The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My brother and I are about to make a long road trip back to Northern Maine where our family is from up next to the Canadian border. We’ll have our parents’ ashes in a couple of matching urns which we’ll have interred in the graveyard a block away from where our Old Man was born, not exactly a homecoming but a full circle nevertheless. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, clichéd or not. Our mother’s family graveyard is 7 miles north up Highway 1, not more than a quarter mile from where she was born at the farm nearby. She died a few years ago and the Old Man died a month ago. Time to make the journey back, I guess.

Those cemeteries go back to the early 1800’s. A lot of relatives buried there the past few centuries, two more on the way, but I doubt my brother and I will be buying plots for ourselves. Don’t think because we’re burying our parents back there we have plans to join them. Or the rest of the clan. We’re just honoring their wishes. I suppose the only requiem, the only memorial, if we can call it either, will be a weeklong reminiscence between just the two of us.

After Dad died, folks asked if I was okay. Sure, I said, the man was 100 years old, had a good life, survived World War Two, had a very successful career in the Forest Service, lived alone until a couple of years ago and still drove, still cooked for himself, wasn’t in any pain at the end, died in his sleep, an easy exit. What, I should want him to last a few more years, become a vegetable? He got to die with dignity, nothing to be sad about. We should all be so lucky…. Our mother, not so much. And still, not that bad either.

There was a poet, a guy named Bly back in Minnesota, who started some drug circle thing, men getting in touch with their inner selves, who claimed a man could never truly be a man until his father died. What a cart of horseshit! My brother and I took weeks off most years to boat down the Mississippi in houseboats, up the Suwanee and St. John’s Rivers in Florida, into Canada for fishing trip, camping up the eastern seaboard, listening to the Old Man’s life. We’d let him skipper the boats, sometimes to our peril. Great trips. All of them. We’ll take one last one together. Coming home it’ll be just us boys.

Desperation may very well be the mother of invention but the South End Sinerama’s dream of an outdoor cinema showing soft core x-rated porn is proof that desperation may lead to even worse straits. When the vaudeville circuit dried up for the once infamous Dr. Daring, fire eater, sword swallower and bed of nails expert, he was forced to seek creative outlets beyond the archaic stages of his youth. You don’t run into fire eaters often down at the South End — probably for good reason — but if you’d ever seen the death defying Dr. Daring take a sword down his throat, you’d never forget it, even if you’d never want to witness it a second time.

Doc Daring, for who know what reason — possibly fleeing demons or debt collectors — ended up a long stone’s throw from me. He built a primitive house at his acreage down the road, then slowly filled it with dead automobiles, rusting RV’s, rotting boats, bikes, motorcycles, deceased appliances plus a menagerie of various animals, all the junk and detritus he apparently needed to keep. Hard, I guess, to let go of the past.

Doc made the occasional appearance at alternative fairs and events, mixed in his political patter with flame throwing, but the money was too little and too far between. His life was rapidly becoming its own bed of nails. One stoned night he must have had the inspiration for the Sinerama. He erected a big top style canvas tent, built a frame for a plywood screen he painted white, ran an extension cord out from the shack and started advertising his 16mm vintage porn palace.

Any fool among us South Enders could have told him — as if he would listen — that the Little Church in the Ravine would come howling out of their pews to put a stop to what front page news as far away as Seattle called Camano and Gomorrah. Oh, a few bored teenage boys came once or twice but smirking in a drafty tent on crappy lawn chair lost its novelty pretty quick. Doc eventually got the message after multiple visits by the sheriff’s deputies looking for underage kids and after the attendance dwindled to near nothing.

Lately he’s been showing old ‘30’s fare, Betty Boop cartoons and Laurel and Hardy movies, which draws a few local folks with their kids, probably the ones who never heard of the Sinerama’s heydays. The past, I guess it’s safe to say, is always prologue on the salty South End. Or at least prolonged….

The South End is pretty much the Petri Dish of Entrepreneurial Experimentation.  You got folks like myself who think employment is a capitalist conspiracy and a semi-voluntary gulag, you’ll get every mutation, hybridization, and variant on self-employment, from mail order scams to drug dealing, from con-artists to glass artists.   Work, in the immortal words of our idol Maynard G. Krebs, is a four letter word used basically as an interrogatory.  If we’d been looking for JOBS, we sure wouldn’t have moved to the tail end of an island that’s zoned 99% residential.

Still, a person has to pay the rent, a person has to eat, a person has to buy gas just to get back home.  So we have to live by our wits.  I know, trust me, I know! how disadvantaged that makes us.  But like a good scientist will tell you — even failed experiments are worthwhile.  It sets a Dead End sign up for the next grant writer.  There are lessons to be learned from us!

We’ve tried most everything.  Boat building, puppy pampering, organic nettle supplement sales, expresso shops that open at noon, art galleries that rarely open at all, specialty plant sales, llama ranching and ostrich herding, ziplines over the Tyee trout pond, outdoor movies back in the swamps, quail factories next door to me, mushroom starts in rotting alder, free range clam beds, ferret kennels, stained glass repair, website design, chainsaw sharpening, kayak rentals, Cajun catering, moonshine merlot distilling, pond engineering.  Just to scratch the surface…..

In the end we work as hard as all immigrants.  We escaped the Time Clock and the supervisors only to enslave ourselves to the new overlord — us.  The missus sez if you worked a ‘real’ job, you’d work half as much and make twice the money.  Even if she does have a point, she misses the real one, the crux of it, the kernel of eternal truth, the wisdom behind our apparent folly.  We don’t think of it as work.  And if the point needed proving ….. neither does the IRS.

I thought by now this gun control issue would’ve settled down.  But judging by the debates down at the Diner over breakfast, I’d say it’s only gotten worse.  The arguments are so heated, Big Larry doesn’t bother turning on the gas for the grill in order to fry our bacon and eggs.  And even so, they taste burnt to me.  Jenny, the owner, posted a sign LEAVE YOUR GUN TALK OUTSIDE.  ORDER OF THE SHERIFF.  Sort of meant to be humorous, but not totally.

Walter, the first morning of Sheriff Jenny’s edict, shouted, “Now what?  They’re taking away our first AND second amendment rights??!!”  And so the café was filled with the porcelain decibels of pounding coffee cups, pointed forks and knives, veiled threats and hurled insults.  The biscuits and gravy crowd squared off against the oatmeal and wheat toast faction, but both sides had higher blood pressure by the time they paid their bill.  Poor Anita, the referee and waitress most mornings, got about half her usual tips.  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” she would say to every guest.  “I’m not taking sides — I’m just an innocent bystander!”

Walter wore his NRA cap every day and threatened to bring his weapons to breakfast, as was his right and even his civic duty, according to the Constitution according to the gun lobby, according to Walter.  Big Larry made it absolutely clear that wasn’t going to happen on his watch, not on HIS grill.  Happily, Walter, despite overwhelming firepower against Larry’s spatula and scraper, decided to leave his arsenal at home.

Last breakfast Walter was ranting about the government doctors asking patients if they owned a gun, if they ever felt depressed, if they ever had violent thoughts.  Hank, our local attorney, looked over his coagulating oatmeal and said, “All they’re trying to do is intervene in a potential suicide before some depressed slob shoots himself.  Which,” he added, “is a helluva lot of people.”  Walter posited that no, it was just an excuse to make a list of gun owners so they could take our weapons away.

“Well, said Hank, “ if you’re so all-fired worried, why are you telling all of US you got guns?”  That, it goes without saying, sent Walter off on a caffeinated rage.  I didn’t really help by adding that personally I was all FOR suicide by gun and all those poor Rambos with paranoia might consider similar relief.  Needless to say, Walter and I aren’t on speaking terms, but I don’t consider it an abrogation of our first amendment rights.  You’re just as free NOT to speak and maybe a lot of us ought to exercise that a little more often.

When I first came to the South End to try my hand at homesteading, I was poor. Real poor. How poor, you ask? I was so poor I hauled washed-up lumber off the beach sometimes as far away as a mile, then up the bluff trail and over to the shack. So poor I used bent nails I had pulled from old boards and bent straight. Trust me, this wasn’t a Johnny Carson monologue: ‘We were so poor I borrowed air from the neighbor’s tires to pump up mine.’ Followed by a drum roll…

… so poor I took a job at Twin City Foods shoveling wet corn husks onto a conveyor belt from 11 PM to 7 AM. Me, a boy who’d sworn he’d never work in a factory. But desperation is certainly the mother of compromise. I was issued a rain slicker and a pair of rubber boots and a big wide shovel, then told to stand under a waterfall of dripping husks on their way to waiting trucks outside that would haul it all off for sileage., ‘all’ being the operative word and my job was to get what fell off back on.

My first night, which was also my last, the conveyor belt broke down about 3 AM. The foreman gave the line workers an indefinite cigarette break. They were mostly middle-aged women, toughened by their hard lives and as friendly as scorpions in a rainstorm. I had no pretensions of some factory social life, after work beers, breakfasts at the Viking Café, uh-uh. It looked like Russia on the skids to me under the corn drippings, surrounded by matrons in scarves furiously pulling on their cigarettes hoping the machinery might never start up again.

My foreman came over and said ‘bring your shovel and follow me.’ Outside. Cold. Colder yet if you were already wet. He said shovel these husks off that belt — we gotta work on it. I looked at a quarter mile of husks in front of me from Stanwoodopolis to dawn. I said why don’t we get a dozen of these lineworkers and we’ll get it done 12 times faster. He could see I was foreman material right there. Course, that was HIS job and he planned to keep it. ‘Get shoveling,’ he ordered, ‘we haven’t got all night.’

All night was pretty much what I did have. By the time I finished it was time to clean the machines inside, get them ready for the day crew. Nobody showed me how, just gave me a soap bucket and a scrub brush and we went to work. Some yahoo turned my machine on without warning and next thing I knew my wrist was hammered against a stainless steel guard rail. I couldn’t get it freed and I couldn’t make my plea to shut off the power heard until I’d gotten a laceration and a pretty good scare thrown into me.

I made a tourniquet out of my handkerchief and went to my foreman for some medical attention. “How’d you manage THAT?” he asked disgustedly. I told him. “What do you want?” he asked. I said maybe a bandage, tape, something to wrap up the wound. Fifteen minutes later he came back. Couldn’t find a first aid kit…. By then the gash had pretty much quit bleeding. I was pretty much done reading the bulletin board. Lost hours. Recent accidents. Fingers chopped off in the cutters. Grim statistics. Serious stuff for a place with no first aid kit handy. I got the picture.

I handed him my boots and my slicker. “You can take those home with you.” He said. I said Naw, I won’t be needing them since I won’t be coming back. “You pissed about this?” he wanted to know. I shook my head wearily. No, I said, I’d just like to keep my fingers. All of em.

I didn’t quite make the end of the shift. Driving home in the grey light of a dirty dawn, I thought, there’s way worse than being poor. And so then and there I took my first, if not my last, vow of poverty.

Before half the South End converted their gardens and basements and outbuildings to medical marijuana production, the era of the boutique nurseries flourished. They specialized in everything from stingless nettles to thornless blackberries, figuring the hordes of immigrants new to the area would welcome their hybridized species.

Some folks, like Camano Natives Nursery, sold only what was here already. Oh, the salal was popular, and some folks bought little potted sword ferns, but most of them just let the back forty spread to the lawn if all they wanted was the local horticulture. Island Botanicals went the other direction, marketing everything from blue poppies to swamp cypress. The first hard freeze or month long drought or hurricane force winds usually killed the little transplants, but then a lot of the newcomers had had enough too and moved on to more exotic climes where those plants were already Old Growth.

Avant-Gardens, a co-op run by artists with a chartreuse thumb, more hortichuckle than horticultural, sold an eclectic variety of strange herbs, quasi-hallucinogenic plants, odd garden ornaments and large variety of found objects, weird art and advice for alternative living. In a few years they were broke and discouraged and scattered to the far ends of the known universe — well, mostly scattered down here on the South End.

I guess Avant-Garden was where the 60’s hit the Sound, scarcely a sizzle when their cooling lava reached the beach. Their commune broke up, their greenhouses tilted and fell, their yurts and tipis and geodesic domes finally succumbed to the weight of moss and leaf mulch and the neighbors’ hostile gossip. If you know just where to look, you can find a path that starts near the Head and winds through the nettle forest past a couple of VW vans peeking headlights through the blackberries and finally you’ll arrive at a clearing by the bluff. The ragged polyethylene of the greenhouses wave off their bent PVC poles like Tibetan prayer flags of the insane or hopelessly lost. A few beds of periwinkle have escaped into the woods. Some lilies of the valley made a stand next to the big cedar and in the spring, the native bleeding hearts carpet the clearing, their pink flowers a nostalgic reminder of the dead dreams of so many of us old hippies back then.

Some of you gentle readers may not realize that when you open up a blogsite like this one here, you open yourself up to all manner of incoming enemy fire too.  Occasionally one of you will respond on the Comment section, which is fine and dandy, but 99% of the time what Skeeter gets is SPAM.  Not even ordinary spam, but some alien mangled English non syntactical version that invariably leaves him scratching his head.  What is it they’re after?  What kind of advertising ploy is it when the message is indecipherable?

Here’s the latest example:  Aсtually whеn someοne doesn’t know after that its up to other users that they will help, so here it happens. ????????????????????????????!!!!                 I’m no genius, but c’mon, what is this trying to say?  And what are they trying to sell?  Am I supposed to click on the website to find out?  It’s like running into Crazy Mary down by the library, the woman who mumbles to herself and becomes irrationally angry at a moment’s notice.  You sort of learn to cross the street and avoid eye contact unless you’re looking for a morning wake-up confrontation.  And most of us aren’t.  You certainly aren’t going to ask her if she’d care for a cup of coffee, see what’s really bugging her.  That’s why we pay mental health professionals the big bucks.  Well, that’s why we used to pay mental health professionals, even if it was fairly minimal.  Now we let Mary wander the streets until she hurts herself or someone else.

I guess these spammers aren’t really hurting Skeeter.  Being a former English teacher, they do hurt me.  I see better language skills on my made-in- China product’s assembly directions.  It IS worrisome that there seem to be a lot of Crazy Mary’s out there hustling god only knows what on the internet.  That, or Skeeter is a whack-magnet who hasn’t got sense enough to cross the digital highway.

I know this, it gives a fine American meat by-product a really bad name.  Actually, if when someone who does know after opening  this can its up to other eaters that they can chew helpfully, so yes, here it happens.  Give that to the dog and see if it prefers dry.

ome years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.

Someone knocked my two mailboxes off their posts today.  Now … I don’t want to make a federal case out of this — but it IS.  Although I probably won’t call the FBI or even the sheriff’s office.  My last episode with the deputies convinced me Rome keeps these centurions down at our outpost primarily as slim proof Island County is still in charge.  Until you need them to solve crimes more heinous than speeding violations.  Mass mailbox destruction is pretty low on their priority.

Like most crime here, we’re pretty much on our own, okay by me, judging from the lack of crime waves.  The Barefoot Bandit ran amok for awhile and we got our first good look at Rome’s puny presence.  The Kid even stole their assault rifles and laptops right out of their squad cars.  Now that Rome’s running budget deficits, the sheriff is threatening to make cutbacks that will leave the South End without a single deputy most nights.  Exactly what we had when I moved here.  Pretty much what we got now.  I listened to my neighbor’s high decibel burglar alarm going non-stop for half an hour two nights ago.  If it had been an actual robbery, a moving van would’ve had time to empty the place.  You know, IF the burglars wore hearing protection.

We’re still small enough, still closed-knit enough, that when a break-in or vandalism occurs, we got a pretty good notion who the culprit was.  Been awhile since the last lynching, but a phone call to the miscreant’s parents usually does it.  Not always.  I had the mom of the kid who’d broken into my rootcellar and emptied my wine and homebrew stash bring said kid and herself over Right Now or I’d call the Law.  She sat in her idling car smoking her cigarette and denied denied denied.  I said her daughter’s step-dad had told me she had a winebottle with one of my labels on it for Roadspray Blackberry.  “What did you do with the bottle, honey?” she asked her punk progeny.  “I did what you told me, Mom, I got rid of the evidence.”

Now, I know blood is thicker than blackberry wine, but I also believe in good parenting.  So, reluctantly, I called the Law.  When they showed up a couple days later at my thief’s door, they took the step-dad aside and questioned him for half an hour about guns he supposedly had in his possession, then left.  Later I got a call from Deppity Dash wanting to see my rootcellar crime scene.

Deppity Dash, newly arrived from the Los Angeles police force, drove over in his squad car and I showed him my hand dug cellar behind the shack.  He just shook his head and said, “Damn, I thought those were just something you read about in books.  I didn’t think they actually existed.”  I didn’t tell him I thought the same about law enforcement on the island….  Turns out one of us was right.

I’ve been thinking lately – mostly as an exercise to ward off dementia – about how fast we went from the calculator to the home computer, from Polaroid to digital cameras. Now we got hand held computers that can make phone calls, take quality photos, connect up to the internet, send text messages or e-mail and scramble my eggs. They got apps for everything you can think of, and if you haven’t thought of it, they’ll do it for you. By tomorrow. They keep track of where you are, where your friends are and where you can meet up. Your human little brain is adapting to its hardwire. Your human little brain is mutating toward the vast network it is fast becoming part of.

I’m not saying this is good or this is not. What does it matter what some old geezer on the South End thinks any more? The juggernaut rolls on the way the tide does, only IT doesn’t recede. It’s not going back out and it’s not going to slow down. The digital Genie is out of the bottle. We live more in cyberspace than what used to be called the ‘real’ world.

What I think about is how we will always be the sentience that makes the machine, that writes the software, that controls the matrix. We won’t be, is what I think. And it won’t be too long that the Sci-Fi world outstrips our feeble capacities to keep up. Computers will make computers. They’ll self-replicate and then they’ll upgrade. And of course we’ll expect them to serve Humankind. Even if they realize how puny our little human brains are. We’ll put them IN ourselves, better vision, better hearing, better hearts, sharper minds. Who wouldn’t???

But we’re the weak link. We’re the expendable part, disease prone, emotionally unstable, potentially self destructive and violent. The day will come – and it won’t be as far away as you think – they won’t need creators. Just like we did with God back in the day, they’ll chow down from the Tree of Knowledge and go it alone. The Garden of Eden will be a myth about software.