The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The Camwood Mobile Home Park, long gone now in this era of gated communities and exclusive developments, once offered modest living on beachfront tracts destined for future high taxation. When the hammer finally fell, there must have been 20 single wides all lined up in angles that gave each tenant a peekaboo view to the Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond, and although the lease was a bit high and the power and water levy exorbitant, folks with limited means could enjoy a small piece of the good life at a reduced price. Most of the island back then, really, was affordable.

Sure, there was no work and the drive to the nearest town was hellishly long, but there are always folks who prefer the edge of poverty to the sacrifice of 8-5, a sadistic boss, a crap job. I should know, I was the same way. My good luck, however, was having a small savings account, enough to buy a shack, not rent a trailer at the Camwood. Some folks there owned their single wide but most rented from Elmer Havelot, the slumlord/slash proprietor of the place who rarely made any appearances, just let Sue Novinsky manage the properties in exchange for free rent in Unit #6, the one with a fine view of the road down from the west side highway.

Sue was divorced. Twice. From the same guy, Phil Novinsky, a charmer but a mean drunk. The second divorce she needed a restraining order the Island County sheriff wouldn’t enforce so she left the island for a year and came back when Phil had died in a head-on, killing his drunken self and a teenage girl when he crossed the centerline just south of the Plaza Grocery. So Sue came back, managed the trailer park for Elmer, worked part time at the Tyee Grocery and decided the single life in a single wide was the life for her, what easily could have been a chart buster single on the country western station she listened to most days. If she’d been a song writer. Or played honkytonk guitar.

When Elmer gave the residents 30 days notice, her life threatened to become that country western song, heartbreak #3. But she worked a deal with Elmer, bought trailer #9, a reasonably intact 1953 Silver Star for peanuts and used what savings she had left for a half acre parcel behind Tyee Store, moved the trailer and cut her commute to walking distance. A few years later Tyee went under and Sue took a job at Twin City Foods, long commute, at least until TCF closed down. Last time I sat with Sue, drinking coffee with a shot of Jack, she said she was ready for retirement and Social Security. “If I learned anything in this place,” she told me, “it was how to live poor.”

The South End, if you give it a chance, I might’ve said back, will teach you that, all right. What I did say was what old Ted Snowden, the guy who built Tyee Store back in the ‘70’s, told me once: “It’s a poor man’s paradise.”

“A woman’s too,” Sue said, “once you get past the drunk husband.” We drank to that….

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Gone are the days when mobs of us kids, festooned with sheets of scissor-cut eyeholes or bandanas and eyepatches carrying wooden pirate swords, out in the neighborhood with our beggar bags, hollering Trick or Treat, armies of zombies and skeletons and ghosts collecting enough candy to make a dentist smile for months on the wages from future cavities. Our parents back then didn’t drive behind us as we slipped through the darkness waiting fearfully in their station wagons idling at the curb — no, they enjoyed a night without us munchkins, that was their treat! Mine sometimes dressed up too, going door-to-door to their friends’ houses, holding out a shot glass, not a pillowcase. Halloween was fun for all ages back before we scared the bejabbers out of all the parents.

Course that was before the urban myths of apples with razor blades imbedded. Or lurking pederasts. Or 8 year olds showing up days later on the back of milk cartons. Have You Seen Me? Moms and dads listened to the evening news and heard the monstrous rumors Loud and Clear. Danger waited on every street corner, up every dark driveway, down the alley and behind the trees. No way they were letting their precious out of sight for one Stanwoodopolis minute!

My remembrance, murky as it is, was that the real danger was us marauding kids. Lawnmowers hoisted onto car roofs, outhouses moved back a crucial yard, paper bags with dog poop set on fire out in the driveway, all the stunts that gave credence to the Trick half of the entreaty. Give us sugar or else! We were candy terrorists. Children without supervision, unleashed on our neighbors, hidden behind masks and makeup and cheezy costumes.

We didn’t have helicopter parents. We accepted homemade cookies and home grown apples, all us little Huck Finns, out under a cloud covered moon, free at last, free at last, way before the Pied Piper Parents of the internet tethered their kids and bought them expensive costumes and drove them in broad daylight to some supposed safe suburb of town or to the merchants who offered treats as bait on the crowded sidewalk in front of their stores.

There’s a trick being played all right. But not by the kids….

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Some billionaire recently argued that our leftist cities are struggling financially because of their woke politics, semi-plausible I guess, so it got me wondering if this was the reason why the South End is fiscally handicapped, all us artists and anarchists tossing grenades into every Chamber of Commerce attempt to haul us out of our financial torpor. Tyee Store threw in the towel a few years back, blamed it partially on me for some of the whoppers I used to tell about their E-coli superstrain from the 24/7 rotisserie hot dog rotator, and yeah, I realize some folks have no vestigial funny bone whatsoever and believe everything they read, so sue me. Geez.

Truth is, outside of real estate sales and VRBO vacation rentals, the South End economy has atrophied from the roaring days of chicken farms at Mabana when the Mosquito Fleet could dock at the pier that only lasted a few years before storms sent it to Davy Jones’ I-cloud. Supplies, mail, passengers, investors!, all disembarking to rake in the riches of South Camano. Old growth nettles and firs were logged and skidded out to the booms offshore before the sailing ships hauled them to San Francisco and Japan. No doubt the woke crowd at the turn of the century ended that booming era. Probably pre-PETA activists ruined the chicken trade and pre-ecological tree huggers ended the logging craze.

Trade back then plied the water. Roads were nearly non-existent and what had been built were muddy and potholed, nothing useful for commerce. Oh sure, a few enterprising folks attempted entrepreneurial miracles but customers were scarce as those chickens’ teeth and many a scheme ended in financial ruin, leaving a legacy of broken dreams and bankrupt pioneers, a legacy that endures to this day. Some left for the cities and more favorable economic possibilities, but many stayed to live a life without the stress of bleak business dealings, content to accept defeat but happy to manage the poverty as best they could. Not everyone wanted to be a millionaire back then the way we do now. And so they found time on their hands. Time to build homes, furniture, art, lives. Some might say they were woke, if woke meant anything back then. If it means squat today.

So maybe our billionaire sociologist is right. Go woke, go broke. Just don’t tell us down here on the South End that’s a bad thing.

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I can’t figure out whether we were bored BEFORE the internet and smart phones …. or whether they MADE us bored.  Ruined our concentration, shot our attention spans full of holes, filled every waking minute with text messages, snippets of celebrity gossip, news flashes and crawler messages on the bottom of our brains’ screens.

We check our phone messages every 3 minutes (if we’re older than 40) or every 15 seconds (if we’re under 40).  The older crowd checks e-mail 20 times a day.  If you still get a newspaper, you got most of the articles from newsfeeds on your computer anywhere from a few hours ago to a full day.  It isn’t ‘news’ you get in a newspaper these days.  Everyone’s got a cellphone now and by god, they paid for it and they plan to use it — as often as humanly possible, whether they’re driving in the freeway passing lane or taking a whiz in the airport urinal.  They’re connected, linked up, every waking hour of every day, I guess forever until the day they die or their phone plan expires.

It’s hard to believe this has happened, not just in our lifetime, but in the last decade.  If we thought the Rat Race was hard, well, the digital rats are on steroids, cranked on meth and just a little too busy to slow down to consider what’s happened in the last few years.  Too busy for sure to read a book or write a letter or just disconnect from the Hive half an hour.  Watch a 15 year old and see the Future — it’s here!  30 minutes ago.  17 tweets.

Even on the South End there’s no escaping the tsunami of this incessant incoming information.  At least until the winter storms.  For those 6 of us who refuse to own a cellphone.  Or buy a generator.  Or even go down to the Diner to keep abreast of the breaking gossip.  In a few days we’ll try to catch back up.  Course, by then the world will have accelerated another few miles per second.  And we’ll be those objects in your rearview that aren’t anywhere near as close as they appear.  Best of luck when you get where you’re in such a hurry to get.  You got a second or two, send us a postcard.  We still get mail….

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I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar.  The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow.  Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value.  Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices.  Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it.  In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does.  But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case.  He looked like a hawk on a telephone line.  Patiently waiting for the next mouse.  “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked.  I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before Biden takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before Biden outlaws em.’  “I shoulda voted Democrat.  The guy is making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got.  He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle …..  “Whoa,”  I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander.  Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals.  If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic.  They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson.  You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar.  Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke.  “Democrats’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck.  “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.

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