The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Used to be we kept a giant billboard bottom of Land’s Hill coming  onto the island telling any and all that this was Private Property.  The beaches, the clams, the crabs, the whole she-bang were owned by us property holders and if you knew what was good for you, you’d stay off our land.

This was about l980 and some good old boys from the Homeowners’s Association decided to erect the thing.  Stanwood has a Wellkommen.  Camano had a KEEP OUT…   Somebody cut it down right off the Get-Go.  I thought about doing it myself, it was so nasty and in your face.  But it got put right back up with steel legs hidden inside the wood ones so a chain saw wouldn’t work to take it down next try.

Being on state highway right-of-way, the sign was Illegal.  A few years later another sign went on the big sign covering up the Keep Off Private Property with a Respect Private Property at the bottom.  Not near as hostile, but still ….  not real inviting.  Twenty years that sign sat there guarding the island’s only entry by would-be trespassers.

About l998 we were building the new Visitor Center at Terry’s Corner.  Department of Transportation came by wanting permission to tear that sign down.  Wanted to know who put it up, who owned it, who maintained it.  Me, being at the corner every day, they figured I must be the head honcho of the Chamber of Commerce.  For two years I got calls from D.O.T.  Wanting to cut me a deal.  They offered to put the sign up at the Center for us.  I said with a sign like that we wouldn’t NEED a Visitor Center.   Just tear the ugly thing down.  Nobody’s alive who cares.  But they were worried about stepping on toes.  I said those old boys sure didn’t care whose toes they stomped on when they E-rected that thing.

D.O.T. kept calling.  Like I’m the Mayor of Camano.  They’d put fancy stripes in our parking lot if they could tear it down, the man said.  Finally, worn down after dozens of these conversations,  I said, okay, you got a deal.  And that’s how we got rid of that ugly sign and how we got fancy stripes too.  Personally I wish I’d cut a deal now to put that sign up at the entrance to the South End.  Plus they’d have had to make me honorary mayor.

Most of you pioneers wouldn’t recall it, but I came with the mizzus to a few Historical Society meetings nearly 3 decades ago.  She stuck it out.  And I lit out.  It was like Happy Hour at the Home.  Tea and decaf  coffee and plenty of little cakes and cookies.  A lot of talk about so and so who homesteaded the flood plain and whozit who married whatshername, you know,  the  family out by the gitcheegumee farm, the one next to the old Florence School.  Most of the history was generally geneological.

I remember some 90 year old gal had moved here from New England by way of the South and she said, you know what, all this talk about pioneers and who’s been here the longest and whose family’s got bragging rights, it’s a lotta Hooey, you ask me.  My family lived where they’re at 300 years and I’m the first one with sense enuff to move away.

We all got old family trees last I looked, nothing to get too proud about there.  I’ll probably live my years out on the South End and I suppose someday they’ll put a plaque up at the South End Historical Pole Building Museum:  here was a man who didn’t have sense enuff to explore further than Elger Bay.  That’s why we made him honorary Mayor of the South End.

History isn’t out in the cemetery, I know that.  It’s figuring out why the town dried up or the farms played out or the timber got cut down and how what was THEN is still pulling on us NOW.  What Stanwood  BECOMES is because of what Stanwood WAS.

Course on the South End, history’s about half mystery.  Most of the family trees have fallen off the bluff.  Won’t be long the only history’s gonna be the outrageous whoppers the Band’s telling.  Trouble with that is, they didn’t stick to tea and decaf coffee, so it’s juiced up plenty more than some of you genuine historians might like.

The mizzus was riding the other day with our state senator Mary Margaret, over to a conference on putting up historical signs for Island county.  Mostly on Whidbey  since nobody over there had ever heard of Camano Island and couldn’t imagine it even having a history if nobody knew it existed.

Whidbey, of course, has its own South End.  The commuters live there.  It’s a company town for Boeing really, but the State drives em to the plant on our ferry.

Mary Margaret said when she was a girl  she  always felt like a second class citizen around the schoolkids of Stanwood, Camano Island in those days being a sort of Tijuana for the Skandihoovian Upper Classes of the fabled Twin Cities.   I guess it’s important to most folks to have someone to look down on. Course now we’re more enlightened.  And the Stanwoodites need our purchasing power so the whispering goes on out of range of our hearing now.

Mary Margaret was saying how one day she was telling her mama how she felt belittled by all the uppity teasing and why was the world so mean.  And her mama, trying to make her feel a little better, a little brighter in this dark cold world, trying to lift her spirits in the shadow of that bullying, stuck up, snot-nosed Stanwood, her mama said, well, Mary Margaret, you cheer up.  It could be worse.  At least you don’t live down at the South End.

Somehow I suspect the mizzus and Mary Margaret aren’t going to get a Historical Marker for us South Enders….

Back in the days of the Wild Wild South End we used to erect our shacks and abodes without bothering with county building permits.  Just a damn nuisance, really.  We weren’t building with the idea they’d outlive us and the next unsuspecting owner would buy something unstructural or unheatable or probably uninhabitable by anyone other than a bona fide South Ender.  The new immigrants just bulldoze down the old structures anyway, even if they’re fairly recent, and make room for their Taj Mahal retirement villas.

We used recycled lumber, scrounged doors and rehung old single pane wood windows.  We didn’t call it sustainable architecture or crow about recycling or call ourselves Green Warriors.  This is just how it was done.  This is all we could afford.  The county even had a special permit for this:  Owner Builder.  Pay a small fee and they’d let us construct our own house.  You couldn’t hire a contractor — you had to do it yourself.  Fair enough.

But when the county began to gentrify, the new squires complained that we were living in dwellings that they considered eyesores.  Nobody asked what we thought of theirs…..   And so the county eliminated the Owner Builder Eyesore permits for a couple of years, but the Sound End squawkers got it reinstated.  That’s when we built our new shack.  The new permit made us meet all the same codes as every contractor so it wasn’t as if we could recycle materials or build on the cheap.  It just meant you could build it yourself legally.  What I would call the principle of the thing….

Nowadays you can’t get an Owner Builder anything.  End of an era.  Some of my neighbors like to talk how they built their own house too.  What they mean is they wrote the checks to a contractor and called themselves the boss.  They didn’t strap on a nail pouch or throw a hammer or cut a 2×6.  When someone says, ‘I built my own house,’ I always ask what to me would be an embarrassing question.  They usually don’t see the difference so over time I’ve learned to let it go.

But … there IS a difference.  The county knew what it was, you better believe.  And down on the South End, we know the difference too.  So if you ever wonder why we skip the permits, it’s not that we’re just ornery, it’s so we can actually build our own damn house.

These relentless rains this winter have driven me indoors, driven me half crazy and three quarters mildewed, driven me to search for new hobbies to kill the dripping, foggy hours.  Could explain why we have so many artists down here.  Boredom, seems to me, is the midwife of creativity.  You can either sink into the soft cushions of cable TV or you can search for something meaningful to do that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol.  At least not too early in the day….

I got friends who’ve ‘retired’ now.  Interesting word, retired.  Sounds like slippers shuffling toward the bedroom.  Ssshhh,  Jerome’s retired, let’s keep our voices down.  He’s worked all his life and now he could use a rest.  La-Z-Boy,  all day sweatpants wardrobe, some long peaceful hours of quality daytime television.  He’s earned it, he says.  You’re just tired, I say.  REtired, he adds.

Jerome worked 40 years at a company off island making doors.  When he reached 65, that’s what they gave him instead of a gold watch.  The door.  Sort of left him with a bitter taste in his mouth, he tells me every chance he gets.  And a pension, I add so he doesn’t forget.  He slaps a dismissive hand on the recliner.  Forty years, he growls, and I get the scraps.

We both know I won’t be getting any scraps.  Course, we know I didn’t give some corporation 40 years of my life either.  Fair is fair.  Jerome will gladly tell you I don’t deserve zip.  What I don’t understand is his smoldering anger.  What he doesn’t understand is my undercurrents of happiness.  NOT giving away 40 years to a company makes it seem obvious only to one of us.

Jerome complains about his taxes and I know he’s worried he may have to sell his home and move somewhere less expensive than the gentrified South End.  He talks about maybe starting a little side business, small engine repair maybe or doing a little handyman work.  He’s been talking about that long before he retired.  Long before he was tired.  So yeah, Jerome is bored half out of his bald skull.  Some might say he’s lazy, but HE wouldn’t.  He worked long enough.  I’ve got a very long time of working before I figure it’s quittin time.  I suspect Jerome wouldn’t agree, but I think I might just be the lucky one.

I happened to go by the Tyee Fitness Center last week, what used to be Camano Curves before that and before that was the Pampered Pekinese Dog Grooming Salon.  Even the mutts apparently need toning up down here on the yuppified South End.  Just not enough mutts to keep a canine hair styling salon open, apparently.

My old ex Janice was working up a lather on the stairmaster and ordinarily I might’ve hustled past the big plate glass windows, but the sight of her in gym shorts striding away to some dialed up half jog held me a tad too long to avoid her catching me looking in from outside.  Trust me, it’s not what you’re probably thinking.  No, too many late night arguments for that.  Too many scars.  We didn’t part mortal enemies, but sleeping dogs don’t snarl at each other, I’ve learned.

Janice has worked her way OUT of the South End dating game, she confides over her bottled water and a towel wrapped around her shoulders.   All I asked was how ya doin?, and she cuts right to it.  I guess that’s what the rules are in marriage and so maybe they apply after.    Too many gnarly single men locked into their idiosyncracies and unwilling to budge one iota, even for romance, she informs me with a roundabout swirl of the plastic water bottle that I nearly have to duck to avoid.  There’s not a romantic bone in any of these boys.  She’s done looking for love down here.

She’s dating on the internet, she tells me when I ask what are the options.  Janice is trying to be, what she calls, a Personal Trainer.  When she told me this a year ago, I just thought we never really knew each other, did we?   What next, I asked, and regretted it, if not immediately, shortly after, a Life Counselor??  Maybe I’ll become a minister.     Actually, that might’ve been our last conversation now that I think of it.

Anyway, she’s in a dating service, she tells me, Romeo and Juliet, costs something a month, but she’s meeting more interesting fellas than ‘you losers down here.’  I let that go since I deserve it.  And it’s sort of true when I think of some of the boys she dated, present company maybe not excluded.  ‘Any keepers?’ I ask and for the first time she seems calm, at least not breathing hard.  She’s got a nice sheen of sweat worked up.  We’re the only ones in the place, but she lowers her voice like she’s telling me a secret.  ‘Yeah,’ she says, dreamy almost, ‘I think so.’

I feel a small stab of jealously and it surprises me so I say quick, ‘I hope so, Janice.  I really do.  You deserve someone nice.’  And she laughs, a laugh I remember from way long ago when things were good between us.  ‘Yes,’ she says, “Yes I do.”

I was chatting it up recently with one of the zillion artists we got proliferating on the petri dish of the South End.  Vanessa’s just discovered her bliss now that the kids have gone off to college and her husband has retired early with his dot.com stock options.  He apparently has found his bliss too, not as an artist, but as a gentleman farmer.  Which qualifies him as a definite minority down here.  Not the farmer part, just not being an artist.  I only know a handful of folks who aren’t.  Or who say they aren’t.  A rebellious kid in these parts, if he really wanted to rattle the cage, would smash sculpture or burn a couple of canvasses.  Declare himself passionate about accounting and wear button down collared shirts from J.C. Penney.  Rad!

We got art tours on Mother’s Day weekend, we got plein air painters planting easels on bluffs and beaches any days it doesn’t rain, we got art guilds and art associations and art clubs and art scholarships and art meetings and art sales and art co-ops and art in all the public buildings and art in all the shops and restaurants and cafes.  There’s art in the parks, there’s sculpture parks and the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center was built by artists so they could advertise, guess what?   Right… art.

Vanessa was going great Gonzo about finding her spiritual center through her watercolor explorations.  Muse this, muse that, painting her way to Nirvana.  Being a cynical sort, I was NOT amused, no pun pretended.  Folks around here, like a lot of places, think artists are somehow special beings, a breed apart from the more common variety homo sapien.  They suffer more, they’re more sensitive, they’re more attuned to nature, they ‘feel’ more deeply.  They are entities set apart from the other, coarser beings who live a life less examined.  Or at least less explained, if I can extrapolate from Vanessa’s hymnal.

No wonder they have nervous breakdowns, these artists.  If I thought about myself and dwelled awhile with my deep sensitivities all the live-long day, I’d spend more time at the pharmacy than pushing a paintbrush.  Luckily, at least Vanessa and 90% of her hypersensitive hobbyists, art doesn’t walk hand in hand with poverty.  She’s happily unencumbered by fiscal anxieties.   Finding your bliss without sweating the groceries seems infinitely easier than digging for it under a stack of unpaid bills.

When the paintings fill her guestroom, she’ll just add another room or two to the hacienda for storage.  When all these Matisses we got filling garages and attics and basements leave their mortal coil for true Nirvana, the sudden inflation from all these masterpieces of deceased artists should make us the envy of Western Civilization.  Practically got the left coast annex of the Louvre tucked away.  That, or the thrift stores better get ready for a tsunami of donated art….

I got a buddy who lives in Shanghai.  For all you South Enders, Shanghai’s in China.  20 million people.  5000 buildings over 30 stories tall.  On the South End we don’t have 500 buildings — unless you count chicken sheds and outhouses too — and none of em are more than 2 stories, unless you count tall tales.

We forget sometimes how much the world off island is changing.  My buddy visited recently.  Brought his two teenage boys who must’ve thought they’d detoured to Mars.  Ma was in the garden when they came and I was bending nails whacking together a shed trying to bring the building total up to 450.  We sat around the house listening to stories of the New China.  Had some homebrew and watched the homemade bread rise while the boys talked about learning Chinese — 2000 characters in their alphabet.  For you South Enders, we got 26, even if some of you only use 20 or less.

They talked about pirated X-boxes, dollar DVD’s, the elaborate transportation system of Shanghai, the rural migration of the peasants into the cities which is larger by far than the Camano exodus into Stanwoodopolis.  And I thought:  we’re living in a backwash up a drying puddle at the end of a dead end road.  I thought we’re becoming Anachronisms.  For you South Enders, it means we’re living a drunkard’s dream.

Personally  …. It’s why I came here.  But I admit it’s jarring to realize how much the rest of the world has moved on and how, sooner or later the South End will be a fossil in the fading memories of all us old timers.  And how, when the population swells and the high rise condos number in the thousands and it’s an easy subway ride to Seattle and Gomorrah’s teeming masses, we’ll be nothing but legends in our own minds, ghosts in gardens long ago paved over.

Til then though, we got our own work to do.  Like wrestling with the language and maybe learning how to use all 26 characters.   That, or start working on pictographs for bread kneading and whiskey distilling.

I been thinking about this fracking stuff lately, digging wells down into sediment, then opening up fissures to get to the oil layers.  Down here on the South End we got wells at different levels of aquifer.  You pump too much water, you pull salt from the Sound.  If I’m on that aquifer, well, I get salt too.

My neighbors who have a water association decided they had some illegal hook-ups on their water system, despite my assertions that the original developer had taken the folks’ money for a watershare and deposited it in his account without registering it with the state, so naturally they closed a valve to their own homes, jacked up the pressure to the suspected water poachers and blew out their lines.   Not exactly  real friendly.

Not exactly real smart either, it turns out.  Unbeknownst to them, an underground supply line ruptured too, which meant a week or more of uninterrupted pumping until their water started to taste like the rim of a tequila glass.  I like to think it was Bad Karma, but they thought it was just Bad Luck.  The point is, we’re all in this together.  You screw it up, you screw it up for all of us.

This fracking, well, I figure you got thousands of wildcat drillers hungry for cash.  Probably safe, for the most part, although there are enough stories about water taps shooting flames that it would worry me to see fracking drill trucks come rolling in next door.  Course, I’m a natural born worrier.  Especially when the folks doing the reassuring are the same folks making the money.

My neighbors might be figuring a few fractures down below their basements might help them hit a new water vein.  One that doesn’t taste like my tears.  And if it doesn’t, maybe they’ll get enough money to pay for bottled water deliveries the rest of their lives.  Me, I’m going to sit pat.  My water isn’t on their aquifer and I sure don’t want a fracture putting us together.  To paraphrase Robert Frost:  good aquifers make good neighbors.  I’d like to keep a little distance between my drinking water and theirs.  Especially when they decide I might not be legally entitled….

I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar.  The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow.  Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value.  Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices.  Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it.  In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does.  But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case.  He looked like a hawk on a telephone line.  Patiently waiting for the next mouse.  “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked.  I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before Obama takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before Obama outlaws em.’  “I shoulda voted Democrat.  The guy is making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got.  He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle …..  “Whoa,”  I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander.  Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals.  If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic.  They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson.  You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar.  Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke.  “Obama’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck.  “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.