The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of folks ask me just exactly where the hell is this South End you keep carping about? I suppose that’s a fair question –IF you’re one of those people who uses a recipe, or reads the directions first or who actually owns a roadmap – but I can tell right off you aren’t going to find the South End that way, I don’t care if you got two of those On Board Computer GPS navigating gizmos, one with the map and the other giving directions out loud.

Someone asked me if the South End is south of the Dump Road or south of the Country Club or south of the State Park. Is it south of the Plaza or south of the Elger Bay Store. I tell em yes, it is and leave it at that.

I don’t really know how to tell you where the South End is. I tell most folks coming down our way to just relax – if you’re following someone, take the first turn he doesn’t. If you aren’t following somebody, you’re doing fine, keep on coming, you’ll get here shortly.

Folks are always asking how far it is to Boeing or Microsoft or Weyerhauser. They think they’d maybe like to Re-locate to where the Living is Good and how far is it to drive to work?? Pitiful. Just pitiful. I don’t have the heart to tell em the truth: you can’t commute from the South End. We’re the end of the line, the last stop, the final destination, the dead end, the Point of No Return.

This isn’t some bus stop, it isn’t a retirement home, it isn’t some Tourist Destination, and it SURE isn’t a bedroom community between office hours, no sir. Commute?? Damnation! Why’d we go to the trouble to build Smokey Point in the first place, I ask you….

TIME CAPSULES IN THE CLOSET

I was going through a cabinet drawer the other day where I kept VHS movies.  Big black plastic spools of brittling old tapes.  Course I don’t have a machine to play them on anymore.  Kind of like having an 8-track to go with my CD player.  Although my CD player still has a hole for cassette tapes and I remembered I have another drawerful of those.

Anyone remember floppy disks?  All those computer storage stragtegies now as obsolete as print film?  I got a drawer of those too … plus the zip disks, plus the drivers.  Be worth a cool million on E-Bay someday or else I’ll be hauling them, along with my Beta Video Player and my 35 mm Nikon, to Antiques Road Show next time they roll in to the Stanwoodopolis Convention Center.  If you don’t think the world is racing right along lickety split, dig through a couple of boxes in the back of the basement or the top of the closet.  It’s a time capsule of the 2^nd half of the 20^th Century, the century disappearing in the rearview of your Prius.

Trouble with living at the beginning of the Industrial Age — or now the Digital Age — you got one foot in, one toe out, sort of like Stanwoodopolis and the mainland drifting breakneck away from the island.  The bridge gets rebuilt every few months and some of us just figure it’s easier to stay home.  Stay long enough and we’ll be swimming to get into town.  Fancy transponder, pay-as-you-drive booths, no cash or credit accepted.  Sign up on your computer, but you better have DSL and on-line checking.

I tell my buddies here on the South End who figure Time must stand still or else they’ll die in the Mabana Sunset Villa before they’re left hopelessly behind, fossils frozen in drying mud, they better get off their rocker and take a couple of computer courses.  Another few years and they won’t know how to turn on a TV much less figure out the latest changes in Windows 27.  Then we’ll see how Old Age in the 21^st Century looks to them without American Idol or Wheel of Fortune to fill an evening with electronic pablum.

I just got done chatting with about the 15th neighbor who plans to go into commercial pharming.  Gonna set up a light system in the empty kids’ room and grow 16 legal cannabis plants for sale to those with various and sundry medical afflictions ranging from bad backs to severe ennui.  We got a lot of chronically ill folks down here on the care-free South End apparently.  And hopefully – at least for these gentleman farmers – a few left who don’t grow their own remedies.

I wish to hell I could figure out how this medical marijuana works.  Actually, I wish the State could figure it out, maybe pull in some desperately needed revenues on taxing the stuff.  Won’t be long before Big Pharma wants a tax break too as long as the small businesses aren’t chipping in.  Near as I can tell, all you need to Grow is a ‘doctor’s’ authorization, a Green Card, costs $100 or $200 and then you can start your plantation.  Unless you live in a place – unlike the South End – where the cops are far too b usy with traffic violations to bust pot growers, chances are you can pretty much count on minimal harassment, and no chance whatsoever of prosecution.  Prohibition, my friends, is over.  Just no celebration…..

Me, I’m thinking Old School.  I grew up in the long dark shadow of illegal grass.  Friends growing paranoid, flushing their stash at the first knock at the door.  I grew up a criminal in the eyes of America.  Folks went to jail and served serious time.  And now?  You can grow it in your front yard, for godsake!!  You tell me what I’m supposed to think about Law and Order.  Naw, I’m for keeping the stuff illegal.  Gives the South End a certain panache, an outlaw mystique, a badge of dishonor and so be it.  Hell, I’m even advocating criminalizing nettles.  We find em growing on your property, you’ll get the full force of the LAW, brother.  And worse, we’ll brand you as the Nettle Growing Miscreant your parents warned you about.

Some of you grizzled up, gnarly nail pouchers maybe remember the era before Cascade Lumber.  Those terrible dark ages when we got our 2×4’s down at Copeland or Woodinville Lumber.  We were remodeling a lot back then.  Roofing, adding a deck for a new large appliance.  Prettying up the back shack for guests.  Maybe adding a skylight, couple of bedrooms.  Fixing up that grungy kitchen.

Pretty soon we were tearing down these 50’s and 60’s cabins.  Putting in new homes.  You boyz remember when they auctioned off Finistere Heights, top lot going for an unimaginable 160K??  We thought the tsunami must’ve crested up there  …..  but only a few years later and we found out that was just the low tide lapping gently against the bulkheads.  Camano Hills, Brentwood, Utsalady …. folks found Camano finally, cheapest waterfront, cheapest views, half of Seattle and a tenth of California rolled up in their Lexus SUV and paid cash.  I remember the day our assessor rolled in — old Fred — and said he had some bad news for me.  And I said we better have us a cold one then.  And he said, actually I got two pieces of bad news.  So I said, well, you know what I said, and he told me about my million dollar absentee neighbors’ evaluation across the nettle ravine.

It’s nice to rub shoulders with wealth, as you know, but it’s quite another thing to pay their same property tax.  All boats rise with the incoming tide — or so they say — but none of us ever imagined the money that was headed onto the South End’s shores and bluffs.  I just try to remember our roots, our humble beginnings, and thank our lucky stars we got property and a little shack and bright prospects from neighbors who are looking to buy our parcels so they can tear down our casas and put up fancy boathouses or an architect designed slave quarter or a simple hangar for their Cessna.

Course, that was before the real estate meltdown of ’08.  I guess now we’ll all have to stand pat for awhile longer.  Give us more time to clear a landing strip in the nettles for the next owner.  And to stock the fridge for the next assessor’s bad news.

Techno Tom was down at the closing of Tyee Store last week buying up all the canned goods at 50% off.  Even at the usual South End mark up, 50% off, according to T.T’s calculations, was worth filling his pickup with everything from Vienna sausages to water chestnuts.  Most everybody else was caching up Bud Lite 12 packs and PBR tall boys at 25% off.  Customers who dropped out of Stanwoodopolis High, the ones who pony up $3 on ATM transactions of $10 for smokes and that night’s TV dinner, thinking only jerks need math, probably didn’t cash in on the deals.

T.T. tweeted a few dozen pals who showed up en masse to clear the rest of the shelves and then a few of us capitalist vultures parked at the table for a couple of cold ones with Don, the manager who presided over the post mortem of the late great Tyee Store, now officially shuttered, possibly forever.  The neon beer signs went dark, the coolers were turned off, the framed South End posters came down, the place went quiet and dark as Tut’s Tomb.

We didn’t have a lot to say.  Brick mortar gives way every day to digital shopping and maybe Tyee had outlived its terminal prognosis.  Patti came by with her kids, one not even born when she first hired on as clerk some 16 years ago.  Sad to say, but the Store was the South End’s largest employer all those years.  Minimum wage, no benefits.  A lot of us worked there.  But nobody longer than Patti….

So we drank a few toasts to Ted and Ellen, the original owners, to Jigs and Ruby, to Dick and Sandy, to Don and Helen, all the owners.  I tried to remember the names of a few of the help, but time has taken its toll and those beers didn’t refresh any brain cells.  I finally said, as usual, it was time to go home and face the music.  We all shuffled out and into the night, solemn as casket bearers.  And another Mom and Pop store closed its doors and went dark on the backroad of an America receding in the rearview.

The whole point of this Spring Jubilee we got going on right now is to make sure agriculture and its heritage aren’t some historical footnotes in the near future.  As, sadly, it is on the tideflats of the once proud South End.

The South End wasn’t always the Backwash Dead End far flung terminus of Camano Island.  Back in its heyday, about 1915, it was a thriving port with a 1000 foot wharf jutting proudly out into the storm tossed Puget Sound.  The Atalanta and other mosquito fleet supply boats moored up for deliveries and mail 2 or 3 times a week, dropping shipments and taking on passengers.

Mabana—– crown jewel of the Saratoga Straits.  The Seattle classifieds advertised 5 acre parcels perfectly suitable for chicken ranching.  So the Roaring 20’s on the South End were more like the Cackling 20’s.  The wharf, of course, sticking out into the full fury of the Sound, got whittled down to the piling stumps you can see today at minus tides, stubby footprints leading far out to Davy Jones’ Locker and away from the Lost Civilization of Greater Metropolitan Mabana.

Oh, we still got a Port of Mabana, a one lane road sloughing its way toward obliteration.  And we got 3 Port commissioners, ditto, a kind of vestigial South End government about as pertinent to our lives as the Island County regime that’s barely conscious of Camano much less our South End.

But as always, we seem to manage, if not quite thrive.  History is like the tides, an ebb and flow, or in our case, an egg and flow, and what WAS might easily be reduced to rubble and ruin.  Or pilings and rebar.  The South End rose once toward soaring heights, Chicken Capitol of the Far West.  And if that grandeur is lost now, we can take some small comfort in knowing, once, in a lifetime not that long ago, in a place not too greatly changed, we raised the cholesterol level of the world a notch or two.  Not much to crow about, I know……. unless you’re a South End chicken farmer.

So even way down here on the digitally derelict South End, the Big News is the 100 billion dollar sale of Facebook.  It’s hard to imagine for most of us accustomed to our own social media in the primitive form of Jolene’s Beauty Salon or the South End Marina and Bait or Gossip Mill Central  — the Diner.  Rumors fly fast down here, but usually not because we started them ourselves.  Back in the sad days of party line phones, we might glean a secret or two listening in, then pass it along at the Tyee Store so that two or three days later half the island knew Sharon So and So’s kid had been busted on drug charges or Jimmy D’s son had knocked up his girlfriend or Carl X. down at the garage had totaled his hot rod going 100 down the State Park hill.

The gravevine was primitive but effective.  Nowadays we got the hive mentality, happy Borgs one and all.  Wouldn’t want to watch a movie if our ‘friends’ didn’t watch it.  Wouldn’t dream of going to a restaurant if our ‘friends’ didn’t recommend it.  Wouldn’t buy a Ford if our ‘friends’ hadn’t bought one too.  I don’t crawl out of bed unless I’m absolutely 100% positive everybody else had already got up too.

Conformity is apparently IN.  If nothing else, it SELLS.  And in the New Religion called Capitalism, that’s all that matters.  The South End — always a tweet or twitter behind the times — just never figured out that folks would pay for gossip.  If Jolene had analyzed how her patrons would not only pony up for a perm but then zero in on their preferences, she’d be dumping the Salon on the open market for a billion or two.  And Tyee Store would still be open…..   Just not bricks and mortar, except maybe their fancy outhouse.

GRAFFITI FOUND ON THE SOUTH END DINER:  You can tell you created God in your own image if He hates the same people you do.

Down here where the island rises up from its mudflat beginnings 20 miles to the north and finally juts a chin proudly out above the smug Hat Islanders who post NO TRESPASSING signs every 50 feet warning us to steer clear, we tend to examine issues from above the ordinary fray of sea level.  Course we may also suffer, in such altitudes, from oxygen deficiency — which may explain more than we care, or need, to examine.

I been noticing lately down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop, a lot of loose talk from the lay-about skippers how the fishing industry — meaning THEM — has been pole-axed, or at least gill-netted, by these damn government regulations.  Closures one day, openings 60 miles west another, zone 8-12 one week, you can crab, but not in zone 7.  How in Blue Hell you gonna make a living motoring to Hood Canal Tuesday then up to the San Juans Wednesday and back down to Camano Friday?  It’s enough to drive a sailor to drink!  Even more….

The days of the great salmon herds are gone the way of the buffalo, that much is true, but the why of it, well, the Ahabs blame everything from the Southendomish tribe to the spotted gooeyduck.  They’d even blame the eagles if it didn’t seem positively unpatriotic.  I don’t say too much when the fleet is drydocked like this, too much land under their boots and too much rotgut under their gills.  But occasionally I’ll hazard the opinion that the salmon have gone the way of the old growth nettle forests, over harvested, ill managed and maybe we got our own selves to blame.  If I brought the rotgut, they tolerate this —- if I’m drinking on their dubloon, it gets a lot dicier….

Truth is, they’ve tried everything from charter fishing to eco-tourism, hoping the CEO’s of San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Smokey Point might be satisfied with a couple of less-than-trophy sized flounder if the flasks flowed freely and the only whoppers were the tall tales of a bygone Puget fishery.  It wasn’t long before the only reservations for once proud bottom fishers were for birthday parties for Weyerhauser exec’s kids.  Trust me, they swallowed more than their pride.

Fishing on the South End is more endangered than naked mermaids.  Their kids will be lucky to fish for perch with a pole and a bobber.  But hard times make men desperate.  We’re no stranger to desperation but desperation is no mother of invention.  The other night, sitting on the poop deck of Coho Bob’s trawler as it slowly gathers barnacles and we quickly gather liquid courage, the talk turned loose and Pete, a one-time tug captain, mentioned he’d been watching the oil tankers idling off Anacortes the other day.  Ripe for the picking, just like the Somalians, he said quietly, maybe hoping nobody would remember tomorrow.

This is what it’s come to.  Poverty, alcoholism and now….. piracy.  Hard times make desperate men and you can take that to the bank … even if the tellers won’t deposit it.  All I can say is Anacortes needs to take precaution.  And Hat Island.  Well, you’ll need more than your uppity signs….

I got a friend whose car just started making ominous tapping sounds up under the hood.  These are basically morse code messages from the soon-to-be-dead.  Course, she could pony up the money for some serious end stage life support but like most of us down here on the South End, we have living wills for our junkers.  Occasionally I find old car bodies and truck beds rusting out in the woods where they were driven one last wild ride into the interior. One guy I know drove his over a 200 foot bluff, photographed the flight and told the fire boyz when they got the 9-11 call from a concerned citizen who had seen the descent that the car’s emergency brake had let go and rolled down the drive and over the lawn and down to the waiting arms of the sea.

A lot of us keep the rigs around for ‘parts’, but the truth is, they become lawn ornaments pretty quick and then just forgotten under the tangle of blackberry vines, antiques waiting for restoration when 1990 cars become collectible.  Hopefully soon….

My friend was quoted 4500 dollars for a short block from the Subaru dealer.  A short block is a partial engine repair.  Meaning, I guess, you save ten bucks and wait for the rest to fail soon.   Used to be we would drive our rig up to the barn and haul out the bad engine and drop in a used one we’d picked up at the Tyee Wrecking yard for 100 bucks.  Tyee Wrecking yard is gone now.  Sort of.  You still see a drive train digging out of the field like a 3 speed zombie occasionally, but you wouldn’t want to stick around to see what it feeds on.  Mabana Mike still does some shade tree mechanical moonlighting, but there aren’t many itinerant auto repairers left down here.  You need a degree in computer technology these days just to figure out how to adjust the clock much less set the pollution controls.

A lot of the boyz say they miss the simplicity of auto repair, but I’m not one of them.  I busted too many knuckles and dropped in too many muddy junkyard trannies that quit working two weeks later to get all weepy and nostalgic about car repair.  We got the vintage car clubs for those who miss the wrenching more than they care about their wives’ complaints about money down a rathole.  Personally I just like my car to be reliable.  When it’s not, I’m with my buddy who pushes them off the bluff.  If you happen to be a beach walker, keep a lookout upward, is all I’m saying….