The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at Sheila’s Shear Salon, the place is abuzz with talk of the new strip joint coming to downtown Stanwood. “Male strippers! It’s about time,” Candy, the new stylist at the end chair exulted. “Bring those bad boys up on stage and let us treat them like sex objects. I say if they could open a Bikini Barista in Stanwood, we can have our own pleasure palace too.”

Jenny Wilson, deputy Carl’s wife, looked up from her People magazine article on Jennifer Anniston’s latest beau so swiftly Sheila nearly snipped off an earlobe. “That puritan crowd up there in the floodflats isn’t going to let a sex club open up, not in your lifetime, not in their Uff-Da town.” “Well,” Candy said in mid-curler twirl, “I can dream, can’t I?”

“Half that town is empty storefronts,” Cheryl Walters mused from under the dryer hood. “You’d think they’d welcome about any business opening up before it becomes a ghost town. Jack Gunter has half a dozen galleries up there, probably the only thing keeping them solvent.” “And he’s got nudes in a lot of those paintings so who’s kidding who about dictating morality,” Candy shot back. “Bring on the naked men, I say.”

Sheila weighed in from over by the cash register. “Be careful what you wish for, Ladies. They got heroin, they have cock fighting. There’s meth and every drug known to Eli Lily sold down at the high school. Medical marijuana and pot stores are gonna be on every corner, you watch. They have big city crime now, home invasions, break-ins while people are watching Wheel of Fortune. It isn’t Mayberry any more, that’s for sure, and now they want men parading their ya-ya’s up on stage. Don’t know about you girls, but I’ve had enough ya-ya’s to last me two lifetimes.”

The salon fell silent in momentary deference to Sheila’s much discussed divorce two years ago from her Ex, Walter. He’d been laid off at Tri- City Foods at the ripe old age of 51 and promptly retired, drank beer all day with his loser buddies and thought he could rest on his laurels until Social Security kicked in. Well, not if Sheila had anything to say in the matter. Which cost her a few black eyes. And cost him a marriage and the last steady income he’d see in long while. After sufficient pause, Candy resumed setting Cheryl’s curlers. “Stanwood and Gomorrah,” she sighed wistfully. “Uff-Da, ya-ya. Equal rights, crazy nights.”

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-Pilgrims-Progress.mp3[/podcast]audio — Pilgrim’s Progress

You lived on the island as long as I have, you start thinking you either discovered it back when the Spanish cruised through or you must have come over on the Land Bridge from Everett, maybe when the mastodons were heading north on their last exodus.

What memories are still intact are of a place not too populated, logged over long back and growing a new forest. The road down to our homestead was through a continuous woods from Terry’s Corner to the Camano Head, 15 miles  unbroken only by Elger Bay Store and Garrison’s Real Estate office. Since then things have opened up a bit. Price of progress, they tell me. High price, you ask me … and I know you didn’t.

But … things change. Take that to the bank any day of the week. I forget sometimes how really long I’ve lived here. Of course it’s going to change! If we wanted it to stay the same we could move to the desert or over to the peninsula where it rains all the time, some place nobody wants to live. Me, I was hoping to live in Paradise a long way from jobs or work, which, I know, is a paradise almost by definition. I just forgot how many people retire here, folks like myself who wanted the cheap land. Trouble was, they also wanted medical services, fire services, police protection, lots of local shopping and, well, everything Lynnwood has without the congestion and taxes. They never figured out that if they got their wish we would BE Lynnwood.

Still, I’ve been hiding out down here 37 years now and okay, we got a couple of stoplights we never had, two little shopping complexes, a medical clinic, full time firemen, way more deputy sheriffs … but … Tyee Store closed and so did Elger Bay Café, Terry’s Corner Commons ‘ commercial district never caught fire and the road down to the South End still looks like it did my first dark and rainy drive to get a first look at my shack and property. Probably some guy in early Lynnwood thought the same as I did 150 years ago. Ask me what I think in another 100 or so….

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.

Before half the South End converted their gardens and basements and outbuildings to medical marijuana production, the era of the boutique nurseries flourished. They specialized in everything from stingless nettles to thornless blackberries, figuring the hordes of immigrants new to the area would welcome their hybridized species.

Some folks, like Camano Natives Nursery, sold only what was here already. Oh, the salal was popular, and some folks bought little potted sword ferns, but most of them just let the back forty spread to the lawn if all they wanted was the local horticulture. Island Botanicals went the other direction, marketing everything from blue poppies to swamp cypress. The first hard freeze or month long drought or hurricane force winds usually killed the little transplants, but then a lot of the newcomers had had enough too and moved on to more exotic climes where those plants were already Old Growth.

Avant-Gardens, a co-op run by artists with a chartreuse thumb, more hortichuckle than horticultural, sold an eclectic variety of strange herbs, quasi-hallucinogenic plants, odd garden ornaments and large variety of found objects, weird art and advice for alternative living. In a few years they were broke and discouraged and scattered to the far ends of the known universe — well, mostly scattered down here on the South End.

I guess Avant-Garden was where the 60’s hit the Sound, scarcely a sizzle when their cooling lava reached the beach. Their commune broke up, their greenhouses tilted and fell, their yurts and tipis and geodesic domes finally succumbed to the weight of moss and leaf mulch and the neighbors’ hostile gossip. If you know just where to look, you can find a path that starts near the Head and winds through the nettle forest past a couple of VW vans peeking headlights through the blackberries and finally you’ll arrive at a clearing by the bluff. The ragged polyethylene of the greenhouses wave off their bent PVC poles like Tibetan prayer flags of the insane or hopelessly lost. A few beds of periwinkle have escaped into the woods. Some lilies of the valley made a stand next to the big cedar and in the spring, the native bleeding hearts carpet the clearing, their pink flowers a nostalgic reminder of the dead dreams of so many of us old hippies back then.

My little brother was just down touring the redwood groves near Eureka.  Like almost any six foot human he was mightily awed by a living thing 300 feet high, wide as a 747 fuselage and older than almost anything living on the planet.  These are magnificent beings and amazingly, we didn’t cut every damn one down for Malibu decks and the furniture to adorn them.

I guess the photos of these arboreal giants he sent via his smartphone camera made me dig out an old burl a sculptor friend had given me, a remnant from her countertop she’d slabbed onto an ugly one and pretty much turned her kitchen into a work of art with one fell swoop.  That’s kind of what artists do, take something the rest of us never notice, then make the ordinary into the extraordinary.  And more — they make us take a second look at the ordinary, the banal, the day to day until we see it differently too.  This is what we call inspirational, meaning, it inspires us to reimagine the world around us.

So I dragged out this big slab of redwood burl, almost 40 pounds, a tiny sliver of some behemoth California old growth three plus inches thick, and I thought, I wonder what it would sound like?  I had to cut an edge off with a chainsaw, then I smoothed two sides flat and then I carved out a banjo neck, sanded it, oiled it and thought, holy cow, what a beautiful dark red wood, all kinds of figuring, birdseyes, tiger striping, gnarls, knots and grain.  So I continued on, cut out the foot round pot from one piece, sanded and oiled it, then stood back in awe the way my brother did from the living tree.

I’m a week into this now, making parts, working the wood, watching it come back to life.  In a few days I’ll assemble the parts, all re-imagined, and then I’ll string it up.  There will be, I have no doubt, a sublime moment, one only heard by me, when a tree that fell in the forest after growing a thousand years, makes the sound it’s held until now.

I’ve known some folks on the South End who didn’t own a car, incredible as that seems. And this was back before the Island Transit free buses plied the highways. They’d hitchhike or walk, they’d ask for rides at Elger Bay Store. Some rode bicycles. They weren’t making some ecological, enviro ‘green’ statement — they were just poor. And without transportation, they kept getting poorer since there weren’t many local jobs.

A lot of us South Enders commute. Seriously commute. After my one night at the Twin City Food assembly lines and a mangled arm, I quit and found myself in a familiar predicament: unemployed with no prospects for work. Just about when I hit rock bottom and figured I’d need to move to Seattle just to keep my homestead, I got a graveyard job at Everett General Hospital as an orderly two nights every weekend. 40 miles one way. I thought it was a trip to Oregon every week, an adventure in my old ’60 Chevy Apache pickup that needed constant mechanical attention, often on the side of the road.

Maybe it’s an indication of just how paradisical the South End is that we’ll drive to Hell and Back just to live here. The missuz drove 75 miles to the University of Washington Library in Seattle for her job. I knew folks who drove to Tacoma, over 100 miles away, to find work that paid enough to keep their piece of Shangri-La-La. Course, they probably never saw it in the light of day —- mostly just imaginary real estate, sort of exactly like Heaven. Maybe without the streets of gold.

My own commuting days are about over. Walk down the hill to the workshop, fire up the woodstove on cold days, go back up for the third cup of coffee and wait for the place to warm up. Sure I miss those drives through the farmlands, the tulip fields, over the rivers and past all those Puget Sound views and the volcanoes and the mountain ranges. But my truck’s gonna last a decade or two longer and if I get real nostalgic about the good old days of commuting, I just take a road trip, you know, without the 8 hour shifts at the end.

Don’t ask me why, but the Avant-Gardeners got it in their heads to build a boat. Not a dinghy, not a rowboat, not a cute little sailboat. Naw, they decided to build a 50 foot ferro-cement ship down at the beach. Ralph, their chief engineer, studied from books he gleaned at the big Stanwoodopolis Biblioteca in town after the head librarian twice made him prove residency when she didn’t care for his unkempt look, then during the first winter when the garden work was pretty much on hold, they commenced to constructing their Ark. Which was what they called this hulk of a boat that slowly began to blight the beach. A late winter storm set the plywood and wood strongback framework out to sea prematurely … but the Gardeners, accustomed to setbacks, rebuilt the skeleton a little higher from the beach.

Years passed, children were born, members left and new ones arrived. But there came a day when us South Enders looked off toward Whidbey to see the S.S. Avant-Gardboat circling the Straits like an inebriated whale, a sight repeated for a week until the lumbering Ark sobered sufficiently, headed south and disappeared around Whidbey’s own South End, its diesel chugging mightily to move the leviathan through the tides and waves of the shipping straits of San Juan de Fuca, an obvious menace to merchant ships and Navy warmachines.

Somewhere west of Pt. Townsend the steering failed and the brave crew managed to limp into Pt. Angeles Marina where they berthed at the visitor dock and promptly abandoned ship, leaving the boat moored. The dockmaster, two days later, realized his ‘guest’ had no registration and its owners were unavailable for contact. He was mightily pissed.

Our itinerant Ahabs, of course, had returned to work their land, tending their gardens and their livestock. Ralph set to work studying the steering fix. And so, following the harvest season, the Gardeners returned to the Peninsula to fetch their vessel, where, of course, they found it impounded and upon indignant inquiry they were promptly arrested.

All due to misunderstanding, you understand. Nothing a hefty fine and some salty cursing couldn’t cure. Nothing unusual, really, when South Enders leave the rarefied bubble of their small ecosystem and encounter the cultural values they left so long ago, long enough, apparently, to have completely forgotten. In a word, they had gone native. And in the Old World, they were now strangers. Like the rest of us.

I decided, in the dreary months of the monsoons, to while away the sunless days by learning a new trade. If you read what passes as medical news, you’ll no doubt know that exercising the brain is supposed to thwart dementia, Alzheimers and probably premature hair loss, something to do with synaptic heat generation upstairs. Course, like with physical exertion, it’s best to go slow, work into it, don’t strain, know your limits — all that cautionary advice — before you tackle, oh, quantum mechanics or the future subjective clauses of Swahili.

So I detoured away from Kantian philosophy or a complete study of Middle Easter history from the ancient Assyrians to Modern Isreal. I’d keep it simple, South End, just baby steps toward a rich and complex intellectual pursuit of, well, who cares? Crossword puzzles, they say, work as well as anything. Why not learn words that no one ever uses? Me, I decided to build a banjo. I can guess what you’re thinking. I can guess because the missuz thought the same thing.

A banjo is a simple device, got a drum attached to a skinny neck with strings you whack and the thing makes a rhythmic caterwaul that you either tap a foot to or you want to stomp on with that foot. You could attach a cigar box or a cookie tin to a 2×4 and tie some wire and when you got done, it would sound pretty much like a banjo. Hell, it would BE a banjo. And sure, I could’ve done that, I could’ve taken the Easy Road, but … the point is to avoid Dementia, not embrace it. So I set out to build not just a banjo, but a work of art. And hopefully … one I could play.

I thought I’d apply my limited luthier skills to this, then probably move on to maybe cellos, make the missuz a grand piano, then when my intellectual stamina was up to it, move on to a new theory of music based on atonalities, discordant triads and a rap musician-on-meth’s rhyming Simon phraseology. Roll over Alzheimer, give Beethoven the news…

I write this after a month of whittling necks, carving pegheads, cutting saddles and nuts and armrests and dowel sticks, all those ephemera you’ll never use outside the NY Times Crossword Puzzle. But I had to design them, laminate and saw them, fit them, adjust them …. more than once, more sometimes than twice. For a novice, this is like flying to the space station — but you need to build the vehicle. And somewhere, oh, maybe when you ignite the propane canister boosters you think will propel you through the first layer of the atmosphere, you realize, far too belatedly, it’s not Alzheimers you should fear, not dementia, not even South End Senility.

No, it’s insanity. And if you could only forget … if the memory of this was forever lost … you might feel blessed. But you’ve closed that avenue now. You’ve got the synaptic strength of a hormonal teenager. And so, sadly, I plow on. I’m building the next banjo. Certain, I want you to know, that I’ll learn from all my mistakes.

Lately I’ve been working the phone bank for the folks who want to get Camano a permanent library.  The one we got was only a temporary one and if we don’t vote to buy ourselves a real space, we’ll be forced to drive to Stanwoodopolis again for our book begging.

Some of the folks I called just slam the phone down, some say they don’t need a library since they can Google everything they want these days and some want to think about it awhile.  Most folks said they love libraries and would vote to tax themselves the cost of about one hardcover book a year for the next ten years to have a nice one.  I’m not there to advocate, just to take the pulse of the island.  If the truth be told, the South End was the LEAST likely to vote FOR a library.  Sure, I could put on my sociology hat and posit some socio-economic theorems, but let’s face it.  Us South Enders think we’re so damn smart already, we don’t need a library.  Why eat more vegetbles if you’re done with your second dessert?

The plan that’s going to be on the Aug. 6^th ballot is to buy the old Islander Restaurant at Terry’s Corner Commons, all 4900 sq. ft. which is 3 times larger than the temporary one we’re squashed into now.  They’ll close in the old veranda outside seating, remodel the kitchens, wire up for internet and open up shop.

Now, I’m all for this, but as usual, I got one itsy tiny suggestion, wouldn’t cost one extra dime.  And … it would garner some South End votes.  Maybe even ALL the South End votes.  It would help this library referendum pass OVERWHELMINGLY, in fact.  That suggestion is this:  KEEP the bar that’s there now in the far corner.  Libraries in the cities have coffee shops.  Hip.  Modern.  Now.  Brings the caffeinated crowd in for some book browsing  and internet surfing whilst they enjoy their mocha lattes.

We would have the first — and ONLY – library Pub.  Guaranteed to make the national news and doubly guaranteed to draw us South Enders in for an adult beverage while we’re perusing the stacks.  It’s a Win/Win pretty obviously and I hope the Citizens’ Committee for a Camano Library will consider it.  Beer burgundy and books.  Plus, with the South End’s powerful thirst for knowledge and liquid enlightenment, the profits would pay off the building in 5 years instead of 10.  Obviously, it’s the right fiscal  approach.  Think about it is all I’m asking.