The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests.  The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property.  Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place.  The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert.  Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry.  Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information.  So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington.   He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way.  When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh.  That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away.  Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer.  The rich folks didn’t mind.  The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

I got a lot of retired neighbors.  You see em walking the dog 17 times a day or mowing lawn 3 times a week or driving to town 2 times a day.  They’re not acclimated yet to days on end, empty as a TV, that they have to fill up every morning all over again.

Retirement, as I’ve known since I took mine at age 27 or so, is no easy job.  Folks wait most of their lives to get to that stage of life, not really imagining the reality of it, just hungering for a cessation of their hellish jobs.  They think VACATION!   Years of it.  They think a really long weekend.  Drink a few beers, watch some ball games, clean the garage.  They don’t think of what happens when the garage IS clean, the ballgames aren’t on everyday, and a few beers becomes incipient alcoholism.  Their wives do.  They never imagined, though, that retirement meant having to share the house, share the days, share their old privacy.

I know:  I should write a Self-Help book on Retirement.  Save some marriages, save the neighborhood, even save some lives.  Get rich doing it too.   But … as I said, I’m retired. Not exactly looking to start a career at my advanced age.  Probably be Chapter One.  Or my epitaph.

Retirement’s a tricky act.  It’s not really institutionalized indolence.  It’s actually learning how to create your day.  Day after day. Week after week.  Year after …. Okay, you get it.  But a lot of my neighbors don’t.  Course, they don’t have my advantage of many decades of trial and terror.  Mostly terror, sure, but you spend as much time as me figuring out Time Management as an Art Form, you got a leg or three up on the poor schnook who stops the 8 hour, 5 day a week regimen, bam!  And then hopes to just live out the remaining years in the Lazy Boy with a remote and a faithful missuz who maybe isn’t ready to be a 24 hour maid service or an indentured servant.  Gonna be trouble, guaranteed!  Gonna be stress, high blood pressure, the inevitable heart attack.  For some of them, retirement might be a little more ominous than a trip to Maui.  If boredom doesn’t kill em, the missuz might.

On the environmentally sensitive tree hugging South End, we’ve been exploring our many eco-options, everything from syntho-fuel to marital marijuana.  Maybe it’s post-guilt syndrome, that remorse we all feel down here after decimating our old growth nettle stands.  We can’t walk the woods without grim reminders every stump slowly rotting into swamp and history, the springboard marks still visible where our forbears stood above the impervious wood at ground level to fell the mighty beasts with crosscuts and grit.  The very heart of our South End culture got loaded and shipped to markets on the east coast and Japan.

Nettle paper, vertical grain nettle boards, nettle veneers — all lost.  As well as the nettle based civilization built around the mythic plants that cast their great shadows from the farms of Elger Bay to the forests of the Camano Head.  Baskets were woven from the fibers, herbal remedies were made from the leaves, shacks were built from the lumber.  Nothing was wasted.  And, of course, now there is nothing.  Just the stunted 8 foot third growth forests of stinging splinters, prickly reminders of another great civilization on the skid road.

Shaky Jake, once a fishing boat captain until the salmon too were decimated, has become practically an environmental evangelist, preaching the need to re-green the South End.  For a time he ran Canadian Bud through the Border Patrol, but after 9-11 there were too many Coast Guard speedboats with bow mounted heavy machine guns for his profits to match the risk.  Now that marital marijuana is about to be made legal, he has visions of hydroponic forests, hemp byproducts and the possibility of the South End rising from the blackberry covered ravines to take its rightful place on the forefront of the Green Technologies the President is advocating to take the place of carbon based fuels.

Nobody has the heart to tell him his dreams are pipe dreams.  But worst case, the stuff might make great gasoline.  High octane, anyway….

Folks are always a little surprised to learn that the South End is home to a school of higher learning, figuring, I guess, that a brackish backwash with virtually no commercial potential, with no public schools even, might be likelier to have a minimum security penitentiary than a college.  For awhile we had the Tucson School, an unaccredited mail order degree factory run out of Nate Benson’s basement for a few years before enough irate students complained to the state attorney general.  Nate did get his opportunity to attend a minimum security prison, but not around here.  He graduated in 3 years with good behavior and no one has seen hide nor hair since, but late at night I notice TV ads for university degrees that sound vaguely familiar.

The Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement has been training young artists for nearly 25 years now.  Half the graduates end up staying here and some become instructors themselves.  The pay isn’t great, but considering the graduates who don’t teach are making far less, it beats the options.  President Otto Vermouth runs a pretty tight ship, near as any of us unwashed masses can tell and nowadays you can find art plastered everywhere from Tyee Store to Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique.  Even the Marina and Bait Shop sports watercolors and bird sculpture.  It’s practically a Louvre down here, although sadly I won’t say most of us have really had our aesthetic consciousness blown up too large.  The Mabana Body Shop has an egg termpura of one of our more infamous graduates, Safari Jack.  Jack says it’s worth more than Roadkill Ronald’s 1964 Mustang convertible, fully restored, but right next to it is a 2003 girlie calendar Ronald must like as much as that egg tempura of the Clamdiggers.  Most of us like it even better, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Miss July 2003 fills the eye, believe me.

The Institoot has classes in everything you can want to study art-wise.  Right now they’re running Winter Classes.  I thought about taking something myself, stained glass maybe, but it cost a bit more for the supplies and anyway, I figured I’d lacerate a finger or an artery and my literary ambitions would be ruined.

Maybe in Spring session I’ll take Figure Studies, if they can squeeze another voyeur in.  Jerry Cochran’s wife models for the class.  She’s no Miss July, but it seems safer than stained glass anyway.  At least until Jerry finds out where she’s been moonlighting….

Down at the forward thinking South End, we were New Age before it became Old Hat.  Herbal remedies?  You bet!  Nettle-opathy has been practiced in the hollows here since old Ma Wexler applied a poultice of the fresh stingers to her Erectile Dysfunctional husband’s non-working parts and boy howdy, things livelied up at the Wexler homestead after that, let me tell you.

Nettle-opathy is a country cross between acupuncture and herbal cure-all.  Apply a few fresh spring leaves to the correct chakra, you can cure everything from shyness to arthritis, halsitosis to insomnia, hair loss to memory loss, seasonal affective disorder to major depression.  You won’t have time to think of much else other than that panacea tickling your chakra.

We’ve been brewing medicinal nettle tonics about since Prohibition forced us to seek alternative medicines.  We got hefe-nettle, nettle stouts, IPA’s, nettle bock, all available in a handy 12 oz. dosage.

Aromatherapy?  Sure.  We got everything from burn barrel poly-blend to chimney cedar to compost leaf mulch/food scrap.  A few minutes of olfactory stimulation, you’ll forget most of those insignificant cares and woes that nag your good mood all day long.

Hypnotherapy.   You want a spell put on you, just wander down to the South End Hotel and belly up to the bar, listen for awhile to the whoppers these old time fishermen spin over a few bottle bass.  You’ll be buying Penn reels and downrigger gear and a boat and motor too — you’ll be broke but if fishing doesn’t cure what ails ya, god help you.

In all honesty — full disclosure here — this New Age stuff, old to us, is really mostly a placebo.  But then, isn’t that the New Medicine now?  And really, who cares so long as it works.  Not our fault the South End itself is really why we live longer, smile more, work less and basically just have most of the answers to life’s tough riddles.  Placebo?  You bet.

Down here on the South End Banana Belt, the Kauai of Camano, we get quite a jump on spring planting.  Personally I like to roto-till about when I’ve eaten the last of the papayas and mangos, but some of my more conservative neighbors believe you should wait until the oranges have just about played out.

I guess we’re in what you call a micro-climate, sort of the sweet spot where the convergence zone hits that warm Pacific gulfstream up from the Hawaiian Islands, misses Everett and Utsalady, but is ideal for growing tomatoes the size of grapefruits by July.  God’s honest truth — nobody down here would lie about their garden yields.  Unless they were hiding the bounty from the poor raindrenched, fog shrouded, miserably cold neighbors up north.

Me, I like to believe, since we don’t believe in science based climatology these days, that the weather is really just a reflection of our clean living and high moral standards.  Not trying to put too fine a point on it, but those poor souls who get a sour tomato ripening by, oh, October, well, maybe they should change their ways.  Better weather through better living.  Like us!

Sure, we used to study weather patterns, frost zones, jetstreams, all that hocus pocus we’ve relegated to the trashpiles of history.  Science: believe it if you want.  Experiments, proofs, double blind studies, computer modeling , labs and testing — not much use in this faith based agronomy we got down here working 12 months a year for us.  Global warming?  Hey, chill out!  Stop by some winter day and have a Papaya cocktail with us.  Fresh picked, blend em while you watch.  Stick around, we’ll help you sort out your moral dilemmas.  You’ll have more tomatoes by July than you can shake a stick at…..

About a month after I bought my homestead, my car broke down between Shangri-La-La and Elger Bay Store, giving me the opportunity to walk most of the South End to get back home.  Before I set out hitch-hiking, a tow truck pulled up and Ted Snowden handed me his business card:  Tyee Towing.  24 hour service.     Ted’s retired now and the tow truck is long gone and the wrecking yard behind Tyee Store — also Ted’s — has been mostly hauled off, although at some of the Swamp Soirees Concert Series every summer you’ll see an old axle or a truck bumper poking out of the field, which is still giving up its dead.  Ted was pretty fair on prices, considering he had a monopoly down here, and if you needed a part to repair your jalopy, he’d let you loose in the boneyard with a socket wrench and a prybar.  Strictly Self-Serve.  Ted didn’t dismantle them.

Now we got O-Zi-Ya Tow and Impound.  Big Walter cruises the South End the way a vulture drafts on air currents, both looking for carrion.  Big Walter doesn’t get business from us locals, not more than once, but he listens to his police scanner squawking constantly, giving him clues on accidents, breakdowns and DUI’s.  He’s almost always the first one on the scene, too bad for the victim.

Because Big Walter charges a country fortune.  Once for the tow.  Twice for the impound fee.  Back behind the trailer office he has an acre cyclone-fenced and topped with razor wire, a Gitmo for GTO’s nobody is getting through without Walter getting his blood money.  The wealthy newcomers threaten him with lawsuits but eventually pay up.  The rest of us leave our beaters behind bars until he sells it to the auction yards, probably save us a fortune in future repair bills, if nothing else.  Pretty small consolation.      Like most places, the South End has its fair share of predators.  Some are legal….

It might seem to some of our northerly neighbors who only very occasionally wander down to this low end of the island that they’ve ventured back into more primitive times.  No doubt this is given credence by the simple fact that they rarely explore off the main road, a bit like judging L.A. by driving through on the interstate.  Of course we seem to lack modern  amenities and urbane sophistication.  It’s like judging Smokey Point by the rest area on I-5.

A friend who visited recently lamented the predicament that she couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee down past the Mountain View/Dixon Line, as though civilization itself teetered on that cardboard cup of latte.  Caffeine addiction no doubt spawns all manner of snobbish sophistry, and caffeine withdrawal can reduce even the most cultured city dweller to a snarling savage.  Before things degenerated into a border war, I took her over to Java Jive, our answer to Starbuck’s attempt at world coffee hegemony, where Brenda Bodice, once the infamous bare barista in Stanwoodopolis’ ill-fated bikini expresso before the town’s fathers found their teenage sons inexplicably hooked on flavored coffee drinks, serving up hot steaming grandes of freshly roasted beans brought in daily from our own O-Zi-Ya Roasters.

Brenda, now less subject to bouts of pneumonia, is always conversationally entertaining.  My friend bought us both two bars of freshly baked blackberry tarts, no puns exempted, from the South End Diner’s pastry shop.  Later I would surprise her with another fine culinary experience at the Tillicum Bistro, another off-road adventure, but I didn’t want to overwhelm her with a tsunami of our clandestine culture all at once.  It would only make her own world seem somehow bland and tasteless … and we sure don’t need more immigrants hungry for authenticity.

This past week South End Hardwoods padlocked its gate, boarded up its windows, handed out the pink slips and closed down once and for all.  Nobody but the couple of stoned part-timers on the greenchain were surprised, but the axe had been ready to fall for more than a few months.  The yard was pretty near cleared and the skidders looked small and rusty standing idle against the chain link fence with no trucks rolling in every half hour with their increasingly skinny loads of sorry pecker poles.

The hey days of old growth nettles are long gone, now just black and white memories on the Mabana Logging Museum’s walls, photos of the now unemployed’s fathers and grandfathers atop logs scarcely imaginable today, once dragged out of the forest primeval by oxen and horse,  gone to chip and bark and ash, gone forever.  A couple of the boys not near enough to retirement to cash it in but too old to sign on for re-training for jobs requiring computer competency, drowned their sorrows at the Hotel Bar and kicked around running a gyppo operation, run  the logs they could scrounge down to Everett maybe.  But woods work is a young man’s game and if felling trees didn’t kill them outright, a heart attack probably would.  Better to idle away a few hours and too many beers and crazy talk than face the music coming when their wives got the news of their layoffs. Maybe they should’ve gotten out when the getting was good, not waited til the ship was listing and half under water, headed straight for Davy Jones’ locker.  But between them they had 60 years at South End Hardwoods and not much desire to start swimming toward a receding shoreline.

Truth is, it was all they knew, those jobs at the mill. By midnight they’d close the bar down, shake calloused hands, tell each other things would work out.  It would be a long ride home, past the new stores, the gated communities, the golf course, the fire stations, past the forgotten forests they’d helped clear, past the dreams and their hopes, past even their own future looking for all the world like ghosts on stumps receding in the rear view.

No one is really sure when the Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement first opened.  Probably most of those early students are gone now —- starved to death probably or else moved on to actual working lives, the kind of lives you commute to, pay taxes with, pay your mortgage and try to forget that misspent fantasy of your wayward youth.  Some say it was a response to the Honey I Shrunk the Art Show down at the old garage gallery by the Tyee Store.  The Shrunk Show’s still going strong after more than 25 years, what would be called a quarter of a century  to most folks, what we call Quittin Time down on the South End.

The Institoot isn’t exactly flourishing.  Nor is it enlarging.  But it does still train its students to paint and sculpt and about any other  form of artistic skill when it can muster instructors.  They’ve taught macramé and basket weaving, duck decoy carving and motorcycle airbrushing.  Back in the wilder days they taught body painting — now they offer the occasional tattoo workshop.  At the completion of every semester the graduates have a student art show of current work over at the Grange.  The instructors bring in their own work and most of the South End attends the gala opening, looking for deals and possibly signing up for the next quarter’s admission.

I’d say most of us have taken a class or three.  I took a night class back in 1980 to learn how to make stained glass windows so I could replace the plastic stapled to half my shack’s window-sized holes.  Half of us go to meet someone single, which is how, I suspect, the place got its real reputation for more than just artistic license.  They had more bacchanalias than baccalaureates at the Institoot and probably twice the orgies the Pilchuck Glass School was famous for.  Plus the tuition was about one tenth what the eyepatch crowd wanted to attend.

Admittedly, not many of us moved up to the NY galleries or the Frisko art scene or even the avante-garde of Everett.  Most of us never had grandiose ambitions, you want to know the truth.  We just wanted to wet our feet, try a little brushwork and rub a shoulder with the artistic crowd.  After all, we’re South Enders, not crazies….  Course , that art stuff has a way of weaving up the synapses.  Our art might’ve shrunk, but the South End sure got a lot wider.