The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We got a lot of neighbors driving in the scenery lately.  The telephone pole just south of our shack got toppled two months ago, some yahoo texting his girlfriend who failed to notice the slight curvature to an otherwise straight road.  Airbags saved his silly hide.  Another telegraph pole got pole-axed near Hutchison’s Park.  Some pickup with a hot engine came out of the intersection thinking he was on the Bonneville Salt Flats, hit 60 in a few seconds, then lost control and took out the pole, the fence to the park, a concrete piling and still came up laughing.

Guitar Bob’s mailbox was hit too.  The guy had to cross clear over from the other side of the highway to do it.  On a straight road.  His cousin had driven into a couple of ditches the month earlier, supposedly fell asleep, and totaled about three of his grandpa’s rigs.  “Falling asleep” is apparently a euphemism for driving under the influence of narcotics.

Further south an SUV wrapped around a power pole.  Airbags once again saved some lives.  What I wonder as I walk along the shoulder of these roads is how do I get an airbag into my hat?

Pretty obviously today’s drivers aren’t paying too much attention to the road.  They got e-mails to read and texts to send and phone calls to make and a radio to find music that needs dialing.  I see folks with reading material on the steering wheel and folks who do their hair in the mirror behind the visor.

I’m not a real great proponent of most technological advances, but I’m hoping for cars that drive themselves real soon.  Cars that sense the shoulder.  Cars that see approaching objects.  Cars that stay inside the white lines.  Cars that won’t tailgate.  Cars that don’t read their manual on the highway or put on make-up on the way to work.  I want cars that drive without any help from their pre-occupied passengers.  I mean, somebody ought to be at the wheel.  Even if it’s just a circuit board.

Folks down by me live by a different Code.  Mostly their own.  You live hell and gone from the Reach of Rome, you tend to make up your own rules that meet your local needs.  Laws from places half of us never visited …. well….  Our boys down here are notorious for exaggeration.   What you might call, for want of a better word, Liars. B.S.ers, braggarts, purveyors of Tall Tales.  They still think this the Wild West and they’re the last of the cowboys.   They mostly do what they want and call it freedom.  Laws were made for suckers and sheep.  They’re, by god, not bound by any rules or regulations, they’ll have you know.

I got a little of that in me too, so when I say these outlaws are slightly left of scofflaw, trust me, they’re slightly on the dangerous side.  Sure, some are mild as Two Toke Tom who grows weed the way Grampa Daddle made moonshine.  Just trying to make a living in times out of synch with societal demands.  Prohibition comes and goes.  Today’s criminal is tomorrow’s CEO.  Some of us are just a little ahead of the curve, or so says Two Toke. We all got a small inclination toward the miscreant, I guess.  Well, maybe not the missus.  She toes the straight and narrow.  And tries her best to help me do the same.  Probably why I’m a pillar of the community.  I’d hate to think what might happen if I was left with my own de-vices.

My pals poach crab, overharvest free range clams, shoot deer out of season with a rifle, not a shotgun, and generally proceed as if game wardens and police officers were mythical creatures.  They eschew niceties like auto insurance, ignore speed limits, drive under the influence and cheat the government on taxes every chance they get.  Which, since mostly they’re unemployed, isn’t all that often.

They build without permits, hunt without licenses, drive without insurance, work ‘under the table’ and generally navigate life as if government was a volunteer program.  All these folks who constantly carp and complain about government, they look at with total bemusement.  Government certainly doesn’t apply to them, why should it bother anybody?  I suppose there will come a time when Rome rolls in, wanting its tribute.  By then we’ll probably all be a docile crowd down here, ready for government health care, meals on wheels and a good nursing home.  Sure hope they don’t have rules at the Mabana Assisted Living Villa.  The boys will want to stay up past Lights Out — even if they’re just asleep on the couch in front of the big screen communal TV.

We’ve been hearing rumors lately that folks are worried these new pot laws and similar sex marriages are going to be the ruination of society as we know it.  Stanwood and Gomorrah.  Coming to a sex and drug emporium near you!  Probably too late to save em from themselves….

Pastor Paul at the Hallelujah Good News Church of the Rock down at the Odd Fellows Hall they rent every Sunday morning was enjoining the congregation after the voters passed the Initiatives of Iniquity to fight the forces of evil unleashed upon us poor South Enders.  Cast the first stoned, you ask me, but Pastor Paul didn’t.  He read passages from a battered King James to prove his point and God’s, made reference to Babylon and Beelzebub, and practically blistered the varnish off the pulpit.

I know it’s hard to watch if you think sin is spreading around you faster than floodwater in New Jersey, but before we get our earmuffs in a bunch, it’s worth remembering us South Enders haven’t turned to pillars of salt yet and this end of the island hasn’t been consumed by an eternal fire of damnation.  We’ve been similar sexing and smoking herbs other than nettles since I came here back on the 5th day of Creation.  I wouldn’t say we’re Paragons of Virtue  — well, most of my pals aren’t — but if we’re on the Road to Perdition, Hell looks more like Elger Bay Mega Mall than it does Dante’s bad dreams.

Folks are a little too lathered up and Pastor Paul isn’t helping much.  Truth is, he was all FOR that Holy War we been running for a decade and I’m not talking about the Crusade to put a tollgate between Stanwoodopolis and the island to keep the infidels back where they belong on the Mainland.  Pastor Paul would benefit mightily from a bowlful of Two Toke’s Heavenly Blitz, I suspect.  Maybe quit worrying about who loves who.  Love might not be THE answer, but it’s a start….

Islands attract an unusual crowd of refugees from the Real World.  We got tree huggers and artists, llama ranchers and artists, herb farmers and artists, boatbuilders and artists, retirees who BECOME artists and artists who are discovering themselves.  THEY’LL be the last to find themselves, apparently, because the rest of us can’t turn over a rock without finding one.

I guess islands appeal to the romantic in us.  Sailboats and sunsets, lighthouses and low visibility, mountain vistas and sparkling waters.  The oyster is our world….       Down at the South End we wouldn’t call it romantic exactly.  Sort of matrimonial maybe.  Til death do us part.

People who visit for more than a 5 minute stop at Elger Bay Grocery for directions to the place they were REALLY headed before they got lost, they wonder if the South End ATTRACTS a certain breed of refugee or if living at the end of a long skinny neck island MAKES them strange.  You live somewhere there’s no jobs, no towns, no restaurants, no bars, no taverns, no nothing — sorta like parking the trailer in a Mars Colony —  I guarantee you gotta be, well, different.  It’s sort of a South End Darwinism vs. South End Creationism.

Either you adapt or move away …. Or you were made to be here.  I suspect when the fog clears here on South Galapagos, the only creatures crawling on the rocks on the beach of the next paleolithic era will probably be tough old lizards in special harmony with their rugged environment, painting all the other lizards and opening up galleries to sell their art.  I wish em luck.

A lot of places, the weight of history holds em down.  Take Stanwood.  They got to live up to their Skandihoovian past.  Uff-Da Festivals and Lefse Smorgasbords.  Viking this and Viking that.  Sorta Leavenworth on the Skids ….

History’s a fine thing – keep our heritage.  Remember the past.  Honor the dead.  Yah shure, u-betcha….  But sometimes it’s an albatross around your neck.  Or a lutefisk necklace.  Keeps a place from growing.  Evolving.  Rediscovering itself.  Moving into new, uncharted territory.

The South End, being an uncharted territory practically forever, doesn’t have much to worry about from History.  I think it gives us a lot of breathing room.  We can make up all sorts of lies and legends and not have to worry about stepping on the feet of dead heroes or old cultures or somebody’s precious antique heritage.

You stop and think about it, that’s what America was once —unencumbered by history.  Making it up as we go.  Creating everything from scratch.  Dreaming up new frontiers.           America’s sort of lost that now.   When you spend most of your time celebrating what you’ve already done instead of what you’re gonna do, I don’t care if you’re a country or a town or ordinary yahoos like us, that’s a prescription for standing still and not pushing on.  Which is sad really, cause like the South End, it’s mostly a state of mind more than an actual place.  I guess we’ll have to keep the Torch lit down here.  Or at least the woodstoves.  Be like those Monks back in the Dark Ages scribbling in the caves all the Knowledge of the World.  Waiting for the exact right time to re-emerge and save Stanwood from its dark last century.

Call me old fashioned. Call me Scrooge.  Call me late for dinner.     Christmas rolled in this last year and one of the TV stations– AS A Public Service – ran a four hour broadcast of a fire.  In a fireplace.  A Yule Log fire.  Run it while the family’s opening the Toys-R-Us packages, the CostCo presents, the Wal-Mart Roll Back Them Prices Made-in-China presents.

Run it Commercial Free!!             Four hours.

Now I KNOW the world’s changing.  And I KNOW this year you can buy that same Commercial Free Public Service, Phony Baloney, Fire in a Phony Baloney Fireplace, Yule Log DVD, WITH editor’s cuts, logger’s commentary  and a special at the end of complete descriptions of the kind of wood burned, the treebefore it got cut down, the make of the chainsaw that cut it, the trucker’s name that hauled it, all for 9.99.

Down at the sad old South End – this is gonna come as a shock and next year the EPA’ll step in, you know it, we’re so behind the times, so pathetic, so lacking in modernity, we still throw REAL logs on real fireplaces.

I’ve been thinking maybe we ought to quit polluting the neighborhood.  You burn those artificial trees, you’ll be doing more harm than good.  Nasty fumes.  Weird metallic smells.

What do I know????     Paper or plastic? They always ask me at the downtown grocery.  I always think they mean money or credit.  It’s too damn complicated a world.  But I do know the difference between a real fire and one on TV.  Even if it is commercial free ….

Back in 1980 we had a rash of vandalism targeted at Elmer Hovik, a local Developer the Seattle Times called a huckster.  Elmer built Camaloch and went on to go bankrupt slashing and burning Thunder Ridge which sat idle for the next 30 years.  In America you can go broke, set up new partners and the banks will let you go right back at it.  Elmer went broke the 2^nd time working on Onamac, but in the meantime he managed to carve up some prime real estate on the way down, one being my suburb across the street.   Named it Brutus after a cow he owned.  The Camano Homeowners Association formed about then just to fight Elmer.

Elmer and his cows had set up mobile home sales about where the golf course clubhouse is now.  That way he could cut down our trees, bulldoze the lots and have you watching TV in the comfort of your single wide in the time it takes to say Chapter Eleven….

Some Monkey Wrenchin Gang wrote on the side of one of the tilted trailers in big black spraypaint STOP THIS UGLYNESS.  Spelled ugly with a Y.  About the same night all the survey stakes got pulled across the road from me in the development named after a bovine, so naturally the police came to chat with me about my whereabouts on the night in question, did I hold a grudge against Mr. Hovik or his cow, and would I like to plead guilty now and avoid a public trial and the subsequent humiliation?  I said I thought Elmer Hovik was so low on the evolutionary totem pole, he ought to apologize to the worms above him.  I said I didn’t remember where I was last night, much less a week ago, but chances are I was playing banjo in front of the woodstove with my dog Dr. Gonzo who could vouch for me.  And I declared I wasn’t guilty and I could prove it.

Carl, the deputy, said he would like to hear my alibi.  My alibi, I said, was that I could not have committed that dastardly act of desecrating a mobile home because I was an English teacher once before I became a South End misfit.  He said SO?  And I said, YOU obviously would’ve flunked my class cause UGLYNESS is misspelled.  It’s got an “I”, not a “Y”.  Also, Sherlock, you got the wrong culprit.

“Maybe you misspelled it to throw us off,” the wily officer said.  I said, “I told you, I was an English teacher and no self-respecting English teacher would knowingly misspell a word and have every passerby see it.  We took an oath.  But good luck finding your killer,” I said, “and look for someone who flunked English.”

Truth is, they never DID find the desecrator.  But I did.  I almost turned him in too, not for vandalism, not for getting me in hot water with the law — that’s right:  for misspelling UGLINESS.  Which is a kind of ugliness to me.

A lot of folks come to the country and are surprised by the surplus of pests they didn’t expect.  Bald eagles snatching the pekinese off the porch.  Otters snacking on their $2000 pedigree koi. The same otters leaving the leftovers under the house where the rotting carcass of carp would gag about anybody BUT an otter.  The coyotes eat the cat, the cat eats the birds, the birds eat the cherries.  The deer eat the prized roses and my neighbor behind me – a 2 legged pest – poaches the deer and the occasional stray dog that shows up too.  A lot of gunplay out in MY neck of the suburbs.

My neighbors think the garbage eating, begging raccoons are cute as buttons.  They feed em dog food like they were pets.  The possums don’t seem so cute somehow.  Pointy snouts, hairless, tumorous, sharp little teeth.  Somehow less than cuddlesome.  A few years back we had cougars.  200 pound cats.  Jump a 6 foot fence with a lamb wiggling it its jaws like paragliding in a breeze.  Easy for a mom to picture little Jimmy instead.  Remind you real quick that the country isn’t ONLY golf courses and weed n feed lawns.

But the scourge of the suburbs, the menace of the manicured fescue, the REAL threat to Easy Living, is the wily mole.  Burrows up every night thru green perfection and you best believe a mole hill to my neighbors IS a mountain.  They shoot at the burrows, dump gasoline and poison into the holes, blow em up, toxify em, trap em, sonic noise em, drown em, irradiate em and finally just stand back and curse em.

In the last great showdown as the sun sets over the sprinkler showered suburbs, the moles will ultimately WIN.  I suspect the tunnels all connect in one vast freeway system and their complex civilization has cities and art and language and calendars far beyond our meager comprehension. We’re their slaves, keeping the gardens tilled, the lawns watered, their elaborate canals flowing.  And the beauty of it is, we don’t suspect a thing.

Christmas on the equatorial South End doesn’t arrive on Black Friday, one hour after Turkey Day is still undigested, the way it does the rest of Jingle Bell America.  The urge to drive 40 miles to the nearest mall with a maxxed out credit card doesn’t compel us to hurry up the holiday that will only push us one step closer to bankruptcy trying to buy the kids enough presents to hide the water basin under the tree.

Oh sure, it’s swell to say every year that the holiday is really about the Spirit of Giving, that the True Meaning is sharing and love and blah blah blah.  But for a full month the REAL meaning blasts across the airwaves, piles in drifts of glossy sale ads, whistles down the blacktop in a high decibel muzak howl fever-pitched to buy buy buy some more….

Nothing new here.  Nothing we haven’t heard every year of our lives.  Too much commercialism.  Too much emphasis on materialism.  Too much tinsel, too little joy?  Plug in the Blu-Ray re-released hi-definition “It’s  A Wonderful Life” and watch it for the 50^th time, only $29.95 on Amazon or run down to Wal-Mart at midnight on Thanksgiving with White Christmas spewing over the loudspeaker in a synthesized cadence determined by a shopper survey study group to enhance purchasing.

Naw, you can have it.  Down here we’re gonna hang the nettle wreaths the day before Santa sets sail, string a few festive lights (that won’t stay up all year) and maybe invite a few neighbors in for a Yuletide nog spiked with something savory.  We won’t give too many gifts, you can bet your stockings hung with care, not in these hard economic times, but we’ll help fill the food bank carts for those who need help this season way more than us.

Like always, we’ll drink a toast.  To another year with our loved ones.  To Peace on earth.  To good will toward men.  And women too.  We probably won’t watch “It’s A Wonderful Life”, we’ll just try to live it.  And hey,  all you Cyber Monday Shoppers — A Merry Christmas to You, Too!  Just not 365 days of the year, okay?

Our latest entrepreneurial entrée into the fragile economic market of the South End is Tatoo U.  Armed with dye injecting needles and a menacing array of bicep tats, ‘Biker Bob’ Kowalski opened up his ‘body art emporium’ in the cleaning supply room of Hair Today – Gone Tomorrow’s Rogaine Outlet beneath Windy Rear Realty.

The opening week alone Biker Bob adorned 30 arms, torsos and lower calves with artworks ranging from colorful butterflies and cute unicorns to snarling hounds of hell and a blood dripping dagger with the always popular logo: NO LOSERS!  Bob acknowledges that he’s fighting a long held stereotype of body art that’s a bit negative.  “Mostly it’s the old farts,” he said in an exclusive interview for the Crab Cracker.  “They equate it with a sailor’s drunk in some port town.  Next morning he wakes up with the worst hangover of his life and the wrong girlfriend’s name on his chest.”  Bob tells us he doesn’t get many sailors and he’s reluctant to inscribe current girlfriend’s names.

Scrutinizing the hundreds of graphic images posted on the salon walls, I ask what are some of the favorites of us South Enders.  He admits it’s a bit early to say, but he’d done a couple of dragons for the guys and the little butterfly is popular among the ladies. “They like it right about bikini-line or just visible below the top of the bra line,” he says, then laughs and admits, “me too.”  Not bad work, if you can get it.”

With all the artists down here, I make the mistake of asking if he plans to use any of them to create one-of-a-kind tattoos.  This rankles him.  “Why don’t you go ask THEM if they’re going to use any of the other artists’ art to make theirs, ya jerk!”

I took his point, without the dye, apologized and took a hasty departure.

Artists are hyper-sensitive people, in case you’ve somehow never stumbled down to Colony Central here at the nettlesome South End.  Biker Bob will make a fine addition.

On my way past a stack of detergent and window cleaning supplies I passed a client coming in:  about 18, pierced nose, tongue stud, 3 tiny diamonds glittering in a clean row on her earlobe.  “Go for the butterfly,” I meekly suggest.  Her accompanying boyfriend glared ominously at me and advised I mind my own business.

You know, if I had one….  Biker Bob apparently does.