The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sarah Jensen runs the South End Animal Rescue here on the island. She’s got an old barn, some sheds, half a dozen outdoor pens, a small vet clinic off the house plus a few acres of fenced pasture where horses and alpacas and llamas patrol the grounds along with a menagerie of dogs, goats and the occasional Vietnamese pig. She doctors eagles and cats, raccoons and the usual squirrels. Most return to the wild but some stay with her the rest of their lives. Her longest guest by far is Quixote, a donkey she had to amputate its hind leg back she guesses around 1995.

Quixote wants nothing to do with the horses or the alpacas and especially the cantankerous two llamas. He gimps around the pasture waiting for Sarah, apparently the love of his donkey life. A truck had hit him on the highway where he’d made his escape from the Drummond place north of the Diner where he’d mostly been staked to an iron rod and left day in and day out tied to a shackle on the metal stake. His life with Drummond was about 20 feet in diameter, water bowl, moldy hay, a circle of mud to stand in or lie down in or just try to ignore. Why old man Drummond wanted a donkey is anybody’s guess but when Quixote snapped the rotten rope and hit the road before being hit himself, the last thing he wanted was a 3 legged jackass, or so he declared when Sarah presented him with a bill for an amputation.

Life is hard enough on the South End for us 2 legged denizens, but if you visit Sarah, you’ll feel like we’re the Lucky Ones. If you take an apple like I do when I drop by, Quixote, who is not above being bribed, you’ll appreciate that the world, hard as it is, also has a few Sarah Jensens to offer balm and medicine and compassion. Quixote too is one of us, the Lucky Ones. You decide to visit the Rescue, bring an apple. Or three.

The Mabana Sunset Villa was originally a sort of low end Dry Out facility, mostly aging alcoholics but later everything from meth to heroin. The fact that they were fairly inexpensive kept them at full occupancy for decades, but when ownership changed hands and the new folks thought they could double profits without changing services — in fact, maybe eliminate a few, everything from staff to cable TV to the quality of the food — well, maybe that works in Seattle and Gomorrah, but up here in the boondocks, setting up a rehab clinic that mimicked a penitentiary, not so much, not when half the inmates, I mean residents, know exactly what a prison looks like from the inside.

When the recidivism went through the roof and half the residents were selling drugs in the recreation room ( a few chairs and a card table plus a filthy aquarium) after hours, a de facto happy hour of their own, well, the Villa lost referrals and profits went more southerly than the South End and eventually the place was sold for less than the last entrepreneur had paid five years earlier. So much for South End dreams of fast riches!

The Villa, once a hotel serving Mabana’s not-very-thriving Port one hundred years ago, was practically historic. When the Mabana Villa LLC purchased it, the previous owners had upgraded plumbing and electric, added amenities such as saunas and hot tubs, recreation rooms with pool tables and jukeboxes, in-room TV’s, all the luxuries … but now the saunas sported black mold, the hot tubs weren’t hot and the TV’s were relegated to one 31 inch tube set in the Commons cafeteria that was itself historic.

Now, some years later, the Mabana Sunset Villa (LLC) offers retirees medium care for a medium price. The staff is mostly minimum wage, but they’re caring and they’re honest. If we geezers need a sterling silver drool bucket,well, we can go to the assisted living franchises up north, pay the dime and spend our Golden Years with cable TV in our well-appointed and spacious rooms. Since most of us down here don’t need three shopping channels or care about the politics of Fox or MSNBC, the gossip at the Villa’s dining room will do just fine as about all the entertainment we’ll need as we all slide slowly but inevitably into history.

Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm. Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel. It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently. The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run-in with a six point buck four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers. Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed. She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip. Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot. Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill. “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked. Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point. Something to consider. Definitely something to consider. Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor. If he stayed long enough.

People always ask me, how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job? They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial house, a super size TV —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer is gonna fit into your income.

I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal. The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices. I don’t owe anybody anything. Except maybe an apology. I drove a jalopy. I lived in a shack for 17 years. I built my ‘new’ house myself. I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant.

I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich. Big smirking grin. Real smug kid. Already a con-artist like his old man. Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured. I thought about wiping that smile right off his map. But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand. But I am free. I don’t owe anybody a red cent. Don’t have debts weighing me down. Don’t have to worry about the mortgage. Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch. That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank.

I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal. He’d go find a rich guy….

I know you folks have probably heard the news: Stanwood wants to bring a 4 year college to the area. Univ. of Stanwoodopolis. Higher degrees in Lefse Rolling, Lutefisk Engineering, and Storage Unit Management.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The town’ll be over-run by eggheads. Professors taking over the barstools at the Stanwood Hotel, ruining our rural backwash hick ambiance. Expecting political discussions, not fishing stories. Wanting napkins with their hand-crafted malt beverages and hors douerve plates, not peanuts. The Stan-Isle Bookstore will sell 5 pound tomes with 5 dollar words nobody but the PhD’s will understand. FOR 50 DOLLARS! With titles like the Socio-Economic Dialectic of 3rd Generation Scandihoovian in the Stillaguamish River Drainage.

The whole town’ll go to hell in a hurry. Just when the fast food franchises were giving us a glimmer of hope of joining mainstream society. All those student shops will take over now. More art galleries. Boutique soap stores. Boutique clothing stores. Boutique furniture stores. Head shops. Movie houses, Art movie houses. Fancy pants restaurants. Ethiopian Epicure. Persian Pizza. La De Da Linguini.

Gonna look like Berkeley in the 60’s. Long hair. Free love. Dope smoking, anti-war, bohemian anti-establishment types. Weird clothes. Weird music. Weird period. Weird as a Way of Life.

Which….. if you stop and think about it, is a perfect description of the South End. Which … if you been following our logic here, is exactly why the new campus should be located down by us — the University of the South End, Tyee Branch. Save em from hiring new professors. The woods are thick with em. The Band alone could be a quarter of the art faculty. Think about it. It’s the obvious location — and it’ll preserve the Stanwoodopolis we all love……