The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

There must have been a time, not too long ago, but before mass media, when life was lived in small communities or neighborhoods somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. A time when folks could fashion a table or chair, write their own music and play it on an instrument they made. A time when they might build their own house even, weave a blanket or sew a dress, stitch a quilt. All of this without measuring their effort against the best artisans, the most professional craftspeople, the finest musicians and poets and luthiers across the globe. Which is what we do now ….

When I graduated college with a degree in English and one in Sociology, I decided to chuck it all and move to an old farm in Northern Wisconsin, then a commune in the Ozarks and finally ended up in a shack here on the southern end of an island at the western edge of the continent. My newfound career was basically to be a hippie, get myself back the land and set my soul free. Which didn’t sound corny to me then and it doesn’t sound corny to me now.

What I discovered, trying to escape career and responsibilities, was that hippiedippiedom was a hard path, not the laid back stoner life I’d imagined. The shack was drafty, the roof leaked, dry rot was winning from inside while nature was attacking from the outside. Being a bum is damn hard work. But gradually I learned some survival skills. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, tree felling, auto repair. I built additions, sheds, cabinets. Learned stained glass to replace the plastic sheeting in some of the windows, gardened, plunked on a banjo, built a sailboat and eventually built a new house up on the hill above the shack. Hippie ethics don’t demand you build like a pro — they aren’t interested in competition against the rest of the civilized world.

But every project, every goofy cabinet chainsawed into existence was a small success, a tiny miracle. Relatives shook their heads, guests too. Friends chalked it up to prolonged adolescence. Me? I was a kid with no skillsets, just the drive to live my life on my own terms, half assed as it was.

I’m old now, 75 and a half as we kids would answer when asked. Occasionally I look at my handiwork over those years and I too shake my head. “Good enough” was my motto. Getting high on getting by. Once in a while now I find myself slipping into comparisons with, oh, a really good woodworker. Or a fine maker of guitars. Or a professional boatbuilder. Or a contractor whose houses are square and sturdy. But I resist that with all my slacker might! That kind of thinking is nothing but a prescription for the blues.

We live in a world of extreme specialization. Whatever task you undertake, most likely you will come up short to the professionals, the folks who dedicated themselves to one undertaking, who spent a lifetime perfecting their craft.

We hippies don’t do that. I didn’t do that. In my three quarters of a century, nearly 50 years of them here on the island, I dabbled in everything from art to music, writing to carpentry, boat building to housebuilding, banjo making to furniture construction, guitar luthiery to cabinetry. Was I really good at any of this? Probably not. But I wasn’t doing it as a competition. I was doing it for the joy of doing it. Even if it was half assed. So when I play the banjo I made, I don’t think, gee, if I’d only dedicated my life to banjo luthiery, this banjo would be so much better. It’s perfectly fine, it’s hand made by me and it’s the perfect metaphor for my life. There’s too much else to do. And not enough time to do it.

Nancy came out of Jolene’s Boutique and Salon’s breakroom in a foul mood, snapping the plastic apron on her chair back with a loud retort that sent Ronald’s client upright underneath her dryer. “Whoa,” Ronald said, “someone’s in a crispy mood.”

“Don’t get me started, Ronald,” she growled and grabbed her broom to resweep her area. Ronald shook his tinged hair, clucked his tongue and said, “Girl, you’re gonna wear out that linoleum, couldn’t be any cleaner.”

Finally she put away the broom and dropped into her chair with a defeated sigh. Her next customer wasn’t due for 10 minutes and Mrs. Anderson never came on time anyway. Never one to let angry dogs lie, Ronald said, “You been listening to Jolene’s hot talk radio station, I’m betting. You don’t have enough stress with those kids of yours and the cost of daycare?”

“I know, I know, I …” She trailed off. For a moment she just clicked her scissors in the air, slow cuts, slicing nothing at all. She stared at herself in the half length mirror running the length of the salon, touched a finger to one cheek and frowned at herself. “Doesn’t it feel like us women are supposed to back to the kitchen?” she muttered.

“Oh, honey,” Ronald replied, walking over to lightly drape an arm over her shoulder in sympathy. “I’m supposed to go back to the closet, not the kitchen,” he whispered out of range of Rita Jorgenson who had stopped reading her Woman’s Day magazine to watch the two stylists with considerable interest.

“It’s hard, Ronnie, really frickin hard, rising two kids, paying most of my earnings for daycare. Maybe I should go back home, quit knocking myself out. Dan wants me to. But … I don’t know, maybe if he didn’t keep getting laid off.”

Dan, as Ronald well knew, didn’t get laid off, he got his ass fired. Usually for drinking on the job. So much for bread winning, Ronald told her when the café that hired him as morning cook sent him home after he screwed up multiple orders.

The front door jingled and Patricia Anderson walked in early. Ronald pulled away abruptly and Nancy welcomed her client. Rita Jorgenson tossed her magazine on the side table, shook her curlered head and said over the dryer, “You just hang in there, Nancy. It wasn’t us women who screwed up this world but it’s gonna be us who fix it. So hang in and don’t ever give up.”
Ronald gave a whoop and a small holler. “Damn right, Ms. J, damn right!” Patricia Anderson took off her coat and parked in Nancy’s chair. “Did I miss something?” she asked.

“No,” Nancy told her, “the revolution’s just getting started.”

When we bought our 7 acres and its accompanying shack back in 1977, we first saw the place at night. The smell of cookies baking in a 1920’s Majestic wood stove, the soft glow of oil lamps, a fire crackling in the parlor stove — sure, I thought I’d died and gone to Hippie Heaven. A thought that evaporated by daylight the day we signed the paperwork, at least for the mizzus who sat herself in a corner of the vacated shack and cried her eyes out.

What we didn’t discover until spring was a clearcut woods that by May was an impenetrable jungle of stinging nettles 7 feet high. These days they’d qualify for required disclosure on real estate forms, same as contaminated wells, leaking roofs, buckling foundations and black mold behind the walls. Trails had to be cleared constantly just to enter the dreaded stinging domain and we were constantly struck by toppled nettles that penetrated even the thickest dungarees.

In some parts of the country, pioneers dealt with predators, arctic winters, poisonous snakes and insects, dust storms, hurricanes and hostile natives. So if my curse was only hostile neighbors and stinging nettles, I counted myself semi-lucky. You can eat nettles and I’ve made nettle beer with the itching bastards. The hostile neighbors, well, we had our differences. And still do. But there’s never been any violence. So far.

For 30 years I made my peace. With both. But awhile back I decided enough was really enough! One spring I took a sickle and cleared acre after acre of these monsters. And when they sprang right back up, I hit em again. And again. Each spring I attack the fresh recruits with extreme prejudice … and each spring less and less of them come back. The cedar and fir seedlings I plant now have sunlight reaching them where earlier they withered and died beneath a dark canopy of nettles.

The old growths are gone now, just a few stumps, a memory of early times here on the South End of the island, a myth maybe to the neighbors with their weed’n’feed manicured lawns. But when I’m gone and my sickle hung up for good, little doubt in my mind the roots of these stingers, patient all these many years, will return with a vengeance. I wish em luck…. The neighbors, I mean.

During the enforced hibernation of the Covid Plague, Techno Tom and his wife took in their son and his wife plus their two kids. No big deal considering Tom and Rachel’s house here across the road from us was a two story, 4 bedroom, 3 bath Cape Cod with a 3 car garage and another for the 40 foot travel trailer that rarely left its shelter. Tom and Rachel didn’t mind the return of their prodigal son, but Jason and his wife Marie viewed this as a personal catastrophe, lost job, their own house underwater, the kids forced to uproot and attend school here in the boondocks, just paupers accepting the charity of parents who they figured might have other plans for their Golden Years than an empty nest filled back up.

Jason, once the quarantines lifted, enrolled in a Coding Boot Camp, something Tom explained to us techie imbeciles that had something to do with creating software programs. Good paying jobs, he said, and sure enough, Jason was hired at a start-up in Seattle and after a couple of years in South End purgatory, made his family’s escape. Tom and Rachel fronted the kids partial down payment on a modest house in the city, the children enrolled in new schools — again — and the future looked rosy. Again.

Until this week when Techno joined our table at the Pilot House, not with his usual beer but a double shot of scotch on the rocks. ‘Wuzzup?’, one of us finally got up the courage to ask after 5 minutes of silent and serious drinking until the tension proved too much to wait on Tom to break the dismal mood.

“My kid,’ he moaned. ‘They laid him off yesterday. Said they didn’t need a coder now that AI can do the same thing ten times faster and twice as well. Plus, nobody’s hiring coders now, same damn reason. He’s screwed. What’s he gonna do now?’

Now, you have to understand, Tom’s audience were maybe not the best choice for eliciting sympathy, most of us having spent our ‘earning years’ in frivolous pursuits, odd jobs, artistic detours … and, well, just basic indolence to be honest.

But we bought the next couple of rounds, declared that the Tech Billionaires were scum, cursed AI and mumbled pathetic aphorisms like ‘when one door closes another one opens’, not altogether helpful in raising Techno’s despair. He declared the American Dream dead and finally Two Toke drove him home. I imagine pretty soon Jason will be joining us at the Pilot House where we can all give him the benefit of our collective sage counseling.

Rhonda was nursing her glass of red merlot when I rolled into the American Legion with a buddy who’d ‘guested’ me into the inner sanctum of the Stanwoodopolis military speakeasy, a windowless, no frills lounge catering to those in search of cheap booze, generous pours and dollar off beers. We’d just come from the No King protests up north with our fellow left wing terrorists who hate America and want to burn our cities down. La Conner was still intact, not a town that looked like Gaze, buildings just rubble and the river townspeople sheltered in tent encampments along the dikes.

Rhonda was the lead blocker for the South End Slammers, our roller derby squad, not a far cry from her detachment in Iraq 2, but a hamstring pull tangling with the Burlington Bruisers the week before had put her on injured reserve. She was recuperating at the bar where we joined her, taking the last two stools available.

“How you doin?” my pal asked her and she just grunted. “Not great, thanks for asking.” Then told us her play by play that led to her injury. “I’ll be back on the rink in a couple,” she said. And being the joker chucklehead, I asked, “Couple more drinks?”

“Weeks, you asshole.” Which prompted a hasty apology and the offer to buy the next round. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m just grouchy today … but I’ll take another glass, thanks,” and waved to our bartender with her now empty glass.

In the adjoining room a cornhole tournament was underway with beanbags flying, scores tallied, drinks close at hand. Spectators sat at tables in the bar watching half interested. No King protests meant nothing to these folks. Rhonda either when conversation got around to it, Larry mentioning our antifa escapades at some point.

“So what’s the idea?” she asked. “The guy’s a jerk but he’s no king. Maybe we need a jerk instead of the usual mealy-mouths.”

Since I’d already proven myself a jerk, I decided to sip my beer and shut up. Larry, a regular here, maybe he’d take a shot at explaining what we were doing at the protests, what the point was. Instead he said, “Maybe you’re right. I sure hope so. Next round’s on me.”

They say the country is polarized. And probably it is. Okay, definitely it is. But for a couple of hours we watched cornhole and talked roller derby and the Iraq War and crazy politics. Nobody got mad and none of us got hurt. No bean bags were thrown in our direction. The last round was on Rhonda.

Some of you crusty old timers out here tonight might remember when Camano was such a sleepy little backwash, we didn’t have deputies on patrol after midnight. Crime was pretty much limited to marijuana growing —- you know, BEFORE it became a medicinal herb — and a few break-ins down at unoccupied beach cabins, probably OFF-islanders sneaking in by boat. Any criminals that were caught, well the sheriff’s department had to haul them over to the hoosegow in Coupeville, kind of a long drive, deliver the miscreant, then drive back here. In the meantime we were left vulnerable, defenseless and unprotected. To be honest, most of us never noticed….

Somewhere in the 1980’s some entrepreneurial South Enders … well, okay, some desperately unemployed South Enders thought the time was ripe for a Private Security Agency, sign up the absentee landowners and go check on their unattended dwellings. You know, cruise by and see if the front door was still on its jambs and lights weren’t on when they were supposed to be off, maybe get out and check the locks, walk around with a flashlight, wear a special agent badge South End Safeguard, something catchy, something official looking in case the neighbors wondered about us prowling the back yard late at night. Admittedly, we looked a little rough. Okay, we looked like the guys we were supposed to protect folks against. But hellfire, man, this was the South End and back then we all looked a little ragged around the edges. Remember, this was BEFORE the great migration, the one where the Dot.com’ers took their suitcases of cash and bought up the bluffs and hauled in stuff WORTH stealing.

That’s the trouble with rich people, you see. They bring valuables. They bring expensive toys. They bring, if you follow my reasoning here, CRIME. Simple as that. When we were all poor, why would we steal from each other? We left our doors unlocked, the keys to the truck in the ignition. You wanted to steal MY truck, chances are I’d find you broke down about half a mile north of me. I’d probably have to apologize to YOU for loaning you a beat up rig you’d have to repair three times to town.

Well, the South End Security and Surveillance Agency was a little ahead of the curve. So they finally called it quits. Before the incoming tsunami of wealthy neighbors brought their big suburb crime to our pastoral paradise of poverty . We got 24/7 deputies from Island County finally and for awhile we could drop off captured criminals, alleged captured criminals, with the Stanwoodopolis Police, save them hours of scenic transportation and get right back to the scene of our crimes.

And then, before we could regroup our patrol cars and security agents, along came the Civilian Patrol. Free of charge. Official. Nice lettering on the side of the vehicles instead of that ratty plastic sign we had that fell off more than a few times and even got Two Toke Tom pulled over for littering. He got off with a warning, but it rattled him so much he resigned and turned in his patrol badge, worried, I think, littering might lead to some sniffing around his grow sheds up by the South End Diner. And that was his sole livelihood, so he didn’t want to jeapordize that.

Well, anyway, I’m sort of rambling along here about the history of crime-fighting on Camano and I haven’t even gotten to Colton yet, but …. I think maybe I better just wrap this up and move on to subjects that won’t interfere with dessert digestion. But I do want to say to you crimefighters, thank you! Not so much for ending crime down by me as for saving me that job in my truck patrolling the rich folks’ houses. If I’d really seen how they lived, how much they had, how nice they had it, who knows, I mighta turned to a life of crime myself with all that temptation. Lucky for me I stayed stupid and poor.

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Reinvent yourself!  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So maybe  it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

Every year I say the same thing: next year I’ll downsize our garden, maybe grow one tomato plant and a row of peas, toss in a row of greens for salads and call it Good. And every year, as sure as the plums blossom and the nettles rise up from the dead, I haul out the old rototiller and start planting two months too early. The pea seeds are gonna rot and the lettuce won’t come up, but I’ll plant again in a couple of weeks, about when the cherries bloom. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as every year since I moved here 37 years ago.

Who’s kidding who? I can buy vegetables WAY cheaper than most of what I grow. They practically give you potatoes by the time I’m digging ours. They even taste better than my scabby ones. Corn? I did quit corn last year. But I’m thinking maybe one token row would be tasty come fall. I can grow mutant squashes here to Stanwoodopolis, but I’m not real big on squash although maybe I should reconsider seeing’s how easy they are, sort of a fruiting kudzu.

And of course it’s a battle with slugs and snails, cabbage moths and cutworms, scabs and aphids, deer and rabbits, weeds and crows. We all want to eat, I guess. When they vote me in as God, I’ll do it different. Maybe just do it like the plants, grow on sun and air and water and dirt. Us animals turned Paradise into a Jungle. Tastes good, but kind of brutal at times.

It’s a lot of work, this gardening. But then, so is shopping. Bump cars with folks in a hurry, the parking lot mayhem, self serve registers trying to find the bin number for organic cauliflower not the Monsanto cauliflower, the bag choices, the plastic store card they swipe to track your buying habits, coupons and sales gimmicks. It’s a jungle in Safeway too.

And anyway, I didn’t move to the country to watch bad TV, I hope. I don’t kid myself — I’m not growing food here so much as I’m trying to get back to some Roots. I’ll have to share it with the vermin and the predators, the pests and the worms. Like always, I’ll have to learn to live with the neighbors, two legged, four legged, no legged or practically invisible. After all, we’re all in this thing together.

This week there’s a viral video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on top of a building, fists flying, feet kicking, punches given and punches taken. What this is is an AI creation. One you or me or the other countless viewers could never, in the past we once inhabited, tell was not real. If seeing is believing — and it probably still is — we’re in trouble. A brave new world of trouble.

Because now the virtual world will look every bit as real as the one you once knew. For awhile the gullible will take every photo, video and political interview as gospel, those are the actual people, they saw it with their own two eyes, same as they did with every clickbait ‘news’ story. But eventually it will dawn on them — and us too — that none of this is certain. Everything will be suspect. You won’t necessarily believe your own eyes. Or your ears. That song that sounds like Dylan, maybe not….

The actors and screenwriters who watched Tom and Brad duke it out on an urban highrise rooftop are just the canaries in the deep hole where reality dropped below the ground. Their jobs will be the first casualties but not the last. AI can duplicate anyone’s voice, now it can generate anyone’s doppleganger. That phone call you got from your best friend? That message on Instagram from the President? Maybe it’s not him.

If you distrusted mainstream media before, hoo boy, you’re going to love the next wave. No need to believe anything but what you want to believe. The rest is bogus B.S., fake news, propaganda, no point even trying to sort fact from fiction. For the people or the countries who want to sow misinformation, what a godsend! Welcome to the anarchy of ideas. By the way, neither Brad or Tom won the fight. AI did.

I got a buddy who claims he was the first Owner-Builder on Camano Island. The year was 1977, the same year I bought my shack. I met him 13 years later and we ended up building 3 sailboats together, one for each of us and one for his pal the building inspector who became my friend too. Ironically, I may be one of the last Owner-Builders in Island County. I don’t think my permit was ever signed off on so I may well be the last official O-B.

I guess maybe they figured the codes got too complex for us amateur housebuilders, all those R-factors for insulation and E-glass in fenestrations and X-factors for our marriages. Or maybe it was this: a permit for an Owner-Builder was next to nothing, something like $50 when I got ours. The county might’ve done the tax-factor and realized us hippies were costing them revenue. Maybe some of us built our own palaces to save the permit expense, but I would’ve paid full freight just for the right to build my own place the way I wanted. A few hundred bucks wasn’t gonna stop me.

I spoze we can still build our own Xanadu, nothing to stop us. Just have to disclose that a rank amateur threw the hammer and ran the saw, flashed the windows, shingled the roof, installed the electric and plumbing and if you’re the prospective buyer, best beware!!! The people at the county sheds told me I’d be a Total Idiot to apply for an Owner-Builder status. Boy, he read me like a book. A comic book, I’d bet.

By the time I got our permit, us Owner-Builders had to meet the same codes as any fly-by-night contractor, go through the same inspections, all the rigamarole as the Big Boyz. In other words, the government here doesn’t allow for hippie shacks or slam-bang cabins. We got to build our parents’ suburban homes. Might explain why kids just stay with their folks now — why bother building the same damn place twice?