The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Content Advisory: Readers should be aware that the following might contain adult language, sexuality, some light violence and possibly was processed with products containing peanuts. Reader discretion is definitely advised.

You would be amazed, flabbergasted really, gobsmacked actually, what you turn up when you spend days looking for something you lost. In my quest to find my lost funny bone, I searched high and low, near and far, under and over, in and out. I found stuff I hadn’t even remembered losing. In a suitcase up in the shack’s attic stuffed in an alcove I found old manuscripts, early poems and some photos of my ex-wife. I remembered why I stuffed them in a suitcase and buried it behind a couple layers of detritus and memories.

Downstairs, in a desk drawer that hadn’t been opened in about two decades, I discovered mouse-eaten letters from friends and from the mizzus back when I first moved to the South End. Sure, I saved em. And someday I’ll sit down and read them again, same as I did 20 years ago when I found them that time out in a box in the woodshop and brought them where I hoped the mice wouldn’t go nearsighted reading them in the dark. Handwritten letters, imagine! Now there’s a lost concept.

I found a couple of tools I’d mislaid, some plumbing parts I could’ve used when I searched for them a few months ago, an old outboard boat motor in the weeds where the blackberries were strangling it, a backpack I haven’t used in I hate to tell you how long, a couple of cameras that take actual film which is another Kodak moment but one that’s relegated to history. Back in the walk-in closet which is barely walk-in-able anymore there were boxes of photographs and slides. I started to dig through those, but geez, I could’ve gotten sidetracked for weeks and I was on a mission to find that missing sense of humor. Old photos would spin me into a cobweb of inescapable reverie I might not free myself from for days, if not months.

In the back of an old Hoosier cabinet I found some tattered pieces of my innocence. I’m not even sure how long it had been lost, but it sure looked like a long time. A long hard time if the tears and rips were any indication. Funny how you never really noticed it was gone until you stumble onto it and then, what good is it? Probably better if I hadn’t. There were old Boy Scout merit badges and little medals from some school in Georgia for some forgotten things those Southern Daughters of the Confederacy had thought important. I found my old I Ching yarrow sticks that I quit using back probably when my innocence was lost. I remember throwing them when I bought the shack, asking if I should take a chance on moving from my ghetto hellhole to a dilapidated house at the end of the world. It said good fortune would surely follow. Why would I quit the sticks when it predicted my life so accurately?

And of course I came face to face with my long lost youth one night searching the back rooms of the studio. Sometimes I like to think I’m still that same kid who moved out here back in ’77, the same optimistic yahoo who called up his old girlfriend and asked if she’d come out and live with him in a love shack in the woods by the Puget Sound with a view of the Olympic Mountains, the very same boy who never wanted to work for anyone, who kept searching for an alternative to the American Dream which didn’t seem like much of a dream to him, who really had no direction home, no direction at all, just a misguided faith in himself and a longing to be a country boy, a half assed Huck Finn who preferred being a bum to selling himself to some job he would hate but probably learn to accept.

I barely recognized him. And I’m sure he didn’t recognize me even though he had that imbecile grin on his face like something was funny but maybe only to him. It was just a brief encounter, sort of like a shadow you catch behind you before the sun drops behind the clouds and it disappears. But I was sure it was a younger me. You know it when you see it and there’s no doubt. None at all. Course, doubt is what made me lose him in the first place. Ironic, isn’t it?

I suspect quite a few of you readers out there in blogland wonder how I make a ‘living’. Meaning, how do I make money? Moonshining is pretty much dried up, so naturally I’ve turned to other forms of petty crime. Currently I’m an artist. Partly a con artist, you might say with the same degree of truth, inasmuch as I have to hoodwink my clients that what I’m selling has real value, no easy thing in this mass produced, low priced WalMart society we live in.

Back in the day folks like me glommed onto a religion. Us artists worked for the church, painted Bible stories or filled cathedrals with portraits of the saints and baby Jesus, maybe throw in some doves and lambs. If we found a rich patron, the patron wanted to curry favor with the priests so same thing, more religious art. The Greeks, the Romans, even the Pagans, the art was to reinforce the rituals, the belief system of the Gods.

Now of course we got Secularism. Meaning, we got Modern Art. If you’re an artist, it means a whole lot of artistic freedom. Artistic freedom, you want to know the truth, means starvation wages. Very few patrons, no church commissions, just a free-for-all helter skelter rush for what few jobs there are, at least in my chosen field, public art.

I’m a glass guy, stained and leaded. Design large murals for courthouses, train stations, libraries, places like that. Build em, haul em across the country, then install em. Usually a committee decides my glass design is more appropriate, say, than a sculpture or a mosaic or an atrium hanging. I have to sell them on that design, justify its expense, convince them I can hoist glass into the heavens without killing anyone below. I have to make them believe what I believe: that this art of glass will do what Renaissance glass did for cathedrals — lift their eyes and their hearts beyond the mundane, upward to an impossible light, what we secularists still call inspirational but seems harder to sell. Even us con artists believe in our art.

Jack Gunter’s History of the World Gallery is packing up after 30 years at the old garage next to the now defunct Tyee Mega Store. End of an era, end of culture as we know it on the now bleaker South End. For awhile we were the Paris of Camano Island, salons and studios, galleries and sculpture parks, art in the parks, a magnet for the annual Mother’s Day Studio Tour, a veritable mecca for the artistically famished. Now, probably, the beginning of an Exodus, leaving us once again the way it was when I first arrived, a cultural desert.

When the Gallery moved from its former location in East Stanwoodopolis, we all told Jack and Karla no one would drive hell and gone to attend fine art openings in an old garage 17 miles down a dead end island. They assured us naysayers we were wrong. Well, we were wrong. Pilchuck glass shows, Honey I Shrunk the Art shows, gala openings, Mother’s Day Tours, art auctions and 30 years of cultural extravaganzas kept the South End lively before social media supplanted that role. Karla moved a few miles north and opened the Matzke Gallery and Sculpture Gardens, a sophisticated appendage to the History of the World, the finest art gallery north of Seattle and south of Vancouver, B.C., bar none. The Jason Dorsey Fine Art Studio and Gallery opened in 2018, adding yet another piece to the South End’s cultural identity.

The way snowflakes and raindrops coalesce around a small nucleus, the History of the World expanded to create the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, the Camano Visitor Center and Sculpture Garden, the Camano Arts Association and gave inspiration to those of us who once were naysayers, that this backwash would never embrace fine art. We were wrong. I like to think that the Gallery is leaving the South End, but the South End isn’t leaving the Gallery. The legacy of those years hopefully will continue to expand outward, from art hangings in the Senior Centers to the new Art Center being imagined in West Stanwood. Cultural identity is an ever evolving work in progress and for those of us who may be disheartened at the loss of the History of the World Gallery, well, we’d be wrong. Once again….

Duck and Cover

I’m old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and old enough to remember nuclear drills where us 3rd graders in Georgia would crawl under our desks and close our eyes, you know, so the blast wouldn’t blind us. My neighbor built a bomb shelter and kept a gun by the door so those of us whose dads were too lazy to do the same could be shooed away when the radiation was bearing down. When I told my father about the gun, he muttered something obscene and said our neighbor was a horse’s ass.

I don’t know how much our generation was affected by the nuclear jitters of the time. Maybe not as much as some psychiatrists think. But there is something about the idea of annihilation that probably seeps into the cellular level. Nuclear winter, mushroom clouds, flesh burned off bodies, cancers, giant ants in the desert mutating, all the horrors of cheezy sci-fi movies and yeah, the real thing.

So when I hear the Senator from Idaho talking about how a war with Russia would be over PDQ, I wonder where he was back in the days of Assured Mutual Destruction. If he thinks maybe the Russkies forgot the code to their nuclear arsenal. And then Sen. Graham joins in with the additional commentary that if Putin ordered an all-out nuclear strike, the general next to him would put a bullet in his head. Ah, magical thinking from the boyz in charge. Calling Dr. Strangelove, calling Dr. Strangelove!

I don’t plan to build a bomb shelter. Just yet. But a few more saber rattling comments from the peanut brain gallery, I may reconsider.

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

What I loved the most about the Trump years, aside from the bullying, dog whistling, money grubbing personality, was the propensity to lie. Fake news, everything was fake news. Catch him red handed, he’d attack the accuser in the most blatant, shameless way. Roy Cohn taught him well.

So now, what we have is an attentive world that, when confronted with, oh, say, an invasion of another country, its Fearless Leader, with a straight face, can claim it was merely self-defense. Or a faked bombing of a hospital, wasn’t them, it was a ruse to cast blame on them. What we’ve exported, this Shining City on the Hill of a country, isn’t democracy, it’s the lesson that prevarication works. Deny deny deny and maybe the true believers will believe that too. And if they don’t, deny more vociferously.

Keep saying the election was stolen, keep calling the war in Ukraine an incursion, stifle the press, ratchet up social media, muddy the water, bloody a nose … it’s a brave new world, pal, and if you don’t like it, well, next regime change maybe you’ll like a prison cell better, get your mind straight, get your facts bent around the right lie. Turkey, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, they must all love the Trump Doctrine: Lie through your teeth. Shut down the internet. Jail the dissenters, the disseminators of fake news! White is black, two plus two is who the hell knows.

Course Trump didn’t actually invent these notions, he just made them acceptable. To dictators, to strongmen, to a goodly portion of the Republican Party. Thanks a lot, Donald, for making us a role model.

Hank ‘the Tank’ Amundsen is standing up next to his barstool taking a swing for the outfield wall. “My gawd,’ he was gushing, “my gawd, it was something to see. That kid of mine is going to the majors, you guyz heard it first.” Pete, two stools down, sipped affably at his pint of IPA and said quietly, “I think you told us this last week, Tank.” Jerry nodded from a table full of empty pints he and the Flatheads had killed during the first hour of happy hour, ready for the second. “I believe Pete’s correct, Tank, but he forgot to mention the week before and last month and I think, check me on this Pete, I think you told us Jimmy was going Pro last year.”

“Aw, guys, I’m just a proud papa, is all. You can’t blame me, the kid is great. You can see it in his swing he’s got plenty of homers coming up. Practically got a contract signed. The scouts probably already got eyes trained on him.”

Little Jimmy, if he declared eligibility at this point, would never graduate Middle School. Tank has been sending him to camps, buying gear, tossing balls, all the stuff a Tiger Woods training dad would do since the kid was two and a half. If Jimmy had hoped for a normal childhood of bikes and X-box, it wasn’t going to happen. If Tank wasn’t hauling him and his bats, gloves and balls to tournaments and camps, he was out back of his shack where he’d set up a batting cage, firing curve balls to the poor kid, yelling at him when he whiffed, hollering in joy when he blasted one into the nettles past the swingset that Jimmy never got to use. His sister, pretty much ignored by Tank, got the swing pretty much to herself.

I don’t know what happens to all the Jimmys whose alpha dads drove them to be the best soccer player, baseball star, football hero or basketball idol, whose only dream was to go pro, make the majors, play ten years or less, then retire wealthy as Michael Jordan. I suspect they become sad, depressed, broken adults. Maybe they put their kids through the same nightmare gauntlet.

I had a buddy in high school who won state champ in swimming. When I saw him after we’d trudged off to different colleges, I asked him if he was still training for the Olympics. “I quit,” he said. When I asked why, he answered, “I spent half my life in a chlorine pool, before school, after school. All so I could compete in the Olympics, probably never make it, then wonder all my damn life why I didn’t do something else. I’m going to do something else.”

I suspect there are mostly losers out there. If we taught em to love the game, if we taught em to enjoy their teammates, if we taught em that sports were fun more than a path to riches, maybe we’d have a lot more winners. Jimmy, I suspect, isn’t going to be a winner. And his dad is going to take it a lot harder than Jimmy.

Just about everything you need is here on the South End. I admit we haven’t got a Mac Donald’s yet and there isn’t a Mall within hollering distance, but I’m talking about the Important Things, like a Modern Art Gallery, a café with friendly waitresses and a decent cup of joe, a mom and pop grocery that rents movies and knows your name, a little church to save a few souls – but not too many.

We used to have a garage and a junkyard back when Snowdens ran the store at Tyee. The first time I went to the garage, I needed my universal joints fixed. Ted was out there with his drinking buddy Seth – you see Seth Road by Mabana –that’s who Seth was.
They said sure, young feller, pull it right in, friendly as could be to a newcomer to the South End. I should’ve known things weren’t quite up to snuff, though, when they had ME under the truck handing ME tools and telling ME what to do next.

Course I was new and eager to get along with these fine neighbors of mine, and when in Rome, I thought, be a gladiator or be eaten. So with the help of these good ole boys I got the thing tore up fairly handily. Next day I hitchhiked into town and got myself some new universal joints – now I know you’re thinking isn’t it odd I got to go in myself, and I was thinking the same myself … but next night Seth and Ted drank and told lies to each other between supervising my cussing and grunting and smashing my knuckles and now I was thinking this is the damndest service station I ever had the misfortune to go to, but it was the ONLY garage on the island and it got me out of the winter monsoon, so I kept at it.

When I got done and crawled out from under that greasy blood-spattered pit I’d spent hours in, I asked how much I owed em for my time. I mean they had a genuine Slicker here is what I figured.
Ted said he thought maybe if I brought a bottle by someday, we’d call it even, and I thought well, that seems about fair.

It wasn’t til a week later somebody told me Ted’s wasn’t a real Service Station – just a place he worked on his own rigs. Later, when I took the jug over, we had a good laugh at my expense. And that was the first and last time we had us a repair shop on the South End and I guess you’re looking at the Head Mechanic. Retired now, thank you.

entropy
ĕn′trə-pē
noun

A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

This past couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning up after the snowstorm that bent over small trees, broke huge limbs off the Doug Firs, toppled a couple of our sheds and collapsed old fences. And so naturally I’ve been mulling over, during hundreds of trips to the burn pile, the concept of entropy. I hear tell the entire universe as we know it is in constant decay, entropic, in other words. You probably don’t need an astrophysicist to tell you that, just wake up every morning with new aches and pains, all the more so when you’re cleaning up a few tons of storm debris and hauling it around the property.

Yesterday I deconstructed a kayak shelter that had crashed after the snowload tipped it off balance, admittedly a poor architectural design devoid of structural engineering stamp, but I guess I hadn’t anticipated snow that weighed as much as ice falling in a surprise attack pre-dawn. I managed to use the truck and ropes to pull the other kayak shed upright, then added extra supports for any future snowstorms. Right, fat chance the new design would be much better than the last. I took the disassembled parts of the old one and used those to build a cute little shelter for our roadside RUBY Airbnb rental, the one with the crabpot and a metal crab hauling itself up onto the sign. Course, you know and I do too, using old wood cuts into its longevity, but hellfire, I’m trying to embrace entropy, not fight it.

The storm came on the heels of a weeklong garden fencing project I’d just completed, the one to keep the varmints out and the vegetables hostage. The old fence was built nearly 30 years ago, a fancy geometrical cedar artwork complete with stained glass in the gates and arbors, now rotting away. What I could keep, I left. What could be repurposed, I repurposed. Some on the new fence’s gates, some to make artworks down by the road, and yeah, I know, they won’t last 30 years this time. So sue me….

In my old age I’m constantly reminded of this notion of perpetual decay and for the time being I keep reciting Dylan Thomas’s recommendation to rage against the dying of the light, not to much avail. Things fall apart, buildings fall down, fences rot and trees uproot. If I’d created the universe, I might have reversed all this, not really sure what the thinking was to make disorder the modus operandi of all things. And yeah, I know, not my call….

When I left college I moved up to a Polish homestead in Northern Wisconsin, no running water other than a hand pump in the front yard, leaned-over outhouse out beside the ‘summer kitchen’ and wood for heat. I thought it would be nice not to work for awhile. I’d saved some money from working through college, which tells you college didn’t cost what it costs today. I think my last tuition payment was $250 for a semester. This was the Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison. That was 1972.

I know most folks would prefer to jump right into their careers, get a jump with that degree, maybe plan to travel later. You know, when they’d established themselves. Me, I’m not much for procrastinating what seems fun. Work, that’s a different deal. I’d pretty much burned out on work back in college. It wasn’t that I was thinking Retirement at 21, but a Prolonged Vacation seemed just the ticket. Give me time to think, time to relax, time to ponder the Future.

My next door neighbors, cousins of my wife at the time, were unfamiliar with those kind of concepts. They saw two people, so desperately poor they had to live rent free in an old farmhouse no one had inhabited in decades, pumping their water from outside, burning firewood to keep warm. It was inconceivable to them that we were not in Need. And so Eddie wandered over one autumn day to announce he had set up an interview for me at the local schoolbus company. I said, “Gee Eddie, you didn’t have to go and do that….” But Eddie waved me off. “It’s the least I can do,” he called as he walked back home.

This was bad news indeed. Should I call the bus company and decline my interview? Eddie would think — no, he would know — what a shirker I was. I decided to go to the interview. I wore some jeans that were mostly holes, threw on an ugly Goodwill shirt and wandered down to the bus lot, figuring, if I acted strangely enough, looking the way I looked, long hair past my shoulders, they’d make the interview brief and send me home. Easy. Great solution.

Ted and Wally, the owner and his mechanic, were in their office when I got there between shifts. I allowed as how my neighbor had talked to them about me working here, here I was. I could see they were amused by the sight of me right off the get-go. But as sometimes happens with me, I’m a sociable guy and before long we’re talking about everything from deer hunting to vegetable gardening, politics to TV shows. Even though I didn’t even have a TV. They asked me what kind of business I had with college and I said I studied literature. They looked at me blankly. “Books,” I said, “fiction. You know, like novels.” Ted shrugged and Wally shook his head.

I tried again. “Like when you were in English class, those books you read???” Ted laughed. “I never read em,” he said. “Fact, I never read any books.” Wally said, “Me neither.” “None?” I asked, incredulous. “Seriously??”

Well, they admitted they’d read some ‘men’s’ magazines and such, but books, no way. As a recently graduated English major, this was akin to finding myself in some backwash of the Amazon. I tried a few more times, thinking they’re having some fun with the new kid, but pretty soon they had convinced me that no, they were basically illiterate and proud of it. I shook my head. “Okay, I need to bring you boys some reading you might like.”

“When do you want to start?” Ted asked. I thought he meant when did I want to bring them some Tolstoy, but of course, that was how they got their new driver to fill an opening they needed filling. And how my retirement ended before it really got started.