The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I notice lately the bank I’ve been going to the last few years started saying hello.  This is possibly good news, then again, maybe not.  The last time the folks of Stanwoodopolis suddenly knew my name was at the now defunct Thrifty Foods, my hometown grocery store of, oh, 25 years or so.  The first 25 years they never even said hello before they started ringing me up.  I was as anonymous as any unwanted immigrant to  them.

Then the first big chain grocery rolled in.  Lower prices, shiny new store, more groceries, better options.  The hometown store looked like a bowling alley for zombies, about 5 of us prowling the aisles in search of stray items left over in their slow but continual downsizing.  The newspaper began running editorials to Shop Local.  Support our local biznesses.  The usual ballyhoo boo hoo.

Gimme a break.  I’ve lived in plenty of small towns from sea to shining sea.  Almost all of them fear the Newcomer as the vanguard for Genghis’s hordes.  But some of them warm up a little after a year or so.  Oh, they’re not going to invite you to Sunday dinner, but the librarian might engage you in a lively discussion on the book you check out, or the hardware guy might wonder what your 2×6’s are going to be used for, or the drugstore clerk might comment on the weather.  30 years in this Welkommen burg and nothing as radical as that.  Not so much as a hello, how are you today?

Until about a month before Thrifty Food Store closed the doors …. Then, much to my amazement, it was hello, it was Hi, Skeeter, did you find everything you were looking for?  They knew my name!  They’d known it all along, of course, but now with the Wolf breathing down their neck, their jobs about to end suddenly, they tried a belated stab at hometown friendliness, one last gasp, throw away the pride.

Maybe a week prior to Armaggedon, Stanwoodopolis will discover a service ethic, manners, a welcoming demeanor.  You know, just before WalMart opens….

Cafes come and go on the island about as fast as the weather. Open up one day, seems like a month later they’ve put the CLOSED sign in the window, locked the doors and another business bites the beach sand. When I first got off the banana boat down by the Yacht Club, a boutique café hung a shingle where the first Senior Center thrift store would eventually take over. Seeing’s how there wasn’t much food service on the island, you’d figure a breakfast and lunch joint would have a pretty easy time making a success of it.

But you’d be wrong. The yuppie couple who ran the place offered macadamia nut waffles, strong fresh ground coffee (long before Starbucks ruled the world) and a menu of fresh vegetables, sprouts, whole wheat breads and local eggs and meats. They were maybe half a century ahead of their time.

I took a boatload of pals up from the smog-smitten city who were crashing at the shack for a wholesome breakfast and a little relief from the hangovers from the previous night’s revelries. We ordered big mugs of coffee and the owners went around the table studiously writing down our orders. Since they were the chief/cook/ and bottle washers, we waited a long time for our servings even though we were the only customers, but the coffee was refilled, our lethargy seemed to subside and life on this side of our foggy island was good once again.

At some point – about a gallon into the coffee – one of us inquired where the restroom might be. We were solemnly informed there was none. This was dire news indeed for nearly all of us. We shrugged it off and waited patiently for our breakfasts. And waited for our breakfasts. When they came, they came one at a time, with five minute intervals in between. Fine fare, however, and we ate our plate’s worth, individually as the rest watched enviously while our bladders swelled like a Guernsey at a dairy where the farmer overslept.

We ate fast. We refused further refills. We crossed our legs and slapped ourselves with knives and forks. We began low moans. I couldn’t tell you if the food was good. Maybe. Probably. All I know is 8 guys stood in the parking lot as soon as we could pay our bill and let loose the floodgates right beside our Volkswagen bus. If we left a tip, that was it, but near as I can tell, they never took it. A month later the café was closed and another dream bit the dust. Well, hit the mud….

I recently renewed my passport and got all the necessary documentation, photos, fingerprints, police records, everything … so I could enter the North End without sneaking across the borders. It’s not as difficult as sightseeing in North Korea, but then again, getting through those gated communities and roads closed to the public is no cakewalk in Pyongyang.

Most of the time we can drive the main road to the Plaza without inspection units or impromptu roadblocks. After all, they want our business. The Plaza is a strip mall that replaced the Hopkins family store awhile back, an iconic little mom and pop whose main draw was crab bait, mostly turkey and chicken parts crawling with E-coli and hopefully unsalable as edible food products. The new Plaza IGA still carries crab bait, a nostalgic nod to the glory days of a maritime North End. And the hardware store annex has crabpots and gear for the weekend Dungeness warrior. Down the mall there’s a good drugstore, a salon and the empty storefronts of a what were the upscale kitchen boutique, the old Copy This/Snail That and the video store before Netflix saved movie addicts that hellish trip of three or four miles. Or ten for folks by me. Many an entrepreneur has broken a bank account on the promise of ‘Camano’s HomeTown Store’, the Plaza’s motto. The SeaGas Art Gallery has been replaced by another real estate office, no doubt fueled by rental income from the ever morphing mall. But the gas station with its oil and lube bays and high priced convenience store waiting open-jawed seems to plug along year after year, a testament to the old motto for Camano : ‘The Island YouCan Drive to’. If you want to leave, you’ll need gas. And they’re the main station for most folks who neglected to fill up where prices were more competitive off island.

The North End, for all its chest pounding, might have higher real estate prices than us who live a day’s drive from the Reach of Rome, but when it comes to commerce, we’re pretty much all in the same leaky boat. We lost Tyee Store, but they’d already see Utsalady Store shuttered and razed. Terry’s Corner Commons took a run at being the next Gilmore Village, but now most of its commerce has gone the way of the galloping gooeducks.

Most of us down here wouldn’t need passports if we traveled off island by boat — the way the folks before us did. But to reach the fabled city in the sewage lagoon, the closest metropolis with fast food chains and even more ‘HomeTown’ businesses just over the new bridge that doesn’t charge a toll (at least not yet), we really haven’t got much choice. It is, after all, the ‘Island You Also Need to Drive Off of’.

I meet folks all the time who have jobs, careers, full employment, financial security, the whole economic enchilada …. but who don’t really like what they do. My parents called that ‘Reality’. Lucky for one of their rebellious kids, at least. I had a buddy’s kid tell me recently – at age 12 – he wanted to be an osteopathic surgeon. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? At age 12 I wanted to be a cowboy.

I mean, where’s the romance here? The adolescent will toward some kind of schoolkid passion? Some ideal of a calling untethered to adult notions of a proper career. Where’s the deep seated urge to … I don’t know, just do something fun, something for the helluvit? Mom, Dad, I got an announcement to make. I’ve been thinking pretty hard lately about what I want to do with my life. I’ve been turning it over and over in my head, you know, between updating Facebook and worrying about my acne, and I’ve finally come to a decision. Osteopathic Surgeon. Whaddaya think?

My folks might’ve been relieved I no longer aspired to Cattle Punching, but somehow I suspect they would’ve rolled their eyes and said, wait a few years, why don’tcha? You’ll find something you love. Course, trouble was, I did. I went through a number of career explorations. Restauranteur. Metro bus driver. Teacher. Substitute teacher. Dog pound kennel worker. Hospital orderly. Furniture stripper. School bus driver. Stained glass artist.

Oops. Stop the film. Rewind to stained glass artist. This is a career? This is what you went to college for? This is what you want to do? And expect to make a living??? Have you considered, oh, osteopathic surgery maybe. Or dentistry?

You could’ve knocked me over with a feather too. Sometimes life’s detours become an interstate. Occasionally passion will override the sensible and the safe and the sane. I know my friends who have impressionable children don’t want the kids near me for fear of contact contamination, but … I know this: life is way more fun, way more meaningful, way more worth living —- if you pick the life you love, the wife you love, the job you love, than if you choose the route that’s most lucrative.

Although …. I think those routes ARE the most lucrative — even if they don’t make much money. My folks might not agree, but at least they can rest easy knowing I didn’t become a cowboy. At least not a real one.

Guitar Bob and I were sitting out with the dogs and couple of 6 strings, enjoying the last of what must be the warmest summer either of us have ever seen in our combined 70 plus years of living here in Pacific Northewest. The sun had set over the South End, traffic has slowed to a dribble, the hounds were lounging at our feet and a contemplative mood was descending on all four of us there on the porch while we played some blues and drank some beers.

Right before darkness settled in completely, the dogs set up a racket slightly out of rhythm with ours then raced to the fence on the highway to menace a passerby walking on the shoulder. Bob hauled the beasts back onto the porch and a voice floated across the summer lawn. “You mind if I play some guitar with you?”

I’d forgot Bob’s not partial to uninvited guests. Or even invited ones most of the time. So I mistakenly said, sure, c’mon in, the dogs won’t bite now that they’ve been fed. Bob hauled his guitar, his beer, his dogs all into the house and left me to play host. I gave the kid my guitar and he played something loud and a little troubling, but hey, music’s a universal language and he was doing the talking. My job was to listen.

He was, he explained when he’d finished his concerto, living down the road, trying to deal with ‘the auditory hallucinations’. He was a spiritual man, he blurted, but sometimes the spirits were intrusive. In the dark I couldn’t see his face or his expressions, just this voice explaining himself, his lack of work, loss of faith, those voices talking to him all the time. I asked if it helped to live down here all alone, end of an island, end of the world. He was thinking maybe he’d move back to the city. More work. More company.

After awhile I said it was nice talking with him, but I had to get on home. He got up and walked down the drive into a dark moonless night. Maybe voices were talking to him, I don’t know. I had the feeling they weren’t guiding him toward any light and I felt bad I wasn’t either. It can be a lonesome place, the South End, no worse maybe than other places, but when you lose your way down here, it can seem like a long ways back to the place you came from, the place you tried leaving in the first place….

Some of us homebrewers were holding an ad hoc meeting on the side of the road yesterday, comparing notes on hops and malt extracts, sharing stories of exploding bottles and quality control issues, all the while dodging Labor Day traffic which was building rapidly to a Mass Exodus of all those summer people hauling boats and bikes and trailers and roof rack gear back to their primary residences in the Big Cities. You know, Conway and Sedro Wooley. Summer’s over for them, but we still have jobs to do —- namely, distilling barley extracts down to a winter supply of stouts and porters and barleywines. The root cellar isn’t full floor to ceiling yet with the bounty of a fine summer.

I know for some folks the idea of homebrewing conjures visions of bathtub gin or bad moonshine, desperate measures for the desperate times of Prohibition. When I started brewing, the micro beer craze hadn’t started. If you wanted a full bodies, pure ingredient malt beverage, you had to make it the old fashioned way: yourself. There were only a couple of self-help books on the market, but they were good enough to get things bubbling. And before long I was my own little brewery, South End Suds, pumping out ales and stouts and meads and double bocks 5 gallons at a time, bottling them in used sterilized bottles.

You see micro breweries dotting the landscape now, sea to shining sea. They’re the folks like us, the homebrewers who made a better beer than Bud or Miller Lite, who stood up to the Goliaths by saying ingredients matter, taste matters, quality matters. The Slow Food folks are doing the same thing. ‘Local’ matters, even if the beginnings were more Loco. In a world of industrialized everything, a return to basics is a revolutionary idea. Real beer. Real food. Someday, in the distant future, in a world we can barely imagine, you’ll grow a tomato that has flavor once again. Dream big! Change is coming, even if it’s one homebrew at a time.

I went to see an insurance agent recently.  I guess I thought maybe I could get some clarification, maybe even a reduction, on premiums.  It’s been a few decades since the last time I took a seat across from the desk of my ‘agent’, but it all came flooding back once I’d snagged myself in the web and the spider, waiting all those years, hurried in for the meal.

Insurance!  When we owed on the house — okay, the shack — we were required to keep insurance.  The cars, well, it’s a steep fine if we don’t keep that up and we’re pulled over by the constabulary.  And pretty soon we’ll be looking – again – at health insurance.  It’s a dangerous damn world out there.  And accidents do happen.  I’ve got a buddy who never carried auto insurance.  Figured it was a sucker’s game.  He had a perfect driving record.  He was a cautious driver.  He wouldn’t have an accident and if he got fined, well, cheaper than the car premiums.

Course, he finally hit another car, his fault totally, and sent one of the passengers in the other vehicle to intensive care for months.  He doesn’t know if she lived or died.  Doesn’t know if the family’s lives are ruined.  Doesn’t know if their bills got paid.  I bet he still thinks insurance is a sucker’s game.  Jeez!

Before I could back toward the door of the insurance agent’s office, I’m looking at an Umbrella Policy, a combo deal with the house and auto that reduces one by 17% and the other by 25% and an aoffer of a gizmo that attaches to the car’s computer to analyze our driving skills with the promise of a 5% discount and free year’s membership in a GPS-driven motor assistance program.  I think supersized fries came with it and a toy from the latest blockbuster movie for kids.  Numbers flew, statistics sailed, money was up, then down, calculations were reappraised, the room and my head were spinning….

Last thing I thought I heard as I stumbled for the exit was a policy to cover nursing care and then the cremation, 33% off if me and mizzus agreed to burn together.   I was thinking it sounded like the right thing to do.  Fortunately it needed both our signatures … and the mizzus plans to outlive me by a long time.  Me, I’m about ready for the Farm.   And I sure don’t mean State Farm.

Tyee Country Club is sort of a misnomer. Oh, they got a clubhouse all right. And they even have a pool. Plus some pool tables. What they don’t have is the golf course the local developer promised the new property owners in the slick sales brochures. He didn’t put it in the contracts, of course, and in the end he sold off the golf course lot by lot. Folks can live on Fairway Street and Back 9 Way, but if they want to actually play golf, they need to go up the road to Camaloch. Sure, people were mad as hell, but there wasn’t much they could do about it short of buying a gun and administering frontier justice. A stint of 5 to 10 for justifiable homicide wasn’t probably what they had in mind for the Golden Years.

I’m not much of a duffer. Last time up at Camaloch’s premiere course I took a Chicago buddy who’d never hit a golf b all in his life. We took three clubs each and plenty of balls just in case we lost a few dozen. Back then the fairways were designed for a very small acreage. Quite a few laid out right beside oncoming fairways. This might work fine for professional golfers, but for fellas who never play, this is like playing scrimmage in Iraq. We sent balls incoming toward approaching carts, bounced them across fairways to the right and fairways to the left. Titleists ricocheted off houses at the course’s edge. Dunlops rained down on putters working nearby greens. Divots flew like manhole covers next to IED’s.

The game, I’m sure, never attained greater excitement than our Chicago- style play created that fine summer day on the links of Camano. We finished 9 hard holes with a few balls left over and all but one club in our duffel, probably mislaid near a green. We asked in the clubhouse if anyone had turned one in, but when they inquired what club, what brand, I was at a loss as to either, although Chi-town Larry swore up and down it was a Goodwill 5 iron. We had two in our bag so I kind of doubted it. Let’s just say I didn’t think we’d need it any time soon. And whoever found it, I doubt he’d want it, but he’s certainly welcome to it, a small gift from one duffer to another.

Tyee Store’s been closed now for over a year. The sign says you can lease it or buy it. Nobody does either. I suppose in the ‘real world’ the owners would drop the price until it matched a buyer’s estimate of its actual worth, some happy median where both parties feel equal remorse. But not down here. The weeds grow around the place, the flowerbeds look destroyed, the store has that look of long shuttered and going to ruin.

Folks ask all the time: couldn’t we rent it and bring it back to life? Folks who should remember that it was never fully off life support. They just miss the cracker barrel ambience of the joint, an oasis where they could get a paper or share gossip or grab a loaf of ‘day old’ bread. For the hard up, buying on credit was the real draw. For folks like me, I just like having a general store in the neighborhood. It gave the South End a gravitational center. Now it just seems like a rural no place, all of it just residences off the 2 lane blacktop. The Art Gallery next door is rarely open, nothing but a rusty elephant head stuck on its metal siding, might as well say Wildlife Moved. Trouble is, we didn’t. And I suppose the wilds are all we have left, the nettle savannahs, blackberry jungles and salmonberry swamps. The Barefoot Bandit could disappear in here until he grew old and grandfatherly, nobody much giving a damn.

I ride by the store nearly every day on my bike. For Sale. For Lease. The barn out back leans a little more every month. The well house tower pokes up above the dead apple tree. The field with the amphitheater by the pond is tall grass and another year trees will start to reclaim it. It’s possible someone will imagine their capitalist dream here. Maybe not a general store, maybe a Laundromat or a furniture repair or a custom stained glass shop. Maybe a garage in the Art Gallery again —- or an antique store and nursery.

Somebody someday, somehow, will buy this. No doubt when they do we’ll all drop by with our valuable suggestions and insights. Probably won’t frequent the joint, but we’ll certainly wish them well. For awhile ….

If you wander back through our woods beyond our old shack, you’ll pass into a ravine where the trail is lined with bleeding hearts and periwinkle, sort of a path into our own worldly heaven. It meanders around past the Nesje farm, then turns uphill through a nice stand of fir and follows the pastures over to the east side of the island where it eventually pops out at Guitar Bob’s place near the Tyee Store and the Art Gallery. I used to keep a couple of miles of trails cleared where I ran every morning in moccasins, carrying a sickle to slash at the always intruding berry vines and nettles. The woods back there stretched unbroken clear to the Head where nobody much went but us kids, young and old. And maybe the Barefoot Bandit.

I would find old homesteads long gone and I’d collect their heirloom plants to bring back to our homestead. Daffodil Hill was an acre of golden flowers every spring, escapees from someone’s ghost garden. The old house was long gone, just a shadow of myrtles to mark its passing. I’d carry a gunnysack and a small spade, dig a few hundred bulbs each spring, then plant them back home, mostly in the woods where it was too dark for them to prosper. Kitty’s grave and old Dr. Gonzo’s too are marked with them up by the shelter I had in the hemlock copse where sometimes I slept at night only to wake up with slugs sliming my hair.

You walk over to Tyee Store now, what used to be woods, but got clearcut twice since I started making trail, you would find the old farm that must have stretched from the west side to the east a century ago. In a clearing off Tamarack Road was an old cabin, covered in ivy and the ivy was up in the firs, a ruined cathedral of green reaching to the treetops, dark and forbidding like dreams covered in kudzu. Just before you got to the blacktop by the store there was another house, mostly just a foundation and some rotted walls fallen in on itself.
A telephone line still stood where the driveway must’ve been. And an outhouse which was pretty much intact. The last logging operation they pushed the house into a pile with a bulldozer and that’s still sitting there in the pasture now, covered with blackberries. The outhouse they left, leaning into its past. Even loggers get nostalgic for what they’re taking away, I guess.

Sometimes I think I’m like that, an old fool growing even older now, even more foolish, looking back over his shoulder more than where he’s going. And these stories I’m telling you, they’re like that outhouse with the telephone line coming in off the highway, its dryrotted pole waiting apprehensively for the next winter storm. We’ll all be gone soon, that much is true, maybe the only thing. And someday someone else will wander this way, wondering who planted Daffodil Hill and where did they go, those people who once lived here not so very long ago, the pioneers who lined their dreams with bleeding hearts and left clam shell trails going nowhere now, the folks who maybe thought their outhouse was a telephone booth, who left a few clues for the next stories of the once wild South End.