The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A friend asked me recently if I was rich. Maybe you get asked that a lot, but trust me, I don’t get inquiries like this too often. Kind of caught me by surprise. My family never talked finances, didn’t announce their bank account balances, really didn’t tell us kids much of anything about how they were doing. And if they never told the family, you better believe it was unwritten gospel they didn’t talk about it in public, with friends or relatives, with anybody. Ever.

So I was caught off balance, checking account and equilibrium both, to be asked point blank if I was rich. You could imagine that the answer, assuming you deigned to reply, would depend on the person asking. If my pal Bill Gates asked me, I’d say, ‘gee, Bill, I’m bumping along, but no, my hedge fund isn’t one of the top 50 or anything, not really even in the top … actually, I don’t even have a hedge fund right now, sort of embarrassed to tell you.’ If one of my pals trying to make ends meet during the Covid shutdown asked, well, I might say ‘Don’t even think of asking me for a loan, you slacker!’ Wealth, you see, is fairly relative.

You ask most folks if they’re rich and they’re going to tell you no. But … if we considered that we’re in America and we’re on the South End to boot, hellfire, by nearly any standards you pick, we’re the 1% of the world. We’re rich. You don’t think so, take a trip to Cambodia, Mexico, Costa Rica, just about any third world country and then tell me you’re not wealthy. You are. Period. Don’t argue with me, I won’t have ears for it.

But my friend wasn’t interested in philosophic fiscal discussion, just wanted to know if I was rich. Asking an artist that question is akin to wondering if I might be vacationing this year with Bezos on his moon rocket, mostly a flight of fancy. I said yes I am, rich. And honestly, I consider myself rich, I really do. We have our house paid for, the one we built ourselves without a loan, without a 30 year mortgage. We pay cash for everything we have, car, truck, you name it. We live in paradise, we live modestly but we want for nothing. We still work, but not because we need the cash but because we like what we do. Even without that money, we feel enriched by working. And we have each other. We lived in a dilapidated shack for 13 years together, scraping by, tending our gardens, learning our trades. We’re growing old together. And that’s just fine too. Are we rich? You’d have to be nuts to ask….

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I’ve always wondered why folks climb the Himalayan or hike solo across Antarctica or want to be the first ones into space. Jeff Bezos is headed up and now Richard Branson plans to beat him to the punch. “Asked about what his kids and wife thought of his attempt to be the first tourist in space and how his family reacted to the news that he would be on the flight, Branson said his children are adventurous, but it’s clear they get that quality from him.
‘As a family, our motto is, ‘The brave men don’t live forever but the cautious do not live at all.’ And so, as a family, we love to say ‘Yes.’ My wife is the sort of person who would be terrified on a Virgin Atlantic airplane. She’s the last person who would want to do something like this. But she’s known me since I tried to balloon across the Atlantic or the Pacific or around the world, and she still seems to love us.’”

I guess what the Great Adventurer is saying is that his wife doesn’t really live at all. Bezos wife took half his billions and said adios. I suspect she’s living pretty high on the hog, at least by most folks’ standards, maybe not Branson’s. Evidently there are folks who need the adrenaline rush of near death to help them feel alive. Trust me, I’m not one of those people. I’ve taken a few chances in my 71 years that might have ended badly, might actually have killed me, but they didn’t make me feel alive, mostly made me glad I was. When I hear people of my generation say they never thought they would live past 30, I want to laugh out loud. It wasn’t that we thought our lifestyles were so dangerous, it was more that we just couldn’t imagine the future.

Or that the future seemed so banal and boring we refused to contemplate the house in the suburbs, the less than romantic marriage, the squabbling kids and the career that seemed so much smaller than the dreams of our youth. Me, I figured on living to a ripe old age. Given enough time, there would be plenty of room for course corrections. Getting crippled in a fall into a crevasse on Mt. Rainier wasn’t part of the Plan. If you want thrills and chills, try walking the tightrope of unemployment without a safety net, try making a living being an artist. It’s enough danger for me and chances are it won’t kill you. Make you crazy, maybe, but it won’t kill you. And I’m pretty sure if you take life with a degree of caution, you’ll be just fine too.

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Rockets Red Glare

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I never cease to be amazed at the amount of money folks are willing to spend on fireworks for the 4th of July. Every year we hike on down to the bulkhead on the beach and watch the celebrations up and down Whidbey from the Head to Greenback halfway up to the top of the island, plus we can see a goodly portion of the South End here on Camano. Sure, the fire danger is extreme and occasionally some enthusiastic patriot will set the bluffs ablaze, menacing the mansions above, but in America, we still think freedom means the right to burn the neighbor’s house down if it was done to celebrate 1776 and the intention was strictly impassioned nationalism. Jingoism and extremism in defense of bottle rockets and liberty is no vice. And apparently not a crime either.

The year of the Great Recession I noticed an appreciable drop in the volume and length of the displays up and down the coast. Money was tight, folks were under water with their mortgages, collection agencies were banging on doors late at night — even patriotism takes a back seat to bankruptcies. But since then the duration and extravagance of incendiary proof of the American flag waver has gradually increased to something akin to mortar battles in World War Two, tracers flying through the darkness, dogs howling, babies screaming, the rest of us just watching the show from afar. Like I say, I walk down every year, my small patriotic duty.

So I’m a little troubled this year at what, at first glance seems like a diminishment of how much my neighbors are willing to spend to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, more or less on the 4th of July back in 1776. I know we’re a divided nation this year and yeah, none of my socialist libtard cronies would spend a farthing on a bottle rocket or even a sparkler or two, but c’mon, where are the folks who support the local church’s fireworks stands and Boom City down at the Tulalip tribe? The economy is cranking back up after Covid, but maybe the year of Lockdown took the heart out of the celebration. I don’t know. I sure would hate to think jingoist celebrations are on the decline. Or worse, my neighbors are financially strapped to the point they’d rather buy food than M-80’s. Or ammo instead of Roman Candles.

Course, I went down alone this year. The revelers at our picnic packed it in before dark, possibly hoping to evade the sheriff patrols for impaired driving, so it was a lonely vigil for yours truly. All I can say is patriotism isn’t what it used to be. But after the election and the assault on the Capitol, maybe you already knew that.

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Let me say right off the Get-Go, I’m no spring chicken, although my behavior might lead folks to think I’m in late-stage adolescence. I never went through a mid-life crisis, never left the mizzus for a college intern, didn’t buy a sports car and never thought I should’ve gotten a career … or even a job. In other words, I feel young.

Or at least did until these past few months, and no, it wasn’t Covid that made my bones feel brittle and my mind sort of squishy, it was all the folks around me who have cancers and aneurisms and busted appendixes and chronic back pains and diabetes and bi-polar disorders. For the first time in my 71 years on this planet, folks I know are dying, some younger than me, most through no fault of their own, just bad luck, crummy genes, who knows? Something in the water, toxins in the house, crap in the air, don’t ask me, I’m not a doctor and you couldn’t pay me to play one on TV.

But … mortality sits perched on my shoulder these past few months, a black crow or a shadow of one, a dark daily companion right out of Poe, hard to shake, impossible to ignore.

I just put my 98 year old father into an assisted living complex. Hard to feel bad for a guy who’s about to hit the century mark … unless you’re one of those who want to live forever. All I can say is be careful what you wish for. Quality of life diminishes a bit for the Methuselahs of this world. Volunteer at one of these places and see if you still want extended longevity when you piss 200 times a day and you eat more meds than food. Me, I’ll pack it in when the check-out time arrives and the maid needs to change the bedding for the next guest.

Not to sound morose, mind you, just that we all have a Best By date and I’m okay with that. But dammit, these early birds leaving lately, well, it’s a phase of life, apparently, that’s here to stay. Maybe I should consider that sports car after all….

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Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

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