The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was watching an IBM ad the other night. They were touting their genius machine WATSON as an example of how we humans were going to succeed in the future. By out-thinking our competition. WATSON can beat any human in chess. WATSON can whip anybody in Jeopardy. WATSON is as smart as we are and getting smarter every day. We just need to make smarter WATSONS if we want to get anywhere in this brave new world. Down here on the South End we aren’t likely to cobble together an artificial intelligence. Or even much of a natural one, judging by our track record so far.

IBM is creating machine intelligence. WATSON is a machine, built by us, programmed by us, in service to us. In a couple years WATSON will build itself, program itself, improve itself and surpass its original creators in no time flat. The mega corporations and the defense departments of the world think this is the leg up for their profits and their success. WATSON and his brethren will simply out-think their competition. Trouble is, we’ll be the machines’ competition. Well, not much competition, judging by the South End, but hey, even MIT, Stanford, NASA, you name it, they’ll be left in the silicon dust too.

We live in a world of machines now. Already machines run machines. Computers run factories, control the banking, game the stock markets, kill the enemy with their drones. They live in our office, control our entertainment, answer questions on our phone, connect us to other humans who have them too. We’re dependent already even though we think we’re boss. We even got em down here on the South End. Okay, we’re mostly using them for e-mail and Google. But we take them for granted already, just a couple decades since Bill Gates put the pods under everyone’s bed.

You think maybe I’m a Luddite. You think I’m paranoid. You think I don’t trust IBM or Microsoft or Apple to make the future a very comfortable place for me. You think we should just let them be smarter. Out-think the competition! You think maybe this is just another tool, like a hammer or a sewing machine or a spinning jenny, something we use to better our lives.

But I’ll tell you something: a hammer doesn’t get smarter. A hammer doesn’t figure out it could make next-generation hammers that self-feed, that replicates those with built-in mobility, that deduces new uses for nails, that realizes its potential as a weapon and identifies the new enemy. A hammer isn’t going to out-think even South Enders. Okay, maybe a couple of us. WATSON isn’t your friend, all I’m saying … and he won’t be your servant much longer.

There are islands and then there are islands. Manhattan’s an island, but the real estate agents bulldozed down its palm trees long ago. A lot of islands are isolated, a bump in the sea. Some islands hang out together. Geologists call them an archipelago. The islands by us didn’t get invited into the San Juan Archipelago Club. I think they knew we’d put bridges up and drive right on like we weren’t proud to BE an island. Naw, we wanted an umbilical to the mainland.

A Real Island sneers at the idea of the Mainland. A real islander doesn’t commute to a job back on the Mainland. A real archipelagist doesn’t shop at the QFC on the Mainland. An honest-to-God rock huggin, brine snorting, bent back barnacle covered island hermit doesn’t jump on a ferry every chance he gets so he can stand on Terra Firma in the Wal Mart parking lot.

A Real Islander is hoping deep down in his seaweed filled boots that the Tectonic Plates are moving him OUT past the Straits, out past Dungeness Spit, out past Neah Bay, out past the 3 mile territorial limits. A Real Islander came, not so much to Come to an Island, as to LEAVE the Mainland, physically, spiritually and meta-damn-phorically. They’re Escapists. They’re refugees from Real Life.

Our island hedges its bets. Way up at the cold north end, folks hardly know they’re ON an island. Down at the equatorial jungles of the South End, we’re unemployed, the drive just to the bridge is too horrible to contemplate, the only fast food we got is growing in our gardens and TV reception’s poor.

When the earthquake knocks down Camano’s puny little bridge, we’re gonna have some folks real surprised to learn they’re gonna have to make a choice finally. Course, when they build the South End Bridge to Everett, we will too.

You might find it hard to believe, but the South End used to be a Destination Spot. The whole island did. The island you could drive to, one developer in the 80’s called it, but 50 years before that, the resorts promoted it the same way.

Camp Grande, Diane, Tyee, Cama. Madrona, Indian Beach, Logoon, Sunset Beach Utsalady Beach, Camano Beach, Camp Comfort. The poor miserable sweltering city folks could escape their sizzling apartments and rent a cabin for the week. All day long the menfolk would do what menfolk have done since Cro-Magnon dropped their tails and descended from the branches of the nut-trees. They’d sit on their butts and drink. Course we modernists call it FISHING. Which is really a euphemism for Drinking, stalking the wily six-pack.

When the boat was full of empties and dead salmon, the boys would pull up on the beach and wobble up to the mizzus with their trophy salmons and do what menfolk have done since the 2nd day they hit the ground. Order the womenfolk to cook up the catch.

Back then they had these cute pioneer woodstoves in every cabin. Women must’ve really liked this. Their menfolk, being he-men, could split up the firewood with an axe, probably whacking off a couple of fingers and toes, and she could stand over a 500 degree stove in a cabin with all the doors and windows open and the kitchen about 400 degrees, and she could fry up some smelly fish for the whole squalling family. Later she could wash the burnt-on skillets and the rest in water boiled on the stove. She probably had the time of her life playing pioneer mizzus.

The resorts are all gone now, end of an era on the South End. Some say the fishing dried up. I say the women finally got fed up.

If you’ve lived long enough on the island to experience one commute on Camano, you probably know already Camano was named after Jacinto Caamano, a Spanish explorer who did a drive-by sail about 1792 or so. Course, this is the white folks’ history. They sail a little boat up and down the west coast, thinking they’re in China or Mars, then they give it their name, stick a flag in the sand and voila, it’s theirs.

Well, the Snohomish and Kikalo tribes beg to differ. They lived on the end of Camano from about the turn of the Ice Age and they never called it Camano. Actually, they called it Kal-lut-chin, which means ‘land jutting into a bay.’ The Southendomish, being a breakaway tribe of the Snohomish people, called the island by its Lushootseed language name.
I was just at a Tribal Meeting at the Southendomish Casino last week. Okay, mostly I was there for the blackjack tables and wandered accidentally into the inner sanctum past the men’s room. They were pretty wound up that President Obama had jetted right over them to hightail it up to Alaska where he restored Mt. McKinley to its rightful native name: Denali. They were hoping the South End Historical Society could maybe write to the Great White Chief and ask if he could restore the original name for their homeland. Kicki-Cialis. Roughly translated, it means Clam with Better Blood Flow.

I said I would do what I could. That’s when they asked me to leave…. Okay by me, I really needed that men’s room.

Sally Jenkins got elected President of the Flame-Ons, the women’s auxiliary arm of our volunteer fire department. The South End is the last place on the island with a volunteer station. All three other stations have paid firefighters. Sally and her fellow Flame-Ons have their hair on fire over this slight and they have vowed to take up arms over it with the fire commissioners, all men, all of who live up north where they keep the manned units in case they themselves need mouth to mouth. Or so Sally opines….

When I debarked the turnip truck here on the South End back in 1977, every station was a VFD. I guess us homesteaders were just happy even to have volunteers. The cops went home after midnight and the closest hospital or clinic was 40 miles away. If you moved here expecting CPR in three minutes or less after your heart attack, well, you had a For Sale sign up on your yard PDQ. And believe me, there were plenty who left.

Sally is one of the new breed of immigrants. She figures we’re living in the past and it’s High Time we stepped into dathe 21st Century. And maybe she’s right. We pay the same taxes as our pampered neighbors to the north. And we got the same incidence of medical emergencies. But … I’m still not one of those who’s all that hot and bothered, even though I’m getting old and decrepit and more and more likely to need that CPR.

The Volunteer Fire Department represents rural to me, I guess. Neighbors helping neighbors, not hiring it out. Sally says I won’t feel that way when I need an ambulance some midnight dreary and I know she’s right, but self reliance is one of the last things I went to let go of. Maybe next to my heartbeat.

History is written by the winners, some say, but those folks obviously never ran into the South End String Band. Saturday, Feb 6th, the Stanwoodopolis Historical Society will host ‘Camano in a Clamshell’, a brief but complete history of the island by us losers, the South End String Band, fiddling once again while Rome burns with special guest Julie Campbell on violin.

According the band’s grief counselor, Skeeter Daddle, it will be a fair and balanced accounting of Camano’s rich past as a backwash paradise accompanied by song and music. As always, food will be provided, wine and beer will be available and ample, the music will be spirited and history degrees will be awarded to those who complete the course by the prestigious if non-accredited Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement.

7 pm Sat. Feb. 6th, Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center. $15 donation at the door. Y’all come on down! Remember, you forget history, you got to repeat it. Don’t make us do that to you. Once is plenty.