The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/zuckerbrother.mp3[/podcast]

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I just got done chatting with about the 15th neighbor who plans to go into commercial pharming.  Gonna set up a light system in the empty kids’ room and grow 16 legal cannabis plants for sale to those with various and sundry medical afflictions ranging from bad backs to severe ennui.  We got a lot of chronically ill folks down here on the care-free South End apparently.  And hopefully – at least for these gentleman farmers – a few left who don’t grow their own remedies.

I wish to hell I could figure out how this medical marijuana works.  Actually, I wish the State could figure it out, maybe pull in some desperately needed revenues on taxing the stuff.  Won’t be long before Big Pharma wants a tax break too as long as the small businesses aren’t chipping in.  Near as I can tell, all you need to Grow is a ‘doctor’s’ authorization, a Green Card, costs $100 or $200 and then you can start your plantation.  Unless you live in a place – unlike the South End – where the cops are far too b usy with traffic violations to bust pot growers, chances are you can pretty much count on minimal harassment, and no chance whatsoever of prosecution.  Prohibition, my friends, is over.  Just no celebration…..

Me, I’m thinking Old School.  I grew up in the long dark shadow of illegal grass.  Friends growing paranoid, flushing their stash at the first knock at the door.  I grew up a criminal in the eyes of America.  Folks went to jail and served serious time.  And now?  You can grow it in your front yard, for godsake!!  You tell me what I’m supposed to think about Law and Order.  Naw, I’m for keeping the stuff illegal.  Gives the South End a certain panache, an outlaw mystique, a badge of dishonor and so be it.  Hell, I’m even advocating criminalizing nettles.  We find em growing on your property, you’ll get the full force of the LAW, brother.  And worse, we’ll brand you as the Nettle Growing Miscreant your parents warned you about.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/audio-outlaw-mentality.mp3[/podcast]

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/audio-outlaw-mentality.mp3[/podcast]

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/audio-all-boats-rising.mp3[/podcast]audio — all boats rising

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Some of you grizzled up, gnarly nail pouchers maybe remember the era before Cascade Lumber.  Those terrible dark ages when we got our 2×4’s down at Copeland or Woodinville Lumber.  We were remodeling a lot back then.  Roofing, adding a deck for a new large appliance.  Prettying up the back shack for guests.  Maybe adding a skylight, couple of bedrooms.  Fixing up that grungy kitchen.

Pretty soon we were tearing down these 50’s and 60’s cabins.  Putting in new homes.  You boyz remember when they auctioned off Finistere Heights, top lot going for an unimaginable 160K??  We thought the tsunami must’ve crested up there  …..  but only a few years later and we found out that was just the low tide lapping gently against the bulkheads.  Camano Hills, Brentwood, Utsalady …. folks found Camano finally, cheapest waterfront, cheapest views, half of Seattle and a tenth of California rolled up in their Lexus SUV and paid cash.  I remember the day our assessor rolled in — old Fred — and said he had some bad news for me.  And I said we better have us a cold one then.  And he said, actually I got two pieces of bad news.  So I said, well, you know what I said, and he told me about my million dollar absentee neighbors’ evaluation across the nettle ravine.

It’s nice to rub shoulders with wealth, as you know, but it’s quite another thing to pay their same property tax.  All boats rise with the incoming tide — or so they say — but none of us ever imagined the money that was headed onto the South End’s shores and bluffs.  I just try to remember our roots, our humble beginnings, and thank our lucky stars we got property and a little shack and bright prospects from neighbors who are looking to buy our parcels so they can tear down our casas and put up fancy boathouses or an architect designed slave quarter or a simple hangar for their Cessna.

Course, that was before the real estate meltdown of ’08.  I guess now we’ll all have to stand pat for awhile longer.  Give us more time to clear a landing strip in the nettles for the next owner.  And to stock the fridge for the next assessor’s bad news.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/audio-vulture-capitalists.mp3[/podcast]audio — vulture capitalists

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Techno Tom was down at the closing of Tyee Store last week buying up all the canned goods at 50% off.  Even at the usual South End mark up, 50% off, according to T.T’s calculations, was worth filling his pickup with everything from Vienna sausages to water chestnuts.  Most everybody else was caching up Bud Lite 12 packs and PBR tall boys at 25% off.  Customers who dropped out of Stanwoodopolis High, the ones who pony up $3 on ATM transactions of $10 for smokes and that night’s TV dinner, thinking only jerks need math, probably didn’t cash in on the deals.

T.T. tweeted a few dozen pals who showed up en masse to clear the rest of the shelves and then a few of us capitalist vultures parked at the table for a couple of cold ones with Don, the manager who presided over the post mortem of the late great Tyee Store, now officially shuttered, possibly forever.  The neon beer signs went dark, the coolers were turned off, the framed South End posters came down, the place went quiet and dark as Tut’s Tomb.

We didn’t have a lot to say.  Brick mortar gives way every day to digital shopping and maybe Tyee had outlived its terminal prognosis.  Patti came by with her kids, one not even born when she first hired on as clerk some 16 years ago.  Sad to say, but the Store was the South End’s largest employer all those years.  Minimum wage, no benefits.  A lot of us worked there.  But nobody longer than Patti….

So we drank a few toasts to Ted and Ellen, the original owners, to Jigs and Ruby, to Dick and Sandy, to Don and Helen, all the owners.  I tried to remember the names of a few of the help, but time has taken its toll and those beers didn’t refresh any brain cells.  I finally said, as usual, it was time to go home and face the music.  We all shuffled out and into the night, solemn as casket bearers.  And another Mom and Pop store closed its doors and went dark on the backroad of an America receding in the rearview.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/poultry-past5.mp3[/podcast]poultry past

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The whole point of this Spring Jubilee we got going on right now is to make sure agriculture and its heritage aren’t some historical footnotes in the near future.  As, sadly, it is on the tideflats of the once proud South End.

The South End wasn’t always the Backwash Dead End far flung terminus of Camano Island.  Back in its heyday, about 1915, it was a thriving port with a 1000 foot wharf jutting proudly out into the storm tossed Puget Sound.  The Atalanta and other mosquito fleet supply boats moored up for deliveries and mail 2 or 3 times a week, dropping shipments and taking on passengers.

Mabana—– crown jewel of the Saratoga Straits.  The Seattle classifieds advertised 5 acre parcels perfectly suitable for chicken ranching.  So the Roaring 20’s on the South End were more like the Cackling 20’s.  The wharf, of course, sticking out into the full fury of the Sound, got whittled down to the piling stumps you can see today at minus tides, stubby footprints leading far out to Davy Jones’ Locker and away from the Lost Civilization of Greater Metropolitan Mabana.

Oh, we still got a Port of Mabana, a one lane road sloughing its way toward obliteration.  And we got 3 Port commissioners, ditto, a kind of vestigial South End government about as pertinent to our lives as the Island County regime that’s barely conscious of Camano much less our South End.

But as always, we seem to manage, if not quite thrive.  History is like the tides, an ebb and flow, or in our case, an egg and flow, and what WAS might easily be reduced to rubble and ruin.  Or pilings and rebar.  The South End rose once toward soaring heights, Chicken Capitol of the Far West.  And if that grandeur is lost now, we can take some small comfort in knowing, once, in a lifetime not that long ago, in a place not too greatly changed, we raised the cholesterol level of the world a notch or two.  Not much to crow about, I know……. unless you’re a South End chicken farmer.

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