The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The times we live in, this fresh start to the 21st Century, seems, at first glance, to be a cauldron of craziness generated by the internet and the tribalism of every media out there. From politics to pandemic, there’s no shortage of whackiness. Science and logic, who needs em? We got superstition and magic to cure the anxiety and dread of this era. Sometimes it seems as if we’d barely left the caves of the Dark ages, just clung to whatever amulets and spells that gave us comfort against the marauding mastodons or the horror of Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pundits and the talking heads lament the internet, social media, cable TV, consolidated radio and the cynicism of our politicians. Bullshit passes for alternative facts and insanity gets you elected. Oh me, oh my, what’s gonna come of me boys, what’s gonna come of me?

We like to think we live in an Enlightened Age, one where reason and logic reveal the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. The internet ruined that, we think. Social media made a mockery of that, some say. I say the internet and social media probably just pulled back the curtains on all those folks who have always believed more in superstition than science, more who think they might win the lottery despite the statistical odds or that supplements will cure what ails them, more who take comfort in unprovable beliefs than facts that make them squirm, more that find faith in the unknowable more compelling than the angst of the knowable.

The Dark Age denizens never really left, they just didn’t have an internet to give them a microphone. We just under-estimated their numbers. And we over-estimated our own. Age of Enlightenment? Don’t kid yourself.

A friend asked me recently if I was rich. Maybe you get asked that a lot, but trust me, I don’t get inquiries like this too often. Kind of caught me by surprise. My family never talked finances, didn’t announce their bank account balances, really didn’t tell us kids much of anything about how they were doing. And if they never told the family, you better believe it was unwritten gospel they didn’t talk about it in public, with friends or relatives, with anybody. Ever.

So I was caught off balance, checking account and equilibrium both, to be asked point blank if I was rich. You could imagine that the answer, assuming you deigned to reply, would depend on the person asking. If my pal Bill Gates asked me, I’d say, ‘gee, Bill, I’m bumping along, but no, my hedge fund isn’t one of the top 50 or anything, not really even in the top … actually, I don’t even have a hedge fund right now, sort of embarrassed to tell you.’ If one of my pals trying to make ends meet during the Covid shutdown asked, well, I might say ‘Don’t even think of asking me for a loan, you slacker!’ Wealth, you see, is fairly relative.

You ask most folks if they’re rich and they’re going to tell you no. But … if we considered that we’re in America and we’re on the South End to boot, hellfire, by nearly any standards you pick, we’re the 1% of the world. We’re rich. You don’t think so, take a trip to Cambodia, Mexico, Costa Rica, just about any third world country and then tell me you’re not wealthy. You are. Period. Don’t argue with me, I won’t have ears for it.

But my friend wasn’t interested in philosophic fiscal discussion, just wanted to know if I was rich. Asking an artist that question is akin to wondering if I might be vacationing this year with Bezos on his moon rocket, mostly a flight of fancy. I said yes I am, rich. And honestly, I consider myself rich, I really do. We have our house paid for, the one we built ourselves without a loan, without a 30 year mortgage. We pay cash for everything we have, car, truck, you name it. We live in paradise, we live modestly but we want for nothing. We still work, but not because we need the cash but because we like what we do. Even without that money, we feel enriched by working. And we have each other. We lived in a dilapidated shack for 13 years together, scraping by, tending our gardens, learning our trades. We’re growing old together. And that’s just fine too. Are we rich? You’d have to be nuts to ask….

I’ve always wondered why folks climb the Himalayan or hike solo across Antarctica or want to be the first ones into space. Jeff Bezos is headed up and now Richard Branson plans to beat him to the punch. “Asked about what his kids and wife thought of his attempt to be the first tourist in space and how his family reacted to the news that he would be on the flight, Branson said his children are adventurous, but it’s clear they get that quality from him.
‘As a family, our motto is, ‘The brave men don’t live forever but the cautious do not live at all.’ And so, as a family, we love to say ‘Yes.’ My wife is the sort of person who would be terrified on a Virgin Atlantic airplane. She’s the last person who would want to do something like this. But she’s known me since I tried to balloon across the Atlantic or the Pacific or around the world, and she still seems to love us.’”

I guess what the Great Adventurer is saying is that his wife doesn’t really live at all. Bezos wife took half his billions and said adios. I suspect she’s living pretty high on the hog, at least by most folks’ standards, maybe not Branson’s. Evidently there are folks who need the adrenaline rush of near death to help them feel alive. Trust me, I’m not one of those people. I’ve taken a few chances in my 71 years that might have ended badly, might actually have killed me, but they didn’t make me feel alive, mostly made me glad I was. When I hear people of my generation say they never thought they would live past 30, I want to laugh out loud. It wasn’t that we thought our lifestyles were so dangerous, it was more that we just couldn’t imagine the future.

Or that the future seemed so banal and boring we refused to contemplate the house in the suburbs, the less than romantic marriage, the squabbling kids and the career that seemed so much smaller than the dreams of our youth. Me, I figured on living to a ripe old age. Given enough time, there would be plenty of room for course corrections. Getting crippled in a fall into a crevasse on Mt. Rainier wasn’t part of the Plan. If you want thrills and chills, try walking the tightrope of unemployment without a safety net, try making a living being an artist. It’s enough danger for me and chances are it won’t kill you. Make you crazy, maybe, but it won’t kill you. And I’m pretty sure if you take life with a degree of caution, you’ll be just fine too.

I never cease to be amazed at the amount of money folks are willing to spend on fireworks for the 4th of July. Every year we hike on down to the bulkhead on the beach and watch the celebrations up and down Whidbey from the Head to Greenback halfway up to the top of the island, plus we can see a goodly portion of the South End here on Camano. Sure, the fire danger is extreme and occasionally some enthusiastic patriot will set the bluffs ablaze, menacing the mansions above, but in America, we still think freedom means the right to burn the neighbor’s house down if it was done to celebrate 1776 and the intention was strictly impassioned nationalism. Jingoism and extremism in defense of bottle rockets and liberty is no vice. And apparently not a crime either.

The year of the Great Recession I noticed an appreciable drop in the volume and length of the displays up and down the coast. Money was tight, folks were under water with their mortgages, collection agencies were banging on doors late at night — even patriotism takes a back seat to bankruptcies. But since then the duration and extravagance of incendiary proof of the American flag waver has gradually increased to something akin to mortar battles in World War Two, tracers flying through the darkness, dogs howling, babies screaming, the rest of us just watching the show from afar. Like I say, I walk down every year, my small patriotic duty.

So I’m a little troubled this year at what, at first glance seems like a diminishment of how much my neighbors are willing to spend to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, more or less on the 4th of July back in 1776. I know we’re a divided nation this year and yeah, none of my socialist libtard cronies would spend a farthing on a bottle rocket or even a sparkler or two, but c’mon, where are the folks who support the local church’s fireworks stands and Boom City down at the Tulalip tribe? The economy is cranking back up after Covid, but maybe the year of Lockdown took the heart out of the celebration. I don’t know. I sure would hate to think jingoist celebrations are on the decline. Or worse, my neighbors are financially strapped to the point they’d rather buy food than M-80’s. Or ammo instead of Roman Candles.

Course, I went down alone this year. The revelers at our picnic packed it in before dark, possibly hoping to evade the sheriff patrols for impaired driving, so it was a lonely vigil for yours truly. All I can say is patriotism isn’t what it used to be. But after the election and the assault on the Capitol, maybe you already knew that.

Let me say right off the Get-Go, I’m no spring chicken, although my behavior might lead folks to think I’m in late-stage adolescence. I never went through a mid-life crisis, never left the mizzus for a college intern, didn’t buy a sports car and never thought I should’ve gotten a career … or even a job. In other words, I feel young.

Or at least did until these past few months, and no, it wasn’t Covid that made my bones feel brittle and my mind sort of squishy, it was all the folks around me who have cancers and aneurisms and busted appendixes and chronic back pains and diabetes and bi-polar disorders. For the first time in my 71 years on this planet, folks I know are dying, some younger than me, most through no fault of their own, just bad luck, crummy genes, who knows? Something in the water, toxins in the house, crap in the air, don’t ask me, I’m not a doctor and you couldn’t pay me to play one on TV.

But … mortality sits perched on my shoulder these past few months, a black crow or a shadow of one, a dark daily companion right out of Poe, hard to shake, impossible to ignore.

I just put my 98 year old father into an assisted living complex. Hard to feel bad for a guy who’s about to hit the century mark … unless you’re one of those who want to live forever. All I can say is be careful what you wish for. Quality of life diminishes a bit for the Methuselahs of this world. Volunteer at one of these places and see if you still want extended longevity when you piss 200 times a day and you eat more meds than food. Me, I’ll pack it in when the check-out time arrives and the maid needs to change the bedding for the next guest.

Not to sound morose, mind you, just that we all have a Best By date and I’m okay with that. But dammit, these early birds leaving lately, well, it’s a phase of life, apparently, that’s here to stay. Maybe I should consider that sports car after all….

Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

Back when crabs weren’t an Endangered Species, I used to walk the eelgrass beds at minus tides sometimes as early as late March or early April. Barefoot, wearing shorts, but an Eskimo parka on top. My feet would go numb, but … those first Dungeness of the year were muy delicioso and worth a little frostbite. Every year the season started later and ended earlier, the price you pay for an overpopulated Puget Sound and too many commercial crabbing licenses. By the time the season starts now, this year the 1st of July, the tribes and the commercial boyz have pretty much cleaned the bottom.

I’m not complaining, mind you, just stating the facts. I don’t make my living off seafood harvesting, but harvesting seafood does help me avoid seeking honest work by knocking down the grocery bills. Back when crabs were the size of pitbulls and plentiful as buffalo, I probably ate too many of the monster bottom feeders. Since they were top of their foodchain, I hate to imagine the toxins they managed to collect down there by the Everett Navy base and the paper mills. The shortened recreation crab season might just add a decade or so to my life.

If you walk for crab the way I always did, you’re at the mercy of the tides. Unless you scuba dive for the buggers…. So lately I’ve kept a dinghy down at the beach and drop pots like all my neighbors do. Course they got 10 horse motors on theirs and I got homemade oars. My row out is about 5 or 6 football fields, maybe a third of a mile one way, good exercise, a nice workout. In calm seas.

Last year my brother was here and the day before he left I wanted crab for his bon voyage dinner. The wind was blowing hard, but being the sons of a Navy father, we hopped in and rowed into the gale. Which promptly picked up to whitecaps. We were a bit overloaded, us and the boat, but by Neptune, we were going to eat crab that night! Half an hour into this my brother starts asking questions like what do we do in case of a capsize, swim for shore or stay with the boat? I didn’t tell him it’s every man for himself, but I could see he was weighing whether crabs were worth drowning for. On the South End they are. Where he’s from, hamburgers looked pretty good, which is what he suggested we consider.

I’m not the world’s most courageous sailor, but I’m right up there with the most foolhardy. My brother isn’t a coward — I don’t recall him ever being scared, except maybe drive-in horror movies we’d go to as kids — but we finally decided about 10 feet from the buoys that Mom and Dad didn’t need a double drowning at this stage in their dubious parenting career. Those hamburgers sounded pretty darn good. Even if we did have to drive to the store when we rowed back into shore. Just had to be careful lighting the barbecue.

Yesterday on the South End the thermometer hit 100 plus degrees. I know this is the banana belt, but even so, this is scary stuff. And today the meteorologists are running around with their hair on fire, yelling Excessive Heat Warning to any and all of us who think 80 degrees is hot as a Hell in a propane truck explosion. Today, they predict, we’ll hit 105 and Seattle and Gomorrah will peak at 111, melting freeways and turning bridges to goo.

Now, God forbid anyone politicize this any more than critical race relations, no global warming talk here, just a small blip on the meteorological record book, a mere 10 plus degrees warmer than ANY TEMPERATURE RECORDED ANY TIME OF THE YEAR EVER! Well, since the dinosaurs…. Just in the history of homo sapiens. I’m going to run down to the garden and plant watermelons and pineapples, fifty fifty I get a harvest. Next year I’ll plant papayas and banana palms, all kinds of exotic tropical flowers and wait for the anteaters and monkeys to migrate north, new garden vermin.

Triple digit temperatures on the South End, in case you live in Tucson or Yuma, aren’t exactly normal here, about as likely as rain that is half frogs and toads. I’m not one of those people who see climate change in every unusual rainstorm, hurricane, heat wave or cold snap. And no way am I going to argue with my neighbor with the historic TRUMP 2020 sign on his tree that will no doubt stay there til it rots or he can replace it with the TRUMP 2028 banner, but … geez, it’s hard to watch the world heating up every year this past decade or two without acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, even probably, all right, definitely, this greenhouse we call Earth is growing hotter. More hurricanes, more hundred year floods, more historic droughts, and yeah, triple digit heat waves on even the South End.

I get that one party is beholden to the gas and oil and coal industry. So I understand they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep digging and drilling and burning hydrocarbons and deny the remotest possibility of any of that being responsible for our heat wave this week. I get that. Doesn’t say much for profiles in courage but after the past few years I think we know that courage left D.C. on a fast coal burning belching train long long ago. Me, I don’t have kids, don’t have to worry about a future much beyond a couple more decades at best. But the folks with a stake in the future? You tell me. That stake seems more like one to the heart. In a couple of days the temperatures should return to the old normal. But not mine. History will not be kind. Course, we just won’t teach it, I guess.

I’m planting the third succession of beans and peas down in the garden today. This year I built a fence inside the outer fence, a double perimeter for the deer and rabbits that breached the outer barrier last year. I’m considering a moat, possibly a security system, and last resort, my granddad’s old 16 gauge shotgun. If I have to channel Elmer Fudd, so be it.

For those of you who don’t have vegetable gardens and even those who refuse to eat ‘rabbit food’, you can stop reading right now. I’m not going to pull a Come to Jesus and Jacama on you, but I will tell you a garden is one very easy connection to the earth. To the Land. To what was once, before the spinning jenny and the I-phone, as close to a cosmic umbilical as I can imagine. You know, not counting sex.

A garden is optimism shaded by luck. Bad weather, pests, varmints, blight — but you plant it and hope for the best. You learn to share with those pesky wabbits, with the crows and the deer, the slugs and the snails, hopefully with the neighbors too. You weed, you water, you pray to the gods of weather. And you curse, you howl, you plant a second time. Or a third. This is the world, the universe, the big roulette wheel, the game of chance and the luck of the draw. You succeed and you fail and mostly it’s out of your hands.

Yeah, you can buy potatoes at the Kroger, corn from the vegetable stands on the highway, frozen peas from Costco, fresh tomatoes … but don’t let me go postal on fresh tomatoes, a fruit the agri-assholes have completely ruined. Gardening is farming on the micro-scale. It’s maddening and it’s hard work. But … I wouldn’t stop for anything. Growing some of what we eat is a joy, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so simple.

I was chatting it up with a couple of fellow artists down at the South End Galleria this week, comparing notes on aesthetic strategies, bizness practices, encounters with philistines and other assorted moral hazards of the art trade. The sculptor among us avowed how he chose to eschew my public art avenue and regaled us with tales of clients and looky loos, folks who might suggest that rather than pay full price they could check Ebay or Etsy for fabulous deals, as if that original stone carving might be had from WalMart for hefty discounts.

We artists love displaying our wounds and scars from the Culture Wars. I mentioned how I lacked bizness acumen and so public art took me out of those sorts of encounters … to which our gallery owner mentioned being a finalist three times for public art commissions only to lose. ‘No prizes for runner-up,’ I said. ‘No Miss Congeniality either.’ Afterwards I started adding up my own losses over the years, something around a dozen. You get a small stipend for a design, maquettes, plane fare, motel, car rental, etc., usually less than what you spend and zero for your work. It’s a tough racket and after a couple of second place finishes, plenty of artists quit throwing their hats in the ring. Me, I got plenty of hats.

My first loss, a fire station entry against a famous Seattle glass artist with a buddy on the jury who gave him helpful hints at our site visit, left me feeling like the game was rigged. But instead of quitting I took my 4 foot by 3 foot glass model, cut a hole in my shop wall and installed it in front of my work table, a wound I could salt every damn day, a reminder that I needed to up my game.

What I’ve learned over a few decades of competition is that it isn’t always fair, it is sometimes rigged, the juries are occasionally a sham, an opponent may actually be better than you and lose … or vice versa. Art in the public arena is a bloodsport. I try to accept the losses and thank my lucky stars for the commissions I win. Mostly I’m glad I stuck it out. And best of all, nobody’s going on Ebay and finding a cheap substitute. Yet.