The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I remember about 30 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields. Pretty amazing. Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner. It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island. For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that. I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into. Tulip Fuel. Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow. Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel. The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended. So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell. The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps. High pollen octane for the BMW crowd. Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival. Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help. Something that should’ve been done long ago. You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power —- think about it!

Before the advent of mega-nurseries, the South End experimented with alternatives to the Big Box Plant Sellers we got now. Half of us back then thought we could grow our way to prosperity, skip a real job and just tend our Gardens of Eden. Avant-Gardens was a Mother Earth, granola munching collection of disillusioned big city emigres bent on subverting the capitalist system by starting a communal garden on Camano. They pooled their meager resources, piled into a 1963 VW bus painted with flowers and vines that broke down once on the way, bought 10 acres of prime nettle land with a 1920’s shack leaning romantically toward the edge of a bluff that fell straight to the Sound.

For years the old hippie bus could be spotted in various locations, broken down once again, a herd of itinerant repairmen at work in the rear end’s engine compartment, usually with a VW Repair Manual for Total Idiots open to smudged and torn pages. It was rumored they could pull a blown engine and replace it with another equally unreliable one in 15 minutes flat, side of the road, pouring down rain. Practice, any VW mechanic can tell you, makes perfect.

The old bus hauled specimens the Avant-Gardeners collected at old homesteads, back in the woods, up creekbeds, culled from neighbors’ cuttings, which the merry band transplanted, propagated, divided, moved to new beds they were forever making from land reclaimed temporarily from blackberries, nettles and salmonberries. No one knew how they got money to live on, but we all knew they never sold much of what they grew. Speculation ran rampant that they raised cannabis in a backroom of the shack under halogens, but it was never substantiated, meaning, they didn’t sell it to us if they did grow it.

Over the years the Avant-Gardeners became synonymous with an era long lost, an anachronistic group who most of us other transplants considered kindred spirits. We mostly wished them luck. Luck, of course, runs its limits. The old VW still sits, now a relic in a vigorous blackberry patch. You look in there you can almost read AVANT-GARDENS painted on its side. Somedays you can almost see the 60’s looking back at you out of the opera windows as the bus navigates the berry boulevards headed toward the bluff.

Since most of the staff here are too young to remember the days back when we built the first Senile Center, they asked an old codger like myself to address all you youngsters, maybe give a short history lesson. So pay attention, I don’t want to have to repeat myself and change the facts due to an overactive memory overload.

Back at the dawn of time, the Camano and Stanwood Senior Center were one and the same, what they cleverly called the Camwood Senior Center, what is now the Stanwoodopolis Senior Center still up at the old Lincoln School, but in 1973 Camano’s population of geriatric insurrectionists seceded from the group and formed the Camano Confederacy, what they called the Senior Services of Island County to make this look legitimate. Like a lot of secessionists, they struggled. They had a pitiful little office in where the 2nd Chance Thrift Store is today, they had a senior social worker available at a desk they rented at the Plaza, they served meals at the Lutheran Church, and they rented freezer space at the Plaza for Meals on Wheels.

In the late 70’s the Seniors decided it was time to put all these eggs into one basket. They put up a thermometer and raised the matching money to build that beautiful blue box of a building the county’s probably gonna tear down soon. It was built as a Multi-Purpose Building, only part Senior Services, but a lot of other functions too in order to qualify for the grant they got. To qualify for senior center matching grants required 50% matching money but a multi-purpose facility only needed 25%? Money talked real loud back then. This served as the hub of Camano activities for two decades and probably should be preserved as a National Historic Site. You know, Early Metal Pole Building, late 20th century, the blue period. That, or a museum to toxic black mold and bad septic. Admission free. Just sign the disclaimer.

Well, we’re talking about 1978, bout the time Jimmy Carter was contemplating an early retirement himself. The County donated the land and like I said, we had that big thermometer for fundraising and before you knew it, we got the donations to help the County finish off the blue building most everybody thought was a Bingo Parlor. Cost $98,000 and change in 1978 currency.
When we built the first Senile Center and Camano Casino in l978 we didn’t have much else BUT retirees on the island. Marla Ries and me were practically teenagers then, probably not even voting or drinking age. We didn’t have schools on the island back in those simpler times… which might tell you how many kids lived on Camano. Which is why we built a Senior Center and not a Youth Center. So Marla and me didn’t get a place of our own to smoke in back of with all the other juvenile delinquents.

About l980 or so I was just starting my career of being Chronically Unemployed when I got wind the Senior Center needed an assistant director. Part time, low pay. Perfect for a retired fella like myself. I put my ponytail down the back of my best fairly clean shirt and interviewed with the Director. She told me in no uncertain terms she couldn’t hire a man for the job. Scare the bejabbers out of the elderly ladies. Probably true. Probably still is. But …. A clear case of Re-Verse Discrimination. Sure, I could’ve called the ACLU, I could’ve gone to the Supreme Court, I could’ve forced them to take me on, but I’m a South Ender and a South Ender eats what’s put on his plate, no complaints, just glad for supper. Boiled nettles, whatever. So my chance for Marla’s Ries’s job slipped away …. I’d have to say mighty damn lucky for Camano.

Say what you will about that ugly old blue box, those folks inside worked wonders with what they had. The testament to that, you might think, is this fine Taj Majal they built for the island. Fancy pants fireplaces and a library nicer practically than Stanwood’s Sno-Isle Day Care Center and Book Drop. State of the art kitchen and nettle steamers. Beautifully landscaped grounds. Sparkling indoor restrooms…. with no backdrafting odors.

But like the Olden Days, the building isn’t the real show. The truth is with all the programs they administer and the events they put on and the classes they teach and the meals on wheels and the outreach social services and I could go on all the live-long day, these folks are the heart and soul of this island and that’s a fact. So …. It’s good to see you troops massing here today! The Band and me are proud to stand here with you. Altho …. Next time, if we’re gonna dress up, maybe we could all get some decent hats…..

My old bus driving friend Cindy was down at the Mabana Pottery Studio the other day, throwing a new line of ceramic vessels and testing some new glaze she’d read about on-line. Cindy and I go way back to the halcyon days we both drove school buses that are now vintage. They were then too. Crowns and Bluebirds. Big snub-nosed diesels lumbering down the empty blacktop backroads in search of kids standing out in the rain, hoping we were on schedule.

I guess we both went through our share of itinerant jobs back then, everything from waitressing (her) to stripping furniture (me). We both got divorced, we both tried to find some way to make a so-called living at something that wouldn’t drive us crazy, and we both ended up stumbling into art.

Cindy’s pottery studio was her old barn. She bought an acre over by the South End Marina with her husband before he lost his job at the Onamac Body Shop and started drinking heavily. Kind of a bad combination, unemployment and alcoholism, but not uncommon down these parts. By the time he’d had his second DUI and was a charter member of AA, Cindy had pretty much had her fair share of abuse. She kept the shack and property — he kept his fancy 4 wheel drive pickup truck he loved more than Cindy those last few years. Fair trade, they both figured. Real estate back then was a bit less precious than now, even after this ongoing Recession.

We all travel roads not on the GPS of life, I guess. Cindy and I, well, we must’ve found the same detour, the one that took us down the highways most folks don’t use: Art.

Cindy’s doing fine. Got herself a part-time boyfriend and a job she loves. She’ll tell you the job doesn’t pay, but she’s got an understanding boss, she can pay her bills and she’s happy for the first time in a long time. ‘Art’, she tells me, squeezing my arm conspiratorially as if I didn’t already know, ‘it won’t make you wealthy, but it’ll sure make you rich.’ Who knew us old bus drivers would grow so damn wise….

I went to see a fortune teller once. Big sign on the highway and under a crystal ball it said: Fortunes Read $10. Don’t ask me why, but I decided to go see Madame Rita and find out what tomorrow held for me. I’m not much of a spiritualist and usually I figure tomorrow’s coming soon enough, why spend money to get a preview. But for some reason, not very clear to me, I went across the road from where I worked stripping furniture for two Armenian brothers in their stained glass and furniture repair shop just across the bridge in Burlington. This was before the malls and the fast food chains.
The Armenian brothers were aghast I was going into the fortune teller’s shop for a reading. Don’t do it! they insisted. Once she’s got her long fingernails into you, she’ll control you like a puppet. The boyz must’ve known some vampire gypsies in their day, is all I could figure, that or watched too many late night chiller thrillers on the cheap channels. Undeterred, I walked across the highway and up the creaking stairs of a dilapidated old two story house and knocked on the door with the logo of an eyeball in a crystal ball. SEE YOUR FUTURE, it said. MADAME RITA

Madame Rita herself came to the door. She wore a shabby bathrobe and her hair was in curlers under a babushka tied in a knot in front. She asked if I was here for a reading. Indeed I was, I said. We went to a small room off the kitchen next to a backroom where she was doing her laundry. The washing machine was in spin mode and made a wild racket, kind of killing any mood of a séance or any possible connection with the spirits of the next world, unless they were the ghosts of Maytag repairmen. Taking my hand in her pudgy one, she asked what exactly I hoped to find out, which, sadly, I didn’t have much of an answer to other than that I’d seen her sign for a year and the sale price of the fortune telling drew me in like a moth to a burn barrel fire. I might as well have said, I’m too cheap to pay for a full price soothsaying, but hey, in the hands of a mindreader, what does it really matter what you say, she’s got your number.

Madame Rita studied the lines in my palms, pointed out the age line, said I’d live long, looked at a few tributaries and finally sighed before telling me I had enemies. Did I know that? she asked. I said I had folks who maybe didn’t like me much, but enemies, naw, not really. We were at a round table. No candles, no crystal ball, no voodoo anything, just a cup of half drunk tea she never touched. Probably eye of newt tea but how would I know? She excused herself and got up to put the wash in the dryer which soon was tumbling in a sinister soundtrack to her inquiries about my enemies. She returned and assured me I had them.

But … if I chose, I could have her exorcise them. She would be willing to go to the church and burn candles to rid me of these harmful pests. Did I want her to do that? Sure, I said, who needs enemies. It would cost five dollars a candle. I asked how many candles did she think it would take? She shook her scarfed head sadly. Who knows? It depends on how much they wish to harm you. I said I didn’t think my enemies really wished to harm me much, maybe not at all. I don’t even think they really dislike me, you want to know the truth.

For you readers thinking of going to a fortune teller, don’t tell THEM about the truth. Madame Rita informed me solemnly that my enemies were the reason why I couldn’t achieve happiness. I said I was pretty reasonably happy. Madame Rita was pretty sure I wouldn’t be in her parlor if that was so. She said she would burn 10 candles for only $25 and that should rid me of my curses. It was her last offer, and by implication, otherwise I was on my own to face these unnamed people who wished me ill and prevented me from achieving even more happiness than I already had. Over the dryer noise, which sounded like loose change clattering in the cylinder the way a deranged kid might whack a wall with a stick, I declined her offer. It took a few times to convince her I didn’t want to help myself, but finally I left after paying her 10 bucks for the reading, then I sauntered back to the Armenian brothers, a little poorer and who knows how much wiser.

They were waiting by the front door, nearly paralyzed with fear for me. What did she do to you? What did she tell you? What was it like in there? If I’d told them she was keeping pet bats in cages and feeding them children, they’d have believed me. If I’d said, She put a curse on you and your business and your sons and their sons, they’d have put a FOR SALE on the front door that day and left the country, doomed, absolutely doomed.

She was washing her laundry, I told them. They didn’t believe me. She said I have enemies I need to get rid of, I told them. That, they could believe. Go over and let her read your hands, I suggested, you’ll see. Are you crazy??? they almost screamed in unison. She’s not Bela Lugosi, I said. But by then they were at the window, surreptitiously checking for odd activity across the highway in the battered old house with the gypsy inside. If she can read minds, they said, she can control you. You should never have gone in there.

I never went back, of course, and within a few weeks, I’d had enough of stripping furniture and breathing toxic fumes. My enemies never showed up, at least at my shack door, and happiness poured over me anyway. Madame Rita’s Palm Reading by the highway lasted a few more years, until the malls arrived and the highway got widened. My guess is she made a bundle on the real estate sale. Probably living in a nice condo now with a state of the art washer/dryer combo. Her own enemies across the street moved away too. Although, the few times I’ve run into them, they seem happy enough too. I guess it worked out for all of us.

Whidbey Island, the land mass that blocks our view of the Straits of San Juan de Fuca and the lower elevations of the Olympic Mountains, just had the biggest landslide in modern Washington’s history. Whidbey added 300 feet more island out into Puget Sound, adding to its boast of the second largest island in America. The ground up on the bluff just slid right out from under the landowners’ feet, taking sheds and trees and houses down to the beach in one cataclysmic minute.

Now, we get slides here all the time. Some pretty big ones. But they don’t make the news and most of my neighbors, being dedicated couch potatoes, never see them down on the beach because they don’t much walk down there. Most are down around the Head, a six mile stretch of uninhabited beach only a few of us ever walk.

So when they see the LANDSLIDE on the national news, it’s a bit of a wake-up call since their homes sit precipitously on an unstable bluff that basically is a cliff of sand, not a gentle slope. Me, I couldn’t sleep at night wondering when the next quake set the sand liquefying and I’d be setting sail in my bedroom on a one way trip.

One of my neighbors was mostly concerned about the houses below, but never seemed alarmed that his would be what fell on them. I guess if I had half a million dollars of my retirement locked up in my bluff mansion, I’d be prone to some serious Denial too.

No one was killed over on Whidbey. And if that was the worst slide in memory, well, we’ll be okay if our bluff goes, I suppose my neighbors are figuring. Me, I’m figuring someday I’ll have waterfront if I live long enough. Course, then I’m the next lemming in line….

I thought by now this gun control issue would’ve settled down.  But judging by the debates down at the Diner over breakfast, I’d say it’s only gotten worse.  The arguments are so heated, Big Larry doesn’t bother turning on the gas for the grill in order to fry our bacon and eggs.  And even so, they taste burnt to me.  Jenny, the owner, posted a sign LEAVE YOUR GUN TALK OUTSIDE.  ORDER OF THE SHERIFF.  Sort of meant to be humorous, but not totally.

Walter, the first morning of Sheriff Jenny’s edict, shouted, “Now what?  They’re taking away our first AND second amendment rights??!!”  And so the café was filled with the porcelain decibels of pounding coffee cups, pointed forks and knives, veiled threats and hurled insults.  The biscuits and gravy crowd squared off against the oatmeal and wheat toast faction, but both sides had higher blood pressure by the time they paid their bill.  Poor Anita, the referee and waitress most mornings, got about half her usual tips.  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” she would say to every guest.  “I’m not taking sides — I’m just an innocent bystander!”

Walter wore his NRA cap every day and threatened to bring his weapons to breakfast, as was his right and even his civic duty, according to the Constitution according to the gun lobby, according to Walter.  Big Larry made it absolutely clear that wasn’t going to happen on his watch, not on HIS grill.  Happily, Walter, despite overwhelming firepower against Larry’s spatula and scraper, decided to leave his arsenal at home.

Last breakfast Walter was ranting about the government doctors asking patients if they owned a gun, if they ever felt depressed, if they ever had violent thoughts.  Hank, our local attorney, looked over his coagulating oatmeal and said, “All they’re trying to do is intervene in a potential suicide before some depressed slob shoots himself.  Which,” he added, “is a helluva lot of people.”  Walter posited that no, it was just an excuse to make a list of gun owners so they could take our weapons away.

“Well, said Hank, “ if you’re so all-fired worried, why are you telling all of US you got guns?”  That, it goes without saying, sent Walter off on a caffeinated rage.  I didn’t really help by adding that personally I was all FOR suicide by gun and all those poor Rambos with paranoia might consider similar relief.  Needless to say, Walter and I aren’t on speaking terms, but I don’t consider it an abrogation of our first amendment rights.  You’re just as free NOT to speak and maybe a lot of us ought to exercise that a little more often.

When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used bent nails I had pulled from old boards and bent straight. Trust me, this wasn’t a Johnny Carson monologue: ‘We were so poor I borrowed air from the neighbor’s tires to pump up mine.’ Followed by a drum roll…

… so poor I took a job at Twin City Foods shoveling wet corn husks onto a conveyor belt from 11 PM to 7 AM. Me, a boy who’d sworn he’d never work in a factory. But desperation is certainly the mother of compromise. I was issued a rain slicker and a pair of rubber boots and a big wide shovel, then told to stand under a waterfall of dripping husks on their way to waiting trucks outside that would haul it all off for sileage., ‘all’ being the operative word and my job was to get what fell off back on.

My first night, which was also my last, the conveyor belt broke down about 3 AM. The foreman gave the line workers an indefinite cigarette break. They were mostly middle-aged women, toughened by their hard lives and as friendly as scorpions in a rainstorm. I had no pretensions of some factory social life, after work beers, breakfasts at the Viking Café, uh-uh. It looked like Russia on the skids to me under the corn drippings, surrounded by matrons in scarves furiously pulling on their cigarettes hoping the machinery might never start up again.

My foreman came over and said ‘bring your shovel and follow me.’ Outside. Cold. Colder yet if you were already wet. He said shovel these husks off that belt — we gotta work on it. I looked at a quarter mile of husks in front of me from Stanwoodopolis to dawn. I said why don’t we get a dozen of these lineworkers and we’ll get it done 12 times faster. He could see I was foreman material right there. Course, that was HIS job and he planned to keep it. ‘Get shoveling,’ he ordered, ‘we haven’t got all night.’

All night was pretty much what I did have. By the time I finished it was time to clean the machines inside, get them ready for the day crew. Nobody showed me how, just gave me a soap bucket and a scrub brush and we went to work. Some yahoo turned my machine on without warning and next thing I knew my wrist was hammered against a stainless steel guard rail. I couldn’t get it freed and I couldn’t make my plea to shut off the power heard until I’d gotten a laceration and a pretty good scare thrown into me.

I made a tourniquet out of my handkerchief and went to my foreman for some medical attention. “How’d you manage THAT?” he asked disgustedly. I told him. “What do you want?” he asked. I said maybe a bandage, tape, something to wrap up the wound. Fifteen minutes later he came back. Couldn’t find a first aid kit…. By then the gash had pretty much quit bleeding. I was pretty much done reading the bulletin board. Lost hours. Recent accidents. Fingers chopped off in the cutters. Grim statistics. Serious stuff for a place with no first aid kit handy. I got the picture.

I handed him my boots and my slicker. “You can take those home with you.” He said. I said Naw, I won’t be needing them since I won’t be coming back. “You pissed about this?” he wanted to know. I shook my head wearily. No, I said, I’d just like to keep my fingers. All of em.

I didn’t quite make the end of the shift. Driving home in the grey light of a dirty dawn, I thought, there’s way worse than being poor. And so then and there I took my first, if not my last, vow of poverty.

Down in the economically distressed hollers of the South End, many a man (and almost as many a woman) has turned to desperate measures to keep from falling into the abyss of full time employment. We’ll try damn near ANYTHING before looking for a job. And essentially, isn’t this what capitalism is all about?? The god-given right NOT to work? Course it is! We’d rather kill ourselves laboring for ourselves, we’d rather go broke and hungry trying some bonehead endeavor, we’d rather jeapordize our mental and physical health before we’d take a job doing something we hate 20 to 40 miles away from hearth and home.

The Hearth and Home B&B was Earl’s idea, but Patti signed on too. It was that or welfare, she figured, so why not humor Earl. She did make it clear, though, she wasn’t going to do all the cooking and cleaning, buster – he’d have to make beds and clean toilets. Earl hemmed, Earl hawed, Earl said he’d have plenty to do setting up the website and handling the reservations that were certain to pour in, that and ‘cuting up’ the place so the old farmhouse would look more quaint than shacky, but in the end, Earl, desperate to escape the horrors of real employment, signed on to bathroom duties and bed making, figuring, if I know Earl, he could wiggle out of those before too long.

Home and Hearth Bed and Breakfast spent a small fortune on web designs, on yellow page ads, on fancy signage, stationary, all the rigamarole of business start-ups not imagined at the outset, took a second mortgage on the property, then waited for the tourists to pour in from the smog-sickened cities. “Charming turn of the Century Farmstead. Spectacular views of orchards and fields and Mt. Baker in the distance.” The orchards were overgrown and played out, the field was impossible to mow, the farm equipment didn’t look rustic, just rusting, and Mt. Baker was barely visible on the best of days. H&H B&B lasted about 6 months before Patti took a job cutting hair at the salon beneath the real estate office. Earl soldiered on, but finally he found work at Boeing 45 miles away. It’s a long commute, but as Earl says, there’s great views of Baker and the Cascade Range on the way. And home is like a vacation at a B&B. Only he doesn’t have to make the bed or clean the toilets anymore. Patti figures it’s a pretty good trade-off.

You wait long enough, everything comes full circle. When I first got off the boat at the Mabana Wharf, the Snowdens ran the Tyee Store. The store was part gas station, park wrecking truck tow services, well drilling, groceries, beer and wine, a garage and a two acre junkyard out back next to the trout pond. They didn’t have what you needed, you probably didn’t really need it. And if they did have it, well, you can bet it cost a little more.

Being a tow service, they ended up with a lot of the vehicles they dragged into the back field. When the towee failed to pay the tow-ers, the cars or trucks became Tyee property. Mostly they settled into the mud and grass. But if you needed, say, a Chevy 350 engine block or a Ford transmission, well sir, you were welcome to haul your tools out into the swamp and dismantle what you needed. And occasionally you could negotiate for the whole rig.

The store’s gone now, the salvage yard has been pretty much cleaned out and hauled away, the garage is an art gallery and the pond is probably more toxic from leaching heavy metals and battery acids than most lakes in Russia other than the ones they dumped nuclear subs into.

But … Honest Al Yankafist has opened up the Tyee Auto Emporium. Your half ton craps out down by the Diner, you can be driving into town with a fine pre-owned rig from Honest Al’s lot. Al doesn’t deal in high end or late model. You won’t get a used Prius or a low mileage Hyundai. You’ll get something pretty close to what died in the Diner parking lot. Down on the South End we don’t expect a divorce to yield a nubile underwear model for our next marriage and we aren’t figuring on a BMW in exchange for that rustbucket Nissan with the missing front quarter panel and the busted out taillights the deputies kept citing us for. We might play the Lottery, but we’re not Total Fools. You want a nice ride, you need a decent job. We’ve learned to accept the necessary compromises.

Al has a slogan for all of us: My handshake is my word. That’s why he calls himself Honest Al. Al, who you only need to know for 15 minutes, is neither honest nor much of a handshaker. He’s a car salesman. But even if he was honest, what would you expect? He gonna tell you the car you’re buying, the one with 250,000 miles and the blown suspension, its muffler full of holes and the speedometer that doesn’t work anymore, with the two bald tires and the missing rearview mirror, it’s going to be your last car, the vehicular love of your life?

Naw, he’s selling you your next automotive tragedy. If life is good and the gods are smiling, you’ll buy your next one at the lot in town or from a private seller who’s slightly more honest than Honest Al. If he isn’t, well, Tyee Auto Emporium will have a lot of your neighbors’ cast-offs to choose from. WITH a warranty that Al intones as the cash leaves your hand —“good until I see your tail lights leaving the lot.”