The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Old Skeeter’s got to fly out to the tundras of Wisconsin this next week. Ma and Pa Daddle are getting up there in age and I need to go see them more often these days. Sure don’t want to look back and feel like these opportunities passed. I guess this is true for most everything. I  don’t want to find myself in the rocker on the porch of the Mabana Retirement Villa wishing I’d done that or wondering why I didn’t do this…. just watching the traffic out on the highway whizzing by while I’m waiting for my feedbag or the next group social hour in front of the bigscreen babysitter.

So I’m going to be basking in the warmth of the red state Heartland, talking to my folks with their twin hearing aids while Fox News is on 24/7 at a decibel level that would kill a liberal democrat. Over the years I’ve built up some pretty solid immunity, but then, you never really know, do you? Anyway, I’ll leave you some old stuff down at the bottom of the blogsite’s compost pile you can maybe scroll down to if you have the patience. I’ll turn the volume down before I go. But be forewarned: it’s going back up when I get home.

And don’t forget: I got a book reading and book signing at the Snow Goose Bookstore Friday the 13th, 7PM. Give you a fine opportunity to criticize the critic. Only fair….

Me and a sculptor neighbor were out and about the other day when we decided to go visit an old friend who was building a dome house out of a mixture of earth and cement, one of those South End homes the county shakes its head at but pretty much tries to ignore. It’s totally heartwarming to this old lapsed, apostolic hippie to see folks going back to the land and the basics. After all, that’s why I immigrated to the South End half a lifetime ago and why a lot of us are holed up down here today hiding from reality.

Our friend offered us some home-made scrumpie — she’s English — which is hard apple cider she’d pressed and fermented. It was, well, really drinkable. Excellent, actually. She offered us some artisan bread, baked, it turned out, in an outdoor wood-fired oven right behind my homestead by a neighbor I hadn’t met yet. I’ve made bread for forty years but I thought this was incredible bread. I maybe needed to meet the baker and take some refresher courses.

I’m always amazed and totally exhilarated to stumble on folks who are building their own homes or making their own wines, who play music on their back porch and sing to the highway, who plant their flower gardens and their orchards, who build boats or fashion an instrument, who take the time — even when time is precious — to make the world theirs. Of course you don’t have to go back to the land to do this. But you do have to return to a simpler time, to a slower pace with a natural rhythm, not a regimen or a routine. You have to return to why you came here in the first place.

Sometimes I forget. Like most of us, I’m in a hurry these days, but I couldn’t tell you why the rush? The times I meet folks who sway to the tidal ebb and flow rather than the tick and the tock, I’m reminded of an earlier South End, where jobs were mercifully sparse, money was a luxury and work was for your own ends. Make bread, brew beer, build your house. Life was good. I’m surrounded by friends who make art and music, who grow gardens and orchards, who teach me, when I most need it, how to recapture what is potentially so easily lost….

I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

My brother once told me, late in our cups, I had the craziest friends he’d ever met. He’s from the extremely flat state of Wisconsin and was an attorney most of his life. HIS friends, he informed me, were boring and straight. Perfectly normal people, in other words. My brother thought maybe living on an island might be some root cause of abnormality.

The very idea of Wisconsin as the epicenter of Normality in the known universe is as risible as Compassionate Conservatism was around the time of the Iraq War, the Sequel. Show me a roomful of normal persons and I’ll bet just below the epidermis lurks weirdoes, psychos, wife beaters, shopping addicts, child molesters, oxycontin fiends, binge gamblers, superstitious astrology readers, philanderers, petty crooks, white collar criminals, religious converts and … well, you get the picture. Folks who believe in UFO’s and alien medical probes, hoarders, agoraphobics, conspiracy theorists, John Birchers, shoplifters, alcoholics, festishists, TV junkies, computer zombies, you name it, they’re in the room, waiting for the lights to go out.
Normality is what you got before the stool got kicked out from under you, before your wife had a miscarriage or your job was axed or your kid was arrested for petty theft. Reality slips a cog or two, then the world starts to lurch, the ground liquefies, assumptions no longer seem so linear and obvious, religion is an ocean with no bottom.

Maybe the South End IS a little closer to Escape Velocity, possibly very close to moving away from the Mainland with every tide. But the whole continent has set sail too — the tectonic plates underneath are piling up and the pressure is building. I like to think we islanders have already made adjustments. Although … I’m pretty sure we haven’t. Otherwise, well, we’d be normal.

Down here in the hortichuckled South End, we’ve been working tirelessly in our bio-tech greenhouses to get a leg up on the competition for artisanal medical nettle in preparation for full legalization.  The naysayer would add pessimism to persistent fogs, pests and piracy for our prickly perennials, but our agrarians won’t be deterred.  Certainly not in the face of hoped for profits when the crops are paroled when their many medicinal attributes overcome the fears of a paranoid anti-itch society.

Admittedly we have an uphill climb.  Anecdotal horror stories of recreational nettle users overdosed and overscratched back in the ravines days after their unsupervised experimentation still serve fodder to those without scientific understanding of our latest advances.  Superstition still surrounds the eight foot itching posts that darken the interior of the South End trail system.  Many of the neighbors assumed the Barefoot Bandit, like his mythic predecessor D.B. Cooper, had perished in the nettle jungles trying to escape the relentless dragnets of our inimitable law enforcement officers.  More likely he used the nutritious plants for survival and herbal remedy.

Thanks to our researchers’ unravelling of the genus Urtica’s genome, we’ve engineered strains of nettles scarcely irritable to a baby’s backside.  Now, hopefully with a healthy influx of venture capital from investors who can realize profits heretofore unimaginable, we can begin the P.R. campaign to bring Medical Nettle out from under its pharmacological reputation as the Bad Boy of Invasive Plants to a more reasoned and sane understanding by the general public. Nettleopathy, the gentle application of epidermal stimulation, may soon be as accepted a healing technique as acupuncture (without the needles!)  Fear and ignorant superstition will give way to scientific method and enlightened medical practice.  The Dark Ages, my friend, are over for the South End.  Artisan Nettle:  Better Living Through Genetic Modification.  And coming to a shop near you….

You live down at the far end of a skinny island, you learn pretty quick how important water is. Agua agua everywhere and not a drop to drink is no laugh down here. We’re surrounded by it and it’s salty. Dig a well and use too much, you pull saltwater and then it wants to stay that way. All of us are on wells. Me, I’ve got a hand dug 3 foot diameter hole in the ground that goes down 105 feet. You can push the metal cover to one side and look down with a flashlight to the water below. That 3 foot hole looks about the size of a silver dollar at the bottom.

Us oldtimers all have hand dug wells — although some have upgraded to drilled ones, usually deeper. The new folks have water associations, big holding tanks, pumps, purification systems, filters and lately, computers that calculate tide tables and the optimum time to pump so as to avoid pulling saline. Used to be, the neighbors all watered their lush weednfeed fescue day and night, but they got saltwater intrusion and boy howdy, they learned the hard way why all of us conserve water, not take it for granted. We’re all on the aquifers, although not necessarily the same one. Ours isn’t as deep as the neighbors – or as reliable, but at least I’m not punished for their landscaping dreams. Not yet anyway.

When we first came, we still had the 1930’s piston driven pump. Ka-chug, ka-chug, 50 year old oak rod sections connected to a foot valve down at the bottom, a heartbeat we always paid attention to and that always needed attention. Packings had to be replaced, foot valves too, pressure sensors regulated, tanks repressurized. If the power got knocked out, we could draw water by turning the flywheel by hand. Now we’ve got a submersible pump. 220 volts, no water if the electricity fails. The price we paid for modernization.

But … we don’t pay water dues and we don’t fight with the neighbors over association bylaws. Freedom sometimes is as precious as a glass of clear water. And as fragile….

A few years back I gave a talk at the Everett Auditorium to about 1500 kids and their folks who were there for recognition in the arts in this area, the Scholastic Arts Awards ceremony. Gail Merrick, our fine art instructor up at the High School, asked me to be keynote speaker and in a moment of weakness I acquiesced. This, among lots of other things, is what I had to say to these poor impressionable youths.

I been racking my brain what I want to say to you folks today, something maybe inspirational that would make you want to give your whole lives to ART. Or maybe go the other route and say, holy rabbits, RUN while you still can…. Get a well paying job, buy a nice house, a fancy car, live the American Dream.

When I was exactly your age, I had a speaker come to an assembly like this that I went to. It was for the Wisconsin State Debate kickoff for that year, 1967, down at the State Capital, Madison, and our speaker was a well known defense attorney. He asked how many of us planned to go into law and most of us, including myself, raised our hands. Then he asked how many wanted to be defense attorneys and most of us kept our hands up. He proceeded, in the next half hour, to tell us that he thought probably we didn’t have a very accurate notion of what that meant, probably sort of movie stuff, Clarence Darrow or Perry Mason, get the innocent guy off at the last minute. And he spent most of the rest of his talk telling us about baby killers and mother rapists and all the horrible people we would be defending who were actually guilty. And probably had done way more than they were even charged with. Cruddy bottom feeders, creepy criminals, the worst! But who, nevertheless, were entitled to legal counsel.

By the end of his speech, I knew I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, that’s for damn sure. That guy changed my life. The trouble was, I didn’t know what else to do when my vague little career path veered into the ditch, crashed and burned. Ten years later, I still didn’t. I’d run out a string of dead end jobs, busted up a marriage, run my crummy cars to death, kind of a typical loser story of dereliction, some scrapes with the law, stuff at your tender age I won’t scar you with. I took the last of my pride and the last of my money and I bought a shack with 7 acres down at the South End of Camano Island. Sad backwash of a place, but a place where I could start my life over.

What I’ve learned in the nearly 40 years I’ve been down here, is that you can always start your life over. For me it was about becoming an artist. An artist sees the world a little differently than most people. The point of art, the Only point that matters to me, is re-making the world thru your eyes, your consciousness. You are re-imagining, re-creating, re-inventing, whatever words work for you. What I learned was an artist can remake that world. An artist can reimagine it. Rewrite the narrative of his life. And then, if you’re persevering enough, or very passionate or just plain crazy, you can inhabit that narrative. You stop and think about it, we’re all artists. We’re all creating our lives.

This is what gives art its power, its nobility, its magic. Creation! Embrace that notion. Have the courage to create the place you want to live in. It’s a way more fluid world than you might think.

Have faith! In yourself, in your own creativity, in your own personal vision. It isn’t about success. It isn’t about money. It isn’t about fame. It’s about exploration. Corny as it sounds, life is a great voyage of discovery.

Most of all, have fun. Not all art is built on pain. Make yourself laugh. Make yourself love. Make your life joyful. Why not? Trust an old timer on this, you’re only limited by your imagination. So dream big.

I wish you all the best of luck. I hope a lot of you will pursue a path in art and all of you will create meaningful lives for yourselves. Maybe 40 years from now one of you will stand in front of an auditorium full of young hopeful faces and tell the story of how long ago you listened to some old fart yammer on about his so-called career in art and it made you rethink everything you’d planned and turned your life around and ultimately led you to a long and prosperous career … in Law. The rest of you, good luck!!

SKEETER DADDLE BLUES: Confessions of a South End Banjo Whacker will be read, in part, by its xenophobic author at the Snow Goose Bookstore on Friday, Dec. 13th at 7 pm. Book signing and South End revelry will follow. Bad luck too, probably.

Jack Archibald continues his rants and ravings in this sequel to his Skeeter Daddle Diaries: Reflections of a South End Nettle Farmer. These are the further memoirs of Skeeter Daddle, a latter day Huck Finn tromping Camano Island’s backwash in search of an America long thought lost, a banjo on his knee and a grudge against Mark Twain for marooning him in a childhood that’s no longer a sanctuary. Older now, but certainly no wiser, the Curmudgeon of Mabana lobs wet sack sarcasm and moonshine philosophy from the bunkered safety of his sagging old shack.

These are stories of his life on the South End, where he went to discover if frontiers still existed and if there might be a pioneer inside himself. In the end he had to reinvent himself. More than a few times. Who the hell IS Skeeter Daddle? Is he fictional? Is he an alter ego? Is he prowling the old growth nettle forests in search of Life’s Ultimate Meaning or just whistling Dixie on a rocker with a homemade 5-string?

Who knows …? Skeeter thinks we all create ourselves, more or less. He thinks we fashion our lives the way an artist creates art. And then the art changes the artist. Fiction? Oh, yeah, he’s made up. Just like the rest of us…

Sit a spell with him. He’s got some stories to tell.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 35 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

You got an island like ours, not much here, you need major creative minds in the Chamber of Commerce to promote its possibilities for tourism. We don’t have a charming little seaport town. We don’t have cute little gift shops or seafood restaurants. We don’t even have, on 60 or 70 miles of waterfront, a public wharf or a dock or a marina. No, you pretty much need to drive to this island. Our old motto ‘The Island You Can Drive To’ was really a real estate pitch. More truthfully, it should’ve been ‘The Island You Have To Drive To’.

We have two really nice state parks side by side on the west coast. Only about twenty miles from the freeway. One is the old Cama Beach Resort, restored now and its cabins usually rented, making it one of the few state parks that runs a profit, which, in these fiscally challenged days, is pretty amazing.

When folks ask what there is to do on Camano Island, I say Not Much, Just Living. I’m happy as a free range clam, but I’ve got a beach to walk and a woods to hike and plenty to keep me busy. A visitor to our fair island, well, a couple of rainy days and the suburbs they left behind start looking mighty inviting.

No malls, no movie theaters, no taverns, no night life, not much of anything but inaccessible beaches and summer houses and us year rounders. Probably seems like a vacation in a desert, only one with water, not sand. No, it’s a hard sell when the San Juans beckon and Whidbey next door has quaint 150 year old villages and tourist trap and ferries going hither and yon. We got a few Mom and Pop grocery stores, plenty of real estate offices, speed traps and miles with nothing but scenery. People don’t yearn for that anymore, I guess. It’s why they carry phones and I-pads and laptops wherever they go. ‘The Place To Do Nothing’, our now abandoned ad slogan, just isn’t going to draw a crowd. Okay by most all of us. Except maybe the realtors….