The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.

A friend of mine just wrote to say she might have discovered she has a heretofore unknown brother, discovered, apparently through the wonders of DNA analysis. He is either her half brother or the son of her father’s brothers, the result, she says of a one night stand in some hick town in Arizona with his mother who until he was 11 thought was his sister. Yeah, I’m confused too. To make the story all the more interesting, his mother is African American. Of course I’m interested in selling the movie rights…

There are studies that show between 10 and 30% of us may not have the right dad when we send those father’s day cards. This is a testament to the infidelity of the American Mom whose libido may have been vastly underestimated. I had a buddy, a white guy, who had a black kid. Kind of a surprise at the birth, but like he said, the mizzus got drunk at a party one night and hey, these things happen, but he was going to raise the kid, someone else’s genetically, his by choice. Gotta say, I was impressed. If you met his wife, you’d never guess her wild side judging by her mousey disposition.

Another buddy of mine got a knock on his door one day a few years back and found his old paramour of even further back darkening his doorway with her son in tow. He’d had a fling with her when she was 15, picked her up in a park, took her home and carried on an affair for a week or two. Yeah, I know what statutory rape is. He did too, but it didn’t stop him. So now the chickens were flying home to roost. My pal, being the distrustful sort, decided to call her bluff, especially since the kid was pretty dark like his mom and didn’t show much Caucasian. And because she wanted money. Turned out the boy wasn’t his after all. I don’t know if he gave her some money anyway, but I hope he did.

I guess these DNA tests are great for exploring the family tree. Personally, I’m okay letting Dad be Dad. I don’t need to be sending multiple father’s day cards every damn year….

Jim Shipley, the editor of the Pulitzer Prize-less Crab Cracker, gets folks all the time who think somehow I’m the chief, cook and bottle washer of this highly successful literary and art and current event bi-weekly journal that’s been publishing since way before my ‘Best By’ date. I have repeatedly told Jim that I take credit for the success of ‘our’ magazine with only a minimal number of gullible South Enders. Not too many. Well, only the people I run into.

Jim gets a lot of complaints from folks who think what I write in the hugely popular Moonshine Wit and Wet Powder Wisdom column is true. Gospel, even. Indisputable if not somewhat libelous. April Fool is nearly every other week up at the litiginous-averse Cracker, but of course, I’m not the one who’s liable, the Cracker is. I know, this doesn’t seem fair. Jim pays the printing costs, the taxes, the deliveries and worse, the extravagant advances and royalties we journalists demand … and yet, he’s on the ropes for attorney fees for, okay, my slanderous and reprehensible attempts at humor.

But then, who said life is fair? I’ll tell you who: attorneys. And humor columnists. Lovers and warriors where everything is fair, that’s who. So … maybe it’s a sense of guilt, maybe it’s a strictly financial move, maybe it’s just a quixotic whim on my part — who knows? — but I went to Jim and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Of course, I can’t disclose the exact terms of our non-disclosure agreement but let’s just say we came to a happy compromise and leave it for the forensic accountants to sort out if it comes to that. But next issue expect the masthead to read:
SKEETER DADDLE DIATRIBES
All the Truth You Need

You want to send a complaint to the editor, pal, good luck. The days we apologize for Attitude left the Stanwoodopolis Station a long long time ago. Say hello to the New Boss. Believe me, you’re gonna miss Jim!

Over the past 15 years I’ve been caretaking a little 5 acre park down on the South End, the only county park down this far, kind of a small and easily forgotten parcel the county can conveniently ignore. A couple of years back the parks guy, let’s call him Jim, asked if I needed anything done down there. I said the entire parking lot is a mudhole and he said he’d put it on the top of the To-Do list. A year ago he asked me the same question and I got the same answer.

This past year he’s called me occasionally, always sitting in the parking lot of the park, telling me he’s misjudged the amount of gravel it will take to level that tarpit and make it something that doesn’t swallow dogs, kids and VW bugs. The second time he told me that I thought, gee, he must be in the wrong parking lot … or else he’s not good at estimating projects this small. He would, he said, get right on it. Soon as he got the county tractor back from the shop. Ditto his pickup and oh, he had a bad leg. By the time he got all those fixed up, the mudholes were dry and only the axles of sunken autos showed in the pits, no need to get the lot graded and graveled until the monsoon season in fall.

End of last year he was re-estimating the work over there, misjudged the expense and time, and oh, the budget for that year was pretty much spent so we would have to wait until this year’s budget. Jim called yesterday. It seems he and the ever vigilant road crew had found and removed the sign I had nailed to the maple tree next to the parking lot that read A YEAR AGO THE COUNTY PROMISED TO FIX THIS PARKING LOT MUDHOLE … IF YOU WANT TO THANK THEM, CALL 360- 387-**** . I said I would like that sign put back up and Jim said no, that he would get to the grading and graveling when the weather stopped raining, what he said he had told me last conversation. What he had said last conversation was he had no budget. The trouble with excuses, like lying, is you got to keep them straight.

Well, we got a little heated and finally Jim patiently explained how every little crummy small park like mine wanted stuff done and expected it right away. I said I’ve been waiting years! He explained in a nice way how if I complained, if anyone complained, our park projects would go to the bottom of his list. Not the top where he has had it for a couple of years. I said are you threatening me, Jim and he said no, he was just explaining how it works, complain and you get put at the back of the line. Not a threat, ma’am, just a fact.

I was standing next to our County Commissioner this morning at a philanthropy breakfast honoring, well, philanthropists. Park volunteers meet that criterion, I suspect, so it would have been the perfect time to relate this little story, paid county employee versus an unpaid volunteer who buys gas, lawnmowers, chainsaws etc., one of many who mow and clean and clear and maintain the county parks , good time maybe even to ask the commissioner why on god’s green earth would us citizens volunteer for nasty threats when all we want is to make our park something other than a mudhole that invites vandalism.

But … I didn’t. I’ve never been much for tattle tails, never been a jailhouse rat, never really wanted to give bad reviews on Yelp or write letters of complaint to higher authorities. Course, the truth is … maybe I’m just worried Jimbo will take me off the top of his priority list.

When the Flatheads got to the door of the South End Diner this morning, they were greeted by Anita’s handwritten placard:
No More Political Arguments
Until After the Election
No Exceptions!!

The vintage car guyz were flabbergasted. What’s it mean? they wanted to know. What about Freedom of Speech? Walter particularly wanted to know. Brenda was pouring the first rounds of coffee to about ten perplexed Flatheads. “We’re sick of it, all of us,” she explained. “Anita’s had a dose. She’s ready to close the diner until after next Tuesday if she has to.”

“Who does she think she is?” Walter demanded, waving his porcelain clay mug in a moving target for Brenda who finally grabbed his hand to hold the cup still. “She’s the owner, Walt, that’s who. No shoes, no shirt no service. You want breakfast, no more of your Trump talk.”

Jerry clapped his hands. “Okay with me, Walt. Maybe my appetite will come back.”

“What’ll we talk about instead,” Charlie moaned, only half serious. “How about cars?” Brenda suggested, starting now to take orders. “You’re a car club, not a political action committee.”

“Anita gonna ban that next?” Walter shouted, which brought Anita herself out from behind her register. Walter had his back to her and never saw the menu before it slapped across the back of his head, knocking his Make America Great Again ballcap onto the formica tabletop. “What the …?” he sputtered and turned to find Anita rearing back for another swat.

“Holy cripes, Anita,” he stuttered. “I’m just kidding.”

Anita whacked him anyway. “Jeez, Anita ….”

The rest of breakfast the boyz spent discussing the virtues of dual exhausts, twin carbs and rebored cylinders. Next week they’ll probably argue who stole the election. Or try, anyway ….

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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.