The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Biker Billy was leaned up against the chrome of Johnny Banshee’s old Hudson showing the boys from the Flatheads, our vintage car club, his newest tattoo. Most of the boys don’t sport body art, figuring, I guess, customizing an old automobile is artistic expression enough. Billy had some heart with the knife in it, dripping drops of blood, and under that the words BORN TO OOZE. “Kind of Old School, isn’t it?” Ronnie asked, risking Billy’s ire which, trust me, no one wants to do. Billy isn’t in an Outlaw Club now, but once a biker, always a biker.

Billy grinned, showing his two missing teeth which none of us ever asked how they got missing. He looked like a pirate gone to seed prematurely. I helped Bill and his girlfriend who was an old bus driver friend of mine from our city days build their cabin too many years ago to count. I like Billy okay, at least when he ran solo or he was sober or he was rehabbing. I didn’t like him much when a few of his biker buddies rolled in with bottles of cheap wine and six packs of beer they’d swill down in record time. Wouldn’t take long until you were the odd man out in their gang and if they were looking for a victim, they didn’t have to draw straws.

Billy’s a tattoo parlor’s wet dream. He went for the clichéd stuff and the Needleman could do skulls and crossbones, snarling dogs and the business end of .38’s in his sleep. Billy was practically covered and running out of room. Once I asked him why he didn’t get a tattoo that was, oh, more artsy fartsy. He glared at me like I was some idiot making fun of his Harley. “Just a thought,” I mumbled and dropped the subject.

I never got the attraction for body art. For one thing, it seems like tourist shop art to me. Butterflies and dragons, Celtic crosses and rainbows, sappy slogans and cornball cartoonery. I figured if I had to look at something dyed onto my skin for the rest of my natural life, I’d want something interesting, something arty, something that maybe I didn’t get sick of in about six months. But then, I’m an old geezer now and that explains a lot.

I had a pal, Norm, who walked up to my artist buddy Prof. Jim one summer day when Jim’s tats were exposed out of his short sleeves and asked him, thinking he was being funny, how drunk was he? This was back in the ‘70’s, before tattoos were all the rage. Jim gave Norm the stink-eye and asked what he meant. “The tattoos. You must’ve been drunk on your ass, right?”

Jim pretty much gave Norm an education that day and I learned not to ask much about folks’ body art. It’s their body, as the women’s rights advocates say, to do with as they please. And if you’re thinking of questioning guys like Billy, he’ll do what he wants with yours too. Beauty, worst case, is in the blackeye of the beholder.

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A lot of the new folks downriver never heard of UpCreek. They hear people talk about it, they think they just mean ‘up stream.’ Like a lot of places lost to rot and ruin and history too, UpCreek once was a prosperous town of prospectors and gold panners around the turn of the last century. Prospecting in 1890 was like high-tech startups are a hundred years later, fat money to be made and plenty of thieves waiting to steal discoveries. Mining towns sprang up like human molehills, tunnels leading everywhere. Monte Cristo made a few men rich, but UpCreek made most men poor.

Except the storekeepers and the bars and the ladies of the night…. Before I was born, but the old timers tell me UpCreek was a wild and lawless place back then, a frontier when most folks farmed down in the fertile valleys. I guess it was the same in the Klondike, the same in Silver City, the same everywhere men leave their wives and family in search of fast riches. Nowadays the casinos make it a little easier, even put ATM’s by the slots for the folks grubstaking their way toward the gold vein or the hot hand. They’ll sell you food and entertainment. They’ll pick you cleaner than an eagle scarfing spawning salmon on Beaver Creek, nothing but bones and head without eyes when they’re done.

My place is an old cabin built from fir logs and roofed with cedar shakes right where a little steam hits the Little Beaver on its way down to the Big Beaver and on to the Stillaguamish. There’s a mineshaft at the back of the property, covered now with vines and lost memories, but occasionally I cut my way into the entrance, just a few rotted timbers left I don’t have much faith in. I go a few yards in with a lantern every few years, but not being a gambler or a daytrader, I back out into the sunlight where poverty looks better than risking everything on a roll of the dice or a turn of the shovel.

I’ve never understood Gold Fever myself, but UpCreek wouldn’t be here if folks didn’t imagine winning the Lottery. Course, now it’s just me and the rest of us who bought the abandoned mines and played out dreams. Maybe we were the winners after all….

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Bob the Baptist lives up the hollow where the dirt road south of me dead ends in a swampy cul-de-sac. You look hard you can see past the abandoned cars, rotted boats, rusty appliances, kids’ toys, broken furniture and busted machinery to where Bob’s shack leans into the last century. Just to be sure nobody will steal this stockpile of valuable rusty corroded parts from his junkyard covered with leaf mulch and blackberry vines, Bob has nailed handwritten signs every few hundred feet: NO TRESSPASING POSTED KEEP OUT!! PRIVIT PROPPERTY, like anyone would venture into his place. By the driveway or entrance or whatever it is that isn’t maintained and is overgrown to the point any vehicle trying to drive in would be scratched to bare metal by berry thorns and cedar limbs and lost equipment, he’s nailed a plywood plank painted black with white words: JESUS IS COMMING SOON!!

These are the End Times, Bob tells us neighbors. South End Times, anyway, if Bob’s place comes under scrutiny. It looks like Armageddon hit yesterday. Windows are broken out and covered with plastic that’s now tattered. Doors hang off their hinges, usually open winter or spring. The first time I went back there looking for my dog who’d wandered off, I walked through an open door with books and magazines strewn everywhere, thinking it was an anteway or a porch … until I realized to my horror I was deep into his house. Believe me, I backed out of there fast as anything, expecting a shotgun blast from Bob the Baptist. He walked up a minute after I’d exited his home sweet hovel and demanded to know who I was, what I wanted, why I was there. “Lost dog,” I mumbled.

“We’re ALL lost,” he fairly howled. “We’re all lost and we don’t even know it!!” Tobacco stains ran down his matted beard and his eyes bulged like King Lear in a room full of psychiatrists.

Bob’s okay, actually, reasonably harmless and even sociable occasionally. The neighbors hear him once in awhile, exhorting whatever demons drive him day in and day out. Apparently the demons aren’t listening. Awhile back we heard he used to be a minister over the other side of the mountains. Heard it from one of his flock. Bob had had an affair with the local TV station’s weathergirl and his wife had run off with the church’s deacon. The weather lady moved up to a megawatt Atlanta station and Bob was banished to the wilderness. I guess it makes some sense he ended up down here. Although … Bob still hasn’t figured out most of us don’t think of this as punishment or penance. Hell, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder too.

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By now you’ve heard the bad news: Island County Transit will cancel all routes this summer in hopes of bringing fiscal responsibility to the beleaguered service. The five person Transit Board making the decision — all from Whidbey Island — voted unanimously to bring costs in line by curtailing service here which purportedly cost twice as much per mile per rider than on Whidbey. When questioned on how that figure was derived, a spokesman said it was obvious since Camano is twice as far from the county seat as any place on Whidbey. “Truth is,” the spokesperson declared, “only one of the Board has ever been to Camano, it’s too far to hold meetings.”

Another recommendation by the Board was to rename the bus system Whidbey Transit, presumably to reduce confusion over here in Tijuana that bus service might still be county-wide. A board member who spoke off the record argued that since most Camano riders didn’t own a vehicle, traffic would not be appreciably impacted. “Plus,” she added, “it should actually decrease slightly with less buses plying the Camano routes.” When asked how those vechicle-less riders would get to their jobs, she said they could always move to Oak Harbor. “Rents are cheaper here in town, I’ve been told.”

Needless to say, the South End Economic Council refused to take this lying down. Plans are in the works to create a South End Shuttle Service serving rideless residents. “Kind of an Uber-bus prototype,” Ralph Flatulenz, current president of the council, was quoted. “Course, we would probably have trucks and SUV’s, not buses. We’re still in preliminary planning. Maybe we could share school buses,” he said. “Be good for the kids to have some extra adult supervision. Although I hear rumors that school buses might also be taken out of circulation on Camano. Stanwood has its own budget problems, same as Whidbey.” Or maybe we could just stop sending Camano kids to school.

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