The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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So my neighbor Pete and his blue ox Babe got those two chunks of 470 year old oldgrowth fir sawed up into two inch slabs, some measuring in at 27 feet long. Perfect for a board room conference table at, oh, Boeing headquarters or Microsoft. I’d been watching this operation since the day I discovered the two logs down a sideroad out of view of the prying eyes of the Island County Sheriff’s Dep’t, if I’m guessing right, one on a lowboy trailer sunk deep into the mud and most of its tires ready to explode from the weight. The other was off to the other side, deep in ooze, a La Brea tarpit for dinosaur trees.

The purported owner later dropped by to see if I might be interested in fencing the timber. Actually, to see if I’d buy it. He claimed ownership and I had no doubt he’d been the boy who had the skill to take it down off the bluff on the east side from me, skid it out, get it up on the trailer and haul it away from the scene of the crime. A storm a few years back had broken the upper hundred feet or more clean off and left the trunk standing to dry and wait for the right gyppo to come along with an idea and a four foot chainsaw. After all, this is how the West was won. And the Midwest. And the East Coast. And now the Amazon and the wilds of Borneo. Global warming’s got nothing on an entrepreneur with a big ass Stihl.

There is, to a dyed-in-the-wool South Ender, a romance to the idea of a tree that was growing here long before Jacinto Camaano sailed by. I have no doubt this will be the last old growth milled up down here in my life time and the lifetimes of all those who will follow after. Call me sentimental and slap me with a dinosaur femur, but I had to have a piece of that tree. So after watching Pete and his brother-in-law Pittsburg Mike spend two weeks on each end of an Alaska portable sawmill, two big saws powering a four foot chain and bar, I said I’d like to have first pick of the slabs if that would be all right.

Now, I have a pretty nice hunk of wood for a dining room table. One with a great history of having traveled from Alaska to Reno to Hawaii and back with stops in between. And the mizzus rightly mentioned that we already have a pretty nice table. But nevertheless, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to jump on a vanishing piece of history. A different man might’ve listened to his wife. A better man certainly would’ve. But … well, I don’t have to tell you what I had to do, now do I?

So I have an eight foot slab on my shop table. It’s 3 feet on one end and tapers down to 3 feet on the other. I spent a day hand planing it. White curls of old growth fir filled the floor around me. I imagined myself building a boat, shaving the hull, planing the gunwales and sanding the deck. There’s a fertilizer for the imagination in this wood, a geography laid out in the continents of its sapwood, topographical swirls in the grain. Dinner, I assure you, will be an adventure from now on….

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[Speech introducing Karen to the Save the Schoolhouse breakfast where she was honored for her work on Camano History]

When they asked me introduce the mizzus, I knew I was taking a terrible risk. More nights in the doghouse — or in my case, the old shack — with the mice and the spiders, sleeping alone, cold and exiled.

But… I said I’d do it. Mighta been bad moonshine, but a man is only as good as his word … and I sure don’t need any more ratings drops.

Karen and I go way back to 1973. She came out here to Camano in 1981. For you mathematicians, that’s 32 years ago. For the rest of us, it’s a hell and gone long time ago. She left her librarying job back in Minnesota — I assumed, to pursue a new career in Romance. There weren’t a whole lot of libraries on Camano back then. About what it’ll be soon enough again, looks like… Between looking for work and getting her PhD in Romance, she took up Local History. Living on the South End, she could see there wasn’t much written down, just stories and lies, what we illiterates call Oral Tradition. She joined the Stanwood Area Historical Society and immersed herself in everything a good librarian can find on a given subject.

Needless to say, it became a full time job. Since it didn’t pay anything, it’s what we call PASSION. That’s romance lingo for Below Minimum Wage. Meanwhile she worked at the Univ. of Wash. Library, even became a Department Head there for a year. The commute in her beat up cars got a little old after a few years and soshe opted to work for Sno-Isle Libraries as a part-time sub. They wouldn’t hire her full time, probably not qualified enuff I suppose, so later she took a job – the one she’s got now — up at Burlington Library’s fancy Biblioteca. But … in all those years she kept digging out the history of Stanwoodopolis and Camano. Wrote a few pamphlets, edited and wrote the Hysterical Society’s newsletter which became way more scholarly than the old meeting minutes and who brought the cookies, helped the Society catalogue photos and artifacts and set up museum displays, wrote a history of Camano, served three years as President of the League of Snohomish Museums and still spends every spare minute and hour she can on research and writing. She’s passionate about this history, trust me.

I know a little something about Passion. And I don’t just mean Poverty….. Karen Prasse IS the Historian of this Area. She knows where the old river channels were and when they changed, she knows the old pioneers and their families that are still here. She can find photos of long lost shingle mills and bootlegger stills or lumber yards or seafood canneries or nettle farms, what that building used to be and when the old Volunteer Fire Station got moved across the highway, how the Stanwood library was once the Stillaguamish Band’s meeting hall once IT got hauled into town and is now the Gun Club up at Cedar Home where it got hauled last, who’s granddad was mayor and whose son’s were ne’er-do-wells, what year the old oyster company started up and why it closed down.
Karen knows where most of the bodies are buried and what skeletons are in whose closets. She’s like the fireman in Fahrenheit 451, one of those people who memorize a book after they were banned and burned and in doing so become that book . She’s a Living History.
When the folks who follow after us look back for their precedents, for what led up to their Here and Now, for some of the Causes and maybe the Effects, the person they’ll be reading, the knowledge that was saved, a lot of it will be Karen’s. Most of us don’t leave much legacy. We’re just the folks history forgets unless someone cares enough to write it down and catalogue it and give it some kind of persepective, put it in the proper flow of Time. I know this: we owe a lot to those who do.
It gives me no little pride to be here today to honor Karen Prasse for giving us a solid footing in the past, showing us where we’ve been and making this a richer place to live.

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It’s Halloween and I’m out on the mean streets where the kids are going store to store with their mom or their dad or even both before sunset. They’re pint sized fairies and waist high pirates, sawed off goblins and short skeletons. They’re way cute, mostly 4 or 5 years old, still unspoiled, I’m guessing … or just hoping. My bartendress where I’m currently holed up for a pint of my own spirits is garbed as an Old West hooker. Ah, innocence.

I suppose I could reminisce about my early Halloweens, packs of us kids in sheets and homemade outfits, going door to door, trick or treat, mostly treat. But I’m remembering instead my first weeks at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, fall of 1968. Everyone seemed to be in costume. Bell bottoms and hippie gear, wild hats, long hair, biker boots, an academia of Fellinis and Timothy Learys, strange trips, acid music —- Halloween every crazy day before the riots and the bombings and the rage. I was the kid from the small northern town, naïve as a polyester fairy holding out my pillowcase.

I’ve grown old since then, but occasionally find myself in a place cast adrift from normality, wide-eyed, a little fearful, the ground grown mushy. Who knows? The world isn’t what we think — we just pretend. We hole up, stay put, find routines, all in the unstated hope we won’t discover our life wasn’t what we thought, wasn’t what we thought at all!

It’s Halloween. By dark the kids will be back home watching TV, eating too much crap candy. I’ve still got chores, places to be, a long drive back down the highway where the giant goblin maple leaves will skitter and swirl in the rain and wind, ghosts in the headlights. The lights will be out when I park at the top of our hill drive. The house will be nothing but a creepy silhouette in the moonless night. Fir trees will tower overhead. In a dark corner, barely discernible, a shadow might move, a future just imagined, a dream not yet dreamed. Trick or treat!

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Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Reinvent yourself!  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So maybe  it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

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I’ve been out here in the wilds of the Arkansas backcountry, tromping hills and woods, creekbeds and pastures, scaring up turkeys and deer, even the occasional armadillo and roadrunner. Vultures patrol everywhere, gleaning the dead. The woods are littered with washed carcasses, bleached skulls, scattered bones.

You might think this is a slice of Americana glimpsed through a lens from 1850. Hard men and tough women. And they are. Plenty of bad dentistry hereabouts. Lots of suspicious, distrustful looks. Life is lived closer to the dirt here and the dirt isn’t so much soil as it is chipped rock without much nutrient. Not many gardens to be seen. Not many orchards either. Homes here are small, patched and made to serve the purpose. Rusty sheet metal siding, rotted clapboard, plywood never painted. Some are nice enough, but you won’t find a large home or one on the Architectural Digest reject list. There’s no money here. Towns have 350, 402, 569 people, man, woman and child. The grocery store calls itself a ‘trading post’, more aptly, I guess. Churches outnumber bars a thousand to one. Actually, a thousand to none. You want a drink here, you drive to Oklahoma for 3.2 beer. That, or you make it yourself. I’m not here long enough to get Set-Up.

Religion and poverty usually go hand in hand. You got to believe in something and these folks aren’t playing Lotto. A sign on the highway read: I’M NOT RICH ENOUGH TO BE A REPUBLICAN. I doubt it meant he was a Democrat either.

Today I walked past a half dozen deer stands, structures up on stilts or in trees, near a field or a pond ten to twenty feet up, a small room with a view to kill. Salt blocks have been laid out all year so the deer come there. Opening day of season, free salt will carry a high price. These boys aren’t hunting for sport, I assume. I sure hope not. There’s nothing sporting about it. One I climbed had an office chair, swiveled and padded. I don’t have to wait a couple weeks to know they’ll have a scope on their rifle. Jesus provides.

Some of us forget that America isn’t mostly a suburb, that folks are living hand to mouth, that poverty exists and the living is hard. Some of us scream bloody murder that the middle class is under assault, that union jobs are suspect, that government jobs should all be eliminated, that our 401-K’s have been raided and lost.

But … it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of us who don’t get pensions, who don’t get to ‘retire’, who don’t have health care, who don’t live in fine houses with huge mortgages, who don’t drive new cars, who don’t use credit cards or cellphones or own computers. They live in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in Detroit, in upper Michigan or Maine or the South End or backwash anywhere. They don’t ask for much, but they don’t give a good goddamn about folks who overspent or didn’t save or never appreciated the Good Life when they had it. They’re fellow citizens and life is a lot harder for them in this Land of Plenty. It’s worth remembering next time we’re whining is all I’m saying.

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