[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-environmentalism-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]audio — environmentalism on the south end
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I have a sequoia I planted below our house, down where the hill levels out into a ravine. I planted it as a seedling instead of buying a wedding ring for myself since I really dislike a ring. At least one on my finger. Ten years later we built the house up on that hill and from a second story perch I’ve been watching it reach up over the woodshop below, then slowly rise to the new house’s level, go beyond the height of the barn across the ravine and above our own house.
I have to step forward into the window now to see its top. At 32 years old it’s still pretty much a baby so far as a sequoia goes. Yesterday Karen and I wrapped our arms around its trunk and barely locked hands. With any luck it’ll outlive me by, oh, 500 years or so. In my own lifetime, with a little luck, it’ll be the biggest tree on the place, which is no mean accomplishment considering the five redwoods we planted from see, a few humongous big leaf maples, some second growth firs and one cedar that, for now, holds the title at a circumference of 13 feet and must be the oldest tree by far on our seven acres.
I’d like to think when we no longer prowl this property, it’ll be a forest again, not some logged off scabwoods the way it was when we first arrived. The field that once grew alfalfa for our goats is now a small arboretum of oaks and maples and beeches, rhododendrons twice as high as us, walnuts and hickories, a carpet of shamrocks and periwinkle growing underneath.
We are definitely shaped by our surroundings, I know that much. And it’s no small pleasure to return the favor by shaping them. The orchards, the flower gardens, the riot of 150 rhodies all blooming over a slowly unfolding spring, the vegetable gardens, the shrubs, the back woods —- all of this becoming as much a part of us as we became part of it. If you were to ask if I was an environmentalist, I would have to say no, probably not. I’m mostly just part of the environment.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-velkommen-to-the-island.mp3[/podcast]audio — velkommen to the island
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Used to be we kept a giant billboard bottom of Land’s Hill coming onto the island telling any and all that this was Private Property. The beaches, the clams, the crabs, the whole she-bang were owned by us property holders and if you knew what was good for you, you’d stay off our land.
This was about l980 and some good old boys from the Homeowners’s Association decided to erect the thing. Stanwood has a Wellkommen. Camano had a KEEP OUT… Somebody cut it down right off the Get-Go. I thought about doing it myself, it was so nasty and in your face. But it got put right back up with steel legs hidden inside the wood ones so a chain saw wouldn’t work to take it down next try.
Being on state highway right-of-way, the sign was Illegal. A few years later another sign went on the big sign covering up the Keep Off Private Property with a Respect Private Property at the bottom. Not near as hostile, but still …. not real inviting. Twenty years that sign sat there guarding the island’s only entry by would-be trespassers.
About l998 we were building the new Visitor Center at Terry’s Corner. Department of Transportation came by wanting permission to tear that sign down. Wanted to know who put it up, who owned it, who maintained it. Me, being at the corner every day, they figured I must be the head honcho of the Chamber of Commerce. For two years I got calls from D.O.T. Wanting to cut me a deal. They offered to put the sign up at the Center for us. I said with a sign like that we wouldn’t NEED a Visitor Center. Just tear the ugly thing down. Nobody’s alive who cares. But they were worried about stepping on toes. I said those old boys sure didn’t care whose toes they stomped on when they E-rected that thing.
D.O.T. kept calling. Like I’m the Mayor of Camano. They’d put fancy stripes in our parking lot if they could tear it down, the man said. Finally, worn down after dozens of these conversations, I said, okay, you got a deal. And that’s how we got rid of that ugly sign and how we got fancy stripes too. Personally I wish I’d cut a deal now to put that sign up at the entrance to the South End. Plus they’d have had to make me honorary mayor.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-sketch-from-the-Historical-Society-benefit3.mp3[/podcast]audio — sketch from the Historical Society benefit
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Most of you pioneers wouldn’t recall it, but I came with the mizzus to a few Historical Society meetings nearly 3 decades ago. She stuck it out. And I lit out. It was like Happy Hour at the Home. Tea and decaf coffee and plenty of little cakes and cookies. A lot of talk about so and so who homesteaded the flood plain and whozit who married whatshername, you know, the family out by the gitcheegumee farm, the one next to the old Florence School. Most of the history was generally geneological.
I remember some 90 year old gal had moved here from New England by way of the South and she said, you know what, all this talk about pioneers and who’s been here the longest and whose family’s got bragging rights, it’s a lotta Hooey, you ask me. My family lived where they’re at 300 years and I’m the first one with sense enuff to move away.
We all got old family trees last I looked, nothing to get too proud about there. I’ll probably live my years out on the South End and I suppose someday they’ll put a plaque up at the South End Historical Pole Building Museum: here was a man who didn’t have sense enuff to explore further than Elger Bay. That’s why we made him honorary Mayor of the South End.
History isn’t out in the cemetery, I know that. It’s figuring out why the town dried up or the farms played out or the timber got cut down and how what was THEN is still pulling on us NOW. What Stanwood BECOMES is because of what Stanwood WAS.
Course on the South End, history’s about half mystery. Most of the family trees have fallen off the bluff. Won’t be long the only history’s gonna be the outrageous whoppers the Band’s telling. Trouble with that is, they didn’t stick to tea and decaf coffee, so it’s juiced up plenty more than some of you genuine historians might like.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-always-someplace-worse-than-where-you-are….mp3[/podcast]audio — always someplace worse than where you are…
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The mizzus was riding the other day with our state senator Mary Margaret, over to a conference on putting up historical signs for Island county. Mostly on Whidbey since nobody over there had ever heard of Camano Island and couldn’t imagine it even having a history if nobody knew it existed.
Whidbey, of course, has its own South End. The commuters live there. It’s a company town for Boeing really, but the State drives em to the plant on our ferry.
Mary Margaret said when she was a girl she always felt like a second class citizen around the schoolkids of Stanwood, Camano Island in those days being a sort of Tijuana for the Skandihoovian Upper Classes of the fabled Twin Cities. I guess it’s important to most folks to have someone to look down on. Course now we’re more enlightened. And the Stanwoodites need our purchasing power so the whispering goes on out of range of our hearing now.
Mary Margaret was saying how one day she was telling her mama how she felt belittled by all the uppity teasing and why was the world so mean. And her mama, trying to make her feel a little better, a little brighter in this dark cold world, trying to lift her spirits in the shadow of that bullying, stuck up, snot-nosed Stanwood, her mama said, well, Mary Margaret, you cheer up. It could be worse. At least you don’t live down at the South End.
Somehow I suspect the mizzus and Mary Margaret aren’t going to get a Historical Marker for us South Enders….
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-owner-built-with-more-than-a-pen.mp3[/podcast]audio — owner built with more than a pen
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Back in the days of the Wild Wild South End we used to erect our shacks and abodes without bothering with county building permits. Just a damn nuisance, really. We weren’t building with the idea they’d outlive us and the next unsuspecting owner would buy something unstructural or unheatable or probably uninhabitable by anyone other than a bona fide South Ender. The new immigrants just bulldoze down the old structures anyway, even if they’re fairly recent, and make room for their Taj Mahal retirement villas.
We used recycled lumber, scrounged doors and rehung old single pane wood windows. We didn’t call it sustainable architecture or crow about recycling or call ourselves Green Warriors. This is just how it was done. This is all we could afford. The county even had a special permit for this: Owner Builder. Pay a small fee and they’d let us construct our own house. You couldn’t hire a contractor — you had to do it yourself. Fair enough.
But when the county began to gentrify, the new squires complained that we were living in dwellings that they considered eyesores. Nobody asked what we thought of theirs….. And so the county eliminated the Owner Builder Eyesore permits for a couple of years, but the Sound End squawkers got it reinstated. That’s when we built our new shack. The new permit made us meet all the same codes as every contractor so it wasn’t as if we could recycle materials or build on the cheap. It just meant you could build it yourself legally. What I would call the principle of the thing….
Nowadays you can’t get an Owner Builder anything. End of an era. Some of my neighbors like to talk how they built their own house too. What they mean is they wrote the checks to a contractor and called themselves the boss. They didn’t strap on a nail pouch or throw a hammer or cut a 2×6. When someone says, ‘I built my own house,’ I always ask what to me would be an embarrassing question. They usually don’t see the difference so over time I’ve learned to let it go.
But … there IS a difference. The county knew what it was, you better believe. And down on the South End, we know the difference too. So if you ever wonder why we skip the permits, it’s not that we’re just ornery, it’s so we can actually build our own damn house.
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