The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We don’t have many rules down here on the anarchic South End. Don’t need em, don’t want em, won’t obey em anyway. But there IS one unwritten one, maybe not something Moses brought down from the Mountain, but if he were around today, he’d probably make it the 11th Commandment: Do NOT do plumbing prior to arriving guests.

Plumbing looks easy. Seems like you take off a coupler here, exchange a faucet, replace a gasket, nothing to it…. If you think that, you’ve never done plumbing and you don’t live down here at the butt end of an island where the nearest plumbing parts are 10 miles away and the nearest SERIOUS plumbing parts stores are 40 miles away. Plumbing Repairs for the Complete Idiot states emphatically: no repair project requires LESS than 3 trips to the hardware store. It is a Law of the Universe, right up there with E= mc squared. It is inviolable. I know, believe me, I know.

I got company coming tomorrow. Don’t ask me why, but … yeah, I broke the 11th Commandment. I thought it would be a no-brainer, a piece of cake, a walk in the park. Just pull our old pitted pedestal sink and replace it with my new 100 year old mint-condition porcelain beauty, a $12.50 score at the RE-Store. All I had to do was disassemble the brass fixtures, put em on the new one and voila’, a Martha Stewart golden moment.

Course, the old parts, being 100 years old and corroded beyond belief, proved a bit recalcitrant, but I patiently worked with pliers, screwdrivers, vise grips, monkey wrenches, hammers, hacksaws, spit, curses and pitiable prayers to the implacable gods of plumbing. Half a day later I had the old sink literally in pieces. The pieces, of course, didn’t match up to the new sink. You can trying mating disparate parts of corroded brass with stripped threads in multiple arrangements, but … guaranteed, they won’t mate up, not in an hour, not in a day, not in the puny time left to you and me in this human lifetime.

So I went to the hardware store. Not once, not twice … you KNOW how many if you believe in PHYSICS. Meanwhile, our company is en route. I guess they can wash up with the outside hose. I suppose they’ll be understanding. Or … maybe this just a South Ender’s strategy for shortening their visit.

Haul out the champagne and shoot off some leftover fireworks!!! Tyee Store reopened!!! They got lotto, they got white bread, they got cheap beer. The world, according to this South Ender, has tilted back into proper orbit. Oh, I know, the fly-by of Pluto was a pretty big deal and maybe more cause for celebration for some, but unless they sell cigarettes and catfood on the mini-planet, let’s try to keep one foot on terra firma.

Tyee Store is back and so what if NASA didn’t send an unmanned satellite to record the event? I sent myself, sickle in hand, through the salmonberry thickets and the nettle jungle and the blackberry barricades that had, for the last few storeless years, grown monstrously wild. I felt like when Lewis and Clark hit the Oregon and Washington coast and the Chinooks paddled up to them in the miserable little cove they’d taken shelter in from a wild storm. Gale force winds didn’t stop the natives from rolling in for some serious bartering and a mile of menacing overgrowth wasn’t going to stop me either. Tyee Store was open again and so was my trail to it. The explorers who made it to the North and South Pole, trust me, they didn’t leave a trail for the next folks.

I know, some of you maybe think, so what? A little mom and pop grocery has reopened after a couple of years, gonna sell some popsickles and camp supplies, some Pall Malls and Bud Lite, big whoop! But for us refugees down here at the end of the island, Tyee Store is the Real Deal. It’s our crackerbarrel, our gossip central, our cultural center and our trading post combined. We’ve gone a long time hauling supplies down from the North. The sled dogs are tired, the transit bus won’t come clear down here, the isolation is wearing on all us pioneers. You think cabin fever is bad, try it when the jerky is gone and the last can of Spam is being held for the next Christmas dinner. Tyee Store is a godsend, let me tell you.

I know, some of you northerners and off-islanders will never set foot on the South End, much less in Tyee Store. Big bunch of nothing down here for you suburbanites and city dwellers. But someday, mark my words, the Tyee Store will be a museum and a visitor center for a time when the Costco’s and the Walmarts hadn’t sent their ubiquitous tentacles into the hinterlands yet, where you couldn’t always get what you wanted, but you got what you needed. And when you did, when you walked into that far-flung outpost of experimental retailing, when you saved yourself that hellish trip to the Plaza or Elger Bay Store, when you walked across the island through a tunnel of brambles, sure, it cost a little more. It maybe cost a lot more, but this was our store, all of us down here, and we’re ecstatic to have it back.

Course, in a week we’ll be belly-aching about the prices and the selections. But … we always did and we always will. It is, after all, the South End.

Back when I first moved to the wild South End, I worked graveyard weekends at the Pain Motel in Everett, Everett General Hospital. We had maybe 3 or 4 emergency rooms in the ER, what is now 65 rooms. Most weekends were pretty quiet, good for sleeping if you were the orderly, which I was. But occasionally we’d crank it up, holidays especially, but we could never predict.

My first year there was an eye-opener. A lot of blood, plenty of horror, none of it for the squeamish. I guess you can get used to about anything. But that first year I wasn’t used to the shock yet. My job was basically gopher. Run fluids to the lab, look for missing medical records, deliver supplies, take the dead to the morgue, deliver patients to the wards, you name it, that was my Job Description.

Bout a month after I started we had this motorcycle gangbanger come into the ER. Drove himself in after he’d put his hand into the moving chain. I ran bloodwork and paperwork on him to the lab and eventually I was called on my beeper to go get him in the ER and take him to his room. He was sitting up on the gurney and said he could walk okay, but I said we got rules and one is he had to get driven by gurney. “Okay, man,” he said, which is biker talk for ‘bite me’, but he said, “Let’s ride.”

A nurse ran up to me with a cup and said deliver it to the desk on the 5th floor when I got there. The biker said, “You got my fingers in there, man. They’re gonna sew em on in the morning.” I took a peek and yeah, there on ice were three fingers a bit worse for wear.

“They told you they’d sew them on tomorrow?” I asked. He said, yeah, no problem. Well, maybe not to a drunk biker, but you know and I know, if you’re going to reattach missing body parts, it’s kind of critical to do it sooner rather than later. I said, “Hey, man, talk to a nurse when we get up there and tell her what you told me. They’re not planning to sew these on you, c’mon, think about it.”

Our hospital, being a public funded hospital, took in everybody, insurance or not, no small thing really, but I learned that night not everyone receives the same care. Somewhere along the line, maybe on an adjoining barstool, I’ll probably meet an old biker, 2 finger Fred, and we’ll have a beer and maybe a laugh over this shared memory. Well … the beer, probably not the laugh.

Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

audio — one woman’s trash is another man’s home

So I get this e-mail, see …. My buddy Captain Lawrence Baum has had some yahoo drop off a derelict 5th wheel trailer on the frontage road to his business. He’s pissed, but he also sees a golden opportunity to tweak old Skeeter about South End riff raff, cc’ing me along with his screed to the Crab Cracker, our quasi-literary/newspaper/calendar of all local events. Rather than summarize, here’s the text:

 
HAS THE SECESSION OF THE SOUTH FROM THE NORTH BEGUN ANEW?
Jumpin’ jehoshaphat and criminently, Folks. I do believe a new civil war has begun and can secession of the Southenders from the Northenders be far behind?
I mean, what else can explain the sudden appearance on the doorsteps of the peace-lovin’ businesses south of our beloved Camano Vet Clinic, of what has to be the quintessential and classic abode of those red-neck, moonshinin’, nettle-wine drinkin’ folks led by (and I suspect egged on by) Skeeter Daddle and his ilk. Sometime in the wee hours of Thurs July 16, most likely between 5 and 7 am, a decrepit, falling-apart, partially-wheeless 30-foot or better 5th wheel trailer was dumped on the easement road serving all of the businesses from Camano Sail and Jon-Sue Mirror all the way north to the Vet clinic. And with nary a fare-thee-well or request for permission. I mean these folks have to be “well endowed” if you get my drift. It would have been nearly or all the way daylight with going-to-work traffic whizzing by. And the towing vehicle would not have probably been some little wimpy car. Egad, I mean we have “dumpers” all over this Island, people who are too cheap or too lazy to take their garbage to the dump, as we used to call it before it got all fancified to “Transfer Station.”
Well now, I knows that them is fightin’ words so how do we know it came from the south, you may well ask. Well, we done fingered that out by the deep scratch marks left in the pavement by a dragging part of the trailer (still visible if you care to look) that begin a few hundred feet south of the Camano Hill/E. Camano junction, and swerve very nicely and definitively into our common driveway and down to its current resting place.
Now, it will be moved one way or ‘tother because the last owner of record lives on this here Island. He claims he sold it but can’t find the documents to prove it, and so, under the law he may be on the hook.
But that is really not who we are looking for. I’m pretty sure the last owner of record did not dump the trailer there. But someone did and we would dearly love to find that “someone.”
If anyone recognizes this pig and can tell us where it may have come from, there is a small cash reward waiting, and I mean really small, $50-small.
Call in privacy and confidence and tell us what you think you know. If the info checks out, you get the bucks.
425-314-9824.
(and my apologies, Skeeter; put your double-barrel away, please)

NOTE: the Salty Dawg runs a charter boat and sailing instruction business on our Beautiful Island and gets just down right bent out of shape by people who dump their garbage on our roads and yards and our beautiful waters.

Here, in its entirety, is Skeeter’s response:

Okay okay, Cap’n! We just thought this would make a nice B&B up there by the dump. That, or a Motel 3, some place a little more affordable than the Camano Inn. And yeah, we might’ve neglected to get the necessary permits and maybe we didn’t meet county commercial codes, but us start-up entrepreneurs ought to get some breaks; after all, we’re the job creators. Admittedly we should’ve washed the rig, but c’mon, we’re conserving precious groundwater. Think Eco-Tourism!

We already have August and September pretty nearly booked so I’m hoping we can find some common ground here, Lawrence, maybe cut you in on part of the rental income. We sure don’t need negative publicity and if you would consider maybe 10% of the profits after deducting our heavy advertising campaign (soon to come), we would be happy to give you naming rights. How does Baum Bungalow sound to you??? Kind of has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Personally, I was advocating a meth lab in that location, but my partners pointed out the proximity to the sheriff’s shack, a building not a helluva lot nicer than our 5th wheeler. Worst case, I guess we could go head to head, no pun intended, with the Bud Hut. But I think you’ll agree, given the aforementioned 10%, the Baum Bungalows (yes, plural, once we get a few more rentals in there) would be a better fit for the touring public. Our attorney, Bubba Frisk III, will provide you with all the contracts and paperwork at your earliest convenience. If you have any further questions or concerns, contact me through the Crab Cracker, our lead advertising agency. Sincerely, as always, Skeeter
Now, the sad part — or maybe the hilarious part — I thought I recognized that 5th wheeler. So when I saw one of my band mates, I asked, nonchalantly, did you get rid of your trailer? “Yah,” she said, “I put it on Craigslist and some guy from up island came for it. Free. But he had to bring spare tires, the old ones were rotted down to the hubs.”

The sheriff found the old owner, but he’d never transferred title and neither had my bandmate’s boyfriend, so now the trailer was legally abandoned off the highway. I’m sure Cap’n Lawrence is worried he’ll inherit the hulk, but I don’t think so. The guy who hauled it off had a buddy and when they were scrutinizing the trailer, purportedly for scrap potential, his buddy whispered, “This is way better than yours.”

On the South End we call this Recycling. Up Island, they’re treating this as a crime. I admit, I’m torn whether to contact the sheriff, but I may let the Skipper know to just hang on, our boy is looking for fresh tires so he can get it back to his place. In the end I suspect everybody’s gonna win.