The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I hear folks say all the time how the country no longer makes anything, everything’s outsourced, manufactured in China, then imported.  Course, they’re running up to Wal-Mart for all this cheap junk, save them a few bucks, half of it going back into gasoline on their SUV.  Here on the self-sufficient South End, we still make stuff.  Okay, mostly because we couldn’t afford to buy that stuff new.  But partly because there’s still a vestige of pioneer pride.  You make something yourself, you maybe understand how much work goes into it, you maybe understand the real worth of it, you maybe become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

We got about 2 million artists down here who paint and sculpt and carve and you name it.  They make stuff.  That’s what art is.  Creation.  If they could sell it, they’d be ‘job creators’.  Always that damn ‘if’.  I admit, half of artistic inspiration is job avoidance, or, in my case, about 100% is.  Workaphobia, almost a crippling malady.  I’ve had friends, who fancy themselves psychotherapists, suggest that if I spent half as much time employed as I do avoiding work, I’d be rich.  Course I explain that then I’d have to do taxes or hire an accountant, set up wills, keep records.  I’m just a little too busy for that kind of complexity.

The thing is, see, if you do your own car repair, fix your own leaky pipes, dig your own garden, catch your own food, prune your own fruit trees, cook your dinners, play your own musical instrument, sing your own songs —- you don’t have time to work some silly crappy job.  No way.  You’d fall behind, the chores would gang up, the shack would rot, the whole she-bang would come undone, entropy would rule, chaos would ensue.  Down here, you do not have the luxury of a job!  What you got, as consolation, is making your own life yours.  Not buying it on credit, piece by piece, from a factory filled with people paid next to nothing in a country that makes stuff for all of us who don’t have time to do it ourselves.

Well, sir, it’s just about that time of year again for old Skeeter to round up the boyz and journey up into the High Country.  I know what you’re probably thinking —- but you’d be wrong.  Mostly.  It’s time for our annual safari up into the snowfields of Roslyn for our 20th or 25th or umpteenth Beer Hunt.  Used to be more of us hunters, but time and domesticity have taken a toll.  We’re down to a motley crew of die-hard veterans, grizzled men who can travel for days on a subsistence diet of barfood, cheap hotdogs and canned beans.  Times have changed over the decades, but we haven’t.  Sadly.

We got a run-down packrat infested cabin near the Cle Elum River dam and reservoir right on the edge of Suncadia.  Suncadia is a 5000 acre high end mucky muck resort and retirement community carved out of elk country, clear cut and subdivided and over-developed for the 1%ers.  When they began bulldozing back 10 years ago, they chained off our access down the rutted dirt mountain road we always used.  Legal access, I might add.  So we did what any South Ender worth his salt would do, we cut the damn lock with bolt cutters and drove the usual easement 5 miles into the interior.  Kind of ruined the 9th green of their new golf course, it turned out.  Although it did get their attention in a hurry.

The boyz, I maybe didn’t mention, are lawyers mostly — how we all met, actually, back in their law school days and my slumming — and now one is a prosecutor for Tacoma and another is a judge in King County.  You want to tangle with folks over property easement rights, you couldn’t pick worse victims.  Needless to say, we now drive through the Guard Station, where they know us well, and they say hello, have a nice stay.  Stay means stay off the putting greens with our vehicles.  After the first trip in on their fine blacktopped roads, at least until the last mile or two, we use the trails to the dam or else bushwhack over to the rotten bridge across the raging Cle Elum to get to the sacred hunting grounds of Ronald and Roslyn and sometimes even as far as the Cle Elum, the town.

The damkeeper — shortly after 9-11 and the fear of Al Qaida blowing the dam — would threaten us with arrest.  The judge would apologize and we would be courteous, but we were crossing that dam like it or not.  After Suncadia’s megabuck tactics, the U.S. government held little to no fear for us Beer Hunters.  I admit we’re an older, if not wiser crew now.  We don’t look for fights any more.  Nope, we’re all business.  And that business is hunting the wild and wily ales.  Oh, some day we’ll probably ‘catch and release’ I suppose, but that day is a long ways off.

So  bear without old Skeeter a day or two while we’re traipsing the Cascades, stalking prey from the Brick to Old #  5, the Past Time to the Brewery, and maybe even a couple new waterholes along the trail.  Give you a break from all this moonshine wet powder wisdom.  You might want to do a little hunting yourself in the meantime….

I don’t want to frighten people, but I think it’s important the citizenry of our area know the truth.  The truth is this:  the Pearson House at the Stanwood Area Historical Society has a ghost.  About once a week the Paranormal Societies call up for information about this spirit, but no one down at the Un-Hysterical Society wants to cause a panic so they never return those calls.

A year ago a woman was ‘hit’ by this poltergeist.  Coming down from the attic she felt a whack on the back of her neck at the the top of the stairs and she had a red spot to prove it.  Witnesses swear she was sober.  Now …. I’m like a lot of us South Enders —- I got plenty of skeletons in my closet and I’m not about to exhume my own boneyard, although I realize I’m whistle blowing the Casper down at the Pearson House.

We all believe pretty much what we want to believe.  Mostly, these days, it’s what we don’t believe that’s most frightening to me.  We don’t believe what we read in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette or the N.Y. Times or even the ever trustworthy Crab Cracker.  We don’t believe politicians, not even our homegrown Commissioner, and she doesn’t believe in government even though she was elected to be the damn government.  We don’t believe in other folks’ religion.  We don’t believe TV or most of the internet.  We don’t think advertising is true.  We apparently don’t believe in science and we certainly don’t think the future is very bright.

But we do believe in ghosts.  Which is why you need to know what’s being hidden up in the attic of D.O Pearson’s house.  Maybe it’s okay for now, but what if they leave the front door open one night?  How many missing cats are unaccounted for in West Stanwood?  Are lights turning themselves on at night?  Are your children SAFE?  Are any of us safe from this swamp spirit prowling restlessly the Pearson widowwalk all hours of the night???

The truth, as the TV show X-Factor always told us, is out there, bumping in the night.  Where is our Chamber of Commerce when we need them?  There’s money going wasted.  Tourism lost.  Build the Paranormal Convention Center and they will come!!  And I don’t mean just the spooks….  At one time the C of C was going to put its office in the Tolin House between the Odd Fellows Hall and the Pearson Ghost Central.  But at the last minute they bailed out.  I suspect they KNEW the truth even then.  The Stanwood Chamber of Horrors.  Somebody needs to tell them you sometimes have to take risks to make profits.

We got a lot of folks down here on the South End who can’t afford health care insurance.  You can bet your next CAT scan bill it’s a hot button topic from the Marina and Bait Shop to the Pretty Pooch Pet Grooming Salon.  You’d be pretty lucky to get more than minimum wage anywhere down here — which may or may not explain either the high rate of unemployment or our entrepreneurial zeal — but you can surmise for yourself what the health care benefits are for any employees lucky or unlucky enough to have a job.  Even the owners of what few businesses we have left down here rarely have their own coverage much less cover some group plan for all two employees.

Oh, it goes without saying that our rural lifestyle, our lack of stress, our generally upbeat esprit de corps, should assure us plucky South Enders a healthy, doctor free existence.  But accidents do happen and none of us can be certain what creepy genetic pre-disposition has in store for us.  And so, when a neighbor falls prey to a stroke or cancer or some other malady not even nettleopathy can cure, we have to circle the wagons and form a tighter knit community to deal with expenses and carpooling to the clinics or generally just helping out.

A lot of the newcomers with health insurance aren’t accustomed to living in an outback where hospitals are 40 miles away and 911 call might arrive 30 minutes after the onset of their heart attack.  They want clinics and paramedics and they want taxes raised to pay for that.  But definitely not to pay for our health insurance.  Don’t want government in that!  Although, in all honesty, even a lot of us without insurance don’t want government involved either, if the chatter down at the Diner is an index of public opinion.  I tell em maybe lay off the chicken fried steaks and the four egg omelette a couple times a week, put that money in the stock market and you’d be pretty much on the road to a health care plan.  Hazy Jake says, ‘Are you kidding me?  You think I could save enough money that way to pay for even a sprained finger much less cancer?’  He’s got a point, of course, but I was mostly thinking about avoiding that next French fry heart attack.  Then again, the stress of playing the stock market might be even worse….

I built my palace about 20 years ago when we finally realized we probably couldn’t outlive our shack no matter how much remodeling and maintenance we were willing and able to do.  It was sagging faster than me.  And I’m sagging fast.  So I got out my trusty 16 ounce finish hammer and my leather toolbelt, powered up my bent Milwaukee skillsaw and set up a 1940’s ½ horsepower Sears table saw and went to work.

Two years later I had us a nice little two story cabin, brand new, mostly cedar and finished with curly maple.  We had a view of the Olympics and Saratoga Straits and Whidbey Island.  You haven’t built your own home, you can’t imagine the pride you would feel that first night sleeping in it, knowing you built it all by scratch.  The house that Jack built….

Course, after time, that new car smell goes away and after a decade or two, here we go again, trying to outlast and out repair the rot and rust, the whole entropic cycle of decay and depression and death.  Plus, I still got the original shack on life support.  And about 15 or 17 — I lost count — other buildings leaning and sagging and on living wills from the mailbox back to the trail to Tyee Store.  So I don’t want the old ‘new’ house taking shortcuts on me.  Which is why I went up on the roof 20 years later to see what kind of moss plantation I had thriving up there — and let me tell you, it was a mossologist’s paradise from gutter to peak.  Reds and greens and exotic flowers — an entire alien ecosystem above our heads completely colonizing our roof.

Twenty years in moss life, I bet, is like 500 for a Doug fir.  And, oh yeah, I had a forest of them too, but mostly just the dead bonsais, a valiant attempt at aerial reforestation of the South End, but even on our lush roof, not really an ideal growing climate in the summer droughts.  Moss, like rust, never sleeps.  It naps.  But only til the next fog or sprinkle or mist or gullywasher.  It is the Big Lebowski of the South End.  It abides.

I puttered around up there reminiscing about the day I nearly collapsed the roof by horsing around, making the rafters sway wildly.  But finally I climbed two stories down the ladder, left the gutters gorged with rich black compost and decided to simply co-exist.  We’ll see who lasts longer, me or the house…. But I tell ya, I’m putting my money on the moss.

Used to be, in the spring, we’d haul our firewood in.  The winter storms blew part down and we’d cut the rest.  The slash, we’d stack up and burn.  Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for nearly a week.  Keep dragging the downfall over to a bed of coals so deep it’d catch the root systems of the long-gone old growth firs on fire and they’d smolder for weeks, spreading along 500 year old tributaries of pitch, sort of an underground river of fire.

We knew every square inch of our nettle forest.  The places where the bleeding hearts had gotten established.  The gullies where nothing but ferns grew beneath the cedars.  The salmonberry savannahs and the nettle jungles.  We found the old shelter where Yazel’s kids had made a fort and built a temple with homemade idolatrous animal gods.  We discovered the pioneers’ dumps with the old dishes and the linament bottles.  We knew what their favorite whisky was and when they got lightbulbs.

You explore your woods and you discover the past.  The stumps of those giant Doug firs with the gash still there where the loggers shoved a springboard so they could saw above the rock hard wood at the base — you still see em.  You find the barbed wire strangling a maple, then finally it’s swallowed inside where the fence line kept the cows.  Cedar snags charred from the fire of the 1890’s when the entire South End burned.

Some of the past is too far gone.  The old barn didn’t have good timber left.  The pig pen barely did.  Some of my own shelters and outbuildings are long gone now, leaving not a clue for the next folks.  The woods is a history book.  It’s a museum going to ruin.  It’s a lesson to me every year that what we do will be swallowed and lost and forgotten.  Something about that I find a comfort, I guess.  Knowing that we’ll disappear back into the rot and the rust as surely as the trees will fall — something humbling about this.  Something part of something relentlessly ongoing.

Every year we go back in there.  And some day we won’t come out.  Someone else will burn the tree that grows on me.  Someone else can warm themselves on that…  I just hope they pay a small respect.  We aren’t the first.  We sure aren’t the last….

Like Dylan’s songs says — and the South End believes — when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.  So naturally we figured we were totally immune to the ravages of the Great Recession.  No jobs, no layoffs….  No hopes, no disappointment….  No woman, no cry…..    Hellfire, we’re practically an ascetic Zen monastery down here, one hand clapping.

And then the Unthinkable happened.  Tyee Store is about to close its doors.  I’ve lived here since 1977 and except for a Christmas or two, Tyee Store was OPEN, rain, shine, hell or high water.  From the Snowdens, who built the original store back in the Dark Ages,  to the Bartletts who made it the economic juggernaut of the South End, to Helen and Don who retired the E-coli dog rotisserie in favor of homemade Texas BBQ sandwiches, the store has been a Permanent Fixture, an icon of the South End Way, a testament that money can still be made the old fashioned way.  No, not hard work.  By selling cigarettes and alcohol and lotto.  Tyee was the prototype for every 7-11, Quicki Mart, Stop N Shop, Kwik Stop convenience store in America.  Their motto —  Fast is Worth More – spread faster than the Bird Flu Pandemic of 2008.

Somewhere in the Heartland, the original Golden Arches still stands, a living monument to American genius in slick advertisement, assembly line cuisine and tasty non-nutritious fare served on a white bread bun in a white Styrofoam take-out container that is easily tossed from another American icon, the very large gas guzzling automobile.

Tyee Store, soon to be shuttered, OPEN neon dark, outhouse next door locked, will stand as mute testament to that era of the South End when we didn’t need no stinking permits, we didn’t need fresh vegetables, we smoked what we wanted when we wanted, we considered Lotto our only necessary 401-K and we all knew, every man woman and child of us, where to go to get it.  If they didn’t have it, we didn’t need it.  Sure it cost a little more.  That was the Tyee Store.

I remember about 30 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields.  Pretty amazing.  Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner.  It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island.  For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that.  I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into.  Tulip Fuel.  Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow.  Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel.  The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended.  So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell.  The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps.  High pollen octane for the BMW crowd.  Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival.  Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help.  Something that should’ve been done long ago.  You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power   —- think about it!

Some of you aging hippies out there probably remember the old Skagit Valley Co-op when it used to sit down on the other end of town.  Close to the jail so the sheriff could keep an eye on who came and went, all us young longhairs would come out of the jungle once a year to get provisioned up.  Fill in what we couldn’t grow …. And catch up on the current events here in Mt. Vernon and Gomorrah.

I tell you what, that was a historic place, that old Co-op.  Sure didn’t have room for a fancy Deli or a free range meat section or specialty cheeses from around the world.  Don’t remember much of a Beauty and Cosmetic section.  Mighta been a magazine rack with Mother Earth News, but that’s all we needed really.  Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Naw…. Our shacks were beyond Martha Stewarting…..

Over the past 25 years the Co-op’s grown up along with us.  Its belt kept expanding one notch at a time until finally they just bought the whole damn block.  Sort of downtown Mt. Vernon’s answer to Wal-Mart.

You think back to those humble beginnings, the cramped bins of grain and the teeny-weeny check-out stand, the loyal customers and the always great staff, you can appreciate how far they’ve come.  And maybe us too.  I know I’ve baked about one million loaves of bread ground from their grains.  And even tho my homebrewing has diminished a bit since they got the giant beer and wine section, a lot of fond memories were from those moonshining Co-op days — even if those memories are starting to slip.

Mt. Vernon, I don’t need to tell you, took a different route than its neighbor to the north.  Kept its history.  Kept its soul.  For those of us who still make the hard trek in from the hinterlands, we want to say thanks.  And if there’s any sheriff deputies reading this, I was just kidding about that moonshining……

The South End’s never had a tavern … at least not a legal one.  Never had a bar.  Surely never had a cocktail lounge.  The Diner doesn’t have a liquor license although the Marina and Bait Shop can sell beer or wine To Go, but they don’t allow drinking on the dock.

Well, okay, they allow discreet drinking on the dock.  Meaning, pour your beverage into a coffee mug or drink like the bums do from a bottle in a paper bag.  Legalities are fluid down here, needless to say.  It’s more than a bit ironic that the South End, notoriously bibulous, is today – and always has been – legally dry.  This was, after all, one of the destinations of Prohibition rumrunners bringing in Canadian booze to us thirsty statesiders trying mightily to avoid the DT’s and wicked withdrawal.  Back then we South Enders had our own speakeasy in the form of a bevy of burlesque dancers and their impresario who partied into the dusk of the Great Depression.  Our old shack once boasted the marquis poster of Miss Ruby, our own in-house stripper, one of those party girls who now graces our bedroom with her still risqué outfit.  She lived in our shack with her mom Pearl and then built the house next door that still stands too, although, like ours, not without a lot of help.

So I guess the tradition of private parties, ad hoc speakeasies, impromptu makeshift livingroom lounges still flourishes.  Some might suggest this makes us a refuge of scofflaws, an accusation we accept as no small approbation and certainly nothing new down here.  If we want to drink in legally sanctioned-by-the-state houses of intoxication, we obviously are forced to drive long distances.  Since drinking and driving are rightly frowned upon in modern society, we South Enders have decided our best and obvious recourse is to do em one at a time.