The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

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.

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.

The South End Senior Center —what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center— is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore.  A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing.  Barns and shops are often built this way.  So is our Senior Center.  Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff — which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones.  Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door.  This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought.  Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses.  A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters.  Believe me, an hour would be plenty.  Or a perm at the Cut and Curl.  An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy.  Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala.  Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers.  The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making.  The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor.  And made even more.  Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building.  The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years.  If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it.  Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.