The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

About 1980 I picked up two good old boys hitching into Tyee Grocery, which was Ted and Ellen Snowdens’ back then.  Part store, part junkyard, part tow truck outfit, part well drilling, part gas station.  Looked like an Ozark shopping mall run by Ma and Pa Kettle.  These two gentlemen were hitch-hiking in the middle of nowhere, drunk as purple skunks in the afternoon, so naturally I was curious where they’d come from, them being neighbors and all,  so I offered to take them back home after they’d purchased their groceries for supper.

Supper, it turned out, was some crackers and a big can of tomato juice they’d mistook for tomato soup.  And a couple quarts of their fortified favorite wine, Thunderbird, their drink of choice.  I kindly declined their dinner invitation, but I WAS interested in seeing where they lived, which was back in the boonies I’d never been, a nice little cabin they’d trashed up nicely sitting on a half acre trout pond like you’d see on a picture postcard.  Turned out they netted the trout and smoked the fish and sold them down at the Pike Street Market for a small fortune.

Well, finally they got to arguing about the ruined dinner menu, what with the big can of soup being juice, and who was to blame –so I said I got to go now, boys.  They said stop by any time and fish all you want and I said thank you kindly, I might just do that.

Course it being the only fishing hole on the entire South End, I was back there, pole in hand, two days later as soon as I knew they’d gone back home to Seattle and Gomorrah.  Had three two pounders in no time flat, dinner for Ma and me.  For awhile I thought I had a gold mine.

But I kept noticing nasty notes on the door of their cabin from creditors and ex-spouses and aggrieved parties and folks who just plain didn’t like the trout ranchers, folks who’d come all the way to the hollers of the South End looking for money or revenge or Lord knows what from these boys, and one day I noticed somebody had stuffed garbage in the wood smoker and let it rot, not a good sign for making flavorful smoked fish.  And that was when the fish were gone, netted up, I figure, on one last drunken weekend.

Every once in awhile I’d go back, hoping the trout might reappear, but of course, like a lot of our fishing around here, it never rebounded.  Still, I can say with some pride, I’m the only fisherman you’ll meet who ever caught a trout on the South End.

Well, it’s that time again.  No, not the semi-eternal elections….  Skeeter’s  going to take a break from American politics and head up into the Great White North, see for himself how you can live life without a 24/7 intravenous infusion of news centered around innuendo and bombast.  Oh, I know I’ll return a week behind the curve ball, dazed and confused as a Rip Van Winkle stumbling out of the Canadian tundra into the electron glare of instant news reports.  But with any luck I’ll have a newfound distance from the candidates’ latest Twitter feed.  And I can always count on you left-behinders to fill me in on important developments.  That, or I’ll mosey into the Diner for a cup of their signature coffee, the one that tastes like the dregs of last night’s pot reheated and simmered to perfection.  You won’t hurry through a cup of that syrupy concoction.  And you won’t need refills.  Unless you’re a hopeless caffeine addict like the rest of us down there, the kind who would spoon up instant dried coffee and wash it down with a glass of water.

So enjoy the break from the caffeinated musings of a man who always says too much, too often.  Or, as a critic pointed out recently in a moment of alcoholic honesty at a recent art gallery opening, comparing these so-called comic sketches to another artist’s growing list of novels :  you’re too hard to read.

A lesser man might have taken this as a slight or even as a slam.  But Skeeter, of course, took in stride.  If necessary, he said, read em twice.  Course, with this Canadian hiatus, she’ll have a golden opportunity.

We got a lot of wildlife still left down here on the Wild and Wooly South End.  And I don’t just mean the artists and musicians and their late night bacchanalias.  I just got done chasing a doe and her fawn out of the garden.  For years we put wire fence around every young fruit tree, dozens of cages.  For about a decade we had a botanical Gitmo going on down here and the complaints from plant rights groups reached such a din and roar, we finally set the apple trees free and let the cherries loose with strict warning not to leave the orchard.  The Asian pears, we had to strap leg surveillance monitors on — couldn’t really trust them to stay In-Country.  The deer pretty much keep the lower limbs denuded.

We got the usual varmints.  Squirrels and raccoons, possums and rats, mice and snakes, rabbits and hawks, feral cats and otter snacking in the pond.  The neighbors’ expensive koi help keep our pond safe, at least until the eagles and herons and kingfishers found it.  Coyotes roam the backwoods where Colton Harris- Moore used to.  They got some of our chickens a some baby peacocks and even our poor geriatric cat, too old to smell or hear them sneaking up.  She forgot, I guess, that despite the neighborhood gentrification, it’s still a jungle out there.

Down at the beach we got everything from skates to seals, sea lions to killer whales, octopus to shark.  It’s all just beyond the tideline, a watery world we mostly only catch glimpses of, shadows right below the keel if you’re of a nautical bent.  Davy Jones’ Locker is teeming.

I don’t really mind sharing with our wilder  neighbors.  At least so long as they stay outdoors.  We got enough problems with the homo sapiens, and I sure don’t need half the woods watching Fox News and ordering Netflix online, drinking our homebrew and wanting to vote.  We got brains twice their size and it hasn’t helped one iota.  Might be that we’d ALL be better off living in the woods.  Return to being two legged instead of sitting on our tail….

If you haven’t heard the rumor by now, you either haven’t left the trailer in a month or you live too close to the city limits of metropolitan Stanwoodopolis.  Tyee Store is going to re-open.  New life in an old bottle, as we homebrewers like to say.  Now, I know some folks will be disappointed the WalMart surveys for South End viability came up short and they decided not to place their next Super Store down here.  They know what they’re doing, obviously, and just as obviously, we don’t.

And there will be folks just as disappointed another Mom and Pop One Stop Shop isn’t stepping into the alcohol and nicotine vacuum that’s practically a gravitational Black Hole pulling beer and cigarettes into its ugly maw.  Elger Bay Store thinks the missing merchandise is just youthful shoplifters  —  little do they guess the defunct and empty Tyee Store is a virtual Hoover of a neutron star, growing denser every month, warping time and space and the very geography of the South End.

We all had our wishlist for the Tyee Store replacement.  Jack Gunter’s History of the World Part 16 Art Gallery, not contented with franchises in Port Angeles and half of Stanwoodopolis’ vacant storefronts, saw an opportunity next door for territorial expansion.  Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique thought about a South Satellite, but got the recessionary shakes and wisely opted out.  WindyRear Realty imagined a gold mine for awhile, but they’d recently closed Rocky Point and if money couldn’t be made up in the high rent district, what were the odds mobile home sales down here would pan out?

In the end Risk Entrepreneurism won out.  As it always does on the Roll-the-Dice South End.  Two Toke Tom had been prepped and ready for his grand entry into high finance.  He has the inventory, he has customers — meaning patients — and he has the big green neon sign :  SOUTH END GREENWORKS.  Let’s just say Tyee Store has moved beyond cigarettes and booze, gateway drugs now.  It’s now officially the Medical Marijuana Dispensary for the island.  Two Toke says the Grand Opening is still a closely guarded secret, but check your grapevine.  Happy Daze are here again!

A lot of us this year are starting to realize we’re counted in with the 99%ers.  Always good to be a conformist, one of the crowd, I guess, but it sort of pulls the rug on the idea that we all have equal opportunity in the Land of the Brave.  I guess if we all got the same odds in the Lottery, we’re all equal.

We have plenty of 1%ers here on the South End, testament to Dot.com bubbles and good retirement packages.  Some of the boyz down at the Diner diss these folks, out of envy, I suppose, but we all share a nice slice of the American Pie here in paradise, so maybe we should be happier with what we have than unhappy with what we don’t.  Cause truth is, what we got is pretty much all we’ll be getting, and personally, it’s plenty.

But it’s been some rough years lately and some of us 99ers lost jobs, lost work, lost houses, lost everything, including hope.  I hear a lot of people angry at the ‘damn government’ but I never hear folks angry at the people whose insatiable greed brought this on.  Those 1%ers we all want so much to be, I guess.

South Enders are like most Americans.  We like to think we’re the Rough and Rugged pioneers, individuals, independent, tough as nails don’t-tread-on-me yahoos.  But the truth is we live in a mythology cobbled together from old movies and bad TV, John Wayne and Dirty Harry.  The boyz who run the show, they love that.  You think Shane is going to take on the Bank of America, you better adjust your meds, pardner.  That, or your hatband.  It isn’t in the cards.  And you’re not going to win the Lottery either, sorry to be the one to give you the Bad News.  Oh, and good luck getting to the 1%.  It’s called that for a pretty good reason.

I’m like a lot of South Enders, I have to drive into Stanwoodopolis to do my weekly grocery shopping.  I used to get the essentials down at Tyee Grocery before it closed, but when I needed milk that wouldn’t spoil in two days or vegetables that weren’t hairy, I moseyed down to the big stores, you know, the chains, QFC, Haggens, Thrifty.  I used to like Thrifty myself.  Aisles looked like bowling alleys there were so few shoppers there by the end of its slow death spiral into grocery oblivion.  No amenities, no cute historical photos, no signs pointing to the restrooms where a bouquet of flowers might beckon a sensitive male shopper like myself.

No, it was spartan.  Sparse.  Practically primitive.  I didn’t waste time talking to other shoppers like I do in the other stores.  There weren’t any other shoppers.  Just me.  It was almost like they’d set out this smorgasbord of lefse and lutefisk and canned entrails just for my perusal.  I appreciated it.  Even if I didn’t buy it.

Sometimes there WERE other people in the store.  It was like a 24 hour store, really, and we were in there on break from our graveyard shift,  zombies on parade.   We’d drift by the macaroni and meet again by the fruit stand.  The fluorescent glare gave a wonderful green patina to everyone.  Ghoulish.  Night of the Living Zucchini.  My fellow shoppers at Thrifty were like myself: shopping challenged.  Xenophobes in search of an empty aisle.  It was a little like a suspense movie.  You know, you know as sure as Alfred Hitchcock is going to shock you,  that we were all going to meet at the checkout stand.  The ONE checkout stand.  No express.  No 10 items or less.  No Other Way Out.

Our carts bumped ominously.  The tabloids were chock-a-block with the latest on movie stars and their sorry sex lives.  Little books told me my astrological future.  My astrological future was this:  I will die in a checkout line waiting for the nice but senile lady in front of me to find all her coupons.  She won’t remember to get them out first.  No, she’ll remember them when the final amount has been tabulated.  She’ll want a lottery ticket.  A pack of cigarettes from the lockup six aisles away.  She wants a price check on the cereal she thought was 52 cents, but was really $5.20.  She’ll mention the spoiled milk she wants a refund on.  And finally she’ll change her mind from plastic to paper.

I don’t want to sound misogynistic, but it was always a lady.  Guys don’t care.  They would do anything to get out of here, not delay their departure.  This is hell to us.  Eternity.  No escape.  We would sell our worthless souls if we could just slip by this sweet senile lady in the fuzzy slippers and move on out to the sunlit parking lot with our pathetic bag of groceries. Pop that first beer right there in front of all the moms with their wide-eyed kids in tow and toss the empty through the rolled down window when we’re done.

It’s going to take awhile…..  I know that.  I’m prepared usually.  Mentally, physically, psychically.  I never learned, you see. Why is it people can’t have their checks ready?  Half filled out?  Why can’t they have their purses open?  Why do they have to search for the 3 pennies in the bottom somewhere so they won’t have to break a buck?  Why don’t they know about the debit/credit thing?  Why isn’t paper and plastic automatic, not a life or death quiz question? Why isn’t God doing something about this????

I remember reading in the 70’s about the Russians lining up to buy bread, lining up to buy meat, lining up to buy this, lining up to buy that, always another line at another store.  I remember thinking, those goofy communists, they must be the most stupid peasants on earth.  Can’t figure out the simplest things….

Some day soon the line would move again there in the DMZ of Thrifty.   And I would wonder who really won the Cold War….

When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.  Just me and my baby.  Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.  Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.  Like making a living.  Or needing a few skills.  You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump.  Basic stuff like that.  I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs:  Love will find a way.  Or all you really need is love.  Or love is the answer.  Love love love.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.

Oh brother.  I’ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school.  Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me.  Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.

You can learn life’s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.  Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies.  But it sure did on my adulthood dreams.  Or nightmares, really.  Still, I was knock-headed persistent.  Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand:  Hand to Mouth Survival.  Karen, my wife now of three decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.

The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive.  I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations,  that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.

We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story…with an ending not yet written.  I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window – I think we all know it’s really, on some level, still a love story.

On some of my more uppity days, I look down the road and my nose at my neighbors’ houses, most of them running 3000 square feet with garages the size of an airplane hangar.  And I think:  how much stuff do you need that it takes 5 bedrooms, his and her walk-in closets, 3 and a half baths, plus a 3 car garage that parks a 40 foot travel trailer big as a mobile home?  All this for a family whose kids have grown and left the South End.  And while I’m up on my High Horse, I start wondering why is America so hooked on material acquisition and always wants more and needs, apparently the new and improved version of everything from their riding lawnmower to their garbage disposal with the 50 tooth slicer-dicer and odor control setting.   I can get pretty damn smug.  I can rant and I can rave.  I will even vent about living in my dilapidated 800 square foot shack, poor as a church rat, and finally end up babbling about those humble beginnings, living modestly, close to the Land.

This past couple of weeks I went into spring cleaning mode — even though it’s August now.  Started out back in the woodshop.  Tools got dragged out and junked or donated, the place got cleaned and rearranged, a lot got burned.  I moved to my bike shed, hauled out everything non-bike, paneled the interior with cedar and now I had all my boat gear in the lawn.  So I remodeled my lawnmower shed, tossed decades old tools and dead chainsaws and mulching blades and rusty junk, moved a 1930’s wringer washer out and put it in the garden shed, then went at the garden shed.

Eventually I made it to the boatshed, then out to the kayak shelter and finally into the old shack itself, now a glass studio, the living testament to frugal living, a shrine to my oh so ascetic lifestyle.  Course now it’s bigger by double, a second house really, bedroom, bath, all the comforts of home even though we have one up top we built 20 years ago.  If you add them all up — and I did— my neighbors look like the folks who downsized, who cut their carbon footprints and who probably should apply for food stamps any day.

Our 16 buildings, yeah, I said 16, from the sauna to the boathouse, the bike shed to the wellhouse, the garden shed to the studio, woodshop to outhouse, rootcellar to garden shed, woodsheds to kayak shelter, well …. I guess they seem maybe a bit extravagant, if not deliriously deranged.  Maybe not a McMansion, just a McNuthouse.  I know this:  I’m gonna stop pointing accusatory fingers at the neighbors and their piddly little domiciles.  At least until I find out they’re depressing the property values here on the politically correct South End.

Over 20 years ago I built myself a little sailboat, one I hoped would be seaworthy enough to sail into the Scylla and Charybdis of the San Juans, stout enough to withstand riptides and whirlpools, big enough to haul camping gear and coolers.  Took me most of a spring and half of summer and when I was finished I rigged it for fishing as well as sailing.  It was, at least for a boy who had never built much of anything, a thing of unbridled beauty.

Cedar planking hid my plywood hull, the rudder was mahogany, the gunwales were white oak, the big oversized tiller handle was yew.  Exotic woods comprised the artsy fartsy ornamentation and a brass bell hung up near the mast.  It had a bobinga bowsprit and handles made of padauk, a bright red wood from Africa.  I had an old 2 inch diameter rope that was the bumper, fastened with copper fittings.  I christened it the S.S. Pterodactyl because the mainsail and the jib were black, huge pirate wings, the scourge of the  South End Seas.

For that summer and most of the next, I sailed every day practically.  Folks would mosey up while I was rigging for launch at the state park and remark what a fine old boat I had.  It kind of annoyed me they thought it was old —- after all, I just built the damn thing.

Course, now it IS old.  Just like the Popeye who built her.  I pulled her out of her drydock this year — it’s been awhile since I’ve sailed her — and sent the rats packing.  Cleaned her up, repaired some torn sails and replaced some lines.  If folks thought she looked old new, believe me, she looks like the Ancient Mariner’s tug now.  And you can guess what I look like.  Naw, not the albatross….

I got to thinking this year that the Pterodactyl was a symbol of my more adventurous years.  I went on to build my house, stud by stud, stick by stick, mostly on the confidence that little boat gave me.  You hate like hell to think those years are receding faster than a minus tide while you watch from an armchair, living intravenously on memories.  So I pulled out the old girl this week and went back out.  I’m not looking for some vestigial glory days.  I just wanted to set the sails into a Puget wind and feel the pull of wood and rope and sail fighting the outgoing current.  Time will come, I guess, to ease her bow downwind and carry us both to a far shore.  But not yet.  We just LOOK old….

I’ve been cleaning house this past couple of weeks.  Okay, cleaning shack.  All right, full disclosure here, I’m cleaning shacks, sheds, sauna, wellhouse, studio, woodshop, root cellar, anything with walls and all the accumulated stuff inside.  Started out putting some cedar planks on the bike shed, sorta Martha Stewart the inside, which resulted in a lot of extraneous boat gear getting evicted.  Reduce the clutter, keep the bike shed strictly bike.  Course that kicked a ball down field.  Now I had to find a place for oars and fishing poles and life preservers and tackle boxes full of rusty lures and monofilament tangles.

Undaunted, I hauled my homemade sailboat, the S.S Pterodactyl, scourge of  the South End Seas,  out of its drydock and cleaned it bilge to gunwale.  Sure I felt bad for the family of mice, but isn’t it more humane to send them packing on dry land than walking the plank some storm tossed sailing venture?  So that added more gear, everything from buoys to crabpots, to the growing pile of homeless stuff.  Eyeballing my lawnmower/chainsaw/ rototiller shed, I crawled in through everything from a 1930’s wringer washer, back behind truck parts of trucks long since scrapped and crushed, plus odds and ends of what some might hope were antiques but are actually rusted junk.

I emptied it.  Then refilled it, christened it the BOATHAUS, and moved the new debris out onto the lawn.  Some stuff got moved into the studio, some to the garden shed, a lot into the burn pile, a small mountain for the dump runs, a few things for the woodworking shop, some odds and ends went to the garden fence where objects of marginal interest get hung, but when the dust cleared there was still an antique store’s worth of my life’s detritus, although not really salvageable after all my neglect.

Maybe when the radioactive tsunami litter rolls in I can slip this stuff in down at the beach, scribble on some Asian looking cuneiform, then let the beachcombers have a field day.  My only fear is I’ll inadvertently buy half of it back from them at their garage sales in five years.  Course, maybe by then I can build a couple more sheds….