[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-johnny-appleseed-in-the-garden-of-eden.mp3[/podcast]audio — johnny appleseed in the garden of eden
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A lot of folks who don’t live down here ask me: Skeeter, it’s hard to believe there’s really a place like the South End, kind of some Never Never Land, turn left at the first star by Terry’s Corner and keep on going until morning. I admit, it does sound damn inviting. A place where the law of physics and the law of Island County don’t hold much jurisdiction. A place where jobs are not only scarce but that very fact is celebrated. A place where maybe too many of us avoided adulthood but we don’t need daycare.
Oh, I suppose I could polish up the vision of the South End as a magical world, shine it til it glowed like Aladdin’s Lamp that offered 3 wishes but you wouldn’t need more than 1 or 2. But there is a dark side to paradise, one you might not notice in the brochures. If I’m going to be the travel agency for Shagri-La-La, it’s only fair I give some warning. If only to deflect future lawsuits….
Sure, we’re the Banana Belt of the island archipelago. Judging by the uniqueness of the inhabitants, we’re really a Galapagos, cut off from the mainland and the mainstream. You visit long enough and it won’t be long before you notice the distinctly odd genetic diversities. I’m talking, of course, about our artist herds. Turn over a rock or go down a laurel shrouded drive, you’ll find 200 subspecies of watercolorist, 50 oil painters, 25 sculptors and too many glass benders, fusers, blowers and breakers to shake a punt stick at. They’re breeding in the nettle hollows, trading art among themselves, putting on studio shows, turning body shops and beauty parlors into ersatz galleries, filling up libraries and schools and fire stations with unsalable artwork, building art parks and sculpture gardens. It’s as if the Garden of Eden had become an apple orchard, 500 varieties and new grafts every year. There’s seemingly No End to it. The inner child has been unleashed, unsupervised and is now unmanageable.
Some folks find an iguana-infested island interesting, I guess. If you’re one of these, by all means, come and visit. If the South End inspires you toward aesthetic ecstasy, fine —all we ask is that when you depart, take your inner child home with you. We don’t need cross pollination from the outside world. We’re having enough trouble with our native species as it is. The day may be coming when a quarantine is required. Not only to prevent contamination from the outside, but to prevent the contagion from spreading…..
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-gimme-that-old-time-religion.mp3[/podcast]audio — gimme that old time religion
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The Little Church of the Ravine actually sits on a knoll above an old logging skid road ruled now by blackberries so thick an old Studebaker can be hidden most seasons, only occasionally glimpsed in winter. The car looks like it was caught in a thorny web and try as it might, no earthly horsepower is going to set it free. The reader sign out by the church entrance has revolving words of evangelical wisdom Shaky Jake changes when the words come down from on high, meaning when the Reverend asks him.
7DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK.
HAVING TROUBLE SLEEPING — SERMONS R US
HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS — TEXT WHILE DRIVING IF YOU WANT TO MEET HIM
Under the pithy weekly message it says: REV. RALPH MEAKER and under that:
A NON-DENOMINATIONAL CHURCH
SUNDAY SERVICES 9 A.M.
We South Enders assume by non-denominational they have no money. What they do have are plenty of sinners in search of salvation. Well, in need of salvation. Every Sunday they ring the bell that was stolen (or ‘rescued’ , depending on the teller) from the Mabana one room Schoolhouse which now houses the administrative offices of the Elger Bay School of Aesthetic Enlightenment. The school has asked for the bell back, but essentially were told it tolls for thee.
The Little Church of the Ravine draws a fairly sizeable congregation, especially considering the Chapel up north’s gravitational pull, with its basketball courts and gyms, youth programs, daycare and state of the art sound systems, could easily drain the flock. But the Little Church, despite its plain jane exterior, its lack of stained glass filled traceries, its metal folding chairs instead of pews, has saved souls since the early 60’s and stills sends missionary support to far flung infidel-filled places like Indonesia and Africa and Smokey Point.
Back in the 70’s they lost half their congregation over a fight to make a park down at the public Port of Mabana, once a pier hundreds of feet out into Saratoga Strait about 1920, now some amputated pilings exposed at minus tides. The locals wanted to condemn some unused property to make parking possible and this pitted old family against old neighbors until the acrimony got so bad not even Jesus Himself could make the peace and the Little Church split into two factions and finally only one stayed. The private property wasn’t condemned. Houses were hurriedly built. Port Commissioners were sued and forced to resign. The park never got anywhere and folks who’d been friends for generations stopped saying hello. You can park now by the beach at the port, walk your dog or launch a small boat. And you can attend services up the bluff at the church every Sunday. 9 AM. The bell tolls. The old Studebaker tries to drive on through, but like most things down here gone to rot and rust and ruin, salvation is hard to do.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/down-at-the-marina1.mp3[/podcast]down at the marina
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Times are tough these days down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop. A lot of barnacle-bottomed boats moored idle at the docks, their glory days of fishing now just a dry-rotted memory. Occasionally you’ll see one of the skippers doing a little brightwork on some faded trim or turning over an engine just to clear the cobwebs from the lines and the tanks, but time and overfishing have taken heavy tolls.
Used to be the fleet was the pride of the island, running from Mabana to Bristol Bay in search of salmon openings and halitbut catches. We maybe didn’t have the widows’ walks the Narragansett boys had for their lonely wives to gaze forlornly out to sea scanning horizons for men returned from hunting whale, but it was an event nonetheless when captains sailed into view with full cargo holds and tales of Alaskan storms.
Sadly, those catches dwindled and the fleet turned to lesser dreams. For a time they chartered for the tourist fishermen, CEO’s up from San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Seattle, in search of trophy gooeyducks and the elusive free range oyster, but even those became uncommon, then finally rare. One by one the Captains Courageous were forced to sit idle, swapping tongue-worn tales of the Big Catch of ’78 or the killer storm of ’82, mostly lies now, but better than constant complaining. And far better than hanging out in the unemployment office.
Some of the skippers sold their boats for what they could get, just pesos on the dollar. Hazy Jake ran Canadian Bud for awhile through the islands until the borders tightened and his nerves frayed worse than his lines. You see the last of them down at the bait shop most days, those Ahabs whose Mobys disappeared, hunkered down over big chipped mugs of thick coffee from the self serve pot, predicting tide and weather, predicting everything except the future, a place they rarely visit now.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-crabdog-day.mp3[/podcast]audio —crabdog day
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I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously. Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd. Even if we had groundhogs! This thing just gives Science a bad name. And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, Mayan Calendar, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.
Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity. Hellfire, if winter’s just going to last until April, we figure there’s no point in fighting serious incentive-reducing Inevitability. We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait for spring. This is how civilizations thrive: they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and happy hours.
The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected. Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see? And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans. No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots. And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring. The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.
Simple. Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct. And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding. We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation. We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it. Crab Dog Day. Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register. If we can keep PETA at bay….
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