The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I came in from weeding nettles that were stealing light and moisture from my vegetables in their cold little garden plot and I noticed I had broken a sweat.  It’s a couple days from August so I assumed summer might have arrived when I had my flannel-clad back turned.  Hot!  Man, it felt real hot.  The rest of the country’s sizzling, maybe it’s our turn to fry.

And yessir, when I struggled up my hill to the house, tearing off layers, one for winter, another for spring, and reached the only working thermometer, it was practically at the Red Zone, mercury ready to blow right out through the glass tube top.  67 degrees, it read.  I cleaned my sweat smeared glasses on my red bandana and peered once more.  Couple degrees shy of 70.  But the way the temperature was boiling up, I would’ve bet dollars to icecubes we were going to bust right through the big Seven O.  I opened up a couple of windows even though the house was a little chilly, but I like to live dangerously.  Plus it would be good to introduce some fresh atmosphere into the hermetically sealed rooms that held mostly 2011 gases and odors.

The meteorologists on the evening news would be writing their copy already.  Heat alerts and advisories.  Don’t lock your dog in the SUV with the windows rolled up — Woofsy will look like a brat in a microwave when you get back.  Drink lots of fluids.  Tie a wet towel around your neck, but not too tight!  Stay indoors if you don’t have a pool.  Run the air conditioner at maximum coldness, full fan.  Don’t wear your winter coats.  And whatever you do, slather on sunscreen every half hour with SPC 500 or more.  Use lard if you have it.

Thank God for the TV weatherfolks is all I can say.  Save us a body count nobody wants.  I just pity the poor yahoos who don’t watch TV, the ones crawling in their longjohns across a lawn rapidly going to desert, desperately trying to reach a faucet.  And the sun, the implacable searing sun, cranking toward 70, beating down on their uncovered heads, another victim caught unawares and definitely unprepared by a stealth Sound End summer.  Don’t let this happen to you!

I take care of a little park down here on the South End.  Ranger Skeeter.  It’s actually a county park but the county only has one real park ‘ranger’ to take care of all its parks so if we want it maintained, we have to do it ourselves.  It’s got no toilet so you can guess what we find in the woods.  It’s got no garbage can so you can imagine what’s in the parking lot.  Believe me, being the cleanup guy will make a person darkly cynical about human nature.

For awhile I would get cases of empty beer bottles, Rolling Rock empties to be exact.  We got a transfer dump station that takes them for free that all us South Enders have to drive by on any trip to the closest real grocery store, but no, our boy dropped them for over a year at the park.  Go figure.  When folks steal clothes from the Donation Bin at Tyee Store, they often times take them to the park, sort out what they want, then scatter the rest.  Lately, I’ve got the latex remains of my own Lover’s Lane showing up.  Kind of puts a chill on the rural ambiance.  Probably syringes next…..

The other day a kid had dug a pit back in the woods, filled it with sharp stakes pointing up and covered it over with leaves and twigs, a nice little booby trap.  I guess he thought this was Viet Nam and the war wasn’t quite over yet.  Or else he was waging his very own small but personal war on what little tourism the park pulls in.  I suppose I should start watching for IED’s out by the daffodil beds.

My pals think I’m a mental defective for mowing this patch of park, clearing fallen trees, re-routing trails, planting flowers and shrubs, putting up sculptures for the vandals to steal and hanging birdhouses, all for the few folks that wander down this way and stumble into the park.  Hardly anybody uses it.  Except folks I wish didn’t.  I tell my cronies it’s the only park on the South End, that’s why.  But there are days when I agree with em…..

The South End Senior Center —what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center— is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore.  A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing.  Barns and shops are often built this way.  So is our Senior Center.  Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff — which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones.  Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door.  This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought.  Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses.  A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters.  Believe me, an hour would be plenty.  Or a perm at the Cut and Curl.  An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy.  Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala.  Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers.  The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making.  The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor.  And made even more.  Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building.  The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years.  If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it.  Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.

I got a bank in Stanwoodopolis, what they advertise as a ‘hometown’ bank.  If you like the whole home town knowing your bizness, this bank’s for you.  Me, I pretty much don’t care who knows my bizness, but after burning a lot of bank bridges over the years in quixotic battles over surprise fees, surcharges, lack of services, I’m pretty much down to few options left.  The missus is worried we’ll be burying cash and coins out in the woods from now on, but I tell her, don’t worry, the one thing that’s recession proof is the folks who brought us the recession.  Banks. There will always be another one waiting open armed and open jawed.

I don’t know what it is exactly that makes me dislike a good small town fiduciary firm.  But since I’ve never borrowed money from one, maybe I resent all the little fees they tack on for holding my loot and lending it to my neighbors at a tidy profit  — apparently not enough profit for these folks.  They want the debit fees, the exorbitant overcharge fees, all the rest that gouges the poor folks most, all that very tiny print in the terms of the contract nobody can read.

So maybe I carry a bit of a chip up there on my epaulets.  And okay, fairly often I’ve had the security guard summoned to stand over my shoulder.  You know … just in case I go postal.  That’s usually when the account closes, the cashier’s check is issued and I mosey down to the next legal usurer.

My current bank, the ‘hometown’ bank, recently cashed one of my rare paychecks.  My checks are from government agencies for  payment on my so-called artworks, mostly from 1% for Art projects.  I don’t come in often but when I do, the checks are larger than a usual payday check.  Pay year, really.  Pay month, at least.  The teller noticed this after a few years.  Profile this:  Suspicious character, goodwill clothes, seedy hat, a bit too friendly, big fat check.  For Deposit Only.  She finally asks what it is I do for a living.  Art, I say, and when pressed, although not under oath, I add Public Art.  Hmm, she says.  Takes a little longer than depositing a rebate check, but we finally get it done.

But this last one, sizeable, issued by the State of Washington, her state, the one she pays taxes to, I guess it was too much for my teller.  “You don’t mind me saying this,” she says, plenty volume enough for all of our hometown bank customers to hear, “I don’t really like that us taxpayers have to pay for art.  No offense…..”

“None taken,” I say.  But don’t say, “I don’t much care for filthy parasitic bankers either or undertrained underpaid minions who do their bidding in the name of unbridled capitalism.  No offense, hope you don’t mind.”

But it is, after all, a hometown Andy of Mayberry bank, my hometown bank, at least temporarily.  Good neighbors, see?  Course, it’s harder all the time to argue with the missus who only uses out of town banks for her bizness.  She cashes her librarian check through direct electronic deposit where nobody  says,” Hey, I don’t read and I really don’t much care for free libraries.  My taxes, my dime, my opinion, ignorant or not.  Hope you don’t mind my saying so….”

Trouble is, I do.

Johnny the Hammer runs Piranha Brothers Construction with his partner Crazy Eddie.  They fight tooth and nail, but for a time in those halcyon years when most of Seattle and half of California were migrating north like spawn crazed humpies, they had enough work that they could run a house or more each and stay out of each other’s hair.  Well, at least Johnny had hair.  Under his baseball cap, Eddie was bald and pale as an ostrich egg, although not near as smooth.  More than a couple of times he’d been coldcocked by beams coming down on his noggin in mishaps and the result was he had permanent lumps in that hard skull of his that never subsided.

Johnny says that’s what makes Eddie so damn stupid — all the sense he ever had got knocked out of him early.  Still, he builds a better house than Johnny and even though Johnny hates to admit it, he calls Eddie when some blueprint gets overly complicated or a fancy roof  design’s flashing gives him too long a pause.  Besides a magnetic attraction to toppling 6×6’s, Eddie’s got a head for details and complexity.  Can’t read well, but he visualizes every stud and roughout as if he had a photo developing in the darkroom of his brain.

Johnny must’ve told this story a hundred times of Eddie getting all excited about the new shop that opened on the South End.  Nails and More.  This was back in the days when the two still could call themselves friends, still worked on one house at a time.  If they had one to work on….  Eddie had been arguing with the counterman at the Lumber Yard over some charge he had questioned and, by god, he was ticked off by the end of the argument and eager for a new vendor.  Any vendor.  Even if it meant driving off island and paying cash.

One morning he took off mid-hammer stroke on the McMansion the Crosby’s of Palo Alto were having Piranha Bros. build on the bluffs of the west side and drove his one ton old Ford up toward Elger Bay Store where the sign he’d noticed that morning had finally seduced him with its siren call:                                                   NAILS AND MORE                                                  GRAND OPENING

He was hoping a little too hard the ‘MORE’ was lumber and possibly even some electric and plumbing.

Maybe it was too little coffee.  Maybe too much.  When he got inside the door and before his eyes could adjust from full sunlight, Sherri, the new owner, greeted him with a Come right on in, I’m Sherri and you’re my first customer and I’m not going to charge you for this visit.  On the house!

Hoo boy, Eddie couldn’t believe his ears.  Visions of free shingles, siding, 2×6’s, bandoliers of nails for his pneumatic —- all floated up like a Christmas in Camaloch.   When his eyes finally adjusted, he realized his mistake.  Couldn’t come right out and admit it, naturally, so Eddie, indeed, unwittingly became Sherri’s first customer.  Full nail trim and cuticle treatment, but he passed on the ‘More’.  “Gotta get back on the job,” he mumbled and fled into the sunlight.

Eddie dated Sherri for awhile that year and it was remarked upon by all the Piranha Bros.’ crews how, despite the cuts and callouses, Eddie’s hands were as immaculately manicured as a golf course green.  Course, never in his presence.

Yes, it’s that time of year again when the South End Yacht Club opens its very exclusive membership to qualified applicants.  Commodore Jerry and his shipmates down at the Marina invite any seaworthy skippers among you to apply for a berth among the elite few at our fabulous dock and its newly refurbished ‘Wheelhouse’, once a thriving cannery for the world famous South End Free Range Clam Company.  Before the clams made their untimely escape.

Situated on the leeward side of Camano Island and protected from the storms of winter and the radioactive tsunami debris of Japan, South End Yacht Club offers year round moorage and E-Z access to the area’s unmatched water playgrounds.  Discover the hidden waterfront of Stanwoodopolis, only minutes away by boat, or venture to fine picknicking at the Head where fishing and crabbing are abundant.

Membership includes year round moorage with water and electric available, live-aboard rights, lighted boat ramp accessible at most high tides, clean Porta-Potties provided and maintained by South End Water Loo, plus free admission the many gala events planned at the Wheelhouse once repairs are complete.  Scheduled events this year include Sunday breakfast buffets by Chef Bluebeard and his spatula savvy sailors, the annual June nautical auction and Lost and Found Sale, the ever popular Summer Salsa Dance and Rum Slam, plus much much more.

If you act soon, you’ll receive, as part of your initiation package, a free life preserver, South End Yacht Club epaulets and Captain’s cap in your choice of colors and one free drink at the Backwash, the Wheelhouse lounge ‘where liquor is liberal and the prices are conservative’.  Join us now and wet your rudders and your whistle.

South End Yacht Club  — the island’s most exclusive gunkhole.  Sail to a new adventure on the fabulous South End!  Apply today.

They’re in a terrible kerfuffle down at the Flame-Ons! now that Lottie Johnson quit the post of Women’s Fire Auxilliary President.  Resigned in a huff, a snit, a flame-throwing kiss-my-caboose departure right in the middle of the June meeting  to decide what to fundraise for in the coming annum.  When she hit the door at the VFD meeting hall, the vacuum swept 4 or 5 others out with her in full irate sympathy.  The ladies left on their metal folding chairs with paper dessert plates half finished in their laps said not a word for at least two minutes, exchanging raised eyebrows and hesitant smiles.

“Looks like you’re the new President, Connie,” someone finally said, breaking the silence.  Connie said no, No, NO, someone else, anyone else.

The trouble is, there’s the Old Guard auxiliaries, the women who remember that era when the station was pretty much Party Central for the South End fireboyz, beer cases stacked higher than fire equipment up the wall, Tuesday night ‘practices’ pretty much a kegger.  Their mothers had served in the Auxilliary and this was their club.  But new arrivals to the area had joined, exhibiting civic pride and plenty of zeal, hoping to make a difference.  And make it quick.  Way of the World, I suppose, but old blood and new blood don’t mix.  Type A’s vs. tired blood.  You see it in the South End Historical Society, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, down at the Bizness Association.  Who ARE those nouveau riche pretenders and what do they want from us?  It was a sociable group before, a lot of fun and friendship — it’s a political nightmare now.  What was tea and cookies now has an evangelical air.  We need to organize, we need to fundraise, we need to lobby the commissioners, we need to get active!  The old plant sale just wouldn’t do.  Would NOT DO!

Now they had a fire district with paid fire fighters at every station.  Well, not the South End station.  They were building or upgrading new stations all over the island.  Well, not the South End station.  It was getting hard to find volunteers when up northcountry the firefighters were being paid handsomely.  Times were changing, Lottie would say, time, ladies, for us to change too.  Oh yeah, there’s a fire smoldering down at the Station, she liked to say, and it was up to us to put it out.

Well, Lottie is gone now, at least for a time.  And that burnt rubber smell in the Flame-Ons! meetings won’t go away soon.  That fire is still smoldering and the trouble is, they got rid of all those cases of beer years ago.  Who knows if it would’ve helped put out this fire.

Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm.  Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel.  It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently.  The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run in with a six point buck  four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers.  Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed.  She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip.  Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot.  Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill.  “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked.  Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point.  Something to consider.  Definitely something to consider.  Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor.  If he stayed long enough.

We don’t really have a Senior Center on the South End.  The Diner is sort of a substitute, but you need to at least buy a cup of coffee before you park in a booth or belly up to the counter for the daily gossip specials.  The vintage car guyz, the Flatheads, fill the joint Wednesday morning.  Tuesdays the Bible study crowd rolls in and most of the regulars roll out.  It’s not that they’re religious averse, but like Freddy the Freeloader sez, Sunday’s plenty.  Freddy gets his disability checks first of every month.  He’s a busted up stump jumper chain choker from the days when logging was man’s work all right but good luck living to be an old man.  If he had his druthers, the Diner would be church a-plenty.

The AA used to congregate on Fridays, but Brenda, the Diner’s owner since 1987, finally asked them to find another meeting place.  She was losing money on their endless coffee refills and the parking lot out front looked like Pittsburg in Carnegie’s day, the smoke from their unfiltered Camels hanging heavy on air inversions.  Plus, she and Big Larry, the grillman, had quit drinking years ago and the new AA members’ determined but usually hopeless drought between benders or DUI’s depressed them mightily.  Half them ended up in Bible study anyway so AA didn’t complain very vocally, just moved it on up to the toxic mold blue Camano Center the County rents cheap and never cleans up.

Thursdays now the Zumba crowd pulls in after an hour of aerobics at the nearby South Grange, mostly post-Mom women desperately fighting the midriff bulges and Michelin Man thighs.  After a morning workout they replaced the calories lost with Brenda’s Blue Plate Specials, burger baskets with fries and slaw and fountain Coke they could get refills on for free, sort of a zero sum gain.  But without the guilt.  They earned every calorie!

We been thinking about maybe fundraising for a Senile Center.  Lot of work.  Lot of money.  Something ever happened to the Diner, maybe we’d motivate.  Meanwhile, the coffee’s cheap and the gossip’s free.  You ask me, we got the best of both worlds.  Without the Book of Revelations or the 12 step program.

Now I know there are a lot of economic indices the government uses to track the ups and downs of this recession we’re in, everything from unemployment figures to manufacturing exports to consumer confidence statistics to balance of trade ratios. If nothing else, it creates employment for unemployed economists and down-on-their-luck statisticians so I guess it’s a small step forward toward ending the current recession.

Down here on the collateralized and leveraged South End, we got our own tried and true methodologies, tested over many years and virtually foolproof, which, if you know many of us South Enders, is a priority if not a Must. What we do is sort of skip the Dow Jones rise or fall and just get right to the Meat of the Matter. Forget adjusting for inflation or what the euro is doing against the dollar —- it’s just fiscal mumbo jumbo and if the Smart Boyz were so damn smart, why are we in a recession in the first place? Which, if you stop and think about it —like we do — you just answered the question.

Our economic analysis is pretty straightforward. What we do once a year on the 4th of July is grab a few adult beverages, a cooler full is best, and head down to any convenient bulkhead toward dark. We sit there and watch the neighbors’ firework displays. And Whidbey’s. And Mukilteo’s. All those bombs bursting in air. This year the neighbors spent the approximate GDP of Slovenia and Slovakia combined, way more than last year and far more than the couple of previous ones. You got money — discretionary income — to blow on spinning bees and kamikaze komets and screaming banshees or magnum bangums, don’t tell us what the price of gas at the pump is or how many housing starts this month or what the bankruptcy filings or bank defaults are. We can see with our own two eyes and hear with our own two ears the economic recovery in full kaleidoscopic Technicolor view.

Three years ago these poor waterfront patriots were reduced to pathetic hand held sparklers and shot a few fizzy Roman Candles. It was a sordid show of pessimistic patriotism, even by South End standards. This year, Whoo-EEE, the gated communities cleaned out Boom City and the Chapel Fireworks Stand too. Blew em off well into July 5th. It looked like Baghdad that first aerial saturation bombing back in the days when America had more money than it knew what to do with. You want to know if the recession is really over — take a whiff of the cordite wafting up your bluff. That’s the smell of new money, buddy.