The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Given that there’s a dearth of tourism down at the South End, it was a gobsmack and a half when Bert and Betty Amundsen opened up their retro auto court two miles north of the Head, not very far from the Diner, but not far enough to escape the patrons’ sneering gossip. The Siesta Motel de La Sur opened for business the year of the gas shortages when Jimmy Carter advised wearing sweaters and turning down thermostats. Tyee Store only sold gas to its regular petrol customers and even us locals were told to take a hike. Good luck to the auto court crowd…..

Course, the auto court never got a crowd. The Flathead Vintage Car Boyz howled among themselves over black coffee and chicken fried steaks and eggs. “Shoulda opened a B&B,” Cadillac Fred would say and Studebaker Ralph would fire back “Sunset Motel de Muerto”.

The Diner could’ve used the extra business. Big Larry, the grillman, had been here long enough to remember the days of Cama Beach Resort, Camp Diane, Indian Beach and a lot of others further north, folks pouring in to fish big Chinooks and escape the fumes of city living. “Might be a shot,” he said. “Nothing else, we can put up the shirt-tail relatives who visit…”

Bert and Betty lacked what you call marketing skills in the dark days pre-internet. They put a listing in the Stanwoodopolis Yellowed Pages and tacked signs on trees all the way down the island. SIESTA MOTEL DE LA SUR 15 MILES. TEN. FIVE. ONE MILE TO SIESTA DE LA SUR! If you know where to look you can still see a weathered plywood board being digested by fir bark, maybe a ‘ESTA MO’, or a ‘SI TEL’, or just a mysterioso ‘5’. The four done bedroom cottages fell into disrepair and Bert and Betty fell into heavy drinking and serious debt. They lost the place to the bank and moved away without so much as an adios. Last I heard the old motel was being converted to rent to artists as studios. Most of us already got studios in various stages of disrepair. Still, hope springs eternal down here. Everywhere maybe but the Diner where comedy trumps optimism.

Someone knocked my two mailboxes off their posts today.  Now … I don’t want to make a federal case out of this — but it IS.  Although I probably won’t call the FBI or even the sheriff’s office.  My last episode with the deputies convinced me Rome keeps these centurions down at our outpost primarily as slim proof Island County is still in charge.  Until you need them to solve crimes more heinous than speeding violations.  Mass mailbox destruction is pretty low on their priority.

Like most crime here, we’re pretty much on our own, okay by me, judging from the lack of crime waves.  The Barefoot Bandit ran amok for awhile and we got our first good look at Rome’s puny presence.  The Kid even stole their assault rifles and laptops right out of their squad cars.  Now that Rome’s running budget deficits, the sheriff is threatening to make cutbacks that will leave the South End without a single deputy most nights.  Exactly what we had when I moved here.  Pretty much what we got now.  I listened to my neighbor’s high decibel burglar alarm going non-stop for half an hour two nights ago.  If it had been an actual robbery, a moving van would’ve had time to empty the place.  You know, IF the burglars wore hearing protection.

We’re still small enough, still closed-knit enough, that when a break-in or vandalism occurs, we got a pretty good notion who the culprit was.  Been awhile since the last lynching, but a phone call to the miscreant’s parents usually does it.  Not always.  I had the mom of the kid who’d broken into my rootcellar and emptied my wine and homebrew stash bring said kid and herself over Right Now or I’d call the Law.  She sat in her idling car smoking her cigarette and denied denied denied.  I said her daughter’s step-dad had told me she had a winebottle with one of my labels on it for Roadspray Blackberry.  “What did you do with the bottle, honey?” she asked her punk progeny.  “I did what you told me, Mom, I got rid of the evidence.”

Now, I know blood is thicker than blackberry wine, but I also believe in good parenting.  So, reluctantly, I called the Law.  When they showed up a couple days later at my thief’s door, they took the step-dad aside and questioned him for half an hour about guns he supposedly had in his possession, then left.  Later I got a call from Deppity Dash wanting to see my rootcellar crime scene.

Deppity Dash, newly arrived from the Los Angeles police force, drove over in his squad car and I showed him my hand dug cellar behind the shack.  He just shook his head and said, “Damn, I thought those were just something you read about in books.  I didn’t think they actually existed.”  I didn’t tell him I thought the same about law enforcement on the island….  Turns out one of us was right.

Some years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.

This is the time of year when I usually bring in next year’s firewood. Actually, the year after next’s…. Just about the time the first nettles poke up out of the leafmulch, I start to panic. In a month they’ll be a foot high and vicious. In two months they’ll sting through my jeans. I need to get the trees cut, split and hauled away before the nettles grow fangs and claws and can pull down unsuspecting prey.

Most winters I’m picking up the blown down trees from the autumn storms. Usually that’s all I need, although occasionally I have to fell some alders to top off the woodsheds. One stormy year I had to build extra sheds just to accommodate the 30 cord of wood that was knocked down. 30 of these, split and hauled out of the woods by hand, is a helluva lot of wood. A cord is a term soon to leave the language, probably when us oldtimers die or when we all move to propane or electric heat. It’s a stack of cordwood 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. Or about what fits in a Chevy pickup with high rails. It sounds like an exact measure, but folks who buy wood from gyppos or woodscroungers will tell you, it’s more than slightly inexact, just like the quality of each cord varies from green to half punky, alder to doug fir. I’m a maple man myself — it splits easy, it’s clean and being a hardwood, it burns hot — but the missus’ll tell you I burn anything that’s flammable, rotten or not … and she’s correct. As usual.

When the burn bans come more often, we’re one of those exempt in the disclaimers the newsguyz give: Sole Source Wood Heat. Not gonna make us any new friends with the neighbors, but I don’t complain about their generators during power outages. I suppose guilt will eventually make me reconsider our heating strategies, especially when the neighbors become more plentiful than my trees. At least that’s what I’ll probably use as my excuse when my aching back and shoulders and legs get wore out from the sawing and the splitting and the hauling and the stacking.

Be nice, maybe, to turn a thermostat and help save the environment too. You know, if you don’t mind fracking or damming the rivers or burning coal or creating nuclear waste to get your heat. Maybe by then I won’t.

We got a hue and cry going up from the north end all the way to the south end. Folks near and far are up in arms that the old Camano Senior Center, that blue metal icon of early island days, is going to be turned over from public usage to the Sheriff’s department. You’d think, listening to the outcry and the wailing that we’d taken a Taj Majal and converted it to a public restroom.

Oh, I know, it’s a prime architectural example of early pole building, probably destined for the Historic Register. You know, if it doesn’t rot first. And yeah, it’s been a cheap rent for every group from the A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous) to the C.A.A. (Camano Artists Anonymous). Most folks don’t remember when we built it back in 1979, put a thermometer out front to keep track of the fundraising efforts, the top goal being somewhere north of $500. We used it for 20 years as the Senior Center, although most folks driving by thought of it as the Bingo Hall. Which, at least partly, it was.

I spent more than my fair share of pain time down at the Blue Building with my 12 step artist colleagues, half the agony just the nature of watching artists becoming bureaucrats over themselves and the other co-existing with the toxic balck mold that currently has full ownership of the building, I don’t care if the County considers it legally theirs or not. It’s a nasty place, cheap rental for damn good reason, but most likely a lawsuit by the cops who will trde their lovely modular sheriff station for a horror movie Killer Spores from Section 7. Folks who ask me would I lend support to the task of Saving the Sporehole have me mistaken with someone who values rotten single-wide trailers or schoolbuses devoured by blackberries down behind the Diner.

That ain’t me, Babe, no no no that ain’t me. Oh, I know, the Hysterical Society will stand some day in front of the wrecking ball the day demolition begins. And I’ll surely miss those heady days of bingo and political caucuses, A.A. gatherings and the eternal Mother’s Day Tour meetings. But if truth comes to shove, I’m for getting three or four of us South Enders, putting our shoulders to it and knocking it down. After that I think the EPA can declare it a Superfund site and do what’s necessary. Good riddance by me …

Barney, my barber, is about to take down his red white and blue rotating tubular pole for good. He’s been cutting hair since back in the day when South Enders either opted for a butch or let it grow their arses, as Barney puts it. You could tell a man’s politics by his hair back then. Needless to say, I didn’t require Barney’s services back in my radical days. And Barney probably would’ve refused to let me sit in his leather chair. “Go to a stylist, someone who’ll cut a woman’s hair.”

His shop has sat at the same spot for about 45 years, open for business and gossip both behind the mini-storage just north of the Diner. He owns the mini-storage which is why it’s there. In fact, Barney owns a lot of the land around him, mostly good business acumen … and tips from his customers on who’s selling out cheap and moving lock stock and rainbarrel to someplace where the sun shines more than once a month.

Barney himself isn’t much of a talker. He’s mostly a good listener. He isn’t much of a barber either, in most of us customers’ opinion, but he’s reasonable about price and it’s a kick to sit with a few other South Enders in for their 2 week trim on what’s left of their hair and jaw on the politics of the day. Discussions can get pretty lively, especially around election years, but even the weather is open to debate these days.

If anyone asks Barney ‘how’s business?’ he shrugs, grabs a scissor and comb before answering, ‘pretty slow.’ He mentions every time all the funerals, how us customers are dying off faster than replacements roll in. I admit, I only go in every 6 months or so, which doesn’t help his retirement fund. He knows I like to stir the pot when I’m parked, waiting my turn, just rev up the discussion for the hell of it, something I pretty much only do at the barber shop, don’t ask me why.

I’m going to miss Barney’s Barber shop. I can go years without a trim, but I’ll miss that finger on the pulse of what my neighbors really think, no holds barred, no punches pulled. Go down to Super Cuts and see if you can get past banalities about the weather. Although … I could always bring up Global Warming, see where the coiffed crowd stands on that.

Awhile back we had a couple move in down at the old schoolhouse when the glass artist who lived there threw in the towel on making a living on the South End and moved her kilns to Portland where she did quite well, thank you.  The new couple were all starry-eyed over the quaintness of the schoolhouse and its adjoining studio.  I certainly know the feeling.  For me, it went away about next day when I could see my shack in the light of day.  For the new kids it took a little longer.  The Volunteer Fire Department’s sirens hurried things along, a 200 decibel scream all hours of the day or night to summon the crew from over a mile or two away.   Later they got beepers, but too late for these neighbors.

A year or so went by and one day they were gone.  No goodbyes, no adioses.  Some folks are like that.  Pack up the conestoga in the middle of the night and don’t look back.  Oddly enough I ran into them up on Orcas.  The little store called itself The Old Schoolhouse Tea Shoppe and I just knew it had to be them.  Sure enough, it was.  After some initial embarrassment, they opined that Camano just wasn’t ‘spiritual’ enough.  Um, no offense….

Now, I’ve never claimed it was and as far as the South End is concerned, ‘spiritual’ never really pops into mind for me.  So okay, no offense taken….  Orcas now, it’s sure got a lot of siritualness, boatloads of tourists, ex-hippies living on trust funds, expatriate writers and nearly as many artists as we got.  It drips spiritual, any fool could see that.  I wished them luck on their new Nirvana and skulked forlornly back home to my hellhole.

About a year later they were back!  Tails between their legs, store gone broke, opportunities a wee scarce in Eden.  I asked what they’d do now.  Try the store here?  Take up watercolors?  Become spiritual advisers?  No, they said, they bought a place south of me and were going to subdivide it to pay for the house they would build on the lot they kept.  So yeah, they were going to get their real estate license and they were going to sell properties.

I didn’t ask what you’re asking, what I wanted to ask:  where is the spirituality in parceling us up and selling us off???  Because I’m a South Ender, you see, and my idea of most folks’ religion is that it pretty much ends at their wallets.  Do unto others what you can get away with.  I suspect they found a hybrid form of spirituality here finally.  I know this:  they’re doing real well selling real estate.  Allah be praised.  Even if Gaia cries a little tear.

Some of you Geezers out there might know what a Blind Pig is … and no, it’s not a myopic hog.  Since there’s no bar or tavern licensed by the State down here, the South End has had to revert to the lessons of Prohibition once more.  Meaning, we keep our drinking establishments underground, what the dry gulchers called in 1920, a Blind Pig.  Knock on the door — if they recognize you or you’re with a pal they do, you can belly up to Rotgut Billy’s Basement Bar.

Course, Billy doesn’t have it in his basement — it’s his barn, once the home of Herefords and a couple of draft horses.  Probably no pigs, 20/20 vision or otherwise.  It sits back behind his house and his house is back along a rutted lane off the highway, down a dirt road dead end.  Nobody goes down that road without an inkling and a thirst.

It’s not like Billy’s making money — he hasn’t got enough customers.  And he mostly just covers his costs.  The jukebox is his old Radio Shack stereo.  The neon isn’t a beer sign, it’s a pink flamingo from a motel in Utah he picked up at a second hand store.  He’s got a pool table you need an alitmeter to calculate the warpage and there’s a battered steel dart board in the back corner where wayward projectiles land harmlessly against the walls.

Billy has a few of us who make homebrew so sometimes the storebought bottles get upgraded to high gravity heavy nettle, jalapena ales, chocolate stouts and any other experiments we care to inflict on the patrons.  Occasionally we’ll bring in pizzas and cheesy nachos Billy heats up in  a little toaster over behind the bar.  The bar’s a nice hunk of old growth he slabbed off a 300 year old fir that fell in the storm of ’79 that knocked out the Hood Canal floating bridge and raised hell on the island here.

Folks ask me all the time  if Rotgut Billy’s really exists.  I tell em if it didn’t, we’d have to open it up anyway, but yeah, Billy’s is an institution, a beacon of entrepreneurial panache without the profit motive, half drinking establishment and half social club.  For Billy, since his wife died, it’s pretty much his life.  He doesn’t serve us when we’ve started to slip over the line.  We’re family and he looks after his family.  Those same folks shake their heads and wonder why the County sheriff hasn’t closed his operation down.

It’s a fair question, one we boyz have debated for years.  The only answer we got is the deputies let it go even though they’re pretty sure what transpires at the barn, figuring, I suppose, it’s better to get sloshed close to home than drive drunk miles to the closest tavern.  Maybe they just see Billy as the lesser of two evils.  I guess a lot of things are like that down here….

Some of the bootleggers down here just realized Prohibition is definitely over.  That, or the Great Recession made bathtub hooch an economically viable commodity.  Liquor may have gotten re-legalized back in the Depression, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be cheap.  Which, sad to say, the cannabis growers and users are going to realize soon as the state puts a tax on it.  Then the local municipalities and unless my guess is wrong and I was born under a rock, the Feds will up the ante AND the price.

Sin taxes.  Most of us down here on the South End don’t actually subscribe to the notion that mind-altering remedies for the Hard Life are sins, but it’s always comforting to know the folks Without are willing to cast the first stone at those of us With.  My fellow rumrunners have definitely seen the advantage of home brew and home grown.  The government’s got enough to do without worrying about our little enterprises and we’re happy to help.

Nevertheless, I have been gobsmacked lately over the sudden proliferation of entrepreneurial spirits, pun probably intended.  Walnut Court Brewery has beers ranging from Dreamliner Lager to Silvana Suds.  Buzz Beer down south of me runs the gamut from a honey mead to a whisky stout he ages in burnt whisky barrels.  Our fiddler in the bibulous South End String Band makes enough moonshine merlot in French oak barrels to supply all the restaurants in Stanwoodopolis.  You know, IF he had any to spare after quenching our own needs.  Kirby Cellars makes a healthful tonic of herbal nettles and mango and a few potions I have been sworn to secrecy over.

Which explains my obvious spiritual vitality, in case anyone wondered  where the glow originated….  Course, so far, no one has.

And of course I have my own bathtub homebrews.  Clawfoot Jalapeno Ale and Heavy Nettle IPA, just to name a couple.  So when folks ask if it’s true we’re self-sufficient down these parts, I guess I have to say, pretty near.  And getting closer all the time.  Store bought’s okay too, just so you don’t think we’re uppity, us South Enders.  We’re just trying to cut out the Middle Man, the trucking costs and especially those burdensome sin taxes.

The Crab Cracker asked if I could maybe whip up an April Fool’s sketch again this year.  You know, something in the line of Tyee Store’s Grand Opening for South End Greenworks, the new recreational marijuana outlet for our own hybridized blend:  Camano Cannabis.

Course, we already did something on this order.  The editors got calls that some of their readers had driven clear down to our remote regions here only to find … well, an empty storefront half lost to encroaching blackberry vines.  Half of em ran out of gas before they could find their way back to the Colton Harris-Moore Memorial Bridge.  I seriously doubt they’ll be back to this sunny end of the island, I don’t care how many of those glass balls we hide down here in the nettle labyrinths we’re making for our Spring Festival.

Folks apparently believe what they read.  When the Cracker ran the issue on the new Alpaca Hunting season regulations, holy moly, you might suppose it would be fairly obvious only a Fiend of the Worst Sort (or the figment of a very sick writer’s imagination) would purchase a license down at Elger Bay Store, dress up in llama camouflage and crawl on his beer belly across blackberry razor wire to sneak up on these poor cute defenseless little critters, I don’t care HOW good they taste on the grill.

The Cracker  could photoshop Big Foot behind the plaza, Colton in a Cessna over Mabana, Bin Laden quaffing a pint of Industrial IPA at Diamond Knot, the South End String Band playing Benaroya — and folks would just naturally believe their eyes.  Not simply because the Cracker is a bastion of journalistic professionalism with all their sources checked and double checked, but we’ve just become folks who either believe everything or believe nothing.

On the internet April Fool is everyday.  The political e-mails and pundits’  blogs that spread faster than bird flu pandemic rumors are more and more outrageous, most of them outright lies if anyone bothered to fact-check.  You either buy it hook line and stinker or you walk away shaking your fist vowing never to believe ANY of this stuff.

So in all honesty I just can’t be a party anymore to the Crab Cracker’s misguided (even if humorously intended) attempt at public deception this last issue before their sale to the Stanwood/Camano News.  And when the new owners vow complete journalistic integrity, I hope you know Skeeter’s going to be 100% honest in his reporting.  And it won’t have one iota to do with my new raise from these really great new editors.  You have my word.  As any who know me can attest, my word is my bond.  And I’m not talking bail.