The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Billy Jean ran the art gallery down here at the aesthetically swollen South End, the only paid employee. The artists who showed their wares could pay extra commission or work 10 hours a week. Since they rarely sold their art, the extra commission was zip so why should they work? The first year the co-op, the South Fork Art Barn, was closed most days when no one was willing to sit in the vacant Second Hand Shoppe they’d leased. Finally, after mounting rental bills, the South End Arts Council voted to hire a staff person to do what they wouldn’t.

Billy Jean interviewed for the minimum wage, no benefits job and was hired the same day, primarily by dint of NOT being an artist herself, the main criterion the Council set for qualifications. Not having been around artists, B.J., who thought the position would mostly be running the store, tracking sales and receipts, closing up at the end of the day, well, she never dreamed the job actually was Ego Masseuse. The first day Sarah Jenkins came in early to demand her watercolors be moved front and center where they would cheerily greet the customers before they decided to leave empty handed. Billy Jean nodded and smiled, but eventually pled ignorance of the rules by virtue of being the New Hire. She would, she vowed, check with the Council and the Co-op Board. Course, it turned out the Board had their art front and center so a rule was made on-the-spot to keep the current display configuration.

The first week various grumpy artists brought forth their complaints, moved paintings or hung new ones, argued their cases with Billy Jean and wished her luck. Meaning, sell my work! By Friday she felt like a vise had scrunched her ears into one auditory pancake of pain. She was, she told her newly unemployed plumber husband Brent, nothing but a glorified Cat Herder. Brent, still in shock over his sudden layoff, told her she’d get the hang of it, just stick with it, Honey, we need the money, a refrain she later could have embroidered in needlepoint and hung front and center by her own front door and called it art or literature or just a motto for the rest of the South End.

Billy Jean lasted two more months. The Gallery lasted three.

Hits: 113

Hits: 441

Opportunities come and go here faster than county commissioners. Like Shakespeare said, albeit a wee more poetically, You snooze, You lose. A few years back the island had the chance to capitalize on the Barefoot Bandit’s international notoriety. Colton Island. We could’ve been what Forks is to vampires, a major tourist destination for teenagers and their drag-along parents. But no, we let it slip through our fingers and now Colton is just a fading memory cooling his heels in the federal pen south of Seattle and Gomorrah. All that memorabilia us South Enders invested in will no doubt jam the Second Chance Thrift Store for a decade.

But! Fate has dealt our backwash island another Hand, a real 2nd chance. And, as always, we’re here to promote it! Forget that 3rd time is the charm stuff — there won’t be a 3rd time. Jump on the 2nd. Learn from our mistakes. Ride the Gravy Train for a change. It’s coming into a station near you. Call your commissioner. Talk to your priest. Chat with your retirement investment counselor. Take out some loans. Do what needs to be done!

The mom and pop auto parts store on 530 has closed to make room for a cannabis store. A marijuana mercantile. A drug emporium. A regular Dr. Feelgood’s real goods. Down on the South End the Tyee Store has been sold and soon will boast multiple greenhouses and grow operations. That’s correct, Sherlock: Marijuana Pharming. Agribusiness is alive and well once again and the island — cue the Power Point Presentation — is ideally positioned to cash in. Cannabis Island!!! Imagine the tourism. Imagine the potential, the profits, the notoriety. Cannabis Island, the island higher than Mt. Rainier.

Forget Colton. He’ll be out soon and he’ll probably get a white collar job with the FBI teaching them his fugitive tactics. The future is now. The future, if we have sense enough to grab it by the bong handle, is going to pot. Contact the Chamber of Commerce, alert the realtors, listen to the artists: Cannabis Island “where you can take a trip and never leave your seat.” Don’t let this opportunity slip from our grasp! We missed our chance once, don’t let this one be a savage flashback.

Hits: 231

Hits: 27

Hits: 67

Don’t look now, but the long economic drought of the South End is about to come to an end. Tyee Store, long shuttered and overgrown with weeds, has sold! Soon a new era begins down here and prosperity will be ours. Ironically it will be farming that returns us to the cash cows we once were. Or, in this case, Pharming.

Tyee Store is going to grow commercial cannabis. Medical marijuana. Recreational mary jane. This isn’t an April Fool’s joke, folks. This is the South End rising up from the ashes of a nettle industry gone to pot, higher than a Katmandu Kite, on the wings of what we once grew illegally, but now will grow and pay taxes on. Without a doubt this will be the largest employer down here. Probably larger than all the others put together. Growers and trimmers, pruners and baggers, labelers and quality control testers. Half of the neighbors have offered to help, free of charge, although I suspect our worthy volunteerism will be turned down. These are legitimate biznesspeople. These are what the 1% refer to proudly as ‘job creators.’

The South End is embarking on a new entrepreneurial era. Ironically, what once made us criminals, now will make us rich. After all, isn’t this the American Way? Oh, there will be some that cry foul, who will say why reward the criminals, who would rather forego the taxes to see miscreants and scofflaws put in their rightful place. Behind bars. We waged a war on drugs and after decades and billions, we lost. In the end pot was the largest agricultural commodity in the country, more than corn, more than soybeans, more than tobacco. And none of it was taxed. You don’t have to be an MIT math professor to do the calculations.

We’ll leave it for others to debate the morality. Obviously down here, we’ve opted for some fiscal sanity and a return to sound agricultural practices. Soon we’ll be exporting not only our THC but our way of life to markets near you. Watch for our tractor trailers rolling in to a distributor in your locale. The South End will Rise Again!

Hits: 42

Hits: 47

Ginny, our mail lady a few years back, had the longest postal route on the island, serving half the South End and all the residents near the Head. She drove a car with right side steering. She always said when she retired she wanted to go to England and rent a car where she’d feel right at home behind a passenger-sided steering wheel. With luggage in the back, not a ton of junk mail and magazines. I never heard if she did or not.

Like all our U.S. Postal carriers, Ginny would drive packages up to the shack if they didn’t fit our mailbox, the one with 10 pounds of goofy add-ons, red star on the ‘flag’, big glass nose on the door like a Christmas present for the insane. That, or a mailbox adulterated by an artist on drugs. Or worse. When parts of this evolving sculpture fell off, Ginny would pick them up and put them in the box with our bills and unsolicited credit card applications, just another small aggravation on a route filled with those. Boxes too high or too low, too far back, too grown over with blackberries or nettles, on wobbly posts with doors that no longer closed. At any given time ours would fit the description.

I hear folks who say the Post Office is a lousy organization, a letter costs too much to send and probably gets lost anyway, that UPS or Fed Ex would do a better job faster and cheaper. I think these people would find fault with Heaven itself and ask for a refund from St. Peter at the gate. I can send a letter across the country for half what it costs for a bottle of pop and it gets there in 2 days, 3 at most. Now, of course, most of us can e-mail it Instantaneously. Still can’t e-mail a package yet. Or a magazine. And anachronistic yahoos like me still send letters. Handwritten even. Even if we never get a letter back.

All my life I’ve appreciated going out to the mailbox, sort of a daily mini-Christmas, a surprise in every Cracker Jack box and yeah, mostly junk, I know. I like that it’s efficient, that it’s been around since Ben Franklin, that it delivered letters sent to soldiers in Europe or cowboys in Amarillo or me at the end of America. To all the Ginny’s driving wrong sided down America’s backroads, through wind and hail, sleet and snow, curmudgeons and naysayers, thanks!!

And Ginny, if you’re touring England, mind the hedges.

Hits: 242

Hits: 38

We got the last officially sanctioned woodburning sole-heat residence on the island. Back when the county still let us pioneers build our own shacks, we put in a Russian fireplace, 16 tons of brick with two flues and multiple horizontal paths that capture 90% of the heat from the wood we burn once a day. Very efficient burning, but not efficient enough when the burn bans roll in … unless you have a house whose only heat source is wood. Then you can burn wood.

The county stopped issuing owner-builder permits back in the 20th century, probably to protect us hobby carpenters from hurting ourselves with kickbacking hammers. They claimed it was to keep the building codes up to snuff, but I can tell you, they made us shack-whackers meet every one anyway. And then they made us sign affadavits in the event we ever sold our palace that we would disclose to the poor unsuspecting buyer that the house they were thinking of buying was built, not by a professional, but by us, slam-happy amateurs who didn’t care if our handiwork fell on us the first winter storm when the walls collapsed or the roof caved in. Not that my buyers would be very much fooled by the homemade doors or the stained glass transoms or the odd tile designs or the handmade furniture or the beach timbers holding up the beams or the cabinets and bookshelves made with exotic woods or the custom toilet seats that fit one particular butt particularly well.

Nah, I suspect they wanted the permit fees. I know, it sounds cynical on my part. Just a few extra hundred dollars to eliminate a right everyone who ever came to America or the South End has had since we first arrived on the continent. Even King George let the Pilgrims build their igloos without inspections or permit fees and George certainly wasn’t noted for his generosity. Admittedly, the island residents didn’t run out to dump tea in the Saratoga Harbor when the county banned owner-builder permits, but that isn’t really the point, you ask me. I know folks these days would rather just get a fat mortgage, hire a contractor, get the permits and pay the fees, then move in to their drywalled, energy-efficient, tsunami-proofed abode and watch the big screen high def TV in the throne room. Okay for them. But there might just be one more yahoo like myself who thinks it would be a Total Hoot to pick up a hammer and a saw and commence to erecting a house he would take pride in for the rest of his days, who doesn’t give a damn what the next buyer might think and if he doesn’t like it, tear it down and hire another built. We used to be people who prided themselves on their Can-Do attitude, who innovated and created and built from the ground up their ideas and their dreams. That was the America we all grew up in. I’m not sure that’s the America we live in now.

But … down on the South End, like other backwashes across the country, there are still a few of us. Maybe someday our shacks will be the museums of the future. Naw, they’ll get torn down. You know, if they don’t just fall down on their own.

Hits: 29