The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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….

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.

Back when crabs weren’t an Endangered Species, I used to walk the eelgrass beds at minus tides sometimes as early as late March or early April. Barefoot, wearing shorts, but an Eskimo parka on top. My feet would go numb, but … those first Dungeness of the year were muy delicioso and worth a little frostbite. Every year the season started later and ended earlier, the price you pay for an overpopulated Puget Sound and too many commercial crabbing licenses. By the time the season starts now, this year the 1st of July, the tribes and the commercial boyz have pretty much cleaned the bottom.

I’m not complaining, mind you, just stating the facts. I don’t make my living off seafood harvesting, but harvesting seafood does help me avoid seeking honest work by knocking down the grocery bills. Back when crabs were the size of pitbulls and plentiful as buffalo, I probably ate too many of the monster bottom feeders. Since they were top of their foodchain, I hate to imagine the toxins they managed to collect down there by the Everett Navy base and the paper mills. The shortened recreation crab season might just add a decade or so to my life.

If you walk for crab the way I always did, you’re at the mercy of the tides. Unless you scuba dive for the buggers…. So lately I’ve kept a dinghy down at the beach and drop pots like all my neighbors do. Course they got 10 horse motors on theirs and I got homemade oars. My row out is about 5 or 6 football fields, maybe a third of a mile one way, good exercise, a nice workout. In calm seas.

Last year my brother was here and the day before he left I wanted crab for his bon voyage dinner. The wind was blowing hard, but being the sons of a Navy father, we hopped in and rowed into the gale. Which promptly picked up to whitecaps. We were a bit overloaded, us and the boat, but by Neptune, we were going to eat crab that night! Half an hour into this my brother starts asking questions like what do we do in case of a capsize, swim for shore or stay with the boat? I didn’t tell him it’s every man for himself, but I could see he was weighing whether crabs were worth drowning for. On the South End they are. Where he’s from, hamburgers looked pretty good, which is what he suggested we consider.

I’m not the world’s most courageous sailor, but I’m right up there with the most foolhardy. My brother isn’t a coward — I don’t recall him ever being scared, except maybe drive-in horror movies we’d go to as kids — but we finally decided about 10 feet from the buoys that Mom and Dad didn’t need a double drowning at this stage in their dubious parenting career. Those hamburgers sounded pretty darn good. Even if we did have to drive to the store when we rowed back into shore. Just had to be careful lighting the barbecue.

Yesterday on the South End the thermometer hit 100 plus degrees. I know this is the banana belt, but even so, this is scary stuff. And today the meteorologists are running around with their hair on fire, yelling Excessive Heat Warning to any and all of us who think 80 degrees is hot as a Hell in a propane truck explosion. Today, they predict, we’ll hit 105 and Seattle and Gomorrah will peak at 111, melting freeways and turning bridges to goo.

Now, God forbid anyone politicize this any more than critical race relations, no global warming talk here, just a small blip on the meteorological record book, a mere 10 plus degrees warmer than ANY TEMPERATURE RECORDED ANY TIME OF THE YEAR EVER! Well, since the dinosaurs…. Just in the history of homo sapiens. I’m going to run down to the garden and plant watermelons and pineapples, fifty fifty I get a harvest. Next year I’ll plant papayas and banana palms, all kinds of exotic tropical flowers and wait for the anteaters and monkeys to migrate north, new garden vermin.

Triple digit temperatures on the South End, in case you live in Tucson or Yuma, aren’t exactly normal here, about as likely as rain that is half frogs and toads. I’m not one of those people who see climate change in every unusual rainstorm, hurricane, heat wave or cold snap. And no way am I going to argue with my neighbor with the historic TRUMP 2020 sign on his tree that will no doubt stay there til it rots or he can replace it with the TRUMP 2028 banner, but … geez, it’s hard to watch the world heating up every year this past decade or two without acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, even probably, all right, definitely, this greenhouse we call Earth is growing hotter. More hurricanes, more hundred year floods, more historic droughts, and yeah, triple digit heat waves on even the South End.

I get that one party is beholden to the gas and oil and coal industry. So I understand they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep digging and drilling and burning hydrocarbons and deny the remotest possibility of any of that being responsible for our heat wave this week. I get that. Doesn’t say much for profiles in courage but after the past few years I think we know that courage left D.C. on a fast coal burning belching train long long ago. Me, I don’t have kids, don’t have to worry about a future much beyond a couple more decades at best. But the folks with a stake in the future? You tell me. That stake seems more like one to the heart. In a couple of days the temperatures should return to the old normal. But not mine. History will not be kind. Course, we just won’t teach it, I guess.