The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/audio-4th-of-july-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]

We got our fair share of veterans down here, heroes of the wars, past and present, maybe too many wars, you ask me, but nothing anybody should voice too loudly any particular night at the VFW Hall.  Patriotism means a lot of things to every person, but most of the veterans I know pretty much believe they got the patent on it.  Maybe they do.  After all, they marched into the fray and a lot of their buddies didn’t march back out.  You don’t question the loyalty of these vets, not ever, and you don’t doubt their patriotism.

The other night some of the boyz were waxing nostalgic over a bottle of some privatized CostCo single malt Baghdad Bill had brought to the Marina and Bait Shop for the usual Friday night poker game.  Two Toke was there, and Big Larry too after closing up the grill at the Diner, plus me and a few other draft dodging, student deferred, anti-war types, and what with the 4^th rolling right up and the fireworks stands about to set up red white and blue bunting to sell incendiaries legally, we naturally gravitated to holiday talk and that led to Independence Day, not just here but for Iraqis and Egyptians and Afghan women, and that got us going on wars, good and bad, won and lost.  Two Toke was about one toke — or at least one shot glass — over the line when he started musing about Viet Nam.  Two Toke was there during the Tet Offensive.  He lost most of his unit and a part of a knee there.  He doesn’t have one good word to say about that war, and really, none about any since.  I guess he earned the right.  Bill was in Iraq.  He argues with T.T., but it’s like arguing with a Stanwoodopolite whether they’d like to be annexed into Camano Island.  You’re just asking for some vicious yelling.

Big Larry served in Korea, meaning, we got about all the wars covered since WWII.  Except maybe Granada.  Okay, Panama and Bosnia too.  Some nights we even have Jimmy Z sit in for a hand or two and he was in on the tail end of the Big One, kind of the grand old soldier, and when Jimmy’s sitting in, not even Two Toke questions the point of the latest wars.  Jimmy, though, doesn’t talk much about his two years in the Pacific theater, which took him through Iwo Jima and some nasty business on the beach and then back in the jungle.

Two Toke was wondering aloud if the Revolutionary War was fought so we could just march back over to some foreign country and make life hell for somebody else while Big Larry and Bill were starting to take swigs with every one of Tom’s verbal shots.  I might’ve let them duke it out if it wasn’t for the fact that I had 3 kings over a couple of jacks and the pot was by far the fattest it had been all night.

Boyz boyz boyz, I said, trying to sound like the cool head I never am.  Let’s agree to, you know, not agree.  But hellfire, we’re all in this together, aren’t we?  We got food to eat, a bottle to finish, we got friends and family, some of us got jobs, we got the great good luck to be born here and not in Smokey Point, let’s just be a little thankful, shall we?  4^th of July is coming and we can all at least be glad we’re sitting here in the Land of the Brave Home of the Free.

Course, that set Larry off, fuming over mangled quotations, and before I could get my bets down, the Marina was its own 4^th of July, fireworks ablaze.  I don’t know who won the argument by the end.  I know this: one of us lost a plump pot while he held a winning hand.  Poker, I guess, is a little too much like war.  But we’ll all be at the table next Friday night.  Probably fight about privatizing liquor.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/audio-trim-and-a-shave.mp3[/podcast]audio — trim and a shave

Down at Jolene’s South End Boutique and Spa, the ladies come for hair repair and a weekly update on gossip.  The B&S is conveniently located just down the blacktop from the Diner so while their menfolk pile on another layer of winter cholesterol, the women can slide in for a touch-up.  Jolene and her cosmetologically adept staff — meaning Wanda and Ronald — offer everything from henna highlighting to full perm.  And, of course, like most retail establishments on the capitalist frontline here on the South End, they offer everything from local artworks and gifts to a plentiful assortment of salon products for the woman in search of a temporary bulwark against gravity and age.

In other words it’s a fine environment to get things off your chest.  Jolene is adept with a scissors and a necessary brake when the ‘unburdening’ gets excessive, but she knows, like most of us on the frontier of a receding civilization, the bitch sessions are not only cathartic, they’re as close to entertainment as we’ll get in the daytime.  Subjects range from Jolene’s no-account sister-in-law’s messy affairs to why there’s no damn holiday in America celebrating a woman.  Because men make the damn holidays, that’s the short and not so sweet of it…  Ronald might pipe in there’s none for gay men either but a moment later, scissors snipping like a crab on steroids, he’ll be off on a tangent about so and so’s snide comment about his new nose ring.  The salon is as abuzz with snide comments as it is with hairsprays and clippers.  Us men rarely pick up the missus there, and if we do, the place goes eerily silent.

Two Toke Tom has his hair coiffed by Ronald.  It changes color every month or two, blue streaks substituted for red locks.  One of the boyz at the Diner asked him what they talked about in there, like it was the Rosicrucians meeting in a graveyard after midnight.  Two Toke just smiled his Cheshire Cat stoned smile, put a hand to sizzling hot purple stripe and said wistfully, Girl Talk.

If I want to keep abreast of current events, it might be time I got my own south end’s trimmed down at Jolene’s.  But I probably won’t tell the boyz…

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/down-at-the-marina1.mp3[/podcast]down at the marina

imes are tough these days down at the South End Marina and Bait Shop.  A lot of barnacle-bottomed boats moored idle at the docks, their glory days of fishing now just a dry-rotted memory.  Occasionally you’ll see one of the skippers doing a little brightwork on some faded trim or turning over an engine just to clear the cobwebs from the lines and the tanks, but time and overfishing have taken heavy tolls.

Used to be the fleet was the pride of the island, running from Mabana to Bristol Bay in search of salmon openings and halitbut catches.  We maybe didn’t have the widows’ walks the Narragansett boys had for their lonely wives to gaze forlornly out to sea scanning horizons for men returned from hunting whale, but it was an event nonetheless when captains sailed into view with full cargo holds and tales of Alaskan storms.

Sadly, those catches dwindled and the fleet turned to lesser dreams.  For a time they chartered for the tourist fishermen,  CEO’s up from San Diego and Frisko, Portland and Seattle, in search of trophy gooeyducks and the elusive free range oyster, but even those became uncommon, then finally rare.  One by one the Captains Courageous were forced to sit idle, swapping tongue-worn tales of the Big Catch of ’78 or the killer storm of ’82, mostly lies now, but better than constant complaining.   And far better than hanging out in the unemployment office.

Some of the skippers sold their boats for what they could get, just pesos on the dollar.  Hazy Jake ran Canadian Bud for awhile through the islands until the borders tightened and his nerves frayed worse than his lines.  You see the last of them down at the bait shop most days, those Ahabs whose Mobys disappeared, hunkered down  over big chipped mugs of thick coffee from the self serve pot, predicting tide and weather, predicting  everything except the future, a place they rarely visit now.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/audio-johnny-appleseed-in-the-garden-of-eden.mp3[/podcast]audio — johnny appleseed in the garden of eden

A lot of folks who don’t live down here ask me:   Skeeter, it’s hard to believe there’s really a place like the South End, kind of some Never Never Land, turn left at the first star by Terry’s Corner and keep on going until morning.  I admit, it does sound damn inviting.  A place where the law of physics and the law of Island County don’t hold much jurisdiction.  A place where jobs are not only scarce but that very fact is celebrated.   A place where maybe too many of us avoided adulthood but we don’t need daycare.

Oh, I suppose I could polish up the vision of the South End as a magical world,  shine it til it glowed like Aladdin’s Lamp that offered 3 wishes but you wouldn’t need more than 1 or 2.  But there is a dark side to paradise, one you might not notice in the brochures.  If I’m going to be the travel agency for Shagri-La-La, it’s only fair I give some warning.  If only to deflect future lawsuits….

Sure, we’re the Banana Belt of the island archipelago.  Judging by the uniqueness of the inhabitants, we’re really a Galapagos, cut off from the mainland and the mainstream.  You visit long enough and it won’t be long before you notice the distinctly odd genetic diversities.  I’m talking, of course, about our artist herds.     Turn over a rock or go down a laurel shrouded drive, you’ll find 200 subspecies of watercolorist, 50 oil painters, 25 sculptors and too many glass benders, fusers, blowers and breakers to shake a punt stick at.  They’re breeding in the nettle hollows, trading art among themselves, putting on studio shows, turning body shops and beauty parlors into ersatz galleries, filling up libraries and schools and fire stations with unsalable artwork, building art parks and sculpture gardens.  It’s as if the Garden of Eden had become an apple orchard, 500 varieties and new grafts every year.  There’s seemingly No End to it.  The inner child has been unleashed, unsupervised and is now unmanageable.

Some folks find an iguana-infested island interesting, I guess.  If you’re one of these, by all means, come and visit.  If the South End inspires you toward aesthetic ecstasy, fine —all we ask is that when you depart, take your inner child home with you.  We don’t need cross pollination from the outside world.  We’re having enough trouble with our native species as it is.  The day may be coming when a quarantine is required.  Not only to prevent contamination from the outside, but to prevent the contagion from spreading…..