The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sarah Jensen runs the South End Animal Rescue here on the island. She’s got an old barn, some sheds, half a dozen outdoor pens, a small vet clinic off the house plus a few acres of fenced pasture where horses and alpacas and llamas patrol the grounds along with a menagerie of dogs, goats and the occasional Vietnamese pig. She doctors eagles and cats, raccoons and the usual squirrels. Most return to the wild but some stay with her the rest of their lives. Her longest guest by far is Quixote, a donkey she had to amputate its hind leg back she guesses around 1995.

Quixote wants nothing to do with the horses or the alpacas and especially the cantankerous two llamas. He gimps around the pasture waiting for Sarah, apparently the love of his donkey life. A truck had hit him on the highway where he’d made his escape from the Drummond place north of the Diner where he’d mostly been staked to an iron rod and left day in and day out tied to a shackle on the metal stake. His life with Drummond was about 20 feet in diameter, water bowl, moldy hay, a circle of mud to stand in or lie down in or just try to ignore. Why old man Drummond wanted a donkey is anybody’s guess but when Quixote snapped the rotten rope and hit the road before being hit himself, the last thing he wanted was a 3 legged jackass, or so he declared when Sarah presented him with a bill for an amputation.

Life is hard enough on the South End for us 2 legged denizens, but if you visit Sarah, you’ll feel like we’re the Lucky Ones. If you take an apple like I do when I drop by, Quixote, who is not above being bribed, you’ll appreciate that the world, hard as it is, also has a few Sarah Jensens to offer balm and medicine and compassion. Quixote too is one of us, the Lucky Ones. You decide to visit the Rescue, bring an apple. Or three.

The Mabana Sunset Villa was originally a sort of low end Dry Out facility, mostly aging alcoholics but later everything from meth to heroin. The fact that they were fairly inexpensive kept them at full occupancy for decades, but when ownership changed hands and the new folks thought they could double profits without changing services — in fact, maybe eliminate a few, everything from staff to cable TV to the quality of the food — well, maybe that works in Seattle and Gomorrah, but up here in the boondocks, setting up a rehab clinic that mimicked a penitentiary, not so much, not when half the inmates, I mean residents, know exactly what a prison looks like from the inside.

When the recidivism went through the roof and half the residents were selling drugs in the recreation room ( a few chairs and a card table plus a filthy aquarium) after hours, a de facto happy hour of their own, well, the Villa lost referrals and profits went more southerly than the South End and eventually the place was sold for less than the last entrepreneur had paid five years earlier. So much for South End dreams of fast riches!

The Villa, once a hotel serving Mabana’s not-very-thriving Port one hundred years ago, was practically historic. When the Mabana Villa LLC purchased it, the previous owners had upgraded plumbing and electric, added amenities such as saunas and hot tubs, recreation rooms with pool tables and jukeboxes, in-room TV’s, all the luxuries … but now the saunas sported black mold, the hot tubs weren’t hot and the TV’s were relegated to one 31 inch tube set in the Commons cafeteria that was itself historic.

Now, some years later, the Mabana Sunset Villa (LLC) offers retirees medium care for a medium price. The staff is mostly minimum wage, but they’re caring and they’re honest. If we geezers need a sterling silver drool bucket,well, we can go to the assisted living franchises up north, pay the dime and spend our Golden Years with cable TV in our well-appointed and spacious rooms. Since most of us down here don’t need three shopping channels or care about the politics of Fox or MSNBC, the gossip at the Villa’s dining room will do just fine as about all the entertainment we’ll need as we all slide slowly but inevitably into history.

Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm. Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel. It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently. The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run-in with a six point buck four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers. Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed. She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip. Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot. Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill. “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked. Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point. Something to consider. Definitely something to consider. Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor. If he stayed long enough.

People always ask me, how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job? They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial house, a super size TV —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer is gonna fit into your income.

I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal. The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices. I don’t owe anybody anything. Except maybe an apology. I drove a jalopy. I lived in a shack for 17 years. I built my ‘new’ house myself. I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant.

I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich. Big smirking grin. Real smug kid. Already a con-artist like his old man. Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured. I thought about wiping that smile right off his map. But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand. But I am free. I don’t owe anybody a red cent. Don’t have debts weighing me down. Don’t have to worry about the mortgage. Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch. That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank.

I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal. He’d go find a rich guy….

I know you folks have probably heard the news: Stanwood wants to bring a 4 year college to the area. Univ. of Stanwoodopolis. Higher degrees in Lefse Rolling, Lutefisk Engineering, and Storage Unit Management.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The town’ll be over-run by eggheads. Professors taking over the barstools at the Stanwood Hotel, ruining our rural backwash hick ambiance. Expecting political discussions, not fishing stories. Wanting napkins with their hand-crafted malt beverages and hors douerve plates, not peanuts. The Stan-Isle Bookstore will sell 5 pound tomes with 5 dollar words nobody but the PhD’s will understand. FOR 50 DOLLARS! With titles like the Socio-Economic Dialectic of 3rd Generation Scandihoovian in the Stillaguamish River Drainage.

The whole town’ll go to hell in a hurry. Just when the fast food franchises were giving us a glimmer of hope of joining mainstream society. All those student shops will take over now. More art galleries. Boutique soap stores. Boutique clothing stores. Boutique furniture stores. Head shops. Movie houses, Art movie houses. Fancy pants restaurants. Ethiopian Epicure. Persian Pizza. La De Da Linguini.

Gonna look like Berkeley in the 60’s. Long hair. Free love. Dope smoking, anti-war, bohemian anti-establishment types. Weird clothes. Weird music. Weird period. Weird as a Way of Life.

Which….. if you stop and think about it, is a perfect description of the South End. Which … if you been following our logic here, is exactly why the new campus should be located down by us — the University of the South End, Tyee Branch. Save em from hiring new professors. The woods are thick with em. The Band alone could be a quarter of the art faculty. Think about it. It’s the obvious location — and it’ll preserve the Stanwoodopolis we all love……

If you were to wander into half the South End’s garages or tool sheds or the artists’ studios, you’d find what a good entrepreneur would need to start a Second Hand Shop. Course most of that stuff came from the 2nd hand shops that flowered and wilted down here where capitalism came to die. Half of us layabouts and slackers were searching for a livelihood that required little or, preferably, no work. After all, we didn’t migrate here looking for jobs or careers. Telecommuting came a little late for us.

No doubt there are other backwashes, box canyons, dark sides of mountains and swamp country where dreams go to mutate, but hope springs eternal on the South End, nourished by the compost of failures lost and forgotten. If you know where to look, buried behind a nettle jungle or peeking through a blackberry barrier, you can still see a sign for DONNA’S KLASSY ANTIQUES, one for SOUTH END COLLECTIBLES, paint mostly gone and posts rotted, JERRY’S JUNQUE over a building gone to powder post beetles, collapsed into weeds and a twenty foot cedar growing through a hole in the roof.

Dirty Dan’s Trash Emporium opened last winter. Recently emigrated from the wilds of Tacoma, Dirty Dan is really Dan Vandiver, newly divorced from wife and job, a refugee from a past life same as the rest of us, figuring he can parlay his IRA’s against his alimony payments, maybe make a Go of things here in the outback of the island. Covid put a stake in the heart of that fantasy.

Timing, the philosophers will tell you, is everything. Location location, the realtors will argue, is everything. Luck, I will counter, is the joker in the deck of the best laid plans. Dan … well, Dan had three strikes against him from the start. A kindred spirit is what Dan is, no shame down here in failure. The graveyard here is filled with Dirty Dans. Welcome to the club.

My neighbor Fred is standing next to his 40 foot expandable travel trailer with his SUV hitched to its bumper as he’s venting his ire at the free transit bus that’s just gone by. “See that?” he asks, waving irately at the emergency lights flashing while the driver picks up another neighbor’s teenage kid, skateboard under one arm. I give him a fish face, not much meaning he can read, because I know where Freddie’s headed. He’ll start with the bus subsidy for all the freeloaders on the South End, then he’ll move on to taxes, most of them wasted, frittered away on government services he sure doesn’t want or need. He voted for our Tea Party commissioner, he’ll tell me again and again, in hopes she’ll ‘starve the beast’, what he calls shrinking government down to something the size he can flush in a toilet.

Freddie worked all his life at Boeing, bastion, he says, of a Free Enterprise system. I used to argue with him about all the military contracts and tax breaks, but Fred worked on 747’s , not cruise missiles. He retired a wealthy man after 30 years, bought a nice home, owns motorcycles and sports cars and travel trailers and about every piston driven device that he can fit in his driveway, the motorcoach shed and a three car garage. He’s got HIS and by god he doesn’t want a red cent going to someone who didn’t work to get THEIRS. Not directly and not indirectly. That free bus bugs him no end and it’s only one item on a very long list of Grievances.

No one says you have to be generous. Or magnanimous. Or take care of the needy or the poor or the infirm. Freddie doesn’t see any, not one, familiar face among the downtrodden and he doesn’t see it as his problem. More than half us South Enders and the island too don’t either. They got theirs and they can’t imagine losing it to bad health or a bad economy or just bad luck. They aren’t their brothers keepers.

“See that kid getting a free ride,” Freddie says sneeringly. “you just taught him he doesn’t need to work.”

“He’s 13 years old, Fred,” I say. “Too young to drive, too young to buy a car. He goes to middle school. You think he should pay tuition?”

Fred pauses a nanosecond. “Might not be a bad idea.” I expect he’ll write a letter tonight to our current commie commissioner.

You maybe read about the town that had its water system hacked. Some evil yahoo with a cellphone managed to instruct the city’s system to pump in extra poison, no problem at all for an amateur hacker bent on serious malfeasance. Imagine what the Russians could do if they were bent on an all-out water attack! But nobody thought it was those Russian trollers, they’re a little bizzy sending out misinformation for the right wing networks to pick up and air as if it were the evening news flash.

But … it got me to wondering in all my Covid lockdown spare time, if all these Qanon conspiracy theories weren’t the result of a multi-pronged, nefarious meddling with the water systems of every major city in the Land of the Gullible, Home of the Rumor, by hackers bent on destroying our very sanity, pitting Republicans against Democrats, blacks against whites, Jews against Evangelicals, artists against, well, everybody. Just a few keystrokes and slowly, pitilessly, demonically, the Kool-Aid seeps its poison into the chlorinated water of Chicago, the lead contaminated water of Detroit, the pesticide fouled agua of Los Angeles, the industrial soup of New Orleans and all the other cities across this once great land. Only the plastic bottle addicted citizens would be unaffected. At first. But who knows where that water in those polycarbonate containers came from. Not secret mineral springs from the caves of France, bet your butt on that. No, more probably they come from Kansas City, San Francisco, Philadelphia. They come contaminated with the same Kool-Aid toxin!!!

At first I thought I was safe. Our well water comes from one hundred feet below ground. We’re not on a community well with its simple controls any sixth grader could probably hack. No sir, pure, unadulterated, clear H20 from the bosom of the island, same aquifer as the neighbors. But then I noticed the neighbor’s sign still up TRUMP 2020. And another. TRUMP 2024. And just up the road STOP THE STEAL! And that’s when I realized anyone could slip into our wellhouses, dump the Kool-Aid and who would know???

I put a lock on the wellhouse door, of course, but now I’m afraid to drink the tap water. All I can say is thank god for beer. And … I notice the cereal is even tasting better these days.

Radio Free South End was the ‘brainchild’, or lack of, of Wolfman Chuck, once a DJ for KRAP, the alternative music station down in Seattle and Gomorrah back before the city morphed into Tech Town. He claims he was ‘let go’ for pushing the boundaries of even those leftist programmers who decried censorship, something to do, they told him, with violating all manner of human decency.

Not to be so easily cast off the airwaves of Puget Sound, Wolfman laid his plans, moved to the politically incorrect South End, recruited a few of us slackers for his Bandwidth Comeback and launched Radio Free South End, a laughably puny low watt FM frequency so low on the dial even the FCC would have to stoop to find us. This was the Year of our Lord 1999, slightly before podcasts and blogblasts, sort of Old School but without much emphasis on the school. Wolfman had a primitive transmitter — don’t ask me the technical — and a tower he erected over his trailer’s roof. All he needed, he said, were volunteers to be the DJ’s when he needed a break. Of course we asked if this was criminal and of course Chuck said Hell No! Freedom of speech, he told us, First Amendment, he claimed. So sure, we volunteered, why not, we had some things to say, even some music to play.

I doubt anyone further than 5 miles north of the island’s head could hear us, but when you consider most of the bloggers out there on internet podcasts get half the listeners Wolfman got, who really cares? Chuck wasn’t interested in advertising revenue, he just wanted what he called, reverentially, airplay. Chuck played old rock and roll, early blues, strummed his homemade mandolin, told off color stories mostly about us local yokels, even played the South End String Band every damn day, probably as thanks for half of us band members volunteering to DJ.

I can remember like yesterday the day our music died. It was my morning to fill the 10 am to noon slot only to find Wolfman slumped over his microphone, headset off one ear, holding up an official looking paper from some government agency or other.

‘We’re signing off today, Skeeter,’ Chuck told me as American Pie was playing, I bet for the 16th time that morning, the last song on KINK’s brief but glorious existence. A week later Wolfman was gone, the radio equipment too and his trailer had a For Sale sign out by the road. Camano’s infamous and only radio station had put a thumb out and hitchhiked into legend.

Rumor has it there’s a pirate radio station operating off the coast up in the San Juan islands, some DJ on the run from the Feds, still broadcasting to any and all in listening range. I’m betting it’s Wolfman Chuck. Every now and then I crank my radio up and run the dial north to south, hoping, I guess, to hear a crackly South End Blues coming out of Canada on the magnetic waves of an aurora borealis, Wolfman still howling into the wind, the last real DJ fighting the corporate mega-stations. And some nights, maybe too much to drink, I think I hear him and his tinny little mandolin. Godspeed, Wolfman C!!!

You don’t run into a lot of old loggers down here on the gentrified South End these days. Dangerous work and if you do it long enough, accidents you don’t anticipate happen with more frequency than you’d care to consider. Tree climbers, fallers, gyppos, chainchokers, toppers, well, it’s a young man’s job. Us old woodsmen, we count our lucky stars and are happy to tell tall tales from the safety of our rockers, just glad we’re still here, gimped but alive.

Yesterday I was over at the little park I maintain. Ranger Skeeter, garbage picker-upper, lawnmower, trail maintainer and tree removal guy. An 80 year old doug fir had uprooted on the south side perimeter where it had completely blocked two separate trails so my assignment that day was to lug in my big Stihl and see if I could buck it up without pinching the blade, clear the debris and open the paths. No big deal for a seasoned logger like myself, nothing too dangerous, just don’t let the sections fall on my foot.

I tackled the upper end of the tree first, still a large diameter section, made my undercuts and managed to cut a section out for trail passage, bucked up the thing and rolled huge bolts out of the way, then on to the second trail with a larger part of the tree. Once again I undercut the tree but this time I worried the sheer weight would suddenly split the tree and pinch my saw and since I hadn’t brought wedges with me, I really wanted to finish this and take that saw home with me, not leave it crushed under the tonnage of that fir. So I made a Vee in the top, figuring if the cut snapped shut when I reached the undercut, I’d have a chance of not pinching the bar.

You with me so far? Cause I wasn’t really sure this would work. And this is why guys like me should be paranoid back in the woods with a running chainsaw and just enough experience to make things even more dangerous than they already are. I put that Stihl on the Vee and started the top cut, expecting any minute the section would snap shut when my cuts met, but instead … holy moley, Smokey, the tree, instead of crashing onto the trail, sprang up into the air twenty feet above my head while the cut section stayed earthbound with me.

There is a moment in times like this when what is happening doesn’t just defy expectations, it beggars reality. Your mind doesn’t really accept the possibility a tree will right itself any more than time running backwards. Trust me, an old hand at the unexpected when falling trees, this boggled my mind. I scuttled backwards like a crab on meth, not sure what that tree might do, maybe come back down even, on me. But it didn’t. The cut end of the tree stood at 30 degrees above my head twenty feet up. The rootball had rotated halfway back into the cavity it had originally left, partly because another tree had fallen at the base of the fir and its weight, once the majority of the fir’s own weight was gone, lifted the tree semi upright. Logic, once I managed to calm myself, had returned.

You maybe think you’ve seen it all. But trust me, you haven’t. I left the tree, what was left of it, standing over the trail, a saw cut at the top 20 feet above, for hikers to marvel at. How in the hell did anyone make that cut? Did they climb up there and risk life and limb? Could anyone be that courageous, that utterly dumb? Let them wonder. Let them ask the Ranger, but he’s not going to tell them. Trails of Mystery is what I’ll tell them. Just another tall tale from the pioneers of the South End who survived to saw another day….