The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was a hothead radical in the 60’s, I thought the government was killing Black Panthers, spying on civilians, letting industry and corporations foul our air and poison our water and lying to us about the war in Viet Nam.  Turns out most of that was true.  My old man said if I didn’t like it here, I could move to the Soviet Union.  Four decades later the Soviet Union is broken up and I still live here.  The government still lies about wars, still spies on civilians.  And my old man is now the one sputtering about the damn government, never mind that he worked all his life in the public sector for the U.S. Forest Service.  The Republicans, now in full battle cry, denounce the EPA, the Post Office, most all government agencies as evil incarnate.  I guess this is the American version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Round up the bureaucrats and send them to Dakota to farm sunflowers.

Social Security is now called a Ponzi scheme.  Regulations on businesses are job killers.  Taxes are a pox on the body politic.  Politicians, except the GOP, are liberal bloodsuckers.  We have moved a long haul right of Richard M. Nixon.  And compromise, once the cornerstone of American democratic prinicples, has become a white flag of surrender to the anti-capitalist Democrats.
Hot talk radio, misinformation from the internet, corporate consolidation of the media — who the hell knows what is true or not anymore?  Demagoguery is winning.  Maybe it has already won.  I get my father’s e-mails of patently false vitriol, week after week, forwarded by his pals to millions.  They believe what they want to believe.  And they want to believe the president is a Muslim, is a terrorist, is a communist and a traitor and a foreigner.  They want to believe the government is responsible for their unhappy lives.  They want to drink their Kool-Aid, turn on and tune out.  The Times, they aren’t just  a’changin, they’ve reversed polarity.  Oh, and Dad, if you and your cronies don’t like it here, why don’t you move to China!

The other day Mt. Vernon decided it was high time their tulip-blighted burg put its mark on the international map.  A lot of towns around here are content to sink quietly into the mudflats while celebrating their past glory days, but Mt. Vernon, looking to the future, decided to seize the moment.  Think Big, the Downtown Bizness Association declared, and so, given that ‘Spirit of the Spud’ was this year’s theme and mantra, they aimed their sights rootward and prepared a full frontal shock and awe assault on the Guiness World Record for …. wait for it …. largest potato au gratin.
Well sir, they blew away the old record, the one held for just over a year by Netherlanders also eager for tuberous fame.  They nearly doubled the tonnage, now tipping the Guiness scale at 16,000 pounds, no sneezeable au gratin, that.
Now I come from the great potato state of Maine and my granddaddy was a potato farmer his entire life.  I eat the buggers fried, baked, boiled, mashed, chipped and grautined.  Spuds are no doubt a huge percentage of my genetic make-up.  And sure, I look forward to Tulip Town’s probable upcoming  art inspiration:  giant potatoes the size of glacial boulders on every street corner, sponsored by local biznesses and inflicted on all those artists weary of competing for the Tulip Fest Poster year after year after year.  Let the Spud Spirit soar, I say.  Let it shine through!  Let it heal the sick and inspire the young.  Sing the praises of the tulip colored tubers, reds and yellows and Finn purple.
A curmudgeon might have hoped for, oh, a slightly grander vision.  A cynic might fault a society fed on the pablum of American Idol instead of nutritious values.  A wag might wonder aloud if the volunteers and the donations might have served, well, needier, loftier purposes.  But I am not one of those.  No, I salute Spud City, au gratin capital of the civilized world!!  And tomorrow I’ll be calling my broker to buy up as many shares of Frito Lay as I can lay hands on.  When the chips are down, I say, buy chips.

This past weekend we gave our old record collection to a young friend who’d bought a 1959 Motorola phonograph player powered by a tube amp with a turntable and two detachable speakers that could be separated nearly 8 feet apart  to create stereophonic  sound.  Quite the innovation back in the Eisenhower era!  Her buying this 50 year old vintage electronica was probably the equivalent of me buying a Victrola when I was her age.  Progress marches on……
I’m told folks are going back to vinyl.  Oh ho, right!  And next we’ll return to the magic of 8-tracks.  You bet.  Every album I ever listened to in my lifetime would download on an I-pod and play back through a home entertainment center’s 7 surround-sound speakers, not necessarily a vast improvement over the quadrophonic leap forward of the 70’s, but nicely compact and certainly easier to use than a turntable and its scratch-and-pop aesthetic.
Sure, it was a hard psychic journey deciding to get rid of hundreds of old albums and all that rich cover art, a veritable time trip through our musical pantheon and those many nights, listening with roommates and friends.  Probably the same with our grandparents and their 2 pound 78’s listened to on Edison’s magic invention.  We have lived long enough to be retro chic, sad to say.
Now I’ve got boxes of cassette tapes, VHS tapes and beta movies.   Sure, I could save em.  Beta’s coming back, rumor has it.  You hang onto anything long enough, it becomes a collector item.  I guess that’s why here on the retro chic South End, we keep our cars up on blocks back in the weeds at the edge of the nettle forest.  When the world is ready once again for ‘K’ cars, we got the market cornered.  You want to beat the rush, order now…..  Our operators are standing by.

We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway.  Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer.  Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news.  Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit.  I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute.  Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art.  Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike.  We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans.  My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over.  The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin.

I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living in some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had.  But … damn if I can remember where we started.  Something about crummy memory, I think.  All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us.  We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

Some of us old codgers here on the South End Shangri-La are starting to cash in our chips.  After a lifetime of skimming the surface of sinning, it’s finally time, I guess, to face the music.  Oh, a few of us will probably make it to heaven but we’re in no great rush, although this lifestyle of excess and bad habits might make you think we’re on the Fast Track to hell.
Other places, you see folks buying their cemetery plots or ordering fancy marble headstones with a pithy Bible verse as a hedge against being denied entry into the Gated Community in the sky.  They make living wills and put their estates in order, plan the funeral service ahead of time with their favorite music and slides, sort of an MTV for the soon-to-be-departed.  Probably working even now on the special Facebook update and that final Tweet :  Bye, I’m dead.
Down here the boyz have our own mortuarial customs.  We like to put an obituary photo in the local newspaper stating date of birth, date of death, who got left behind and something about going now to be with Jesus.  The grieving missuz writes this.  What we do is pick the obit photograph ahead of time.  Custom dictates that it is at least 30 years old when we still had our hair and didn’t have that beergut, and most importantly it shows us proudly holding a trophy size fish.  Salmon’s good, halibut’s better.  Anything that takes both hands to hold up for the camera is best.  If necessary, a string of trout or a mess of panfish works, but only as a last resort.  The Deceased As Sportsman is the idea here, even if the sportsman’s features are blurry (the photographer was drinking and celebrating too, you see).
No, I don’t know where this custom originated, we just follow the dictums.  Most of us haven’t fished in the last 30 years.  I suppose we all hope Heaven is just one big lake, fully stocked with whopper Chinook and 150 pound halibut.  Hell, I figure, might be the same …. Only we have to clean the catch ourselves.  Until  the missuz shows up.

I bought a camera the other day.  It had an instruction manual that might as well have been a syllabus for a college course.  150 pages.  Technical?  Daunting?  Oh yeah, you bet.
I remember my first camera, a Brownie.  Had to crank the film to take the next picture.  I remember my first Polaroid.  You could watch the picture develop right before your eyes in 60 seconds.   Magic in a box.  Instamatics came next.  You have to admit, we could all take nice pictures.
My family had a movie camera.  8mm I think — we watched those home movies like they were made by Cecil B. DeMille.  About 3 minutes long, each one, but we’d wait for the next installment,  rewind the little reels,  splice them when they broke, change the projector light, all the nuisances worth the trouble.  I loved the soundlessness of them, just the whir of the projector and the old man talking over it.  I still love that.
I got myself a single lens reflex when I got out of school.  Got myself lenses and the whole rigamarole.  Took the film in to the drugstore to have it developed.  Nice photos.  Real nice photos.  Later on I got a profession I needed photos AND slides.  I’d drag along two cameras, shoot a million shots, keep maybe 6.  Carry filters, lenses, lighting equipment, tripods, light meters.  Looked like Ansel Adams on safari.
Now we got digital.  I had a little bitty camera.  Weighed about what a hummingbird weighs and did everything but stand on its head.  Dropped the images in a computer and manipulated em til they looked great   …. Or at least a whole lot better.
My new Bad Boy is digital with exchangeable lenses.  It can be programmed, it can tell time, it can compensate for fluorescent lights, it can shoot landscapes or action movies, it could run for President and probably win on the GOP ticket this year.
Photography has been one of those things in my lifetime — like aviation — that makes me shake my head in wonder.  If I ever figure out my new camera, the one that comes with an honorary PhD, I’ll probably sit back with no little pride that our generation dreamed this up and made it possible for me to actually learn how to use the thing. Well, at least til the next generation makes all of it obsolete….

You know, I grew up hearing it repeated as Gospel that government was way less efficient than the private sector.  I guess that’s why we’re hiring private contractors to fight our wars.  Why we want to pay corporations to run our schools, run our jails, maybe even  ramrod our fire and police departments.  They’ll naturally do a better job for way less money.
I’m no economist, but I need more than mantras to make me want to dismantle half of society by gutting and cutting government like it was a sacrificial cow on the altar of unbridled capitalism.  Wasn’t it GM and Ford and Chrysler, bastions, capitol B, of capitalism that just got bailed out by the federal government?  Not just bailed out, propped up, given CPR, put on life support,  brought back to life ….Oh, and brought back to profitability.
And maybe my memory is slipping, but wasn’t it the banks, the mortgage companies, the credit firms who drove this country into the worst recession in more than half a century?  Maybe they were what?  Too efficient?  Too something, that’s for sure.
We complain about government but I don’t see the heads of  government agencies or departments pulling down multi-million dollar salaries with huge mega-bonuses and sweetdeal stock options.  I guess if we ran them like businesses, we’d inflate that executive pay by, oh, a hundred times or so.  See how that helps efficiency.  Sort of like paying military contractors way more than our military men and women — maybe why we take 10 years to lose wars now.
So before I wrapped myself in the American flag and started dismantling all our government departments and offer them up like railroad right of ways to the corporations, I’d follow the money a ways and see who exactly is going to profit from that supposed increased performance.  Call me cynical and paint a bullseye on my be-hind, but I suspect it’s some of the fellows in corner suites at the top of Wall Street skyscrapers.  Even if profits don’t  go up, they’ll get a nice bloated package, you bet.  Efficiently wrapped.

SOUTH END ECO-TOURISM

No doubt all you Eco-Adventurers have got your spandex in a bunch salivating over Camano’s newest zipline ‘canopy tour’ at Kristofferson’s farm across from the Plaza Grocery.  I know, you can’t wait for the aerial clothesline through the alders and out over a spectacular vista of Camaloch’s suburbs, the Plaza stripmall and the scenic highway to the South End.
But if you think that is the final word on Aerial Adventure, hold onto your zip harness.  The Tyee Treetop Tours are opening this month too.  One quarter mile of death defying logging cables strung  over killer nettle forests, the store’s old wrecking yard, monster blackberry jungles and a pond filled with west nile mosquitoes bred in car battery water  that make piranhas look as dangerous as guppies.  This is no Thrill or Spill, this is South End history viewed from an eagle’s perspective and moving at 90 mph.  You sign our ironclad waiver of Non-Responsibility and before the ink dries, you’re rocketing above discarded appliances, rusting 1930’s automobiles, vintage logging equipment, all with a spectacular view of Tyee Store and the adjoining Art Gallery, both untouched and unimproved since they designed and built by the now famous firm of Frank Lloyd Wrong, pre-strip mall purveyors of the early pole building school of architectural design.
Tyee Treetop Tours is a virtual time machine on a cable.  Bring the kids — we’re Family Friendly.  Bring an appetite — the Tyee Rotisserie Dogs are tailor made for the courageous.  Bring a Bible — prayers never hurt.  And they’re far more potent than a liability attorney.
Tyee Treetop Tours start at the ridiculously low price of $75 dollars per adult and half price for kids.  We also offer our unique Senior Citizen Discount for you Old Timers looking for that last big thrill.  No safety harness, no admission fee.  Just sign the waiver and skip the small print.
So come down for the fun, come for the adventure or come for an education you won’t find at the community college.  Or come for all that and more!  Tyee Treetop Tours:  History at 90 mph.

Luck’s a funny thing.  Some folks don’t much believe in it – or don’t want to – since they think they’re the Captains of their own Destiny.  Me, I’m easily seasick on the storm tossed waters of my life … so I put more faith in luck than my own crummy navigational skills.  I guess living on the South End had a lot to do with it.  You find yourself on an island on the edge of a continent, you think it’s a short walk before the next move is a wet one.   I came when no one had heard of Camano, few people lived here and most of the cheap land was far down at the south end where I stumbled in one dark and stormy night.  Luck had pretty much run out, jobs were scarce and a bad marriage had foundered on the rocks thanks to the aforementioned maritime skills.
I bought a shack and 7 acres for the princely sum of $25,000, everything I had down, $225 a month for the next 15 years.  Sound cheap?  Well, I had a hard time meeting that mortgage the first few years.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the poorhouse.  Corny as an A.M. radio pop song, I fell in love, got married to my old sweetheart and fell in love too with my place, the South End and my life.  Lucky?  You bet!!
We take forks in the road all the time.  I know buddies who always wonder where the other road would’ve take them.  I don’t look back.  I don’t use the rearview mirror because it takes all my attention to drive the road I took, the one with the NEXT fork and the unexpected curve.  You ask me — and I know you didn’t —luck is part being ready for it.  It’s not a lottery ticket, it’s that small opening, that slim opportunity, that sudden chance that may not come twice, the one that veers up out of the headlights and offers, for those who are ready for it, a new game, a fresh start,  a brand new road.  Luck, I’ll admit this: it does take some skill.

The Colton Crime Capers go on week after week, month after month and year after year with reporters rolling down Camano Island from France, England, Brazil and every other country interested in international breaking news.  To say it’s a media frenzy is like saying the Gulf Spill will require some big sponges.

The South End Chamber of Little Commerce, our bastion of entrepreneurial endeavor, doesn’t really like talking to reporters about Colton, something akin to Forks denying that vampires walk their streets after dark.  I guess the realtors hate having to explain the intricacies of alarm system technologies to every prospective shack buyer.  It’s a difficult enough market as it is  … and if you were looking for property with a small airstrip behind the carriage house and a hangar for your Cessna, well, probably there are better places to retire.

Our tourism ad slogan — ‘the place to do nothing’ – always troubled us slackers down past Elger Bay Store.  We weren’t proud of unemployment and indolence.  We aren’t ashamed either, but hellfire, what kind of tourist promotion IS this?  Especially when we got the Mother of All Tourist Promotions going on for the past 3 or 4 years.  The Barefoot Burglar, the Camano Kid, the Flying Filcher, our very own international anti-hero.  The movies are being shot, the books are being written, the documentaries are being edited, the mom is hiring an entertainment lawyer, the deals are being made!  Rolling Stone has declared Camano officially the Cape Cod of the Pacific Northwest.  And we still want to be the place that does nada?  Maybe the Chamber  …. But the rest of us are ready to roll!  Tour buses, T-shirts, coffee mugs, souvenir shops:  we’re ready to cash in.  Camano, the island to do nothing?  We don’t need a new slogan, we need a new NAME.  Colton Island.  Nice ring to it.  Get off the hammock and call your commissioner today!

Paid for by the Committee to Rename Camano Island