The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When we were kids, my brother and I noticed the little grocery across the bridge leading up the hogsback past the Pelican River in Northern Wisconsin sold bait. We asked the owner if he would buy worms from us and he said, yah sure, u betcha. Even provided us with the cardboard containers we’d put 50 red worms in with some mulch. So, being good little entrepreneurs, we went to work down in the ravine below our house digging up thousands of the wrigglers and selling them to the store where we noticed they also sold nightcrawlers which sold for a lot more than the regular worms.

Nightcrawlers, for you folks who never explored your backyard grass in the middle of the night with a flashlight, are giant worms that sneak out of their burrows after dark to mate. They especially like rainy nights. We’d wander around the yard with a flashlight and see their long shiny bodies stretched out of their holes, but as soon as the light hit them, zoom, they shot back underground. You had to be quick, no hesitation, and accurate. Get a grip and pull real slow so you didn’t rip them in half. Half nightcrawlers weren’t saleable. The big ones brought a nice profit.

True kid capitalists migtht’ve franchised the operation, recruited other kids to dig and hunt, monopolize the worm market from Wisconsin to Texas, expanded into grasshoppers and eels, sequenced worm DNA, built huge bio-tech labs with 3-D printers, added bio-luminescence as fish attractors, controlled the bait shops across America and organized ‘protection’ to keep rogue worm dealers from incursions into our empire.

But … we didn’t. Too busy, I guess, being kids, discovering girls, drinking and rock and roll. Story of my life. Opportunity, like the Bard said, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Well, we missed our chance. Worm Kings, could’ve been us.

“No Way! No Way!” Techno Tim was hollering to any and all down at the South End Bait Shop and Marina where he was checking his 25 foot Arima parked in its berth. Both Tim and the fishing boat were rocking wildly, buffeted by storms real and imagined. A few of us boyz were hustling along the dock, tightening lines, securing bumpers, trying in vain to avoid Tim’s rant, especially when we all ended up trapped inside after the front of the squall sent waves lapping over the wharf and rain sent us all scurrying indoors, soaked in 15 seconds.

Cap’n Phil didn’t even wait before drawing our favorite beers from the cooler. And neither did we, grabbing beer rags and towels and bottles in one choreographed movement, drying off and wetting down simultaneously to Tim crying “No Way can this country afford raising minimum wage!!!”

“You’re a small businessman, Skipper, tell em what’ll happen when you can’t afford to hire help at 20 bucks an hour.” Cap’n Phil slid back behind the counter, half defensive, half official, half hidden, mostly none of the above. “You sorta answered your own question, Tim,” he dodged.

“Damn right! Nobody can stay afloat paying high wages,” Techno shouted, proud of his meteorological metaphor in the very teeth of the storm lashing the Pilot House that served as informal bar for the Marina. Miserable already, I decided my 2 cents wouldn’t make much difference. “Techno, you gotta put yourself in their place, the ones working full time and can’t make a Go of it.” “Their place?” Tim spluttered, sparying foam over his storm battered lips. “Their place? Get a better job, I say. Get some ambition! Get an education! Quit looking for handouts.”

“Seems a little cold hearted, Tim,” Gyppo John threw in, a towel draped over his head. He looked like a post-fight boxer. That, or a demented Yasser Arafat. “Cold hearted? Hell yes! It’s dog eat dog in the jungle of capitalism. Wake up and smell the money, John! The losers deserve what they get!”

“Pretty much nothing,” I answered. Techno Tim always did rock my boat.

“Serves em right,” he cried happily and threw down half his Bud Light in one victorious gulp, then slammed the bottle triumphantly on the formica … before noticing the bow line on his Arima had wrenched loose and his boat was bashing against the neighbors. Howling, he headed for the door. “You guys gonna help?” he asked mournfully, pausing at the door.

Gyppo said, “Dog eat dog, Tim Boy.” Cap’n Phil said he was feeling cold hearted all of a sudden. I asked, slouched comfortably in my seat, “What’re you paying. I sure don’t work minimum.”

Techno cursed us one and all , then scrambled into the squall. We waited a judicious minute, grins all around, then finally went out to help. Fun is fun, but in the end we’re all in this together.

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 down at the Diner a couple months ago. Anita, our morning waitress had let slip the news they were going to change the menus. Some of the regulars were instantly agitated — and this was before their second cup of Black Tar coffee, a high-dosage distilled caffeine that would prop a trucker ramrod straight behind the wheel of a Kenworth hauling from Stanwood to Berdoo.

“Why tamper with perfection?” 3 Putt Pete was asking the entire assemblage of us Late Morning crowd, although purportedly he was aiming his alarm at Brenda behind the cash register. When she’d finished ringing up Little Willy, our ex-commissioner who served one term before half these yahoos sent him packing over a detour during a months long road construction, she turned on 3 Putt and scowled her Early Morning No Nonsense scowl that sent half the boyz back to breakfast lest she shot a laser blast at them, ruining way more than some suddenly overcooked omelette smoldering on a charred plate. 3 Putt wasn’t looking her way, unfortunately for him, sort of like Bambi hopping happily in the meadow before Godzilla makes venison toejam out of our cute critic.

“Why, oh why,” he was lamenting, maybe imagining this was his Big Chance at a thespian breakthrough, play to the Imagined Producer who might be taking breakfast Off Broadway, “why can’t we just accept things as they are, not ruin em by pushing the limits to what might never be?”

By the conclusion of his soliloquy, Pete was practically standing on his chair, fork and knife dancing in a grand flourish of stainless and saliva, the expected applause, the cries of ‘Author’ and ‘Bravo!’ soon to follow …. when Brenda slammed the register shut to steal the finale while shaking a receipt in 3 Putt’s direction. You could’ve heard an egg break back on Big Larry’s grill as total silence descended on the café heavy as that chlorine gas leak the previous week when a welding torch opened a mystery tank and set off a South End mustard gas evacuation.

“For the luvva Grease, Pete, will you sit down!? We’re not changing the food, you fool, just the damn menus. These old ones are tattered and stained. You’ll still get your chicken fried steak and that heart attack that can’t come quick enough, you ask me.”

3 Putt, you can rest assured, left enough tip to pay half the printing costs. And when those new menus arrived a few days later, it was Pete who admitted they were a fine addition to the Diner and asked meekly if he could take one of the old ones home. As a special keepsake. Historians, it seems, are made, not born.

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

My ex-wife and I bought a house in a Seattle ghetto back in ’77. She was living with her boyfriend across town and I lived in the ghetto house with an assortment of roommates. Don’t ask, it’s too long a story right now. The house was in what was the Red Line District, meaning grocery stores, pharmacies, most retail weren’t able to finance from the banks which considered our area a DMZ. We did have a small store down the block which sold beer and fortified wines, some bread and old dairy, lots of canned goods, pop and candy. In a pinch, I shopped there. When I got my change, it was always short. Always. Not being the sort who argues about nickels and dimes, I wrote it off as a sort of ‘tip’ to the clerk, usually an obese black guy who never said hello or thanks or how’s the crime down your way?

Wednesday nights my wife would come over to visit. We had a small black and white television set that got 3 channels, something called an Astronaut, probably Sputnik era. The sound was shot — even turned up full volume, you could barely hear it. My wife liked watching it while we ate dinner, usually a box pizza. We were ‘living large’, as we say down in the mean streets. One Wednesday she forgot to bring wine so I hopped over to the ghetto market and bought something savory and romantic to go with sitcoms and preservative packed pizzas. I was thinking our marriage might’ve pretty much run its rope. I was thinking maybe I was close to Bottom. Course, if you think that, you aren’t even looking over the edge of the abyss. Yet.

I carefully chose an insouciant little white zinfandel for $3.99 plus tax, took it to the counter and watched ruefully as my friendly merchant shorted me most of a dollar in change. Don’t ask me why, but I chose this moment to challenge his math skills. “Mistakes, happen, Man,” he shrugged. “They happen all the time here,” I said, “and oddly, Man, they always come up short on my end.”

“Don’t got to shop here, you know. Plenty of other places. Free country.”

A racist thought jumped into my politically correct head. I kept it to myself, pocketed my extra quarters and headed back to Camelot with a fine bottle of screwtop swill. My ex was 5 feet from the Astronaut, sound this tinny scratchy noise. I poured her a tumbler of zin, popped a beer and we settled in to eat pizza and watch reruns. When she finished her wine she mentioned casually she had to leave soon. She and her beau were meeting for an evening of fun and frivolity and, well, she’d forgotten to mention it, but there you are.

My one lousy night a week marriage just got whittled down a bit. I looked at her with what I assume was a look of incalculable pathos mixed with scarcely concealed rage and/or disappointment. I’m guessing it was actually the look of a rube at the fair who just spent his last dollar on his girl throwing baseballs at rigged targets for a kewpie doll prize he’d never in a million reincarnations ever win. When she left minutes later, I sat stupidly staring at the Astronaut, slowly becoming aware the sound had given out, no doubt beyond earth’s orbit and terrestrial audio range. I twisted the dial until it too left orbit.

It was later that night, after midnight, when the wine was gone and the beer too and most of what was left of a stupid marriage. The TV had sat on its crappy little stand, flickering black and white images for hours, snowy ghosts dancing in my peripheral. At some point I jerked the power cord out of the wall and the picture shrank to a dot then nothing. I picked up the set, walked out the front door with it and up the now rainy street to my ghetto store. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just walked up the block looking, to any cop driving along, like a looter on his way to the pawn shop with a brand new stolen TV.

The store was closed, the doors shut behind iron bars, the lights mostly out other than a neon or two. I suppose I vaguely planned to put the TV through a window, but the bars made that plan pretty much senseless, if it ever made sense before. Finally I put the Astronaut on the ground in the doorway next to a couple of empty fifths of wine, gave it a good kick in the picture tube teeth and walked away. If I thought the Space Age had ended, I was in for a very long wait.

The aptly named Land’s End RV and Trailer Park sits near the end of the island back off the road just before it hits the Head and slingshots back north again. The state park sends folks with travel trailers down there when they’re full up, but that advice has ruined more than a few vacations. Johnny Reddick runs the place, mostly into the ground. Back in the late ‘70’s it wasn’t too bad. A dozen or so single wides were spaced out on concrete pads and an old caboose sat in there too. There was a small area for tents and some gravel for the RV’s. Rents were reasonable and the public showers and toilets were kept clean and operational. The tenants, mostly elderly folks on small fixed incomes, were content down there even if it was the end of the road. In more ways than one….

But old man Jensen had a stroke and Mrs. Jensen sold the kit and caboodle to Johnny in ’82. Johnny was looking for an investment, something he could use a small inheritance to parlay into a substitution for working, and the trailer park seemed an ideal fit. Jack up the rents, pull a few more trailers in he’d snagged cheap, collect the rents and drink the rest of the day. If Johnny hadn’t been a bad drunk, things might’ve worked out for everybody, but like a lot things on the South End, things went downhill.

Most of the original tenants left after the shootout in ’88, just picked up their belongings and moved on, something they’d been thinking of doing for years once Johnny leased half a dozen dilapidated RV’s on the weekly or monthly basis. Dangerous looking men showed up in rusted vehicles with broken windshields and missing fenders and dogs they kept on chains outside. They never seemed to work, other than under the hoods of their jalopies, not totally uncommon on the South End, but their worried neighbors sensed whatever money they got was somehow suspect. Apparently the sheriff’s deputies did too. Land’s End became part of their drive-by route even before the gunplay.

Johnny says the gentleman in the last trailer was drunk when he knocked on his vinyl door to inquire about that month’s rent. Johnny most certainly was. What Delores in Lot#6 testified in court as ‘3 sheets to the wind.” When the door finally opened after prolonged pounding, Johnny was staring at his delinquent tenant wearing nothing but a pair of black briefs and pointing a small caliber pistol at Johnny’s head. Apparently interrupted in a 3rd rate romance, the man was noticeably displeased. He suggested Johnny remove various anatomical parts immediately from his doorstep. Which Johnny did.

Maybe Johnny would have been wiser to go home, let things settle, collect the rent in the morning. Instead he went back to his own trailer, finished a 5th of Jim Beam, pulled a chrome handled .38 out of his sock drawer and hauled down to the last trailer with dogs snarling and barking, lights popping on, but before anyone could get to a window, shots broke the night wide open. Andy Watson called 9-1-1 and told his wife to get on the floor behind the kitchen counter. Still on the telephone, he watched Johnny stroll back to his own place, gun in hand. He was pretty sure he’d killed the kid at the last pad.

When the first deputy arrived, the entire Trailer Park was awake and terrified. Bill Traxton, the cop, jumped out of his cruiser, gun drawn. He’d called for back-up, but he knew that would be half an hour. Nothing moved. No one came outside. The only noise was barking dogs, half crazed. Bill Traxton turned his spotlight along the line of trailers, one by one, until he hit the last one where a man in his underwear sat on the step. “Don’t move!” the deputy yelled. The man didn’t. “Put your hands where I can see them,” he commanded. The man did.

Carefully, Bill Traxton approached him. Finally he saw the pit bull, bleeding beside the nearly naked man where Johnny Reddick had shot it point blank, hitting it in the shoulder. The dog was breathing hard. The man watched Bill watch the dog. Finally Bill asked, “You hurt?” The man shook his head no. “Just my dog.”

The deputy took Johnny away, cuffed and swearing, in the back of the squad car. The man in the underwear took his dog in his pickup god knows where. No one at Land’s End ever saw him or the dog again. Johnny got a $500 fine for animal abuse, same as the rent he hadn’t been paid, and a year’s probation for reckless endangerment. Most of the dog owners moved along pretty quick. Some of the single-wide folks stayed, but not many. And not because they wanted to. They just hoped, like a lot of us down here, things would get better.

Some of you less fortunate few who may have followed this little blog for probably too long won’t be surprised to know that I am actually a stained glass artist. You may even know that I came to my profession in the unlikeliest of routes when, back at the time I bought my old shack with plastic on the windows instead of glass, I chanced to see an item in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette for a night class at the high school to learn the lost art of stained glass. Who lost it, I never learned, but I can tell you one of the lucky ones who found it again. I took one lesson, went home and before the second class the following week my continuing education had terminated once I had finished two windows and a full size door. I never went back for that second class.

I’m a couple of beers past turning 71 years old. I started breaking glass back in 1980 or slightly before, so it’s been 40 plus years. All I wanted to do was replace that plastic in my drafty shack’s windows, but a funny thing happened on the way to a warmer house, I just got hopelessly addicted to stained glass, its design, its unique interaction with light and with seasonal shifts, its uplifting spiritual presence, corny as it sounds coming from a secular yahoo like me. I built a glass studio out back in the woods, piddled around selling show-and- tell stuff at the hospital where I part-timed as a graveyard shift orderly on weekends, then fortunately fell into public art with a small commission by the WA State Arts Commission.

Public art was what I loved. What I love now. When work was slack, I donated public art around the area, nearly 20 large murals with the last one for the new Island County Administration Building. If I were a better musician, I would give free concerts if the paying gigs weren’t coming in. Actually, the South End String Band has. Or if I were a writer, I might write blogs or maybe humor sketches for the local Pulitzer-prizeless Crab Cracker, not for any money but because, well, a writer should really write if he wants to call himself a writer. Because we so-called artists didn’t become artists to get rich, we followed a different piper.

We’re in the plague years now and when it subsides, just as it was after the Great Recession, money for government spending will be too tight to mention. Public art — which is based on construction of public buildings — will grind to a halt the way it did after 2008. I had a few commissions lined up before the drought hit me, kept me going for a few years, then the work was sparse and the competition for the few remaining jobs was ferocious. I expect this will be a repeat performance.

But … before it all goes to hell in an unsanitized shopping cart, I received notice that I was a finalist for three different WA Arts Commission projects. Well, I thought, long shots but maybe one more before forced retirement. And sure enough, I won one. And that one was for, maybe you guessed it already, the Stanwoodopolis High School. If you think we’ve come full circle, I couldn’t agree more. If you think maybe sometimes the planets line up and the stars shine a bit brighter, I’m thinking so too. If you think I’m grinning from ear to ear under my battered old hat, you’d be absolutely right. Life is full of surprises, probably the only thing you should count on.

As a card carrying bleeding heart snowflake liberal, I watch with bemusement the hair-on-fire panic of my fellow commies who seem to be predicting the end of the world as they know it and the demise of all things progressive. The 3.5 trillion dollar Build it Better budget, surprise surprise, is a political football. My socialist pals are wringing their collective hands, cursing the two senators who are roadblocking the bill and all the Republicans who refuse to raise the debt ceiling, hoping the Dems will take the blame for the deficits of the past, oh, couple of decades.

I admit that I gnash my teeth and pound my fists but when I calm down I try to remember we sent Trump into exile down at Mar-a-Lago to hold court with his jesters and funders, plotting a return from that grave in 2024. I expect he’ll either be in federal prison by then or his hopes for another grand entry down the T. Tower escalator will be more than likely a grand jury, just one more prediction that crashes and burns. Meanwhile, back at the sausage factory, a package will be emerging from this Congress, one that may not have 3.5 trillion as a price tag but will more than likely legislate provisions for more health care, maybe even dental, possibly prescription drug cost reductions, child care, subsidized community college tuition, climate change provisos, rural internet, all this and more. What we down here on the South End call a liberal agenda, one coming to a theater near all of us.

So maybe it won’t be a total Green New Deal and maybe it won’t be single payer national health care and probably it won’t make everyone happy, but … geez, c’mon, we’re swerving to the left in an electric car. Who knows, we might even tax the rich and the corporations that don’t pay their fair share. Quit yer crying, I say, and stop expecting perfection. Progress isn’t a bad alternative.

Literacy exists on the South End, despite rumors of its premature demise. Oh sure, the Little Library was sacked and books burned in its first month of opening over at Hutchison Park, but pockets of erudition still flourished. The Salish Sea South End Book Club has been meeting monthly since 2010, its membership mostly stable until the Covid Epidemic forced some to avoid public contamination. Finally the Club went on pre-vaccine hiatus, vowing to return when the plague ran its course.

Naturally the final book selections dealt with … well, you guessed it, disease and epidemics. Sheila Brockhurst wanted to select Andromeda Strain, some nightmare scenario of extraterrestrial origin unleashed from secret labs in the American desert, but she was outvoted for the last selection before the group went into quarantine. Last Town on Earth, the Club pick, scared everyone enough to go into Lockdown themselves, a frightening little novel about the Spanish Flu and a town, supposedly modeled on Darrington, that sequestered itself from outside contamination. A little close to home in more ways than one, Ginny Schwimmer complained over her Chablis and cheese.

Half wine club, half literary review, some of the members were notoriously averse to reading, coming primarily for the camaraderie and vino. Sylvia Nostrum once voiced her opinion that those who didn’t read the week’s selection should just stay home and binge-watch Netflix serials, but the bibliophiles tabled that, worried that too few of them would be left for a meaningful discussion. And anyway, the social aspect of the book group probably outweighed rigid enforcement of reading rules. Besides, the non-readers were entertaining in their own right. And they brought the best hors-douerves.

The Club members took turns meeting at each other’s homes, which, if you’re the spousal unit, literary or not, meant heading for a nearby tavern, a friend’s house or just sequester voluntarily in a back room. The ladies were always inviting us menfolk to join in, always nice to get a gendered opinion on the book of the month, see if the pheromones could get a word in edgewise. I admit, as one of the menfolk, I considered the invitation but in the end decided discretion might be the better part of valor. Or at least an easy way to avoid divorce.