The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Camwood Mobile Home Park, long gone now in this era of gated communities and exclusive developments, once offered modest living on beachfront tracts destined for future high taxation. When the hammer finally fell, there must have been 20 single wides all lined up in angles that gave each tenant a peekaboo view to the Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond, and although the lease was a bit high and the power and water levy exorbitant, folks with limited means could enjoy a small piece of the good life at a reduced price. Most of the island back then, really, was affordable.

Sure, there was no work and the drive to the nearest town was hellishly long, but there are always folks who prefer the edge of poverty to the sacrifice of 8-5, a sadistic boss, a crap job. I should know, I was the same way. My good luck, however, was having a small savings account, enough to buy a shack, not rent a trailer at the Camwood. Some folks there owned their single wide but most rented from Elmer Havelot, the slumlord/slash proprietor of the place who rarely made any appearances, just let Sue Novinsky manage the properties in exchange for free rent in Unit #6, the one with a fine view of the road down from the west side highway.

Sue was divorced. Twice. From the same guy, Phil Novinsky, a charmer but a mean drunk. The second divorce she needed a restraining order the Island County sheriff wouldn’t enforce so she left the island for a year and came back when Phil had died in a head-on, killing his drunken self and a teenage girl when he crossed the centerline just south of the Plaza Grocery. So Sue came back, managed the trailer park for Elmer, worked part time at the Tyee Grocery and decided the single life in a single wide was the life for her, what easily could have been a chart buster single on the country western station she listened to most days. If she’d been a song writer. Or played honkytonk guitar.

When Elmer gave the residents 30 days notice, her life threatened to become that country western song, heartbreak #3. But she worked a deal with Elmer, bought trailer #9, a reasonably intact 1953 Silver Star for peanuts and used what savings she had left for a half acre parcel behind Tyee Store, moved the trailer and cut her commute to walking distance. A few years later Tyee went under and Sue took a job at Twin City Foods, long commute, at least until TCF closed down. Last time I sat with Sue, drinking coffee with a shot of Jack, she said she was ready for retirement and Social Security. “If I learned anything in this place,” she told me, “it was how to live poor.”

The South End, if you give it a chance, I might’ve said back, will teach you that, all right. What I did say was what old Ted Snowden, the guy who built Tyee Store back in the ‘70’s, told me once: “It’s a poor man’s paradise.”

“A woman’s too,” Sue said, “once you get past the drunk husband.” We drank to that….

Gone are the days when mobs of us kids, festooned with sheets of scissor-cut eyeholes or bandanas and eyepatches carrying wooden pirate swords, out in the neighborhood with our beggar bags, hollering Trick or Treat, armies of zombies and skeletons and ghosts collecting enough candy to make a dentist smile for months on the wages from future cavities. Our parents back then didn’t drive behind us as we slipped through the darkness waiting fearfully in their station wagons idling at the curb — no, they enjoyed a night without us munchkins, that was their treat! Mine sometimes dressed up too, going door-to-door to their friends’ houses, holding out a shot glass, not a pillowcase. Halloween was fun for all ages back before we scared the bejabbers out of all the parents.

Course that was before the urban myths of apples with razor blades imbedded. Or lurking pederasts. Or 8 year olds showing up days later on the back of milk cartons. Have You Seen Me? Moms and dads listened to the evening news and heard the monstrous rumors Loud and Clear. Danger waited on every street corner, up every dark driveway, down the alley and behind the trees. No way they were letting their precious out of sight for one Stanwoodopolis minute!

My remembrance, murky as it is, was that the real danger was us marauding kids. Lawnmowers hoisted onto car roofs, outhouses moved back a crucial yard, paper bags with dog poop set on fire out in the driveway, all the stunts that gave credence to the Trick half of the entreaty. Give us sugar or else! We were candy terrorists. Children without supervision, unleashed on our neighbors, hidden behind masks and makeup and cheezy costumes.

We didn’t have helicopter parents. We accepted homemade cookies and home grown apples, all us little Huck Finns, out under a cloud covered moon, free at last, free at last, way before the Pied Piper Parents of the internet tethered their kids and bought them expensive costumes and drove them in broad daylight to some supposed safe suburb of town or to the merchants who offered treats as bait on the crowded sidewalk in front of their stores.

There’s a trick being played all right. But not by the kids….

Some billionaire recently argued that our leftist cities are struggling financially because of their woke politics, semi-plausible I guess, so it got me wondering if this was the reason why the South End is fiscally handicapped, all us artists and anarchists tossing grenades into every Chamber of Commerce attempt to haul us out of our financial torpor. Tyee Store threw in the towel a few years back, blamed it partially on me for some of the whoppers I used to tell about their E-coli superstrain from the 24/7 rotisserie hot dog rotator, and yeah, I realize some folks have no vestigial funny bone whatsoever and believe everything they read, so sue me. Geez.

Truth is, outside of real estate sales and VRBO vacation rentals, the South End economy has atrophied from the roaring days of chicken farms at Mabana when the Mosquito Fleet could dock at the pier that only lasted a few years before storms sent it to Davy Jones’ I-cloud. Supplies, mail, passengers, investors!, all disembarking to rake in the riches of South Camano. Old growth nettles and firs were logged and skidded out to the booms offshore before the sailing ships hauled them to San Francisco and Japan. No doubt the woke crowd at the turn of the century ended that booming era. Probably pre-PETA activists ruined the chicken trade and pre-ecological tree huggers ended the logging craze.

Trade back then plied the water. Roads were nearly non-existent and what had been built were muddy and potholed, nothing useful for commerce. Oh sure, a few enterprising folks attempted entrepreneurial miracles but customers were scarce as those chickens’ teeth and many a scheme ended in financial ruin, leaving a legacy of broken dreams and bankrupt pioneers, a legacy that endures to this day. Some left for the cities and more favorable economic possibilities, but many stayed to live a life without the stress of bleak business dealings, content to accept defeat but happy to manage the poverty as best they could. Not everyone wanted to be a millionaire back then the way we do now. And so they found time on their hands. Time to build homes, furniture, art, lives. Some might say they were woke, if woke meant anything back then. If it means squat today.

So maybe our billionaire sociologist is right. Go woke, go broke. Just don’t tell us down here on the South End that’s a bad thing.

I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar.  The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow.  Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value.  Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices.  Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it.  In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does.  But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case.  He looked like a hawk on a telephone line.  Patiently waiting for the next mouse.  “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked.  I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before Biden takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before Biden outlaws em.’  “I shoulda voted Democrat.  The guy is making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got.  He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle …..  “Whoa,”  I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander.  Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals.  If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic.  They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson.  You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar.  Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke.  “Democrats’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck.  “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.

Nobody seems to like growing old.  Can’t blame em,  I guess when you factor in the aches and pains, the wrinkles and hair loss, the diminished mobility.  Well, almost nobody, cause I don’t mind.  Sure, I got the same ailments, but hellfire, you ought to pay  SOME price for all this accumulated wisdom, for some peace of mind, for a more stable financial grip on this hard world.

My brother’s father-in-law, a dairy farmer in Northern Wisconsin who knew a few things about Hard Living, told him at a ripe young age to quit worrying about money.  Money, he said, takes care of itself.  You’d be better off to tackle the rest.   Love, marriage, family, career, happiness.  My brother, being young, didn’t believe him until he too was older and wiser.

We used to value maturity.  We used to respect the accumulated wisdom of all those years of living.  We used to pay homage to our elders.  Now that I’m an elder, I sure wish we still did.  But we don’t.  We value youth, energy, good looks, clean skin, svelte bodies, shimmering hair.  We’re a bit superficial.  Okay, we’re TOTALLY skin deep.  We’d sell our souls to be beautiful, to be athletic, to be rich.  If I was the devil, boy oh boy, I’d be banking more souls than I’d have rooms to rent in Hell.  I’d be building infrared suburbs, you bet.  Plenty of beauty parlors, fitness centers, spas, sports injury treatment facilities, so many mirrors a 60 watt bulb would heat the place up to full sizzle.

You reach my advanced age, you ought to pat yourself on the back.  You probably figured most things out.  You must’ve learned plenty from all those mistakes.  You should’ve learned to live in your own skin.  When kids ask who your heroes are, tell them YOU are.  It’s not egotistical.  It should be the truth.

The truth is, we got this far.  Meaning, we had a hearty dose of living, our fair share….  We learned a thing or three.  We witnessed the world.  We even changed it a bit, don’t underestimate yourself.  Pass some of it on to the young’uns.  They might listen.  More than you think.  Just don’t wish you were them, young and starting out fresh.  Why go through that twice?

I got an e-mail today with a link to the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ jobs in America.  Gotta tell you, I dreaded opening it up, fully expecting to find Artist probably the worst.  In all honesty, I almost hit the DELETE button, but this had come from a friend and he probably expected a response or a confession or a vow to do better in my next career choice, one from the ‘best’ list.

Turns out the ‘best’ jobs were pretty much judged on the basis of salary.  Actuarials, statisticians, mathematician(!), no kidding: high paying, technical, number crunching corporate gigs.  Boy oh boy, if I’d only know known back when I drummed out of school and began my desperate search for a ‘meaningful’ job.  Nobody told me the best careers were the highest paid ones.  I thought maybe they would be the ones that made me the happiest.The ‘worst’ jobs were the dangerous jobs.  Like Lumberjack.  Probably cut your leg off or be killed by a miscalculated cut in a leaning Doug Fir.  Poor pay, hearing loss, amputations.  And forget health care or vacations or sick leave or a pension.  Not gonna get to pension age anyway….

No mention of Artist in the group.  I guess poor wages, no bennies, no pension, not really the ‘worst’ job if it isn’t dangerous too.  Although I got to thinking how about those glass installations I did back when I was too eager and too stupid, climb up on a skinny ledge two stories above a concrete floor to hoist 30 square foot panels of stained glass into place with barely a few toes on secure footing at 3 a.m., every cell in my body screaming NO NO NO! and the sweat smelling like fear.  Fear, in case you don’t know, that kind of fear at least, smells like excrement.  Truly, unforgettably.

Anyway …. I didn’t find my ‘job’ listed on this link.  I’m just sort of glad I got something I can call a job.  Although, between you and me and the pegleg lumberjack, I never think of what I do as a job.  Someone asked me about retirement two nights ago at an art gallery opening. Would I — could I — just stop?  It’s not like punching a time clock, I guess.  It’s not about making the money.  And it’s not about being afraid of the danger.  My danger was really starvation, poverty, failure and humiliation.  Too late for that now.  The fear now is the creative well drying up, the days growing longer and emptier, the boredom settling in like a slow metastasizing dread.  I don’t know yet, but I bet it still smells the same.

Businesses come and go down here on the South End.  Mostly go…. Folks figure they can just empty out the kids’ piggy bank or sell the old Chevy van that’s been up on blocks 10 years behind the shed and scrape up the cash to hang a shingle out on their new storefront.  Something about working for other people makes em yearn for the entrepreneurial dream.  They figure if they work for themselves, their new boss will treat them a whole lot better.

Starting a business, they suppose, is a snap.  After all, this is a capitalist society and there’s all those consumers up on the North End clamoring for sales and services.  Wanda opened up the El Sol Tanning Solarium last year.  Now you know and I know the sun doesn’t shine much up on the cloud shrouded North End…. And so did Wanda, so she put out the CostCo neon OPEN  sign in a little 700 square foot storefront rental up by the Plaza Market where storefronts are opening up faster than real estate offices can move in, something Wanda mighta shoulda oughta factored in when she developed her business plan that night between dinner and Wheel of Fortune.

She lasted about the time it takes to say melanoma.  I don’t know what tanning beds go for used on CraigsList, but someday the antique value should be right up there with Ozone Generators from the 1920’s.  Wanda did get a nice full body tan herself, better than the burn down at the bank, and now we got another FOR LEASE sign where the neon no longer says OPEN.

When I last chatted with Wanda, she was heartbroken her dream died before it even had a chance to blossom.  ‘People must stay indoors and figure the TV will give them a tan,’ she lamented.  I said they go to Palm Springs or Albuquerque for the sun, not some coffin with full spectrum artificial lighting.  Wanda was in full denial.  More advertising maybe.  A location closer to town.  One free tanning session for every ten.  Now her savings were gone.  ‘I don’t want to go back to driving that school bus again,’ she practically sobbed.  In the land of capitalist dreams where Bill Gates whispers sweet somethings in every aspiring entrepreneur’s ear, failure is hard to accept.  Wanda will be fine.  She’ll dust herself off, take stock and probably launch into the next hot market.  DVD rentals or an umbrella shop.  Dreams don’t really die down here on the South End, they just recycle.  Worst case, she can do like most of the rest of us small businesspeople and become a working artist.  Low pay but huge self esteem.

Our latest entrepreneurial entrée into the fragile economic market of the South End is Tatoo U.  Armed with dye injecting needles and a menacing array of bicep tats, ‘Biker Bob’ Kowalski opened up his ‘body art emporium’ in the cleaning supply room of Hair Today – Gone Tomorrow’s Rogaine Outlet beneath Windy Rear Realty.

The opening week alone Biker Bob adorned 30 arms, torsos and lower calves with artworks ranging from colorful butterflies and cute unicorns to snarling hounds of hell and a blood dripping dagger with the always popular logo: NO LOSERS!  Bob acknowledges that he’s fighting a long held stereotype of body art that’s a bit negative.  “Mostly it’s the old farts,” he said in an exclusive interview for the Crab Cracker.  “They equate it with a sailor’s drunk in some port town.  Next morning he wakes up with the worst hangover of his life and the wrong girlfriend’s name on his chest.”  Bob tells us he doesn’t get many sailors and he’s reluctant to inscribe current girlfriend’s names.

Scrutinizing the hundreds of graphic images posted on the salon walls, I ask what are some of the favorites of us South Enders.  He admits it’s a bit early to say, but he’d done a couple of dragons for the guys and the little butterfly is popular among the ladies. “They like it right about bikini-line or just visible below the top of the bra line,” he says, then laughs and admits, “me too.”  Not bad work, if you can get it.”

With all the artists down here, I make the mistake of asking if he plans to use any of them to create one-of-a-kind tattoos.  This rankles him.  “Why don’t you go ask THEM if they’re going to use any of the other artists’ art to make theirs, ya jerk!”

I took his point, without the dye, apologized and took a hasty departure.

Artists are hyper-sensitive people, in case you’ve somehow never stumbled down to Colony Central here at the nettlesome South End.  Biker Bob will make a fine addition.

On my way past a stack of detergent and window cleaning supplies I passed a client coming in:  about 18, pierced nose, tongue stud, 3 tiny diamonds glittering in a clean row on her earlobe.  “Go for the butterfly,” I meekly suggest.  Her accompanying boyfriend glared ominously at me and advised I mind my own business.

You know, if I had one….  Biker Bob apparently does.

Before my Old Man died and he stopped watching or reading the new, if we asked him about some current event or other, he’d shrug and say ‘crazy world’. I think in his late 90’s he figured there wasn’t much he could do anymore to change things. If there ever was …. So he put politics, world and national and local events, catastrophes and wars, all of it in the rearview and tried to focus on eating and breathing. The rest — someone else could worry about it.

There are days — and this is one — I wish I could ignore the outside world, play my banjo, make some furniture, design a stained glass window, chop wood, hunt for crab, sit and write, enjoy the remaining years of my life without the constant bombardment from the insane jungle beat of a world going mad intruding constantly. The polls say Trump is at his highest approval rating ever. Higher than Biden, even though the guy is a crook, a traitor, an authoritarian creep without morals or values or the slightest human empathy for anyone but himself.

And I was worried about Artificial Intelligence taking over …. Global warming is no hoax and it and all our new wars are spurring immigration on a level we’ve never seen, only to get worse, but always a wedge issue for the ultranationalists here and abroad. What, me worry? But, like my old man says, crazy world. Unlike him, I have to live in it awhile longer.

Riding my non-electric bike around the Head today, I came across a small pile of firewood stacked on the side of the highway that read: FREE — TAKE ALL OR NONE. I have a friend who could use a little extra BTU’s for the coming winter, her own pile being a bit shy of warming her past Christmas, so I thought I’d drive my truck back when I got home, pick up half a cord and make a surprise delivery.

I arrived with my pickup and backed along the shoulder next to the pile, but before I was barely out of the cab a woman appeared out of her blacktop driveway riding a gas powered mini-tractor. ‘That’s on my property,’ she announced, which, since the sign said FREE, momentarily confused me. ‘Is it yours?’ I asked and she told me no, it was the neighbors’ but they’d piled it on her property instead of their own, apparently a territorial intrusion that perturbed her greatly. I said I would remove the offending wood post-haste, figuring this would alleviate her boundary dispute, but then she said I should move my truck to their side of the woodpile, more a demand than a suggestion, and although I considered explaining that the shoulder was actually neither hers nor her offending neighbor, it was county right-of-way, I decided to move the truck. Then … I don’t know, call it contrariness. Or maybe the imperial way she was acting, but … I decided why should I move the truck when I would be gone in five minutes, no harm done.

So I asked her highness, ‘What’s the problem if I just simply load the wood right here and be on my way? To which she responded that the shoulder was more level on the other side. This side was just as level, seemed to me without calling in a surveyor, so I decided to ask again, ‘What’s the issue here?’ The lady started to answer, harrumphed heavily, then threw up her hands and started up her go-cart to leave.

A better man might have let it go at this. A better man might have moved the truck to the other side. But that man, alas, is not me. I said, ‘Hold up!’ And remarkably she did. ‘I just want to know why it’s a big deal to you to make this some kind of confrontation.’ This flustered her and she seemed on the verge of forming an answer, if there was one, but finally gave a disgusted wave and motored down her asphalt drive toward her million and a half dollar manse, no doubt muttering to herself about low life, cruddy losers who have the temerity to park anywhere near her moatless mansion in some beat up truck wearing a beat up hat and addressing her with insolence On or Next To or Too Nearby her estate.

There was a time, long before m’lady or m’lord bought their palace, when the South End was a tad more neighborly, when we helped each other build additions or fixed plumbing or troubleshot car problems. We knew each other’s name and yeah, sometimes we didn’t get along. I guess we were all serfs back then, but happy serfs. Now we got the dukes and duchesses to show us our proper place where even the shoulder of the road is off limits. It won’t be long before they’ll toll us for the use of their highway too.