The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We just got back from a little R&R on the Olympic Peninsula, Marrowstone Island to be exact, Mystery Bay to be precise. The island is 7 miles long, roads running east side and west side, pretty much the same as the South End here on Commando Island. Just one store, closed after a fire. No commerce, pretty much the same as here. Paradise. Sometimes you have to leave home to appreciate your own slice of heaven, I guess.

A few days without news or word from the Outside, makes you feel like the world is not a half bad place to hang out. Course we get home and there’s the announcement of the Biden impeachment by the House, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the floods in Libya and the earthquake in Morocco. The debt ceiling is coming up. Again.

It makes a guy like me want to pull up the covers and go back to sleep. Or at least hang the hammock and listen to the breeze and the birds, let the rest of the planet deal with whatever politics or calamities they have this week. What can we do anyway? Volunteer for Doctors without Borders? Send money to the refugees fleeing Sudan by the millions? Or the Syrians? Grab a picket sign and protest in front of the Supreme Court asking the bribe takers to step down? Vote my one measley vote? Put a solar panel or two on our roof and buy an electric car?

We don’t have much say in how the world works. Although judging by some of the rants out there on the internet, plenty of folks think they do. Sometimes I feel as if my own carping and bitching is pretty much the same, just spitting into the wind blowing back at me, not just a waste of time but a face full of my own expectorant. So I don’t know. What I do know is we should be thankful for whatever we got, never take it for granted, maybe pay some attention to the things we can affect and even those we can’t. And try not to let the world make us cynical. Yeah, it’s hard….

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We’re parked on Marrowstone Island for a few nights of R&R. Between us and the Olympic Peninsula is Indian Island, an extremely secure Navy base surrounded by fences topped with razor wire, no doubt in my mind bristling with sensors, alarms, attack drones and assault units. Because all Navy ships entering Puget Sound are required to unload their ordinance. Don’t want some ship detonating in the Seattle harbor causing mayhem and widespread destruction.

No, better to concentrate all that firepower here on the sleepy citizenry of this island. When they think about the Big One, it isn’t the next earthquake, it’s that Fireball that scorches every cabin, cottage and beach house facing Indian. No, honey, that wasn’t a meteor, that was Armageddon….

I’m a little surprised the National Rifle Association isn’t, pardon the pun, up in arms over this. All these warships asked to leave their weapons at Puget Sound’s door. Sounds like a commie, left wing, woke plot to me, leaving all these vessels defenseless, sitting ducks in Everett and Bremerton. None of us should sleep well at nights knowing our Navy has disarmed before the first shot has even been fired.

This is quite possibly another conspiracy theory for those attuned to every nuance of government policymakers, and while I hate to be the seed for more Qanon crackpot theorizings, the truth has to be revealed. Even if it means property values plummet here on Marrowstone Island, Ground Zero for the Apocalypse.

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The tide’s going out here on Mystery Bay where we’re hunkered down on Marrowstone Island. The coffee table history declares that the first settlers to Indian and Marrowstone Islands — about ten in all — in the late 1800’s were men who just ‘wanted to be left the hell alone’. Good luck, gentlemen, good luck. You want privacy and isolation, don’t live in Paradise, speaking as one who knows.

Marrowstone’s a smaller version of Camano, an island you can drive to so unless you blow the bridge upon arrival, expect company. We’re holed up in a 1914 farmhouse surrounded by the old orchard and various outbuildings that look more worse for wear than most of ours back home. It’s a virtual museum of antiques, add-on rooms over the decades, photos of the cows munching in the backyard, all clues to generations of early islanders long ago passed, a vicarious window into our own aging homestead draining like the Bay into lost history.

Some say if you don’t remember history, you’re doomed to repeat it. But that was before the era we live in now, the Digital Age that creates a chasm between what’s coming and what was. History may be useless to the world of algorithms, AI, cyborgs and drones. All that matters is what’s NEXT. The past will offer no clues, no guideposts, nothing but nostalgia for what is irrevocably lost.

Course maybe this is just the cynical musings of an old geezer watching his world disappear. Maybe the androids will study us, maybe learn from our mistakes. Trouble is, they were our mistakes.

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A lot of the newcomers to the fabled South End build their mega-mansions with their yards left menaced by 100 year old 2nd growth nettle forests.  The first windstorm slamming them with 80 mph hurricane force winds triggers frantic calls to their insurance agent … when the power and phone service return.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize their woodland retreat is a potential deathtrap and, better safe than sorry, they decide to clearcut the property.  Worst case, they can put in a 9 hole golf course with sand and water traps and never miss the forests that brought them here in the first place.  The eagles and deer can migrate back inland a ways among us poorer residents, the ones with handicaps too high for golf.

Course now they need a tree expert.  Or at least some logger bonded and insured with references a long resume in the woods industry.  Trouble is, the logging era on the South End is pretty far back, mostly black and white photos down at the Historical Society and Tourist Information.  So … after some futile internet searching, they invariably get to Jimmy the Gyppo.

Jimmy’s been topping trees for suburban worriers ever since the log market went to pot, medical and otherwise, and the price of a board foot of timber nettle plummeted to less than the cost of hauling it to the mill over in Arlington.   He figured out the real money was in One-Offs, either before or after they were on a roof, didn’t matter to him either way.  When clients asked if he was bonded and insured, he’d just laugh.  That’s why you got the home insurance, he’d say, knowing full well their options were fairly constricted.

Jimmy the Gyppo didn’t come cheap and he even charged to haul the downed trees away.  Then he sold the firewood off a flatbed down by Tyee Store, what he called a Two-fer.  The rich folks didn’t mind.  The whoppers Jimmy regaled them with, spitting tobacco plugs across a pansy garden, made them feel a little like pioneers, breaking soil for the next expansion of the American West, bringing civilization to the wild old South End before finally deciding to move on to the sunny southwest where the winters were dry and there were no forests left to threaten their vacation homes.

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