dropped too far for thinking anyway. Up in the hills sits a sawmill assembled by one man, run by one man, that is so far beyond my meager capabilities, it was staggering. When I started writing these stories, I wanted to remember the places like this as they disappeared. Remind folks what it was like …. you know, Back When. It’s a joy, a total joy, to find that these places not only exist, they’re still running full bore. Hat’s off, Jack!