The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

There’s a truism among us park rangers: a neglected park invites vandalism. I’ve been taking care of the only county park on the South End for about 15 years. It’s not much, five acres, couple of picnic tables, BBQ grill, trails, just a small place of respite from the woes of the world. I mow, plant flowers and shrubs and trees, clear trail, pick up litter, stock the 60’s phone booth Little Library, add sculpture and art where I can, all to help the county for nada, another Friends of Camano Island Parks volunteer.

For the past five years or more the chain link fence around the parking lot perimeter has been smashed, knocked down completely in places and stood sagging so that it looked like the dental work of a bad prizefighter. This year the county finally got around to replacing the sections that were bad. A little late, but better than nothing. For the past couple of years I’ve asked the county to regravel the parking lot which is, after any rain and always throughout the fall and winter and spring, a mudhole with deep craters. I’ve been told this is Top Priority for the county parks. I hate to think what qualifies as Low Priority.

I could write an entire humor column on the excuses I’ve been given why our Top Priority mudhole never gets graded and graveled. Broken tractor, busted pickup truck, leg problems of the park guy, misjudged gravel estimate (twice), budget shortfall, backlogged blackberry cleanup, forced sick leave if not taken in this fiscal year, you name it, I’ve heard it.

The place with its tarpit parking lot looks like hell, a great invitation for vandals and yeah, we’ve got plenty of vandals. Strewn garbage, broken library windows, burned books, stolen grill, stolen art, new fence smashing, tossed condoms, plants dug up, paintball splatter on the trees. Do I blame the county for all that? You bet I do. The volunteers on these parks, working years for nothing, donating gas and mowers and landscaping, we deserve better than a shrug of the shoulders or a litany of lame excuses from the county. Am I pissed off? You’re damn right I’m pissed off.

But …to be fair, I’ve forever been the one who rejoiced in living far from the reach of Rome. The County of Island has always been a moat away, a Saratoga Passage away or worst case, a long slog by road up through Stanwoodopolis, through Snohomish County, Skagit County, Fidalgo Island then across the Deception Pass bridge and down to Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. From my little park, about most of a day round trip. So if the bureaucracy of the county seems to have forgotten about us, well, maybe they’ll understand if I skip my property taxes this year. You know, my truck isn’t running well, my foot has been hurting me lately, I’ve got my own blackberry cleanup, I’m saving for a tractor, I misjudged the tax payment, my personal budget is a little thin this fiscal year, I need to take sick leave or at least a few mental health days, don’t forget Covid but hey, that property tax is Priority One for me, trust me on that. Oh, and thanks for your patience!

When I was the ripe old age of 20, I decided to get a vasectomy. The world sure didn’t need any more Skeeters, I decided, and furthermore, I knew I wouldn’t be much of a dad. Maybe too selfish, maybe knew I’d be broke and out of work, maybe just wasn’t in my life’s job description. Looking back 50 years later, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever even though I suspect I might have been an okay father but hey, the world has plenty of okay fathers and way plenty kids without me adding to the glut. Deciding to be childless was one thing, finding a doc who would perform the vasectomy on a 20 year old was a lot more daunting. The first few I went to quizzed me about my decision, told me they wouldn’t perform it, figured I might change my mind down the road. I assured them I wouldn’t be changing my mind. They assured me they wouldn’t have any part of my plans.

I will say, at least I didn’t have picketers outside the clinics and doctors’ offices, shouting at me, screaming Bible verses, telling me I would go to hell if I prevented a life from coming into this world. But what I took away from all this was that it was my body all right, but there were those who thought maybe it wasn’t. They knew better than me and they had the scalpel hand. They had the law on their side. They had the Power and I had, well, I had pretty much nothing. Way of the world, I guess.

I could have used birth control the rest of my life. Could have abstained. Could have been a priest. There would still be those self-righteous folks who would object to the pill, to the day-after drug, to condoms, to … well, you name it, they would pass a law if they could. And they do. They prevent Planned Parent clinics from operating in a lot of states, they ban the morning after pill, they want government out of everything BUT your sexuality. And today they’re arguing at the Supreme Court that abortions be made illegal, essentially. They’ve decided when life begins and they have the Bible on their side. If you don’t believe in the Bible, if you think life begins at birth, if you don’t happen to believe that abortion is baby killing, well, get ready, things are about to change. And not to your liking.

Nobody, and I mean pretty much nobody, is pro-abortion. Abortion is a hard damn decision and I wouldn’t want to be in the position to have to make it. But …plenty of women, girls really, find themselves deciding if a child is the right choice. The Court is going to help them with that now. For sure some will do okay raising an unwanted kid, some by themselves, some just a kid themselves, some struggling to be a mother and still find a job. But a lot of women are going to discover their body isn’t theirs, their decision isn’t theirs, and their future was determined by five or six people in black robes. Way of the world, maybe, but that doesn’t make it right.

These pesky viruses, they just keep mutating like zombies digging back up out of their hastily filled graves. This latest one, according to frantic news accounts from every network, newspaper, media platform and gossip, appears to be mutated like nothing before, some 60 mutations on its little self. God only knows what it’s capable of, what it might do, who it might infect, where it will show its spiky face next.

And just when you thought you were safe. Two inoculations and a booster plus masks still worn and public avoidance still in effect, what, me worry? Course, back in Wisconsin where I just spent a couple of weeks, they stopped worrying long ago, mostly anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. Covid? Naw, they don’t believe it’s real. So what if their hospitals are filling up again, facts don’t scare them. I rarely saw a mask on anybody in the grocery stores, other than myself. So you can bet the Omicron variation won’t convince them any more than the Delta that vaccines might help. They don’t need your damn help!! And, you know what, I’m not offering to help. Like how? Tell them about Charlie Darwin? Isn’t this the whole point about evolution? You got a brain that feeds on Qanon and Breitbart, well, it’s going to atrophy. Simple as that. Eat a banana and piss up a rope.

Meanwhile, back here on the ground we got scientists working around the clock, monitoring cases, checking out severity, transmission speed, DNA sequencing, all that mumbo jumbo the folks who don’t believe in Covid think is bogus. And who knows, maybe this new variant will be the one that dominates and is less deadly, just a seasonal flu down the road. More Darwin, more evolution when it comes to these replicating bugs. Give me science as a weapon to fight this, maybe stop with the hair-on-fire news media reports and good luck to the folks who think three quarters of a million dead Americans is nothing worse than a cold. Duh.

We live on what the tourism folks like to advertise as the Island You Can Drive To. It’s sort of true, unless you come at rush hour or a busy summer weekend, then it’s more like The Island You Can Crawl To, not quite as appealing but never the less, slightly more accurate.

I read in last week’s Stanwoodopolis Gazette that the city planners were going to propose multiple plans for a bypass around the gridlocked megalopolis, most imagining a beltline out through the farm fields to the north before looping back to the main highway at the edge of town just before the Memorial Bridge leading to the island. Farmers are already upset, downtown businesses are peeved, the City Council doesn’t need another civil war after the deadlock over if what where and how to site a new City Hall, the city administrator just quit and, well, everything’s pretty much normal in our fair city.

Not being a registered voter in the town, I suppose I’m not really welcome to offer my outsider suggestions. Sure, I’ve driven that gauntlet through the sewer lagoons for 44 years, but it doesn’t make the local yokels Velkommen sign any more welcoming now than it did when I first arrived with long hair and no money, no job and no doubt a bad attitude. Times change, I’ll grant you, but some things don’t. The downtown businesses are still as friendly as ever, meaning they want our bizness but not our presence. Shop, but hurry on home now. Here’s your hat, what’s my hurry?

So okay, here’s my two cents, a long time suffering outsider who tried the SHOP LOCAL slogan and never thought reciprocity was part of the deal. Build the Tunnel! Bertha’s done digging Seattle’s, haul it north, set it up by the new high school and dig til you reach the bridge. Now there’s a bypass. Out of sight, out of mind. Stanwoodopolis gets the peace and quiet it has always wanted and we islanders get to bypass the town that never really wanted us in the first place. If the city puts up a Velkommen sign at the island end of town finally, well, I’m saying it’s too damn late. Dig the bypass!

Today we’re going to my wife’s father’s funeral. She’s been out here in Wisconsin three weeks while he died a lingering and painful demise, probably memories she’ll never erase but hopefully not permanently scarring. I arrived here in Oshkosh a week ago after flying into Madison to visit my 98 year old dad in the assisted living place we put him six months ago, only to walk into his apartment to find him flat out on the floor half dressed, moaning from where he’d fallen. Welcome back!

I’m not accustomed to Death or Dying. Although … I suppose nobody is. Wars maybe. Pandemic hotspots, possibly. Having worked in a hospital as an orderly for ten years, I witnessed plenty of horrors but those were strangers, brief brushes with fellow earthlings leaving their mortal coil, just part of the job, nothing personal, no need to turn it into a philosophic inquiry.

This is different. It feels as if we’re all dying. Which, of course, we are. If we care to view it that way. People like to say — and even believe — a funeral is a kind of Closure. I’ve never understood that word ‘closure’. A door closing behind us, shutting out the past? Turn off the lights, lock the door and leave the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob?

We’re going to the cemetery where Karen’s mom was buried years ago on a similarly cold bleak and windy November day in Wisconsin, the sky the color of Lake Winnebago, spitting snow over an open grave, soon to be filled back in, grass growing again in spring, all of us back where we came from, back to the business of living.

I’m no longer a philosophic enquirer. Explanations are the faux news of my existence. For those who ask no questions, there are no mysteries, no need for answers. Life, I think, is more like a music, not a riddle. The dead dance with us, the living. They’re never really gone and the door we thought we closed was never really soundproofed.

Steve Forbert sang this back in my youth:
“Here’s to all the shitty jobs that I despise
Here’s to two-bit guarantees and other lies”
I guess I took Steve pretty much to heart in my wayward youth. Worked in a dog pound for awhile, taught school a bit, drove trucks and buses here and there, stripped furniture until the fumes got to me, cleaned Coca-cola bottlers and loaded their trucks, managed a University dining hall, spent one night in the local cannery shoveling corn husks out to a conveyor belt, tried my hand at carpentry, ended up on the graveyard shift weekends at the Everett hospital as an orderly. My favorite days were the ones when I threw down the shovel and quit. My least favorite were the ones spent looking for the next shitty job.

My folks thought I was mostly a slackard and a bum. Quitting was for Losers might have been the crocheted sampler on their kitchen wall, but fortunately for me, I’ve never been looking for parental or peer group approval. In 1992, I had had a dose of bad jobs, bad bosses, low pay and all the rest. We had decided the old shack we had lived in the past 17 years wasn’t going to outlive us and the mizzus was lobbying for us to hire a builder, get a mortgage and move into the modern world. I, of course, was terrified of a mortgage, a ball and shackle on my current job, the one I planned to quit as soon as possible, meaning, right now. So … I begged her, pleaded my case, swore I would build the house myself and even, so help me god, get permits and build it by code, a novelty for us after multiple illegal additions and buildings. No doubt in a moment of weakness, or plain pity, she relented and agreed I would quit my graveyard shift job, build the house and when it was done, make my avocational glass business a real occupation. And if it wasn’t ….? Well, that was the dagger.

The house took me two solid years, almost to the day. Hardest work I’d ever done. Happiest job I ever had. I worked 7 days a week, long days, lots of overtime, plenty of stress. You try building a house by yourself, learning plumbing the night before, electric from a book, most every step a new education. But day by day, nail by nail, the house rose out of the ground, a satisfaction that’s hard to describe.

And then the day came when it was finished. Time to make a living doing art or else it was back to the mine. I always thought artists should have a day job, if for no other reason they wouldn’t be forced to compromise their art for money. But … the opposite might be more true. Necessity might be the mother of creativity as well as invention. If you want to be an artist, nothing focuses the mind like the fear of those crummy jobs throughout the years and more to come. Poverty is okay. But it’s far better to be working for yourself and even better if that work is what you love. Quitting, sometimes, is the best strategy.

I was at the opening of new works by one of our local oil painters at the South End Fine Art Gallery and Expresso Shoppe. As always it’s a guaranteed large crowd, mostly us artists and a few of our friends and occasionally a patron or two. Regina, the gallery owner and latte barista, always provides liberal winepours and enough hors d’oeuvres to hold back rickets among the starving artists another week or so.

I was admiring a fine piece titled, tantalizingly enough, “Sailboat at Sunset #56”, one of a series I’m guessing of at least 56 or more, when a couple jostled me out of the way for a better view. I didn’t really mind moving on, after all, there were plenty more similar offerings, but the gentleman of the pair had caused me to spill my merlot onto the sleeve of my last presentable Goodwill shirt, then gave me a cursory ‘scuse me,’ that sounded vaguely like ‘sue me’ before steering his companion and her jangling earrings into the appropriate viewing angle. A moment later they were discussing perspective and complimentary colorations, the expressively bold brushstrokes of the sails, the minimalist way the artist had captured the shimmer of the sea, and of course, the price, anything BUT minimalist.

“I may not know art,” my jostler said, sipping daintily on a white wine from his plastic glass, “but I know what I like.” He was quite pleased at this knowledge, no doubt gained with considerable effort. His companion wagged an earlobe with a windchime banging to life, evidently in total agreement with both of us on this aesthetic declaration.

I guess I was still miffed about the impromptu dye job on my best shirt, or maybe it’s just a character flaw deeper than any fabric stain, but I smiled winningly and said out of the cerulean blue, “I don’t know much about biochemistry, but I sure know a good clone when I see one.” This caused some raised eyebrows, a rolling of the eyes and the beginning of distant alarm bells that would soon drown out the jangling jewelry. For good measure I added, “I don’t know much about history either, but hey, I love a good war. I know what I like.”

So okay, I cost Regina a commission and I should feel bad about that. Probably cost the artist a sale and I should feel worse about that, but I don’t. I do happen to know something about art, and I know what I don’t like. I guess it’s okay to buy what you do; I just don’t think we should be proud of our ignorance. Then again, what the hell do I know?

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.