The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of you gentle readers may not realize that when you open up a blogsite like this one here, you open yourself up to all manner of incoming enemy fire too.  Occasionally one of you will respond on the Comment section, which is fine and dandy, but 99% of the time what Skeeter gets is SPAM.  Not even ordinary spam, but some alien mangled English non syntactical version that invariably leaves him scratching his head.  What is it they’re after?  What kind of advertising ploy is it when the message is indecipherable?

Here’s the latest example:  Aсtually whеn someοne doesn’t know after that its up to other users that they will help, so here it happens. ????????????????????????????!!!!                 I’m no genius, but c’mon, what is this trying to say?  And what are they trying to sell?  Am I supposed to click on the website to find out?  It’s like running into Crazy Mary down by the library, the woman who mumbles to herself and becomes irrationally angry at a moment’s notice.  You sort of learn to cross the street and avoid eye contact unless you’re looking for a morning wake-up confrontation.  And most of us aren’t.  You certainly aren’t going to ask her if she’d care for a cup of coffee, see what’s really bugging her.  That’s why we pay mental health professionals the big bucks.  Well, that’s why we used to pay mental health professionals, even if it was fairly minimal.  Now we let Mary wander the streets until she hurts herself or someone else.

I guess these spammers aren’t really hurting Skeeter.  Being a former English teacher, they do hurt me.  I see better language skills on my made-in- China product’s assembly directions.  It IS worrisome that there seem to be a lot of Crazy Mary’s out there hustling god only knows what on the internet.  That, or Skeeter is a whack-magnet who hasn’t got sense enough to cross the digital highway.

I know this, it gives a fine American meat by-product a really bad name.  Actually, if when someone who does know after opening  this can its up to other eaters that they can chew helpfully, so yes, here it happens.  Give that to the dog and see if it prefers dry.

Gyppo John dropped by today with a block of old growth straight grain fir he’d whacked off a tree he’d felled just north of here.  You see a few old timers left on the bluffs where the loggers of old couldn’t get them down easily.  Gyppo John’s got the know-how, the tools, some equipment and enough cronies to get it down without losing the whole thing down the hill, then sectioning it into 25 foot lengths some 5 feet in diameter, loading it up on a lowboy trailer and dragging it down to a muddy side road south of the Diner while he figures out how to sell it.

It’s been dead on the stump long enough to be completely dried.  It’s vertical grain, tight ringed and beautiful, what goes for $10 a board foot at any good lumber yard.  A board foot, for you city slickers, is the Width x Length x Thickness.  Probably not on the WASL test these days.  Unless you go to high school in Darrington.  A plank 1 inch by 4 inch thick would only need to be 3 feet long to make one board foot if my 6th grade math serves me….  An eight foot 2×4 would be worth a little less than $60.  Gyppo John had 5000 board feet on the hoof and he was trying to figure out who would pay him the most.  He’d tried the mills.  He’d called the specialty hardwood places.  He’d talked to some luthiers and he’d been sniffing around some cabinetmaker shops.  John need the cash and he needed it fast, but he sure didn’t want to give this tree away for someone Else to make the profit.

Such is life on the gentrified South End.  The days of Les Benz’s sawmill down the road are long gone.  Me and my neighbor Pete put poor old Les in the morgue one night, toe tagged and cold storage, when we two orderlies at Everett General Hospital delivered him to the fridge.  His mill is Pete’s now, but the old Chevy 350 h.p. engine and the rusty 3 foot diameter blade scared us boys too much to fire it up for a nostalgic run at pre-OSHA sawmilling.  Naw, those scrappy days are long gone.  Thankfully for those of us who hold dear to things like fingers and limbs….  But the infrastructure to help Gyppo John is gone too, unfortunately.

Still, it warms my heart a little to think of John, gimping now at 50, straddling a chainsaw with a 4 foot blade, almost a ghost sliding into our digital present, winching up a dinosaur for the gawking crowd who never saw the real thing in the wild.  Yah, you betcha, I went down and took a picture of the beast myself, strapped and secured on the trailer, dead as Kong.  John isn’t far behind and most of us won’t know, not really,  what we lost.

The South End apparently is suffering from growth pains judging by the sudden proliferation of storage units down here.  Further up-island they build fancy heated units and offer free use of a pickup truck to help haul stuff to their hot rented cubicles.  We used to use the old pickups as our storage units.  That, and beat up campers, unused truck canopies, chicken coops, falling down barns, well houses, just about anything with a roof that only moderately leaked …  and sometimes we just stored our overflow back behind the hacienda under those festive blue tarps that added a blast of color to the blackberry jungles beyond.

Folks figure it’s better to stash their overload than donate it to the thrift stores or haul it to the dump.  I got a friend who’s a certified Hoarder, what we used to call a Pack Rat before the medical community analyzed it and labeled it and declared it a subcategory of neuropathy, who filled his shack floor to ceiling, porch to mudroom and now rents space at the newly opened South End Storage Solutions.  Only costs him $150 a month, he says, but he may need to rent another unit pretty soon, which would put it in competition for a second mortgage.

Storage units are the drydock equivalent of boat moorage.  Folks think they’ll use em again, either the boat or their stuff, then pay for the privilege of ownership, month after month, year after year.  I had a pal, Landlubber Larry, who parked a racing ketch he was intending to restore to full glory, in the Everett Marina.  Paid $90,000 in moorage fees then couldn’t even give the boat away when destitution arrived at his door.  I guess folks think someday they’ll build a bigger house or a new addition to park their belongings, but until then, why not store it at South End Storage Solutions?

Trouble is, it’s an expensive solution.  Be cheaper really to build the addition.  Be way cheaper to do like the rest of us, just put it next to the blackberries and let them take care of it.  That’s the real South End Storage Solution.

The South End is pretty much the Petri Dish of Entrepreneurial Experimentation.  You got folks like myself who think employment is a capitalist conspiracy and a semi-voluntary gulag, you’ll get every mutation, hybridization, and variant on self-employment, from mail order scams to drug dealing, from con-artists to glass artists.   Work, in the immortal words of our idol Maynard G. Krebs, is a four letter word used basically as an interrogatory.  If we’d been looking for JOBS, we sure wouldn’t have moved to the tail end of an island that’s zoned 99% residential.

Still, a person has to pay the rent, a person has to eat, a person has to buy gas just to get back home.  So we have to live by our wits.  I know, trust me, I know! how disadvantaged that makes us.  But like a good scientist will tell you — even failed experiments are worthwhile.  It sets a Dead End sign up for the next grant writer.  There are lessons to be learned from us!

We’ve tried most everything.  Boat building, puppy pampering, organic nettle supplement sales, expresso shops that open at noon, art galleries that rarely open at all, specialty plant sales, llama ranching and ostrich herding, ziplines over the Tyee trout pond, outdoor movies back in the swamps, quail factories next door to me, mushroom starts in rotting alder, free range clam beds, ferret kennels, stained glass repair, website design, chainsaw sharpening, kayak rentals, Cajun catering, moonshine merlot distilling, pond engineering.  Just to scratch the surface…..

In the end we work as hard as all immigrants.  We escaped the Time Clock and the supervisors only to enslave ourselves to the new overlord — us.  The missus sez if you worked a ‘real’ job, you’d work half as much and make twice the money.  Even if she does have a point, she misses the real one, the crux of it, the kernel of eternal truth, the wisdom behind our apparent folly.  We don’t think of it as work.  And if the point needed proving ….. neither does the IRS.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-tanned-not-burned1.mp3[/podcast]audio —- tanned, not burned

Businesses come and go down here on the South End.  Mostly go…. Folks figure they can just empty out the kids’ piggy bank or sell the old Chevy van that’s been up on blocks 10 years behind the shed and scrape up the cash to hang a shingle out on their new storefront.  Something about working for other people makes em yearn for the entrepreneurial dream.  They figure if they work for themselves, their new boss will treat them a whole lot better.

Starting a business, they suppose, is a snap.  After all, this is a capitalist society and there’s all those consumers up on the North End clamoring for sales and services.  Wanda opened up the El Sol Tanning Solarium last year.  Now you know and I know the sun doesn’t shine much up on the cloud shrouded North End…. And so did Wanda, so she put out the CostCo neon OPEN  sign in a little 700 square foot storefront rental up by the Plaza Market where storefronts are opening up faster than real estate offices can move in, something Wanda mighta shoulda oughta factored in when she developed her business plan that night between dinner and Wheel of Fortune.

She lasted about the time it takes to say melanoma.  I don’t know what tanning beds go for used on CraigsList, but someday the antique value should be right up there with Ozone Generators from the 1920’s.  Wanda did get a nice full body tan herself, better than the burn down at the bank, and now we got another FOR LEASE sign where the neon no longer says OPEN.

When I last chatted with Wanda, she was heartbroken her dream died before it even had a chance to blossom.  ‘People must stay indoors and figure the TV will give them a tan,’ she lamented.  I said they go to Palm Springs or Albuquerque for the sun, not some coffin with full spectrum artificial lighting.  Wanda was in full denial.  More advertising maybe.  A location closer to town.  One free tanning session for every ten.  Now her savings were gone.  ‘I don’t want to go back to driving that school bus again,’ she practically sobbed.  In the land of capitalist dreams where Bill Gates whispers sweet somethings in every aspiring entrepreneur’s ear, failure is hard to accept.  Wanda will be fine.  She’ll dust herself off, take stock and probably launch into the next hot market.  DVD rentals or an umbrella shop.  Dreams don’t really die down here on the South End, they just recycle.  Worst case, she can do like most of the rest of us small businesspeople and become a working artist.  Low pay but huge self esteem.

History’s about half mystery, the Band likes to say.  A good historian is like a detective, digging for clues, looking for bones, finding surprises.

Nobody dug much at the South End.  You ask most of us why is Summerland summerland?, what is O-Zi-Ya?, when did Tyee Grocery become a major shopping district?, who was Mabana? – most folks on the South End who drive by this stuff everyday, every week, month after month, year after year, they don’t know or don’t care or just can’t read yet.

Tyee used to be a resort, had cabins for rent in the ‘40’s.  Before Tyee Store exploded on the scene, vacationers would get ice and beer and produce on the west side at Bucklin’s store.  Still sits where you go down to Summerland, named that because it used to be only used in, yeah, the Summer.  Brutus next door is named after Elmer Hovik, the developer’s, cow.  Thought it was funny.  Mabana is named after an early South End pioneer Nils Anderson’s daughter Mabel and his wife Johanna.  Couldn’t make up his mind, I guess, so he named it after both, better than Joannabelle, you got to admit.  Bernie Road and Dallman Road are named after Bernie Dallman.  Nice guy, Bernie.  Lived to be nearly a 100.  Lived to see his roads paved.

Camano itself was named after a Spaniard who sailed through in search of fame and fortune and adventure.  Some of the band think he was troubadour in a Tex Mex Band and that someday we’ll rename Camano after US.  Washboard Island.  Spoon City.  The band is always rewriting history….

O-Zi-Ya though, now there’s a mystery.  Could be the first part of 3 names, could be some bad spellers, could be drunk loggers having some fun …..  Hard to say.  Half the band swears it’s the Kikiallus tribe’s lost language, roughly translated, means:  Trailer Park –Pets Welcome.  Maybe they’re on to something.  Or just ON something….

The history of the South End, as you might of guessed, isn’t written down.  It isn’t much of an oral history either … at least til the Band came along.  The history of the South End is back in the woods where you’ll find an old hunting shack covered in vines or a homestead with only the privy left intact and a patch of daffodils gone wild.  It’s down at Mabana beach where the old Mosquito Fleet wharf is nothin but pilings now or the schoolhouse is  a vacation cottage.   It’s a mound of dirt up by the neighbors’ barn where cows were loaded or it’s a rusty tin shed where machinery was stored and fixed.  It’s a skid road thru a cut in the bluff where the old growth was slid to the beach.  It’s a cluster of cabins that once was a resort nobody remembers.

It’s a chunk of blacktop runnin along the bluff – or down the bluff – that used to be the old south end highway.  It’s an orchard grown old and lichened and nothin left around it for a homestead.  It’s a tree girdled around 50 yr old barbed wire.  It’s stumps back in the nettles with the springboard notch still showin.  And burnt cedar snags from the great fire of the 1880’s.  It’s a Studebaker still driving the blackberry backroads.

There’s clues and hints and a few folks who vaguely remember.  Sometimes you’ll find a scratchy photo.  Or an old Stanwood News article.  The truth is, the history’s gone to rot and rust and ruin.  Some folks think that’s a shame.   But I’m not one of them.

The South End was a place to start over.  America was that way once.  History, you think about it, has a way of setting up expectations.  Rules.  What you can and can’t do.  The South End felt like to this old sodbuster, a place to let go of the past, not worship it. We’re all just newcomers here, pioneers in our own minds, and I hope we’ll leave some breathing room for the imaginations of the NEXT immigrants.

Good evening, buckaroos.  We’re the South End String Band and we want to welcome you to the Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center.      I suppose I could get up here tonight and rail about how culture in America has gotten dumbed down, shrunk up, pixellated, sterilized, mass produced and just plain ruined.  Easy to do.  Rant and rave about low IQ hi def TV, splutter about internet pornography, beat my fists bloody about American Idol.  I could throw a cord of my best maple onto the bonfire of the Culture Wars, smear myself with blackberry tattoos and stick a sea lion bone thru my nose and howl to the moon all winter long.

The Moslems hate this western culture and half of us westerners do too.  Violence and sex and the worship of money.  Satan’s serving Big Macs with whisky by a naked teenager, they think.  And the Chinese are working on the special sauce using lead paint and soy, probably sell you a Whopper for 10 cents.  The Culture Crusades are gonna be fought the rest of our lives and the rest of our kids’ lives.  We think the enemy is Satan or the Sunnis or the Shi-ites or the Taliban or the Liberals.

But the enemy is really something that’s already won — and most folks barely noticed.  The so-called enemy is technology.  Digital, satellite,  nano, speed of light computer technology.  Driven by money and mega corporations and governments.  Course us Cro-Magnons feel bad about losing our cave drawings and the drumming around the fire circle.  But the tribes with the bronze tools, they’re always gonna win.  You better get metal too.

This time it won’t take centuries.  The good old days folks want to save, they’re in the rearview, looking closer than they really are, but they’re already roadkill on the digital highway.  I don’t blame people for hanging onto their old ways, for wanting to preserve a way of life that makes sense to em.  You couldn’t drag the band here into the 20th century, much less the computer age.  So tonight we want to take you to a simpler time, a time where we plowed with jackasses and harvested and baled nettles and made our implements by hand.  Made our music ourselves and played that music with friends and neighbors.

Oh, I know, I’m gonna miss that era too.  But tonight, let’s not worry about that or our e-mail or the netflix we could be watching or the latest installment of American Idol;  let’s imagine, well, a slower paced life.  Bank up the stove, pour yourself a shot from the jug and kick off those muddy boots.  The culture wars are gonna have to wait awhile, but in the meantime, let’s have a twist of this……

I have a sequoia I planted below our house, down where the hill levels out into a ravine.  I planted it as a seedling instead of buying a wedding ring for myself since I really dislike a ring.  At least one on my finger.   Ten years later we built the house up on that hill and from a second story perch I’ve been watching it reach up over the woodshop below, then slowly rise to the new house’s level, go beyond the height of the barn across the ravine and above our own house.

I have to step forward into the window now to see its top.  At 32 years old it’s still pretty much a baby so far as a sequoia goes.  Yesterday Karen and I wrapped our arms around its trunk and barely locked hands.  With any luck it’ll outlive me by, oh, 500 years or so.  In my own lifetime, with a little luck, it’ll be the biggest tree on the place, which is no mean accomplishment considering the five redwoods we planted from see, a few humongous big leaf maples, some second growth firs and one cedar that, for now, holds the title at a circumference of 13 feet and must be the oldest tree by far on our seven acres.

I’d like to think when we no longer prowl this property, it’ll be a forest again, not some logged off scabwoods the way it was when we first arrived.  The field that once grew alfalfa for our goats is now a small arboretum of oaks and maples and beeches, rhododendrons twice as high as us, walnuts and hickories, a carpet of shamrocks and periwinkle growing underneath.

We are definitely shaped by our surroundings, I know that much.  And it’s no small pleasure to return the favor by shaping them.  The orchards, the flower gardens, the riot of 150 rhodies all blooming over a slowly unfolding spring, the vegetable gardens, the shrubs, the back woods —- all of this becoming as much a part of us as we became part of it.  If you were to ask if I was an environmentalist, I would have to say no, probably not.  I’m mostly just part of the environment.