The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I joined CostCo this past year, what they refer to as a ‘buying club’, meaning you can join the fun for a fee.  For years I’ve resisted.  I usually don’t pay my stores for the privilege of shopping, but friends had been buying stuff for me when they went and I finally let guilt wear me down.

CostCo, for those of you who are accustomed to express lines or Quickie Marts, is a bit jarring.  You don’t just grab a basket and run in for a couple of items.  No, you get a cart the size of a tractor trailer rig.  Within seconds of entering the warehouse, passing through their version of TSA, you are swept into a traffic nightmare comparable to Seattle at rush hour.  Folks in quest of huge cost savings, are investing in giant food rations that are stacked alongside electronics, auto parts, hardware, toys and clothing, sporting goods, then grunted along corridors more and more jammed as we maneuver bravely toward the checkout assembly line while maniac kamikaze cart wielders slash blindly toward free food samples, totally risk averse and apparently near starvation.  The stopping distance of one of these overloaded vehicles is about that of the Exxon Valdez.  I don’t have statistics on pedestrian fatalities, but presumably it is a national scandal.

All in all it’s a surreal shopping scene.  A year’s supply of rations piled high, mammoth sized jugs of perishables whose prices don’t portend the probability of spoilage, super sized everything  — we Lilliputians struggle with 200 pound loads, bumpercars on steroids, everyone carbon-loaded and dreading the deathmaze of the parking lot zoo waiting open jawed for us after the cart inspection at the exit.  I can only assume most head for a storage unit to unpack the booty.

Every time I go I feel awash in shopping shame.  Imagine, say, a Sudanese immigrant or a fellow South Ender, stumbling onto this scene, aghast at the sight of gallon jars of everything from kalimata olives to pickled okra.  I know I have to pay a little more at Tyee Store — okay, a lot more — but sometimes I don’t need to stock up like a survivalist.  Sometimes I just want the small jar of pickles.  And that’s what Tyee Store’s got …. and so far they don’t charge me to join their buyer club just to come in.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/south-end-archeology.mp3[/podcast]south end archeology

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The other day I was vacationing up at Lost Lake (apparently rediscovered) where I was conscripted to help clear an overgrown homestead.  A couple days into it, first with a chainsaw, then a sickle and finally just mano y mano with the downfall and the ivy and the blackberries, I was full bore into what was a veritable archeological dig.  I see how Mayan temples disappear under vines and sediment, lost civilizations stumbled on by accident centuries later.

The Lost Lake Dynasty didn’t appear to be quite centuries old, but some of it had slipped under mud and mulch.  If I was hoping for discovered treasure, I was sorely disappointed.  A couple more days of burn piles for the brush revealed old shrubs, creeping myrtle, hidden rhododendrons, plenty of daffodils and hyacinth pushing greenery into spring, all the telltale of someone’s old homestead next to the lake.

History here doesn’t lead back generation after generation to a distant Vanishing Point.  Much as some of us want to believe, the South End isn’t the Cradle of Western Civilization and Lost Lake isn’t Mesopotamia on the Stilly.  This was virgin ground and scarcely trod upon much less inhabited even by aboriginals who, like us newcomers, preferred the waterfront real estate of Puget Sound’s Big Sea Waters.

Most history, you stop and think about it, is lost.  Oh sure, we remember the Big Stuff:  wars and conquests, religious beginnings, Hot Shot Philosophies — but most of human endeavor is lost to rot and rust and ruin, covered over by the neglect and detritus of the next generation busy with making their own history.  Civilization is built on burial grounds.  Down here on the South End, we got the dubious distinction of being the bottom layer.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/end-of-prohibition-again.mp3[/podcast]end of prohibition, again

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The South End, being a bit occupationally challenged, has always relied on alternative avenues of work to sustain us.  In the 20’s we used our inaccessibility to advantage by bringing in Canadian hooch through our coves and hidden ports.  Course, we added our own single stalk nettle scotch to the blend and managed to prosper even into the Great Depression.  The end of prohibition cut into the Canadian stock, but Daddle Distillery continues to this day back in the ravines where Revenuers rarely trek.

In the 60’s a new breed of entrepreneur flurourished here in the backwoods, men who accepted risk for high profit.  I’m talking, obviously, about the Green Trade, Camano Cannabis.  You’d see the sheds with the boarded up windows or the plots bordered by 8 foot high nettles to hide the outdoor crops.  An underground market flourished from Elger Bay to Tyee, and homegrown became a staple and a lifestyle.  Some say the artists who gravitated down to the island’s far reaches were inspired by Killer Kannabis or Two Toke or Bud Bomb.  Others claim they were the new Pharmers of the South End, painters and sculptors who turned their creative energies to horticulture.  Or hortichuckle.

These Avante Gardeners now find their way of life threatened with the onslaught of another end to prohibition now that the tidal wave of medical marijuana has reached their hidden shores.  No doubt some will adapt.  Hazy Jake says he’ll switch to hydroponics and slick marketing.  He’s enrolled at the Skagit Community College where he’ll bone up on biogenetics and website design.  Jake should do fine.  But some of the others ….. well, a lot of bootleggers went broke overnight following the Repeal.  My guess is you’ll be seeing an upsurge in art real soon.  Not much profit, but we need to stay busy down here…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/audio-flying-with-the-kid-one-more-time.mp3[/podcast]audio — flying with the kid one more time

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Most of you folks I talk to refuse to buy Bob Friel’s hot-off-the-press book The Barefoot Bandit.  He spent over a year hunkered down in a bluff cabin on Orcas fighting editors’ deadlines and rat-nibble poverty in order to get the details dead on right.    You think maybe you know the whole saga after years of gossiping down at the Diner or endless speculation at Jolene’s Spa or over the neighbor’s truck hood, forget it —- you don’t.  Bob’s dug up more facts, details, interviews and in-depth reportage than all the skeletons you got hidden in your shed closet.  He knows where the bodies got buried, who helped who, what so and so said to the cops and what they said back and all the minutiae of how the Kid managed to stay fugitive for years.  And he tells the saga with an unblinking eye and a style as feisty as a sucker punch.

Some of us don’t like hearing it, but Bob’s got it right:  the Barefoot Bandit is the first genuine, certifiable, authentic, bona-fide, bigger than life 21st century folk hero.  Sure he terrorized us on the South End and then terrorized Bob and his neighbors up on Orcas.  Whaddaya want – an apology??  The Kid’s serving serious time.  For serious crimes.  You don’t have to feel sorry for him.  You don’t have to be some bleeding heart and blame society or his mom or even yourself.  But trust me, you’ll get to know Colton as well as your own brother when you finish this book.  He was your neighbor.  He was maybe your kid’s friend.  He was a helluva crook, as you’ll see reading the details of how he operated.  And he had nerves of steel, as you’ll see when Bob Friel takes you up on his plane rides, sets you in the cockpit and flies into the cloud covered Cascades and lands in deadly stumped clearcuts and finally into Legend.

But most of all he’s part of the Lore of the South End now.  Our folk heroes can’t all be Jesus Christ or Charlie Manson either.  Sometimes they’re just the person down the street, the one with a torqued sense of adventure keeping time to a demented drummer with not as many options in life as we ‘normal’ folks got.

Read the book!  You won’t get anything better until the next legend comes down the pike.  And she won’t be from around here.  And a writer fine as Bob Friel won’t be capturing the essence in as entertaining and comprehensive a chronicle.  Billy the Kid’s neighbors might not have wanted to encourage the mythologizing either, but trust me, it’s too late.    Read this book — it’s part of your lore now.  Give you some ammo down at the Diner too next blue plate special…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/audio-helping-hands.mp3[/podcast]audio — helping hands

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