The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m flying the friendlier skies out of Paine Field in Everett this morning, avoiding the gauntlet of megalopolis through Seattle and Gomorrah and driving into a two gate airport with a TSA checkpoint line shorter than a McDonald’s at midnight. In other words a nearly enjoyable experience after our last misadventure on icy roads trying to make a flight out of SeaTac … which we missed after over an hour in their TSA cattle line. A long day, that one.

Course in a few hours I’ll land in LAX and fight rush hour traffic to push through Los Angeles gridlock to where my final destination waits open-jawed further north. But for now, like the stewardess says, push back and enjoy the ride. My seatmate is a four year old girl engrossed in her personal device, some game gizmo impersonating as a cellphone, her fuchsia glitter tennis shoes tapping occasionally to the beat of a thumb 20 times more dextrous than mine, manipulating icons in whatever game of solitaire she’s queued up until her short attention span changes the game. She has no more interest in me than the man in the moon, four years old and already marching to the Pied Piper’s walled cave with all the other kids.

Here’s another perk with a small airport: we back out onto the tarmac, rev up the engines and skip the 20 plane taxi. We’re always going to be the first in line on the jetway.

Off to the side a group of the Boeing 737 Max jets that were grounded after two crashes sit in a row with the Olympics as backdrop, waiting for a software fix to prevent their computers from misreading anti-stall demands causing the nose to ‘porpoise’ before plunging to the ground. My seatmate, innocently unaware of the lethality potential of planes certified by their same manufacturers, is busy learning the skillsets necessary to find work right here in her hometown. I’m just glad we’re both on this plane, not one of those. Strike One against self-flying planes, trucks and automobiles, but … it won’t be long. My seatmate will just take it for granted. Driver’s license? She won’t need no stinking driver’s license. Her fingers will do a lot more than just the walking….

Now in case you’ve taken up residence under a rock, you’ve probably heard the news. The State is in the preliminary planning stages to build a one mile tunnel under the present Hwy 532 to bypass Stanwoodopolis. Sure, the city is upset, all those potential shoppers who for years were bottlenecked up at the gauntlet of stoplights and figured they might as well turn in to the grocery stores or the Rite Aid while traffic is backed up, they’ll zip right past on the four underground lanes, no exits.
Can’t say I blame them, but hey, they had a century to make their profits with a captive audience and the slogan ‘Shop Local’. A tunnel, ladies and gentlemen, 4 lanes UNDER not only the Stillaguamish, but under all of Stanwoodopolis. Out of sight, out of mind. A win-win for the Camano commuter sick of big box grocery chains, dying strip malls, bad signage and the Twin City Foods Concrete Curtain. Sure it’s an engineering challenge. Sure it costs more than an above ground freeway. But in 2050 dollars, probably what a unit costs in Camano Condos.
Us South Enders want to applaud the State for finally solving the ‘Stanwood Bottleneck’. It’s a good start. But while we’re planning for the future’s highway solutions, why don’t we think a bit more Long Term. The South End, as always, is way out front on the region’s transportation issues. Take the Elger Bay Canal, the Big Dig. Eighty years ago we were advocating a series of locks and dams to connect Port Susan with Saratoga Passage, open up shipping through the South End – South End ISLAND, I might add — to the Mainland from Langley, Greenbank and Coupeville. Lock fees would offset the costs, something the Stanwood Tunnel won’t have. Yet, anyway. No doubt the Legislature will eventually consider tolling the tunnel once commuters are hooked on its advantages.

So call your commissioner, call your state representative, call the lady with the alligator purse, this is our best opportunity to solve more than the Stanwood Sewer Lagoon Seawall Bottleneck. It’s our chance to create shipping lanes, possibly a port for a ferry terminal and definitely a new island for the county and the state. South End Island, a stone’s throw from Camano, a world apart for future tourists. The possibilities are beyond imagination. Don’t let this opportunity slip by. The Tunnel budget can easily be amended to include another transportation fix.

Our local pharmacist just announced he’s pulling down his shingle and calling it a career. Mark was one of the last remaining hometown druggists who held out against the big box pharmacies over the past few decades. You were more likely to see a doctor making house calls than a pharmacist competing with CVS or RiteAid. I had a brother who ran five pharmacies back in Wisconsin, but they’re all gone now, absorbed by the mega-chains. So are the small chains he competed with, so are most of the bigger ones too. For us on the island it’s the end of an era that pretty much ended for everyone else a long time ago.

I went down the other day to bid Mark a fare thee well but he’d already boarded up the space. I’d only been in to have prescriptions filled twice, once for the flu and once for some cataract surgery drops so I felt like I needed to apologize for staying in good health while his business was struggling. Mark hadn’t put in coolers for milk and beer and pop, he hadn’t expanded into gifts and toys and stationary, he didn’t have aisles of cosmetics and health supplements. What he had was medical stuff and pharmaceuticals you needed a doctor’s prescription for. If he’d asked me for advice he didn’t want, I’d have suggested an ice cream counter. But I know he would have rejected that as a little too new-fangled. The man was an apothecary, all he wanted to be. Minister medications to the sick, fill prescriptions, give advice when he could. My brother always told me if I needed medical advice, talk to my pharmacist, cheaper than a doctor and for most maladies, just as good.

The world belongs to Big Money now. Amazon will probably take over most everything on earth in ten years or so. Grocery stores, book stores, hardware sales, clothing goods, yeah and drugs too. Drone delivery in a guaranteed two hours. Big is cheaper, competition is a thing of the past, the internet is the new Sears Roebuck catalog. Small town newspapers are dying, mom and pop groceries are absorbed, the real estate offices are consolidating, even the malls are dinosaurs on their last poop. Way of the world, nothing we can do about it, cry if you wanna….

Mark’s Pharmacy ought to be preserved by the local Historical Society along with Elger Bay Store, Huntington’s Grocery and Tyee MegaMart and a shrine to Mark ought to be erected out front. If there was ever a poster child for Pharmacist, he was the guy. Funny, considerate, concerned, professional — all those traits a great hometown druggist should have. Then add to that he and his wife Debbie’s involvement with the community, yeah, he’ll be missed, that’s for sure. As for me, sorry to see you go, Mark, but if you have any surplus of that new nasal spray ketamine that’s psycho-active you’re cleaning out of the backroom, call me, we’ll meet behind the dumpsters any day, any time, plenty of customers still left down here on the South End.

Is this a great country or what? The President of the United States just got a summary report that, in effect, stated there was not enough proof to convict him in a court of law for obstruction of justice. Sure he fired Comey and bragged to the visiting entourage of Russians that he’d gotten that monkey off his back. Sure a dozen or more of his associates are going to jail for lying about meetings he and the kids had with the Russkies. Sure his lawyer testified to all manner of criminal behavior on his boss’s part. Sure there’s plenty more to come out in federal district courts, grand juries, state courts and municipal courts. But so far they haven’t proved beyond reasonable doubt anything yet.

So we’re offered up the spectacle of a self-righteous mobster declaring himself fully exonerated when the Mueller report states in no uncertain terms it is NOT an exoneration. They just couldn’t make an airtight case. In America you’re innocent until proven guilty. Ask O.J. Simpson. Ask the Republicans who screamed Witch Hunt! how it is they think Hillary should be re-investigated. Or Bill on the Whitewater matter. Were they exonerated? No, but they couldn’t be found guilty in a court of law.

I have no quarrel with the system. I do have a quarrel with folks — let’s call them Enablers — who ignore facts, who demean a free press, who support a man so corrupt even his personal attorney denounces him. Take a Victory Lap, by all means, when their Leader wasn’t charged (yet) with high crimes or treason, but the threads of that investigation lead to all sorts of corollary crimes, still to be revealed and possibly adjudicated. I know a lot of us judged Trump guilty at the beginning of the Mueller probe and a lot of us are disappointed the President wasn’t indicted, locked up and tossed on the trash heap of history.

Personally I think the verdict is still out. But you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Okay by me. But let’s be honest here, the Enablers weren’t going to be swayed even if Mueller had found probable cause, airtight proofs and bodies piled in heaps behind the White House dumpster. This, I guess, is the state of partisan politics. Not a resounding endorsement of democracy as it’s practiced in America these days.

Trump has played fast and loose with the truth, with the laws, with the Justice Department, will all of us. He says he’s not a crook, but most of us know he makes Nixon look like a boy scout. Mueller’s investigation was narrow as per the mandate he was given. That won’t be the case with other jurisdictions. And even his Enablers won’t be able to help him then. Me, I’m waiting to vote him out of office, then let the courts have their say.

Our old shack was built about 1910. Probably didn’t have any electricity back then, pre-World War One before rural electrification came to the end of this island. Probably didn’t have a well either with no way to pump it up from over one hundred feet deep. If you dig into the walls of this old house, you will find rough cut 2×4’s, full size 2×4’s, not the modern size that’s smaller today, and you will find old knob and tube electrical wiring, rags stuffed into crevices for insulation, theater posters and cardboard, paper and tarpaper to keep the wind from penetrating, you can find disconnected galvanized plumbing, you will find dryrot and powder post beetle damage and carpenter ant burrows. This old house has been added to, partially torn down, rebuilt, shingled over, reroofed and re-sided, painted and stained and weathered. It’s a miracle it still stands, testament to the virtues of wood and an owner who loves the damn shack because it saved his life in more ways than I care to recount.

The guy before me, about 1975, bought it cheap and dug it out of the blackberries that had grown over the second story roof. He rewired the electrical and must have found a circuit panel box at a second hand shop, one meant for a barn or a shed where the main power came off another building where it could be cut off. The box I have can’t be disconnected from the power pole out on the road. Meaning if you have to work on it, you’re playing with fire. Potentially literally. I have worked on it in the past, terrified each and every time, so much so I haul out a rubber truck tire and stand on that while fiddling with live feeds that could kill me, hoping, I guess, I’m not real grounded. Most of the people who know me could tell you I’m not real grounded most of the time. But I’m a cautious man.

For those of you who lack my superior understanding of electron rodeos, the power from the street comes down a masthead, through a meter and into the circuit breaker box where two metal strips carry juice to one side and another side next door, all grounded to the box and hopefully a metal rod deep in the earth where, god forbid, a short can be carried to the center of the planet. Breaker fuses slot into the two metal strips. One side of mine stopped working. My superior understanding of electron roundups didn’t help me figure anything out, so, like I always do, I started dismantling stuff, muttered mightily the curses that would curl the hair of Odin and proceeded to play with fire.

It didn’t take long. A recalcitrant 60 amp breaker wouldn’t budge and it wouldn’t respond to my obscenities, the bastard, so I grabbed a little metal prybar and tested the above description of the box being grounded when I touched both it and the hot bar carrying enough voltage to knock a lesser man clear across the driveway with burning hair and screams of desperation. Me, it just scared the bejabbers out of me when the sparks kept shooting at me standing idiotically in near shock on that old truck tire. The video would have gone viral in an hour, an instructive how-to primer for would-be arsonists. Or suicide by more creative means than knives, guns or pills ….

It’s ten days later. It feels like ten months. Tomorrow, hopefully, we slap on a new panel (one with a shutoff at the top), rewire the new breakers, call the state electrical inspector and if we pass, call the power company who will, for an exorbitant fee, charge to channel electrons generated who knows how many miles away. Once again the old shack will light up, run outlets, play music, power tools and live to lean deeper into its second century. Me, I’m glad to be working on the first.