The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I joined CostCo this past year, what they refer to as a ‘buying club’, meaning you can join the fun for a fee.  For years I’ve resisted.  I usually don’t pay my stores for the privilege of shopping, but friends had been buying stuff for me when they went and I finally let guilt wear me down.

CostCo, for those of you who are accustomed to express lines or Quickie Marts, is a bit jarring.  You don’t just grab a basket and run in for a couple of items.  No, you get a cart the size of a tractor trailer rig.  Within seconds of entering the warehouse, passing through their version of TSA, you are swept into a traffic nightmare comparable to Seattle at rush hour.  Folks in quest of huge cost savings, are investing in giant food rations that are stacked alongside electronics, auto parts, hardware, toys and clothing, sporting goods, then grunted along corridors more and more jammed as we maneuver bravely toward the checkout assembly line while maniac kamikaze cart wielders slash blindly toward free food samples, totally risk averse and apparently near starvation.  The stopping distance of one of these overloaded vehicles is about that of the Exxon Valdez.  I don’t have statistics on pedestrian fatalities, but presumably it is a national scandal.

All in all it’s a surreal shopping scene.  A year’s supply of rations piled high, mammoth sized jugs of perishables whose prices don’t portend the probability of spoilage, super sized everything  — we Lilliputians struggle with 200 pound loads, bumpercars on steroids, everyone carbon-loaded and dreading the deathmaze of the parking lot zoo waiting open jawed for us after the cart inspection at the exit.  I can only assume most head for a storage unit to unpack the booty.

Every time I go I feel awash in shopping shame.  Imagine, say, a Sudanese immigrant or a fellow South Ender, stumbling onto this scene, aghast at the sight of gallon jars of everything from kalimata olives to pickled okra.  I know I have to pay a little more at Tyee Store — okay, a lot more — but sometimes I don’t need to stock up like a survivalist.  Sometimes I just want the small jar of pickles.  And that’s what Tyee Store’s got …. and so far they don’t charge me to join their buyer club just to come in.

The other day I was vacationing up at Lost Lake (apparently rediscovered) where I was conscripted to help clear an overgrown homestead.  A couple days into it, first with a chainsaw, then a sickle and finally just mano y mano with the downfall and the ivy and the blackberries, I was full bore into what was a veritable archeological dig.  I see how Mayan temples disappear under vines and sediment, lost civilizations stumbled on by accident centuries later.

The Lost Lake Dynasty didn’t appear to be quite centuries old, but some of it had slipped under mud and mulch.  If I was hoping for discovered treasure, I was sorely disappointed.  A couple more days of burn piles for the brush revealed old shrubs, creeping myrtle, hidden rhododendrons, plenty of daffodils and hyacinth pushing greenery into spring, all the telltale of someone’s old homestead next to the lake.

History here doesn’t lead back generation after generation to a distant Vanishing Point.  Much as some of us want to believe, the South End isn’t the Cradle of Western Civilization and Lost Lake isn’t Mesopotamia on the Stilly.  This was virgin ground and scarcely trod upon much less inhabited even by aboriginals who, like us newcomers, preferred the waterfront real estate of Puget Sound’s Big Sea Waters.

Most history, you stop and think about it, is lost.  Oh sure, we remember the Big Stuff:  wars and conquests, religious beginnings, Hot Shot Philosophies — but most of human endeavor is lost to rot and rust and ruin, covered over by the neglect and detritus of the next generation busy with making their own history.  Civilization is built on burial grounds.  Down here on the South End, we got the dubious distinction of being the bottom layer.

The South End, being a bit occupationally challenged, has always relied on alternative avenues of work to sustain us.  In the 20’s we used our inaccessibility to advantage by bringing in Canadian hooch through our coves and hidden ports.  Course, we added our own single stalk nettle scotch to the blend and managed to prosper even into the Great Depression.  The end of prohibition cut into the Canadian stock, but Daddle Distillery continues to this day back in the ravines where Revenuers rarely trek.

In the 60’s a new breed of entrepreneur flurourished here in the backwoods, men who accepted risk for high profit.  I’m talking, obviously, about the Green Trade, Camano Cannabis.  You’d see the sheds with the boarded up windows or the plots bordered by 8 foot high nettles to hide the outdoor crops.  An underground market flourished from Elger Bay to Tyee, and homegrown became a staple and a lifestyle.  Some say the artists who gravitated down to the island’s far reaches were inspired by Killer Kannabis or Two Toke or Bud Bomb.  Others claim they were the new Pharmers of the South End, painters and sculptors who turned their creative energies to horticulture.  Or hortichuckle.

These Avante Gardeners now find their way of life threatened with the onslaught of another end to prohibition now that the tidal wave of medical marijuana has reached their hidden shores.  No doubt some will adapt.  Hazy Jake says he’ll switch to hydroponics and slick marketing.  He’s enrolled at the Skagit Community College where he’ll bone up on biogenetics and website design.  Jake should do fine.  But some of the others ….. well, a lot of bootleggers went broke overnight following the Repeal.  My guess is you’ll be seeing an upsurge in art real soon.  Not much profit, but we need to stay busy down here…..

Most of you folks I talk to refuse to buy Bob Friel’s hot-off-the-press book The Barefoot Bandit.  He spent over a year hunkered down in a bluff cabin on Orcas fighting editors’ deadlines and rat-nibble poverty in order to get the details dead on right.    You think maybe you know the whole saga after years of gossiping down at the Diner or endless speculation at Jolene’s Spa or over the neighbor’s truck hood, forget it —- you don’t.  Bob’s dug up more facts, details, interviews and in-depth reportage than all the skeletons you got hidden in your shed closet.  He knows where the bodies got buried, who helped who, what so and so said to the cops and what they said back and all the minutiae of how the Kid managed to stay fugitive for years.  And he tells the saga with an unblinking eye and a style as feisty as a sucker punch.

Some of us don’t like hearing it, but Bob’s got it right:  the Barefoot Bandit is the first genuine, certifiable, authentic, bona-fide, bigger than life 21st century folk hero.  Sure he terrorized us on the South End and then terrorized Bob and his neighbors up on Orcas.  Whaddaya want – an apology??  The Kid’s serving serious time.  For serious crimes.  You don’t have to feel sorry for him.  You don’t have to be some bleeding heart and blame society or his mom or even yourself.  But trust me, you’ll get to know Colton as well as your own brother when you finish this book.  He was your neighbor.  He was maybe your kid’s friend.  He was a helluva crook, as you’ll see reading the details of how he operated.  And he had nerves of steel, as you’ll see when Bob Friel takes you up on his plane rides, sets you in the cockpit and flies into the cloud covered Cascades and lands in deadly stumped clearcuts and finally into Legend.

But most of all he’s part of the Lore of the South End now.  Our folk heroes can’t all be Jesus Christ or Charlie Manson either.  Sometimes they’re just the person down the street, the one with a torqued sense of adventure keeping time to a demented drummer with not as many options in life as we ‘normal’ folks got.

Read the book!  You won’t get anything better until the next legend comes down the pike.  And she won’t be from around here.  And a writer fine as Bob Friel won’t be capturing the essence in as entertaining and comprehensive a chronicle.  Billy the Kid’s neighbors might not have wanted to encourage the mythologizing either, but trust me, it’s too late.    Read this book — it’s part of your lore now.  Give you some ammo down at the Diner too next blue plate special…..

You don’t need a sociology degree from the Stanwoodopolis University to know that these modern times we live in make us more isolated from each other.  Oh sure, you got 1500 ‘friends’ on Facebook and you all watch the same TV shows and ‘like’ the same shampoo, but if you need help hauling an appliance from the Goodwill to the back porch, good luck with any of those ‘friends’ driving the truck you need.

Even a gnarly curmudgeon like myself believes Social Networking is okay so far as it goes, but down here on the pioneer South End, we got a slightly more Hands-On social network.  Last week I got a call that a friend whose sibling was being held by the state for remedial psychiatric assistance, needed help clearing house and property.  A bunch of us dropped what we were doing and headed up the holler with chainsaws, packing boxes, garbage sacks and pickup trucks.  We’re still at it, but we’ll get her done.

Another friend needs a little construction done, one needed a lift to the doctor’s office for an eye operation, another wants her cats cared for while she’s on vacation, someone needs help dropping a tree and just this morning I got a call to deliver a prescription to the drug store — the list goes on.

You live on the frontier, you need each other.  Learning how to ask for help might just be harder than learning how to give it, but it’s worth learning if you want to live down here in the remote nettle regions of the Great Mossback backwash.  Nobody said it would be easy, but it doesn’t have to be too hard either….  All I can say is folks who bellyache about the damn government interfering with their right to ignore their neighbors’ plights better hope their safety net isn’t 1500 yahoos on Facebook.

Before the advent of circuit boards, silicon chips and computerized everything, us do-it-yerselfers took no little pride in fixing our broken appliances, our busted stereos, our crippled cars and even our dysfunctional lives.  Really didn’t have much choice given our fiscal challenges.  The washing machine quits, you have to weigh that $50 service fee just to drive down here.   Believe me, you’ll learn to diagnose a blown fuse or a broken fan belt yourself before you wait two days in your last clean underwear and then pay half the cost of a Maytag to keep the wringer washer working another six months.

My dryer quit this week.  Nothing new there — it goes on strike regularly.  But this time the little gizmo that held the blown fuse wouldn’t let go of the fuse.  No big deal — I went on-line, googled up the part, found it … and discovered it cost more than that service fee I’m trying to save.  Being a South Ender I balked at the rip-off price.  No way was I paying $54 plus shipping for a plastic toy fuseholder.  Next trip into town I scrounged the hardware store, found a reasonable facsimile and rewired the dryer to hold it …. And yeah, $5 later, I was fluffing up my dungarees.

Sometimes it pays to think outside the box, cornball as that expression is.  I bought an extra hard drive for my computer — and oh yeah, I got one — but when it came it wouldn’t fit inside the Tower.  A North Ender might send it back, see if there was a better fit.  But like I said, we like to think outside the box, so I cut a slot with a hacksaw in the tower side and slid that new blank brain right in and left its frontal lobe sticking out for better ventilation.  Sure, the missus shook her head sadly.  But the salient point here is that it worked and  MORE IMPORTANT BY FAR, the job was done.

The trick here is to show No Fear to these malfunctioning objects, even the ‘black boxes’.  They sense fear quicker than a dog or a tax assessor.  Open them up, grab a handful of wires, pull on em with authority, half the time they’ll respond positively when they realize unequivocally you’re the Boss.  When my VCR ate a rental movie, I eviscerated the aggressive little unit and when it still refused to function, I made an example of it to its electronic brethren and tossed it two stories out into the driveway.  I have put rocks through recalcitrant TV picture tubes and in one instance burned one alive, fully plugged in, begging like HAL in 2001—A Space Odyssey.  Some machines are incapable of learning.  You must be firm.  You may even need to be ruthless.  The worst mistake you can make is allowing one miscreant cyborg mutant monster to infect the rest.  Give em an inch, they’ll grab half of cyberspace.

For those who think it’s a brave new world, one where nothing can be fixed or repaired, cowboy UP!  Down here we aren’t going to be slaves to the machine.  Even if we have to destroy every damn one ….!

On the capitalist South End we entrepreneurs have been forced by lack of normal fiscal opportunity to adapt to our harsh circumstances.  To an outsider we may appear, oh, somewhat desperate, possibly a little deranged, but once you acclimate a bit to the slower pace of backwash living, you’ll apprehend the frontier wisdom of these moss-backed pioneers.

From free range clam herders to hydroponic nettle farmers, from every kind of artist working in every conceivable medium, we got folks scrounging up a marginal living with their bare hands and their even barer wits.  Two Toke Tom is a fine example.  For decades he’s been farming his pitiful piece of scrub, five acres of logged off old growth nettle forest that he’s been what agriculturists call ‘amending the soil’, meaning, he’s fertilizing with the neighbor’s chicken poop droppings to grow his income of Camano Cannabis.  Course, pot was illegal and Two Toke was, I guess you’d say, a criminal.  Kind of a harsh assessment, you ask me, but then, I got Daddle Distilleries back in the tundra so maybe my assessment is a mite biased….

Now, of course, with Medical Marijuana about to be legalized, old Tom is forced to adapt once more.  Dr. Tom, he calls himself down at the South End Diner.  A local healer.  Practically a shaman.  He’s got a few good years, he figures, to make a fast killing before Phillip Morris and the Big Boys grow bud commercially in climate controlled greenhouses guarded by Blackwater contractor/soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Pretty soon, he says, you’ll buy weed from CostCo in the Liquor Department and he’ll be back to painting watercolors for the tourist trade at Tyee Store.

No one ever said the Good Times would last forever down at our Shangri-La-La, but if anyone is ready for unemployment, it’s a South Ender.

Down here at the cell tower challenged South End, we get our news the old fashioned way:  via gossip.  You want to know what’s happening in real time, you don’t try to adjust the rabbit ears to bring in Fox News on the new improved digital airwaves that dropped our reception by half, you go down to the Diner for breakfast or stop by Tyee Store for a cuppa or sit a spell at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Spa.  Their antenna pick up more than snow and weak signals.

Word of mouth always spreads faster than bird flu, especially in confined areas where ricocheting rumors hail in like birdshot off aluminum trailer siding.  We got a little crime wave going on right now, mailboxes getting stripped by some meth heads looking for bank account numbers or credit card info or just some reading material on the cheap to save em from applying for their own library card.  Sammy the Skillet, head cook and chief dishwasher at the Diner, had his box rifled and by noon, half the South End was on full vigilante alert.  The newcomers got tamper-proof boxes that are basically safes on poles cemented into the ground, that, or they got post office boxes in town, but for us old-schoolers, we got slightly  more exposure to identity thieves.

Personally I figure a few of these java sippers hanging over their chipped porcelain mugs most of a promising morning could use a new identity and if having the old one stolen proved a useful catalyst, well, maybe these meth head robbers serve a useful function.  Now that the Barefoot Bandit is cooling his heels in a federal pen and we’ve lost our favorite Jesse James, the Postal Pirates offer up some pretty good opportunity for dryer time observations at Jolene’s, mostly surmises on whose no-account delinquent kid is probably behind the current crime spree.

I suspect if the Postal Pirates go viral the way the Barefoot Burglar did, Jolene will get her own segment on Fox News.  Course, it’ll be old news by the time it airs for the fair and balanced crowd by then.  You want breaking news, you best stay tuned down here.

You see folks everyday who are more stressed than a government service employee in a GOP administration.  Stress, as we should all know by now, is a Killer, capital ‘K’ and I don’t mean Jerry Lee Lewis.  Traffic tie-ups, hellish commutes, bad bosses, a co-worker who needs meds or a capital K for Killing —- we all know what that does to our blood pressure, our marriage and our equanimity.

On the South End we definitely believe in Equanimity.  Let the rats race, we don’t really have a finish line, so why hurry?  Some of the boyz down at Karls Kustoms Hot Rod, lounging around the lift, were comparing notes on headers and 4 barrel carbs over a few cold ones and inevitably they got around to jobs they hated the most.  It’s an old list, something to talk about when politics goes stale, and better than worrying about whether to take Social Security early or hold on a few more years of odd jobs and piecemeal work.

Karl used to run the service department at the Ford dealership a few years back.  Long commute, pressure job.  Unhappy customers.  Unhappy Karl.  But like the rest of us spinning socket heads and imagining ourselves behind the wheel of the cherry red little Vette Karl was putting the final touches on with an artist’s concentration, he’d tossed in the grease rag one Friday payday, told the boss to shove it and  took the long way home past every tavern and dive from the dealership to the cold dinner, then began living off his wits and his savings, neither a gold mine.

Poverty, of course, can be the cruelest stress of all, wondering week to week if you can tread water a little longer, not really expecting your ship to come in or even sail by, just holding on.  Course, the months pass, then the years and there finally comes a day when every South Ender worth his salt decides to quit worrying.  History is on his side.  Precedent.  Patterns.  And now … probability.  Truth is, we’ve learned the art of Making Do without making much money.  Hard to believe for a lot of folks.  But … belief is what we had to learn.  Things usually work out fine and worrying about em won’t help.  We leave that to the folks up north.

The talk lately around the grease pit at the Tyee Service and Lube these days invariably comes around to Medical Marijuana.  Or what most of the boys call Marital Marijuana.  Gary, the head mechanic, flat out opposes legalizing pot.  He says that’s all he needs, a bunch of dopeheads along with all the artists down here on the South End.  “We might as well call ourselves the People’s Republic of Camano, put everybody on welfare and keep em high as Katmandu kites all day long.’

Ralph works the pumps and does the oil changes.  He wonders if the Stanwoodopolis city council will let dispensaries sell marijuana.  ‘They’d make a fortune off taxes,’ he declares and Gary throws down a grease rag in disgust and twirls his socket wrench like a six-shooter.  ‘Cost em twice as much to take care of all the addicts.’

Two Toke Tom usually doesn’t weigh in on these panel discussions, at least not around Gary, but he opines that nothing much would change except now there’d be some quality control instead of the hit and miss of today’s marketplace.  ‘Sort of like bad moonshine,’ he says and Gary gives him the evil eye like maybe he’s considering urine testing for all future fellow employees.  Pretty quick Two Toke slips over to the pop machine for another jolt of high fructose and caffeine to get him through what looks like a long morning.

‘And WHY do they call it Medical Marijuana anyway??’ Gary bellows.  ‘How many potheads got diseases only dope can cure?  What’s next, you can buy meth instead of coffee? What’s going on here?’  Now it’s Ralph’s turn to shrink away, reflexively aiming at the Mr. Coffee boiling down to pure caffeine.  Ralph has plans to grow legally if laws get lenient.  Course, Ralph grows already, but it would sure make life easier if he could sell to his ‘patients’ without looking over his shoulder for the Island County Sheriff.

Times change, that’s for sure.  Not too much on the South End, although Ralph is daydreaming about using part of the Service and Lube as Dispensary.  Something to think about between oil changes.  Maybe buy the station from Gary when he retires or drops dead of a heart attack.  You never know, he thinks….. You just never know what’s around the corner.