The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Guitar Bob and I were sitting out with the dogs and couple of 6 strings, enjoying the last of what must be the warmest summer either of us have ever seen in our combined 70 plus years of living here in Pacific Northewest. The sun had set over the South End, traffic has slowed to a dribble, the hounds were lounging at our feet and a contemplative mood was descending on all four of us there on the porch while we played some blues and drank some beers.

Right before darkness settled in completely, the dogs set up a racket slightly out of rhythm with ours then raced to the fence on the highway to menace a passerby walking on the shoulder. Bob hauled the beasts back onto the porch and a voice floated across the summer lawn. “You mind if I play some guitar with you?”

I’d forgot Bob’s not partial to uninvited guests. Or even invited ones most of the time. So I mistakenly said, sure, c’mon in, the dogs won’t bite now that they’ve been fed. Bob hauled his guitar, his beer, his dogs all into the house and left me to play host. I gave the kid my guitar and he played something loud and a little troubling, but hey, music’s a universal language and he was doing the talking. My job was to listen.

He was, he explained when he’d finished his concerto, living down the road, trying to deal with ‘the auditory hallucinations’. He was a spiritual man, he blurted, but sometimes the spirits were intrusive. In the dark I couldn’t see his face or his expressions, just this voice explaining himself, his lack of work, loss of faith, those voices talking to him all the time. I asked if it helped to live down here all alone, end of an island, end of the world. He was thinking maybe he’d move back to the city. More work. More company.

After awhile I said it was nice talking with him, but I had to get on home. He got up and walked down the drive into a dark moonless night. Maybe voices were talking to him, I don’t know. I had the feeling they weren’t guiding him toward any light and I felt bad I wasn’t either. It can be a lonesome place, the South End, no worse maybe than other places, but when you lose your way down here, it can seem like a long ways back to the place you came from, the place you tried leaving in the first place….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-South-End-Suds.mp3[/podcast]audio — South End Suds

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Some of us homebrewers were holding an ad hoc meeting on the side of the road yesterday, comparing notes on hops and malt extracts, sharing stories of exploding bottles and quality control issues, all the while dodging Labor Day traffic which was building rapidly to a Mass Exodus of all those summer people hauling boats and bikes and trailers and roof rack gear back to their primary residences in the Big Cities. You know, Conway and Sedro Wooley. Summer’s over for them, but we still have jobs to do —- namely, distilling barley extracts down to a winter supply of stouts and porters and barleywines. The root cellar isn’t full floor to ceiling yet with the bounty of a fine summer.

I know for some folks the idea of homebrewing conjures visions of bathtub gin or bad moonshine, desperate measures for the desperate times of Prohibition. When I started brewing, the micro beer craze hadn’t started. If you wanted a full bodies, pure ingredient malt beverage, you had to make it the old fashioned way: yourself. There were only a couple of self-help books on the market, but they were good enough to get things bubbling. And before long I was my own little brewery, South End Suds, pumping out ales and stouts and meads and double bocks 5 gallons at a time, bottling them in used sterilized bottles.

You see micro breweries dotting the landscape now, sea to shining sea. They’re the folks like us, the homebrewers who made a better beer than Bud or Miller Lite, who stood up to the Goliaths by saying ingredients matter, taste matters, quality matters. The Slow Food folks are doing the same thing. ‘Local’ matters, even if the beginnings were more Loco. In a world of industrialized everything, a return to basics is a revolutionary idea. Real beer. Real food. Someday, in the distant future, in a world we can barely imagine, you’ll grow a tomato that has flavor once again. Dream big! Change is coming, even if it’s one homebrew at a time.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-buying-the-farm.mp3[/podcast]audio —- buying the farm

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I went to see an insurance agent recently.  I guess I thought maybe I could get some clarification, maybe even a reduction, on premiums.  It’s been a few decades since the last time I took a seat across from the desk of my ‘agent’, but it all came flooding back once I’d snagged myself in the web and the spider, waiting all those years, hurried in for the meal.

Insurance!  When we owed on the house — okay, the shack — we were required to keep insurance.  The cars, well, it’s a steep fine if we don’t keep that up and we’re pulled over by the constabulary.  And pretty soon we’ll be looking – again – at health insurance.  It’s a dangerous damn world out there.  And accidents do happen.  I’ve got a buddy who never carried auto insurance.  Figured it was a sucker’s game.  He had a perfect driving record.  He was a cautious driver.  He wouldn’t have an accident and if he got fined, well, cheaper than the car premiums.

Course, he finally hit another car, his fault totally, and sent one of the passengers in the other vehicle to intensive care for months.  He doesn’t know if she lived or died.  Doesn’t know if the family’s lives are ruined.  Doesn’t know if their bills got paid.  I bet he still thinks insurance is a sucker’s game.  Jeez!

Before I could back toward the door of the insurance agent’s office, I’m looking at an Umbrella Policy, a combo deal with the house and auto that reduces one by 17% and the other by 25% and an aoffer of a gizmo that attaches to the car’s computer to analyze our driving skills with the promise of a 5% discount and free year’s membership in a GPS-driven motor assistance program.  I think supersized fries came with it and a toy from the latest blockbuster movie for kids.  Numbers flew, statistics sailed, money was up, then down, calculations were reappraised, the room and my head were spinning….

Last thing I thought I heard as I stumbled for the exit was a policy to cover nursing care and then the cremation, 33% off if me and mizzus agreed to burn together.   I was thinking it sounded like the right thing to do.  Fortunately it needed both our signatures … and the mizzus plans to outlive me by a long time.  Me, I’m about ready for the Farm.   And I sure don’t mean State Farm.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-A-Short-History-of-Golf-on-the-Island.mp3[/podcast]audio — A Short History of Golf on the Island

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Tyee Country Club is sort of a misnomer. Oh, they got a clubhouse all right. And they even have a pool. Plus some pool tables. What they don’t have is the golf course the local developer promised the new property owners in the slick sales brochures. He didn’t put it in the contracts, of course, and in the end he sold off the golf course lot by lot. Folks can live on Fairway Street and Back 9 Way, but if they want to actually play golf, they need to go up the road to Camaloch. Sure, people were mad as hell, but there wasn’t much they could do about it short of buying a gun and administering frontier justice. A stint of 5 to 10 for justifiable homicide wasn’t probably what they had in mind for the Golden Years.

I’m not much of a duffer. Last time up at Camaloch’s premiere course I took a Chicago buddy who’d never hit a golf b all in his life. We took three clubs each and plenty of balls just in case we lost a few dozen. Back then the fairways were designed for a very small acreage. Quite a few laid out right beside oncoming fairways. This might work fine for professional golfers, but for fellas who never play, this is like playing scrimmage in Iraq. We sent balls incoming toward approaching carts, bounced them across fairways to the right and fairways to the left. Titleists ricocheted off houses at the course’s edge. Dunlops rained down on putters working nearby greens. Divots flew like manhole covers next to IED’s.

The game, I’m sure, never attained greater excitement than our Chicago- style play created that fine summer day on the links of Camano. We finished 9 hard holes with a few balls left over and all but one club in our duffel, probably mislaid near a green. We asked in the clubhouse if anyone had turned one in, but when they inquired what club, what brand, I was at a loss as to either, although Chi-town Larry swore up and down it was a Goodwill 5 iron. We had two in our bag so I kind of doubted it. Let’s just say I didn’t think we’d need it any time soon. And whoever found it, I doubt he’d want it, but he’s certainly welcome to it, a small gift from one duffer to another.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Tyee-Resurrection.mp3[/podcast]audio — Tyee Resurrection

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Tyee Store’s been closed now for over a year. The sign says you can lease it or buy it. Nobody does either. I suppose in the ‘real world’ the owners would drop the price until it matched a buyer’s estimate of its actual worth, some happy median where both parties feel equal remorse. But not down here. The weeds grow around the place, the flowerbeds look destroyed, the store has that look of long shuttered and going to ruin.

Folks ask all the time: couldn’t we rent it and bring it back to life? Folks who should remember that it was never fully off life support. They just miss the cracker barrel ambience of the joint, an oasis where they could get a paper or share gossip or grab a loaf of ‘day old’ bread. For the hard up, buying on credit was the real draw. For folks like me, I just like having a general store in the neighborhood. It gave the South End a gravitational center. Now it just seems like a rural no place, all of it just residences off the 2 lane blacktop. The Art Gallery next door is rarely open, nothing but a rusty elephant head stuck on its metal siding, might as well say Wildlife Moved. Trouble is, we didn’t. And I suppose the wilds are all we have left, the nettle savannahs, blackberry jungles and salmonberry swamps. The Barefoot Bandit could disappear in here until he grew old and grandfatherly, nobody much giving a damn.

I ride by the store nearly every day on my bike. For Sale. For Lease. The barn out back leans a little more every month. The well house tower pokes up above the dead apple tree. The field with the amphitheater by the pond is tall grass and another year trees will start to reclaim it. It’s possible someone will imagine their capitalist dream here. Maybe not a general store, maybe a Laundromat or a furniture repair or a custom stained glass shop. Maybe a garage in the Art Gallery again —- or an antique store and nursery.

Somebody someday, somehow, will buy this. No doubt when they do we’ll all drop by with our valuable suggestions and insights. Probably won’t frequent the joint, but we’ll certainly wish them well. For awhile ….

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