The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Our chalet was one of the last houses built under the county’s ‘owner-builder’ permit, just before they outlawed notions like a citizen building his own home without meeting every Uniform Building Code that applies equally to a house in Maine winters or hurricane-prone Miami.  The county folks said I’d be stupid to build a house that way.  When I sold it, I’d have to admit, or confess, or ask forgiveness, to any and all potential buyers.  Probably couldn’t sell it to anybody that hadn’t just fallen off a turnip truck and hit their head.  Which, undoubtedly, the county thought I’d done.

The truth was, I still had to meet all the codes, the square footage for window openings, the R-factors for insulation, beam calculations, perc tests and septic requirements, plus meet the state electrical codes.  About all I ‘got away with’ was reduced permit fee and the right to take as long as I wanted to finish the house.

I took two years.  The pioneers didn’t take two years using ax and ox.  I was 42 years old, prime of my life, cocky as Bantam rooster, figured I could learn as I went.  Study up on concrete, then pour a foundation.  Read up on framing, then build a wall.  Study plumbing, then install an indoor toilet.  Bone up on electric, then wire up the main panel box without running 220 volts through my eyeballs.  This is what we South Enders call Trial and Error in the School of Hard Knocks.  It isn’t rocket science, but …. mistakes can be costly.  I nearly lost the house removing studs in the main bearing wall in order to frame up for a Russian fireplace we hadn’t planned originally.  Studs bent like a row of archers’ bows and the second story and the roof obviously were coming down around me.  Could’ve planned this better if I’d been experienced…

I could bore you with all the details of all my mistakes —- there were plenty.  But in the end, we moved in two years to the week after pouring the foundation.  Doors are all homemade.  Cabinets are hand fashioned.  Most of the furniture we designed and built.  Even the toilet seats are custom fit curly maple.  It’s a shame, I think, we don’t allow, much less encourage, folks to build their own home, the way they want it, as simple or as fancy as they choose.  I know for a fact it’s the most ambitious, the hardest, the most satisfying thing I ever did.  Although I’m real glad it didn’t kill me that day when it almost collapsed on top of me.  And I admit, during winter storms, I sometimes wonder if I got enough nails and screws in the old place to hold things together.  So far, so good…..

Maybe it’s advancing old age … or maybe I need more good books to read to fulfill my literary addiction … but I’m starting to notice the obituaries in the paper these days.  Obits used to fall into the same category as high school sports scores, recipes in the food section and all the devotional stuff under the heading of feel-good clap-trap.  Usually I won’t find friends or acquaintances there, but that will change, no doubt.

At this point I’m mostly pausing to look at the photographs of the recently departed, the one their spouse or children submitted.  You can tell a lot from these, maybe more than we ought to know, way more than the verbiage about passing away peacefully or going to be with the Lord or being called Home, followed by a list of surviving family members that should be indispensable to genealogists many years hence.  The saddest to me are the ones fished out of some old shoebox in the basement, obviously the only one they could locate, faded, out of focus, of a dearly departed no one thought enough of in life to bother photographing.  There’s the shot of poor dead Mom with her daughter — obviously submitted by the now motherless child — which shows a better photo of the kid.  Some have the family dog.  Or the cat.  I assume the pet may still be alive to carry on the memory.

But I’m mostly struck by how many of the men are shown with their fish.  Big salmon, huge halibut, trophy trout.  Bad shots mostly of the happy angler, probably shot at the pier by a half inebriated charter boat buddy.  Dead fish, now both of em…  Sometimes you still see an obit with a bloody elk or a fresh shot buck.  Hunter fishermen:  the last of an era, I suspect.

Maybe the only surviving mugshots are these photos.  Maybe this was their one crowning achievement before departing to the heavenly Fish Pond.  All I know is, I’m gathering up all my old fish fotos and burning them Now.

I live in a third world sort of place, kind of the Tijuana of Camano Island.  Given that Camano is the Tijuana of Whidbey, it probably tells you all you need to know.  My neighbors have discovered that when they want to rid themselves of a ratty sofa or an obsolete tube TV the size of a Volkswagen, they just drag the item out to the road, stick a FREE sign on it and next day, as if leprechauns had organized into teams, the goods disappear.

In other words we’re just passing our commodities hand to hand, neighbor to neighbor.  Saves that trip to the dump if you don’t own a pickup and, let’s face it, saves the humiliation of trying to sell obvious crap on E-Bay or Craigslist that now self-respecting, fully functional adult would bid on.  I’m all for this, by the way.  South End Recycling: just plain old fashioned good stewardship, you ask me.

So when my next door neighbor hauled his 1970’s butt-ugly hide-a-bed and his busted microwave oven onto the shoulder, I figured the hazard to early morning, pre-caffeinated commuter traffic was offset by this Carbon Credit Swapping tactic.  Sure enough, before any accidents ensued, the aforementioned items disappeared.  All well and good….  The dead refrigerator on the porch, though, sat a week, the result of my neighbor’s laziness and poor signage.  Nevertheless, one day it too vanished.

I was amazed and astounded.  Until my bike ride around the Head the same day …. where the reefer was discovered unceremoniously dumped on a backroad in the nettles, not so noticeable to vehicular traffic, but a white billboard to me on a bicycle.  To say I was pissed would be a gross understatement.  I wanted to pound on my trashy neighbor’s door and UNLOAD not just my anger but the refrigerator too.  But … I thought, unlikely as it might be, maybe this was someone else’s midnight discard.  Plenty of folks who would rather haul stuff into the woods than pay a dump charge ….

It nagged me, though, it really did, that my boy next door would trash up my paradise.  So finally I took some paint and wrote his address on the fridge door after hoisting the appliance upright where it loomed white and apparitional out of the gloom of the nettle forest.  No great harm if I was wrong.  Bullseye if I was right.  The Skeeter Gambit.

The sheriff’s deputies noticed it the very next day, trained professionals that they are, and they stopped by my pal’s house and inquired if perhaps he’d reported a Missing Frigidaire.  He had a cockamamie story, but next day when I checked at the dump, oh yeah, a refrigerator with an address on it was standing over in the appliance section.

If there’s a moral here, damned if I know what it is.  But I’ll say this:  before you toss your old stoves and iceboxes into some woods you think is remote, just leave it on the shoulder of the South End with a FREE sign on it.  Apparently we can always use another appliance out on the front porch.  Save you a lot of embarrassment with the Island County Sheriff.

SOUTH END COMMISSIONER CANDIDATE POSITION STATEMENTS

Bubba Frisk Jr. JOB CREATION  PARTY

Our current tourism ad slogan might as well be ‘the place to do nothing’ .  Sadly, it’s not just for tourists; it’s for all the unemployed we have down at the South End.  If I’m elected, my first executive order will be to jumpstart the Mother of All Tourist Promotions centered around our own HomeBoy:  the Barefoot Burglar, the Camano Kid, the Flying Filcher, our very own international anti-hero.  The movies are being shot, the books are being written, the documentaries are being edited, the mom has hired an entertainment lawyer, the deals are being made!  Rolling Stone has declared Camano officially the Cape Cod of the Pacific Northwest.  And we still want to be the place that does nada?  Maybe the Chamber  …. But the rest of us are ready to roll!  Tour buses, T-shirts, coffee mugs, souvenir shops:  we’re ready to cash in.  Camano, the island to do nothing?  We don’t need a new slogan, we need a new NAME.  Colton Island.  Nice ring to it.  And how do you get to Colton Island? Bingo!  Get off the hammock and call your commissioner today!

[Paid for by the Colton Harris- Moore Bridge Committee]

Tweeter Daddle  47% PARTY

My father Skeeter Daddle was the perennial candidate for the position of South End Commissioner.  I know there will be folks who accuse me of riding his infamous coat-tails.  Course, Dad never won a single election so only a damn fool would ride those tails.  And believe me, I’m nobody’s fool but my own.

If elected, I promise my fellow 47%’ers that we will grow the county government until WE become the 53%.  Once we have the majority vote we’ll give our disadvantaged business sector a fiscal injection of county corporate welfare, B&O tax breaks and nettle subsidies so that we can compete against Whidbey markets.  Together we’ll make Government work FOR us …. so we won’t have to!!  Thank you for your vote.  “Two chickens in every pot, a little pot in every chicken.”

Sarah Doolittle DO NOTHING PARTY

We all know County Government has done nothing to bring jobs to the South End.  Instead it has encouraged a debilitating, work-sapping ethic of entitlement to the region, one where able-bodied people prefer the sad sack life of a Lay-About over good minimum wage jobs.

When I take office, I will raise cable TV fees so that the indolent will be forced to work to pay for their government induced slothfulness.  And that includes the retirees as well!  We need to put the South End back to work.

We all know Government is the real problem.  Not just Big government, but Little government too.  That’s why I’m running for a government position.  As your next South End Commissioner I will WORK to eliminate unnecessary programs and agencies.  Government jobs are phony jobs.  Let’s get back to the Business of Island County.  Government should not be Job Creators.  I promise to be a Job Killer where county jobs are concerned.  You have my promise…

A lot of us chainsaw-wielding menfolk around here are engaged in role reversals with the missus.  Probably says more about rampant unemployment on the South End than it does gender bending, but when the women work to pay the mortgage on the shack, most of us lay-abouts realize a healthy marriage — not to mention physical well being — depends on us pitching in around the house.  Cooking, laundry, dishwashing duty, basic cleaning chores go hand in hand with our more manly obligations now.

The reverse is true too.  A lot of lady friends chop wood or repair their plumbing or push a lawnmower or throw a mean hammer.  Part and parcel of living with one foot in poverty and the other in the 19th century.  Gender roles get pretty blurry.

So it always surprises me when I take a savory potato salad or a loaf of fresh homemade bread to a potluck and the hosts compliment, without fail, the missus.  I only been baking bread now, continuously, for 4o plus years.  Got a grain grinder older than me attached to a curly maple butcher block table I made when I built the house designed just for that purpose.  I grind wheat berries, rye, barley, oats, corn, quinoa, flax, amaranth, buckwheat, spelt and soybeans.  It doesn’t get much fresher.  Add some salt, some olive oil, plenty of molasses or brown sugar and let the yeast froth it up to something alive and kicking.  Knead it, roll it, put it in a buttered pan, bake it for half an hour.  Used to bake it in the wood cook stove and still do occasionally, but we got a gas one we use most of the time now.

A lot of the womenfolk ask if I use a breadmaker.  Actually, they all ask.  Just assume, I suppose, a He-Man like myself wouldn’t strap on an apron and grab a rolling pin.  (Next thing they’ll have to imagine my thinning locks up in curlers.)  Most of em sigh and say they always wanted to learn, maybe they could drop by for a hands-on lesson or two next time I’m in full knead mode.  I say sure, but I know they won’t.  Working women really don’t have enough free time.  Maybe when they’re semi- retired  …. like me.  Besides, breadmaking is a little like magic.  A good magician doesn’t give away the trick.  And anyway, if they all started baking, what would I bring to the next potluck?

I guess I’m reaching the age where friends are starting to leave this Mortal Coil.  Last weekend I went to another funeral.  Same church, different deceased.  Same minister, different crowd.  Same platitudes, different Bible quotations.  Most of last week’s mourners were old ourselves.  Watching them hobble down the aisle, you sort of knew we’d all be back here way too soon.

You might’ve guessed.  I’m not a real big fan of funerals.  I can only listen to the 23^rd Psalm so many times.  And I’m not real comforted by the promise of ‘Going Into the Light’  or ‘passing through the Pearly Gates.’  I never was much for Gated Communities and all those covenants and bylaws.  Oh, I know a lot of folks get some reassurance there’ll be a Better Life, but me, I’m not that unhappy here and now.  And the promise of Life Eternal … well, that may sound good to some but I’m not too keen on filling the hours of Eternity with something that’ll hold our interest.  Most folks are bored by afternoon.  Try half past Perpetuity and see how bad daytime TV can get, even a Perfect World.

Death is one of those so-called facts of life we don’t want to believe in.  So we say it’s just a way to go to the ‘after’ life.  Not really dying, just shedding some skin.  If folks really believe this, we’d be partying for the deceased, celebrating their new birthday, the first in a line of them stretching farther than the decimal calculations for Pi.  Dust to dust, is my thinking.  Ashes to ashes.

There will come a time — for all of us —when all these words fail us, when vision is lost and memory has receded back to its source.  We are really spirits who emerge from some unnameable darkness and for an all too brief moment, glow incandescent.   It’s little wonder that what we know of the world is that small circle of light…..  We who share it together can take some comfort that for a fleeting moment we could rise like sparks from that same fragile fire.

In the end we won’t know many others.  Friends and family are few.  All the more remarkable and precious it is to share some of each other’s light and each other’s warmth. When the darkness beckons, some part of us will pass on, but certainly not the totality of what was us.  Each of us who knew the deceased and loved him and were loved by him, we each carry some part of his spark now.  We each carry a piece of him in our hearts and our memories.  Prize it because it’s a very valuable thing.  It is the most valuable thing.  It’s what keeps the circle from being broken.  From here on out, in no small way, we are now their torchbearers.   And always remember:  this is all that holds the darkness back.

Nostalgia seems to be the antidote to cure the Shock of the Future here on the wireless South End.  Just when folks are thinking about that Prius purchase or waiting for a fuel cell Chevy, the old car guyz are intent on something pre-fuel injection, non-hybrid and seriously retro.  The Flatheads, an ad hoc group of antique car aficionados, meet once a week at the Diner for a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast buttered with 30 weight.  Whey they roll in, the Diner looks like a scene out of American Graffiti, gleaming waxed Mercurys and perfectly restored Oldsmobile Rocket 88’s.   For a few hours the South End freeways return to Big Fin glory.

The boyz argue double vs. 4 barrel carburation, rebored cyclinders vs. short block, stock vs. custom.  They trade sandblasting work for decal painting.  They travel to each other’s garages  — which, by my shade tree standards, would qualify for Health Dep’t food prep certification, they’re that immaculate.  Snap-On tools are organized in rolling cabinets, parts are labeled and easily accessed (I bet they even have computer files.  I know they used the internet to locate replacement parts.)  Lifts and grease pits look like a dealer’s repair bay.  The boyz are serious.

One of the drawbacks to their hobby, other than high divorce rates and a serious drain on retirement funding, is something most Flatheads acknowledge but not proudly or loudly:  Car Accumulation Syndrome.  One restoration leads to the next.  They no more than finish that ’57 BelAir than they’ve got a project car hauled in on a flatbed, some must-have, couldn’t pass up Model A or  a ’65 Mustang from their high school glory days.  Garages get enlarged and the missuz’ dream of a kitchen remodel gets deferred once again.

I used to park my beater ‘70’s pickup at the end of the Diner’s showroom, hoping their enthusiasm for vintage vehicles might rub off.  But sadly, my days of busted and bleeding knuckles, recalcitrant bolts seized in the block, hateful stripped threads, all the grime and grease and grunt made that a little unlikely.  I never had a garage.  Just crawled under my broken rigs and worked in the rain, the cold, the private hell that was MY car repair.  I didn’t work on them for fun.  I worked on them because I was too poor to own a decent rig.  So when I drive by the Diner these days, I salute the Flatheads with a toot of the horn and thank my lucky stars I own a truck, a modern, computer modulated, sensor-driven, circuit board-on-wheels truck WAY too complicated for a boy like me to work on.  Nostalgia is nice, but I like to make it to town.

Today walking on the beach north of Camano Head a few miles, I found my first Tsunami Radioactive Debris, a plastic bag with Japanese lettering.  So …. I thought here comes the onslaught, litter drifting thousands of miles, all the terrible detritus of that tragedy rolling and tumbling across the wide Pacific to arrive finally on our pristine doorstep.

Won’t be long, I figured, before all us beach combers would need a Geiger Counter and a crash course in reading Japanese.  Everything from rusting Prius’s to entire houses broken into their original components, all laying down on the sand like a garage sale from Hell.  Sure, a lot of us South Enders would sift through the spoils, maybe set up a Mother-in-law unit out back by the edge of the nettle forests, nice for the missuz’s old lady, a few extra roentgens  of background radiation, no worse than daytime TV screens.  Plenty of stuff for the weekend teenagers to build something a little more architectural than driftwood forts, maybe 3 story kid condo units, outfit em with cabinets and furniture and square dishware, sort of a Tokyo Motel.

A few hundred yards further I found a rusting washing machine cylinder.  And another ways down, some casing for the washing machine.  I looked for Japanese labeling, but nothing readable.  Quarter of a mile later, I stumbled on the washer case, pretty new looking.  Kenmore, it had on its instrument panel.  American.  Probably not radioactive, probably not from the tsunami, probably rolled down the bluff a week earlier if my forensic litter skills are still up to date.

I guess the alarm bells of all that tsunami debris are fair warning for the coastline here to Alaska.  But me, I’m more worried about appliances tossed off the front yard of my neighbors’ places down the bluff, landslides of steel and plastic hurtling toward me in a white trash avalanche.  All I can ask, I guess, is holler down a warning!!  Seems like the neighborly thing to do…. That, or just take it to the dump like the north enders do….Might save a few lives.

I just finished my latest – and last – interview with a documentary filmmaker doing another take on the Barefoot Bandit saga.  Nice enough woman.  Dedicated.  Skilled.  She’s spent a year doing this and plenty more work to go.  It’s not HER, it’s just that after 50 interviews with reporters and film crews and book writers, you just get tired of it.

If you ever wondered what a famous person’s life might be like, try just a peripheral taste of it.  Telephone calls, cameramen in the yard, reporters from France, magazines from England, film crews from Canada and Brazil, Newsweek magazine writers tromping the woods, Wired magazine guys peeking in the outhouse.  Sure, it’s amusing for awhile.  Hilarious even.  But how long do you want the gag to go on before it’s in your throat???

Fifteen minutes of fame should be all most of us need … or want.  Beyond that your life gets co-opted.  The paparazzi of the news media will call and call, no taking prisoners, no taking NO for an answer.  It’s their job and you’re just a paragraph in their Big Story.  Trouble is, you’re a piece of hundreds of the same story.  At first you think you can control the spin, but pretty quick you realize you can’t.  Editing, revision misquotes, all of it slipping away on shifting sand of pseudo-notoriety.

Today I hope I’m calling it quits on this Colton mythology.  Seems old, but the Hollywood movie is still on its way.  So is the Canadian documentary.  And the one shot today.  The South End String Band can hardly stand to play the song we wrote.  Although…. We’re talking about a Free Colton! Concert.  Not really advocating getting him out of jail — just no admission charge to the gig.

Be careful, is all I’m saying.  You want 15 more minutes of fame, better get yourself a publicist and an unlisted number.  I don’t have either ….

Half the South End is For Sale.   Three quarters of the neighborhood have real estate signs out by the driveway, everything from WindyRear Realty to Reflux Realty.  They used to hold open houses on the weekend, but after 3 or 4 years, I guess even the optimism of a realtor starts to look like a horny snake courting a garden hose.  Or vice versa.

Some of the homeowners have given up too, bought haciendas in Arizona or trailer court lots in Nevada.  They come motoring back in their 40 foot mobile homes when the asphalt starts to melt down there and the gila monsters stay under the rocks all day.  I guess they’re the optimists, folks who figure the housing bubble will eventually swell up again and they’ll get the million dollars they thought the place was inflated to back in the carefree days before October 2008 when the betting stopped and the banks had to show their cards.  House of cards, it turned out, one very bad bet.

We’ve gone through the Boom and Bust cycles on the South End many times since I lost a wheel on the Conestoga and decided to stay put.  Folks find out the neighbor sold for twice what anybody dreamed somebody would pay and next thing you know, everybody figures they can sell now and retire like a dot.com executive.  Signs sprout up and proliferate like nettles in chicken manure, eventually they DO sell or the sellers give up and we return to normal.  Although … normal may just be more of those selling binges than living our lives, hard to say.

The realtors do fine most of the time.  Commission coming in, commission going out.  Rita, down at WindyRear’s North End office, tells them when they’re ready to get rich, come on back, she’ll sell their dream house for 50% more than they paid.  There’s ALWAYS another house — the real dream is making money.

Personally — and nothing against the wisdom of Rita the Realtor — I don’t care how much my bank account would swell, I wouldn’t want to end up in a trailer park in Nevada.  I don’t care how good the air conditioning is.