The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Billy Nashville was wailing on a red Gibson he’d put stick-on gold letters up the body that read B-I-L-L-Y  S-I-X G-U-N. His real name, William Cosnosczski, wouldn’t fit in neon, he claimed, so he changed it to a stage name he thought better suited to his debut in Nashville. None of us figured Billy had ever owned a gun, certainly never shot one, but Billy 6-Gun only had to write ballads of bad marriages, drunken brawls, truck driving romance, heavy drinking and hard living. He didn’t know anything about those either and Nashville wasn’t waiting for him to learn, not when most of the songwriters came in from Hard Rock County, Tennessee or Whisky Creek, Kentucky, practically born with a guitar in their pudgy little hands and bottle fed Jack Daniels.

Poor Billy grew up in Olympia, Washington, then ended up on the South End when his parents moved here, not exactly an early retirement. We all thought maybe his Daddy shoulda gone to Nashville. With or without a 6 string.

Billy 6 Gun or Billy Nashville or William G. Cosnosczki, he wasn’t half bad on that cherry red Flying V Gibson. The trouble is, half the damn males in America aren’t half bad either. And some of them write decent songs. And every now and then, one of them looks good on stage. Unlike Billy …

Music is like any art medium, it’s hard — very hard — to make enough money to keep above water while you learn the ropes. And trust me, there are ropes. Some to hang yourself by, but some to swing to another level. If we made accountants work this hard for so little money, well … maybe this would be a world filled with song instead of one painted by numbers. Just my opinion, of course. Not based on scientific data. Or even much research.

Billy still plays the open mike down at the South Grange every Wednesday night. He’s talking about a Try-Out with American Idol. Good luck, Billy, I say. Just don’t be too disappointed. Don’t quit playing, don’t quit singing. And if you ever get despondent, consider this: there is no, and never will be, an American Accountant. Because, really, why would anyone with a soul care? Just my opinion. Of course.

I was out on the road the other day trying to sell the last of my Skeeter Daddle Diaries, the second printing. I’m about as good at door to door sales as I am at hedge fund managing. Me and money don’t really mix, I’ve learned slowly over a long life without an MBA degree. Neither of us trusts the other….

I meet folks — even down here on the indolent South End — who knew shortly after teething that they wanted to make money, get rich, retire early. They didn’t go to college and spend four years on a Philosophy degree. They picked careers in law or dentistry or finance. You don’t drill for water in the Sahara, that’s what they understood.

Me, I always thought I’d rather do something I loved doing. Call me naïve and slap me with an IOU, but I figured there was always a job, even a miserably low paying one, that would pay the bills and allow me to pursue some quaint interest or other. So I took English, majored in literature and poverty, then stepped off the educational track years later with a nice solid background in arts and history and yeah, literature, then promptly discovered I had virtually NO marketable skills. Kind of a shock. You kind of figure if they sell you a degree, there’ll be a placement.

I worked awhile in a dog pound, ran a cafeteria, drove metro buses, wrote poetry and short stories that got published for, oh, nothing, drove school buses, seriously considered graduate school (maybe get a PhD. in Unemployment or Swahili), moved around a bit, lived in shabby apartments, ate a lot of macaroni and cheese. To be honest, I didn’t mind. What I did mind was not finding the exact perfect job that fulfilled some as yet undiscovered passion in life. Four years at a university and I sure didn’t find it. Now I had to do it AND work crap jobs looking.

I can tell you youngsters — in hindsight — the only thing worse than some crummy job is looking for the next crummy job. But I can also tell you — and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Perfessor of Smartology — if you settle for the money, or the security, or the health insurance benefits, or the pension, you’ll maybe be satisfied, possibly even happy, but you will never find the thing that makes working really worthwhile. It took me plenty of dead end jobs, too much macaroni, far too many bad bosses, but in the end, you’ll persevere. Probably not rich, but trust me on this, a helluva lot happier.

Somehow in the course list of my varied syllabus I never got around to reading Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the musings of an individualist who decamped from civilization, such as it was in the 1800’s, parked himself in a cabin and reflected on life and living. It was a short walk to his mom’s house for lunches or dinners, tough life, Dave. But give him this: he created his own myth, true or not, doesn’t matter, Americans love a tall tale. Hell, we’ll vote for a guy as President who takes the prize for best liar in the country. You think most people care? C’mon, even the so-called Christians make excuses for his sexual affairs, his financial frauds, even his attempt to overthrow the government — they love the myth, he’s lying, cheating and stealing … for them!

I guess if you don’t have your own Tall Tale, the story of your own life’s heroics, well tag on to someone else’s, ride their coat tails. Taylor Swift or Brad Pitt’s. Identify with them, maybe make you feel a kinship, a bond, a shared world view. Nothing wrong with that. Except … you aren’t Taylor Swift and you will never be Brad and I hope to God we never see another Donald Trump.

Seems to me, a kid who grew old living a life that was maybe not heroic or enviable or soon to be a serialized Netflix drama, but at least my own, where the protagonist, for good or ill, was my own self. Yours is too, by the way. You just have to see it that way, make it yours, not someone else’s. Fine to have role models — okay, maybe not Trump — to clear a path, to show you the way. But eventually we have to bushwhack our own trail even if it means getting lost. Or worse.

Thoreau walked away from what was expected of him. I couldn’t tell you if he was disappointed maybe he didn’t move very far from town and lunches with mom. But I’ll give him this — he gave it a shot. And maybe someday I ought to read his book, see how he did. Right now I’m still working on my own pond.

Sometimes I lose track of time. Not just the days of the last week. I forget how old I am, all those years behind me. I’ll be looking at one of our Doug firs and think, my god that’s one bigass tree, neglecting to consider that it was fairly large when I came here 47 years ago. You stop and think how much difference half a century made the first half of last century, then how accelerated change was the second half, trust me, future shock is real.

We live down here in the backwash South End of Camano. What was a fairly desolate tail end of the island is now filling in with Boeing and Weyerhauser retirees, Dot.comers who cashed in early and refugees from California whose house back when it cost a couple hundred grand now makes them multi-millionaires up here. I suspect if we sold our homestead we could probably be the Nuevo royalty in Kansas or upstate Alabama. But then who wants to be King of the Louisiana swamps or Duke of the tundra in Upper Michigan. I already left those places — sure don’t want to go back just to own more acreage of swamp or snow drifts.

But … you stay put, the world doesn’t. I’ve resisted change ever since I parked my hippie ass down here, just wanted to be left the hell alone, good luck to the rest of so-called civilization. Still don’t have a cellphone but the mizzus does. I finally had to learn how to use a computer, got one on my desk up at the house I built 30 years ago. All those homesteader skills I learned, everything from plumbing to electric, carpentry to woodworking, they’re all mostly anachronistic now. 3-D printing, Artificial Intelligence, 5-G networks, drone warfare, hundreds of satellites orbiting, electric cars, social media, driverless vehicles, gene manipulation, not all of it bad, just the relentless push of progress, technology ascendant, all of us wired, connected to the Hive.

My father, recently deceased at 100 years old, told us boys on one of our Huck Finn Mississippi River houseboat trips back through the Wisconsin/Minnesota and Illinois/Iowa cliffs, he thought he’d lived in the best of times. Despite the Depression and World War Two. I think maybe I’ve lived through the tail end of those times. What’s coming next will be totally, unpredictably, different. Personally, I’m glad I’m old.

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.