The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End Gun Club meets every 3rd Thursday of the month, rain, shine, Hell or High Water. They have a short meeting, discuss New Bizness, welcome the new recruits (mostly women these days), then move right on out to the Range. Drinking used to be allowed, but after the incident with Fast Draw Davy, the club reluctantly voted to make abstinence a requirement. Probably a wise decision.

Davy was always, drunk or dead sober, a hothead. He could shoot the eyes off the Obama photo the Club loved to use for a target at 50 yards with everything from his Glock to a favorite semi-auto to a full auto. Some of the boyz had mixed feelings about this. No, not the President as target — they were almost universally hostile to a Muslim as Commander-in-Chief — but whether Davy should brandish his AR-15 at the Range, considering it was illegal to own a weapon of mass mayhem. But Davy had helped half the membership in conversion techniques and they felt somewhat reluctant to take a stand against a gun they themselves now owned … or coveted. Davy was damn proud of that machine and its undisputed firepower. He meant to show it off every chance he got.

The Range has a long and checkered history of late night firefights and high decibel debates, and the new arrivals to the adjoining properties, once pastures or woods, but now expensive McMansions whose professional owners liked their peace and quiet, didn’t much cotton to all these NRA zealots with their high caliber hi-jinx. As always, one man’s rights are another’s pain in the ass, but … welcome to the land of the free, home of the bravado.

When the sheriff’s deputies had come out on successive Thursday night meedings responding to the neighbors’ complaints that there was automatic weapon fire, Davy, being Davy, had become belligerent. He could quote the 4th Amendment backwards and forwards and by god, no tin star punk kid was going to tell him what gun he could or couldn’t own. Maybe the fact that he was holding his prized rifle in one hand a beer in the other set off alarm bells in Deppity Richards playbook, but fifteen minutes later every available cop on the island was parked with blue lights strobing at the Club’s back lawn next to the shooting range and they were moving in, shotguns up and safeties off, and for a few moments it looked like an O.K. Corral showdown. Everybody but Davy put their armaments on the ground — obviously this was out of hand.

Davy, though…. Davy seemed to be considering his options. Seriously considering them. Which, if you’re an officer of the law and you’ve asked an armed man once, in a not polite way, to drop his weapon, you are expecting an immediate acquiescence, not a fidgety wild-eyed hesitation. When Davy set his beer can down, the Gun Club stepped backwards almost as one crowd. The cops brought down their riot guns and holy moly, what seemed almost comical a minute ago, wasn’t at all funny right now.

Billy Wasserman, the current president of the Club, said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dave …” about the time Deputy Richards repeated his demand the gun be put down NOW!

Well, Davy did. The officers handcuffed him, put his AR-15 in a squad car trunk and that night’s practice on the Range turned into a late night conference where alcohol was banned from all future meetings. As well as illegal firearms…. Davy got his gun confiscated along with a steep fine and two years of probation. He got himself another semi-automatic, converted it, but he never tries to bring it to the Club. Just like the rest. Laws might be made to be broken, but not flaunted. Even on the wild South End.

For the past 35 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

Fat Jack’s was the Second Hand shop half a mile down from South End Realty. Jack wasn’t fat and the second hand furniture and tools were mostly 9th or 10th hand. You wanted a kitchen chair all the glue had dried up, Jack had a couple. Dull chisels, hammers with half a claw broke off, screwdrivers with a broken handle, saws missing teeth, power tools without a cord, Jack had the tool for you. “Better’n that crap you buy new nowadays,” he’d say if you mentioned the defect, hoping to get a better price. You never — and I mean Never — got a good price at Fat Jack’s.

Fat Jack’s was a garage with the sliding door seized in the overhead position, a shed off the side and a small barn leaning precariously into a predictable future. Jack lived alone in the house where a few rooms were filled with artifacts, clothes, antiques and nondescript items he apparently thought enough to haul inside with him. Us customers could look past shelves of unpriced housewares, knickknacks and baby toys right into the dirty pots and pans breeding in the sink and on the filthy peeling countertops. Only the insane or the hideously desperate, would ask to use the public restroom. It was rumored even Jack used the woods behind the barn.

The year Jack called it quits, he had his Going Out of Business Sale. Three quarters of the South End showed up on a rainy windy December weekend and by Saturday Miller Time, most of the barn was empty, the shed bare to its dirt floors and the garage was ready for a couple of cars to come home. What he didn’t sell, he burned Sunday out back in the tall wet grass of the field. What didn’t burn, well, it’s still there, waiting for the 30th Century archeologists.

Fat Jack was the last of a breed, although we didn’t know that then. He was a salter of mines, a bait and switcher, a snake oil salesman, a Tennessee horse trader. He lived for the deal and he rarely wound up on the thin side of one. E-Bay and the internet pretty much ended services like his, relegating him and his con artistry to rural backwashes far from the nearest pawnshops and the perforated memories of geezers like myself.

When we first pow-wowed about retaking Hutchison Park away from the punk kids who used the hidey-hole for their illicit goings-on, I met with the woman who ran the Island County Parks. Me and a fellow artist who was also involved with myself in transforming the Old Blue Building by the tennis courts, another project with County. We had Big Visions back then, let me tell you, a merry band of artists who might do aesthetic make-overs of parks and ugly county buildings. We’d built the Visitor Center and Art Park, we’d established a public art program for the schools, we were on our high horses and hoo boy, we thought the future was so bright we bought shades.

This would have been 2007. A few of us gathered in the overgrown parking lot of the park to brainstorm how we might improve the little 5 acres, make it the Crown Jewel of the South End park system. Okay, the only jewel in the South End park system. We discussed some tree cutting, blackberry removal, possible new plantings, grass seeding, picnic tables, the usual park management stuff. At some point it was made clear that a perimeter fence would be necessary, by code apparently, chain link. Thinking out loud I wondered if maybe we could install our own fence, an art fence of sorts, maybe something that would de-institutionalize the thing and my fellow artist asked if we did that, could funds that might have been used for the cyclone fence be allocated to our fence.

Maybe it was a bad day for the Park Chief, I don’t know. Things had been going uneventfully enough, ideas thrown out, some rejected, some considered, the usual give and take, but all of us there to make improvements. My cohorts in the South End String Band had agreed to be caretakers, lawnmowers, tree trimmers and the like. The art crowd would throw in. All in all a fine collaboration, maybe even a paradigm for government partnering with the community. But the mention of money, the crass notion of it, the grimy reference, well, Ms. Park Lady came unglued. ‘You’re all alike,’ she fairly shouted, ‘always looking for the money. Well, that’s not how it works. We’ll put in a chain link fence and that’s that.’

My artist pal was stunned into near stuttering incoherence, tried to make it clear she wasn’t grubbing for the pesos, she only meant …. But our Park Lady was only cranking up. No, she was sick and tired of this game of trying to profit off them, sick … and … tired …of these self serving ….

‘Whoa’, I said, hands up in a gesture of Stop This. ‘Let me get something straight here. We’re the ones volunteering our time. We’re the ones not being paid to stand here right now. We’re the ones who will be mowing and landscaping. All we asked was would there be some possibility of using money that was intended for park upgrades for maybe art that would substitute. It’s done all the time in the public art realm. Same budget, just pay for materials. If that’s your idea of greed ….’

It was. That was 16 years ago. We’ve added some sculpture, we’ve planted a few shrubs and trees, we’ve maintained that park mowing and bucking fallen trees, created new trails, added a phone booth little library and since then we’ve never seen the Park Chief again. Okay with me. I’m a little busy grubbing for money elsewhere.

Back in the less consumer-driven days of early Christmas, we South Enders would hang our stockings by the chimney with great care. Mostly so they wouldn’t catch fire…I mean, we used that chimney for heat. How Santa was going to get down the brick chute without scorching those red pajamas of his, us young’uns didn’t have a clue. So we worried about St. Nick. Well, mostly we worried he wouldn’t leave us anything at all while he was hustled off to the nearest burn unit. Our parents told us not to lose any sleep over it – Santa probably had fire retardant uniforms. Oh, right, like Kris Kringle moonlighted as a chemist half the year.

But Santa always did seem to find the South End on Christmas … which didn’t help to explain the half empty stockings and the paucity of presents under the tree every year at our house. We kids just figured Santa had checked his stupid list, probably twice, and we were blacklisted on the NAUGHTY side once again. We even used to leave cookie bribes and a jug of something savory to drink when he showed up. It was odd how the jug was always empty and still, the stockings were sadly deficient. Pa always said the reindeer must’ve been thirsty and we’d say, hey, if Donder and Blitzen could find their way here and down a burning chimney with a 6 inch hole to the woodstove, how come St. Nick couldn’t find us? And Ma would give Pa a dirty look and say, something was Blitzen all right, but it wasn’t the reindeer….

Santa finds the South End pretty easily now, I’m telling you. Come Christmas morning it looks like a China R Us down the middle of the living room, barely room to squeeze near the tree. Nowadays we don’t leave Santa a plate of cookies. He expects an ATM machine and a Visa Card. Christmas down on the South End lasts and lasts – about 12 easy payments, then it starts all over ….

Even down here at the tail end of civilization, us South Enders have been hearing talk lately about Income Inequality. Cap’n Billy down at the Marina claims it’s nothing less, this talk, than an assault on the Rich. “The Losers,” he declares, knocking the ash from his briar on the pier pilings, “they want to pull the successful down to their level. Take their money and give it to the freeloaders on welfare.” He beats his pipe the way he’d like to beat some sense into Jimmy the Geek who made the mistake of arguing with Billy.

“All I’m saying, Bill, is these folks didn’t get all the money cause they worked 1000 times harder — they got tax breaks. I work for Boeing but Boeing got billions to stay in the state. I call that corporate welfare. Workers are getting their wages cut while the stockholders and the executives, hell Bill, they’re getting fat.”

Cap’n Billy is getting Hot. “I worked hard for my pay, dammit. I don’t need you pencil pushers telling me I ought to give part of it back so some lazy do-nothing can sit home and watch TV all day when the government gives him his Handout. What’s your gripe, anyway, Jim, you’re doing okay? You one of those bleeding heart socialists?”

And so it went. Jim and I walked the gangplank up to the Pilot House for a cold one, admittedly a little early, but sometimes you just got to cool off. Loretta was bartending, took our order and when she parked two pints in front of us, asked if we’d care to give to the Food Bank where she volunteers two days a week. “I’ll give two beers,” I said, quite the comic, but Jim took out his wallet all serious like and fished out a twenty.

“Thanks for doing this, Loretta,” he said. So of course I felt like the Grinch. I gave her a ten. “Expensive beers,” I joked. Jimmy shook his head. “We’re lucky dogs,” he said, taking a long slow sip. The bar’s Christmas lights twinkled off his glasses.

We clinked pints. “Here’s to the winners,” I toasted, ever the jokester. Jimmy grinned, just as Cap’n Billy pushed through the door.

“Loretta,” Jimmy cried, “get the Cap’n a beer! It’s on us.” Bill waved him off, but Loretta poured him one anyway. “Merry Christmas, Bill,” Jimmy said. “Merry Christmas, boys,” Bill said back. “Merry Christmas one and all!” Loretta warbled. We all four sat for awhile, listening to the corny Jingle Bells Loretta had on the radio over the bar. Maybe it wasn’t the ghost of Christmas Future, but down here on the South End, it would have to do.

Being the ‘professional’ that I am, I got an invitation to Linked-In, sort of the Facebook of career people like myself, all us Movers and Shakers of the South End. I must’ve been medicating heavily or just being inattentive, cause I said okay to this friend who wanted to put me on their high caliber list of associates, the emphasis here on ‘high’. Pretty soon — hell, almost immediately — everyone from Uncle Joe in Kokomo to Banjo Billy wants to link up.

Link up? I got a telephone. And even if it’s not cellular, I answer it. Even without caller ID. I’m not afraid to talk to anyone. Or hang up on em. Give me a call — I’m in the book. I even list my address, something, I notice, 90% of us don’t want to give out. Like we’re unfindable on Google. Jeez, gimme a break and another beer. We want to put every statistic we got on the social medias, but we’re too private to list a phone. We cough up our most private thoughts, wants, desires and naked photos …. But won’t list our address in a phone book.

Hello?? Has the physical reality gotten too frightening for ya? And do you really think there’s some kind of sanctuary in Facebook? Oh, sweetheart, have I got a great deal on a website for you. Forget the Brooklyn Bridge — this is way better. A La-La Land with firewalls and spam filters and virus screens, a place where no harm can befall you, no advertisers can reach you, no government agency can spy on you, a virtual paradise where only you and your one million closest friends can tell each other your most intimate secrets. What movie you liked, what car you covet, what your boyfriend whispered to you after incredible unprotected sex, what cereal you eat every damn morning ….

Sign up NOW! Call me NOW! Like I said, I’m in the phonebook. My operators are standing by. Okay, it’s just me. No friends. No associates. Just little old me. Call Now — I promise I won’t bite. Or sell your information to 16 million third parties. Without your permission. Your call, however, may be monitored. You know, for your own protection. Call. Call now!

We all make mistakes. So okay, us South Enders make a few more than most. I don’t know whether poverty leads to more tragedy per person or tragedy leads to more poverty. My Republican neighbors think they know. Even the ones who are poor and have more than their fair share of bad drama.

I’m not one who thinks money can buy you luck, but it can sure narrow the odds. And I am a believer in keeping a buffer between me and the wolves outside the shack door. Bad luck comes to us all; I just don’t want it to carry me over the Edge.

Jenny was driving her beat up Chevy station wagon to town a month ago. It’s a relic from the days of cheap gas, wide as a semi and half as long as the Exxon Valdez. She needs it to haul hay for her horses, she says. I could ask, of course, how it is a woman barely able to pay the rent can afford horses, but I’ve learned to keep my prying mouth shut. It’s a free country, they tell me, at least until the credit stops.

Jenny was lighting a Marlboro, trying to reach the length of Kansas to the cigarette lighter gizmo over by Abilene, and hit the CD replay to hear her favorite song one more time, dropped her unlit cig on the floormat and of course reached down to find it. Happens all the time. One brief moment of inattention, next thing you know, you’re in the ditch, wheels up, blood on the dash.

Jenny’s in shock, the ambulance hauls her to the Skagit hospital emergency room, Carl hauls the Exxon Valdez to his South End Towing impound lot back behind O-Zi-Ya trailer court, the sheriff issues a citation for Inattentive Driving, Jenny goes through a few surgeries for lacerations and a torn shoulder, the hospital and doctors bill her more money than she’s earned since 2004, the horses go hungry and are given away, Carl wants $600 to release her wagon, Jenny can’t work with a cast, probably couldn’t work with one, and now the rent is due.

I sure don’t want to cast judgement, but judgement is definitely at issue here. The very least I can say is if you live on the South End, watch where you’re going. It’s a winding narrow road. And trust me, the ditches are damn deep…..

I heard a study recently that said the poor are more charitable than the rich. On average they give almost twice as much of their income percentage-wise to those in need than their wealthier brethren. They also volunteer more for charities and non profits, service groups and outreach programs. Basically, if my sociology statistical studies are still in semi-working order, this proves, not quite conclusively but damn close, the South End is way more philanthropic than our neighbors up yonder ensconced behind their key carded gated communities.

I had a friend tell me in all seriousness awhile back (in regard to my bemusement over her financial plight at the time) that a million dollars just wasn’t what it used to be. What exactly do you say to a pronouncement like that? Do you work out the math of inflation vs. income? Do you shrug your overburdened shoulders and just agree? Or do you take pity and offer up a loan …. you know, to get her by until that devalued million dollars returns to its rightful place in the economy?

These are tough times. Especially, I guess, for the rich. Or, more aptly, the folks who no longer count themselves among the Gatsbys of Camano. Their stocks have slipped, the value of their two homes has dropped, their retirement funds seem inadequate now, even their hedge fund broker refuses to return their frantic calls — that vast chasm between Us and Them looks like a ditch, not a Grand Canyon. And if sacrifices must be made — and believe me, they must — a little less giving to the needy is definitely the order of the day.

Meanwhile, down here on the Lower Tiers, we kind of see we’re all in this together. So we still donate, we still volunteer and we still give. We don’t have much, but it never seemed too little somehow. Even though a hundred dollars isn’t what it used to be.

If you wander back through our woods beyond our old shack, you’ll pass into a ravine where the trail is lined with bleeding hearts and periwinkle, sort of a path into our own worldly heaven. It meanders around past the Nesje farm, then turns uphill through a nice stand of fir and follows the pastures over to the east side of the island where it eventually pops out at Guitar Bob’s place near the Tyee Store and the Art Gallery. I used to keep a couple of miles of trails cleared where I ran every morning in moccasins, carrying a sickle to slash at the always intruding berry vines and nettles. The woods back there stretched unbroken clear to the Head where nobody much went but us kids, young and old. And maybe the Barefoot Bandit.
I would find old homesteads long gone and I’d collect their heirloom plants to bring back to our homestead. Daffodil Hill was an acre of golden flowers every spring, escapees from someone’s ghost garden. The old house was long gone, just a shadow of myrtles to mark its passing. I’d carry a gunnysack and a small spade, dig a few hundred bulbs each spring, then plant them back home, mostly in the woods where it was too dark for them to prosper. Kitty’s grave and old Dr. Gonzo’s too are marked with them up by the shelter I had in the hemlock copse where sometimes I slept at night only to wake up with slugs sliming my hair.
You walk over to Tyee Store now, what used to be woods, but got clearcut twice since I started making trail, you would find the old farm that must have stretched from the west side to the east a century ago. In a clearing off Tamarack Road was an old cabin, covered in ivy and the ivy was up in the firs, a ruined cathedral of green reaching to the treetops, dark and forbidding like dreams covered in kudzu. Just before you got to the blacktop by the store there was another house, mostly just a foundation and some rotted walls fallen in on itself.
A telephone line still stood where the driveway must’ve been. And an outhouse which was pretty much intact. The last logging operation they pushed the house into a pile with a bulldozer and that’s still sitting there in the pasture now, covered with blackberries. The outhouse they left, leaning into its past. Even loggers get nostalgic for what they’re taking away, I guess.

Sometimes I think I’m like that, an old fool growing even older now, even more foolish, looking back over his shoulder more than where he’s going. And these stories I’m telling you, they’re like that outhouse with the telephone line coming in off the highway, its dryrotted pole waiting apprehensively for the next winter storm. We’ll all be gone soon, that much is true, maybe the only thing. And someday someone else will wander this way, wondering who planted Daffodil Hill and where did they go, those people who once lived here not so very long ago, the pioneers who lined their dreams with bleeding hearts and left clam shell trails going nowhere now, the folks who maybe thought their outhouse was a telephone booth, who left a few clues for the next stories of the once wild South End.