The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Spring doesn’t come early to UpCreek. Too dark, too high in elevation, too impervious to Global Warming. Summer lasts about a month, less if you live on the north side of Daddle Mountain, not that many of us do ….

You won’t see gardens up here. Orchards either. Late frosts, early freezes. Folks who last more than a year or two usually come from the cold countries. Norway, Sweden, Minnesota and North Dakota. UpCreek seems positively tropical to them. They know what winter is like, although … they miss those hot summers, I don’t care if the mosquitoes ate them alive and the humidity was like a steam sauna. What we got is cold and clammy, perfect for moss and fungus and aggravated arthritis.

The UpCrickomish have 56 words for rain in their native language. They got everything from a dry mist to a gullywasher and 54 in between. The Eskimos got snow covered and the Hawaiians fine tune their lava, but the UpCrickomish have parsed their precipitation fairly fine. Us non-natives, we got one tenth that meteorological vocabulary, but we spice it up with four letter descriptors. Sometimes it seems like the boundary between rain and the rest of the world is too arbitrary, too ephemeral. We merge with the wet world the way dew is rain that quit falling.

Some of us old timers remember when the rain did quit falling, the drought of ’76. The rainforests on the Olympic Peninsula burned. In the winter! UpCreek burned too, over a thousand acres east of Otter Creek all the way to Pilchuck Pass. Biker Bob lost his cabin, so did a few others, fire burned right up the canyon before the Forest Service boyz got on top of it.

My cabin sits in a clearing so that year I was passed over. The meadow downstream the year after the burn was loaded with morel mushrooms, maybe not a great payback, but you learn up here to take what you can from hardship and disaster, it’s all this hardscrabble place is gonna give for recompense.

Biker Bob moved on. Last we heard he was holed up in Pahrump, Nevada. Got himself a little trailer and on the postcard he sent to the Otter Creek Trading Post for all of us to read, he said it doesn’t rain down there and there’s nothing to burn. He liked it just fine. A couple of the usual layabouts at the Trading Post said they might just have to go visit Bob some winter to escape for awhile, but we all know they won’t. If we wanted to live in the desert, we’d have gone long ago.

Love on the South End was never a bowl of cherries. You try to woo a prospective mate after she’s set eyes on 8 foot tall killer nettles menacing the front door, you’ll see what I mean. Course, the Rottweiler barking all night from its pen next to the neighbor’s travel trailer which no longer travels, the one Mr. Dog Lover lives in with the hound chained close by for affection or protection, that doesn’t endear new girlfriends to the neighborhood either.

Most of my single friends have about given up on the local scene. They’ve dated every yahoo, unemployed or otherwise, down at the Hotel Watering Hole and Dating Service, and those memories they’d like to forget. Or at least suppress. I know. I had to mail order my bride. She probably sensed the muted desperation in my throb-filled love letters, but she took pity, I guess, on an old hermit. I sure didn’t mention the banjos. Or the ivy holding up the shack walls. Or the well on its last legs with an ancient piston pump wheezing and gasping just to haul up a glass of water. Love, I knew, would overcome all those drawbacks.

Course we were younger then, still ‘marketable’. My friends, my single friends, have grown a bit longer in the tooth. Some are missing teeth. More than a few have turned to internet dating to meet future partners, figuring, I guess, the ‘pool’ around here has grown shallow with mostly only geezers fossilizing in the puddles. Now they got a pool of millions of prospective mates to choose from. Just sort through the criterion, run the data and preferences, make allowance for some creative exaggeration, then set up a date. “Non-smoker, loves to walk the beach at sunset, enjoys good literature, would rather snuggle than watch TV, loves puppies and quiet conversations.” True translation: psychopath, possible killer. “Fit, but could lose 5 pounds, enjoys an occasional glass of merlot, young at heart.” Translation: obese nursing home escapee.

Fat chance of finding an honest person in the era of Facebook selfies. The mizzus is counting her lucky stars, but our friends — Mr. Right is fudging the facts. He’s balding, morbidly obese, 15 years too old, drinks until he blacks out, watches any sporting even on TV day or night, eats exclusively Doritos and beer nuts and has the conversational equivalency of Cheetah the ape and a literary proficiency that stalled with Archie and Jughead. He wants mostly to get laid, then left in peace with his TV show. He is, if you haven’t guessed, 6 farts shy of being a heart throb.

Love is an elusive realm. It takes a lot of compromise to share a life, a whole entire life. With a person who has faults and idiosyncracies that have to mesh somehow with your own. And on top of that there’s the cultural overlay of physical beauty and … well, physical beauty mostly. And sex. Let’s not even go there, the rest is hard enough. Although for the guys, the rest is sort of superfluous.

I know this isn’t exactly an Advice Column and by now you know any advice I got is seriously suspect anyway, but … for those who still believe the AM radio bubble gum pop song notion of True Love, don’t give up. But DO keep in mind, bad love is worse than no love. I’ve had my vaccination of bad love. Loneliness usually won’t make you miserable. Or cynical. Or suicidal. But love gone south … love on the rocks … love turned sour and rancid and mean? Be choosy is all I’m saying. Be your own best friend. If that’s all you got, remember: it’s plenty!

I just learned the roadwork between Camano Island and the mainland that’s been going on for months isn’t actually a tunnel bypassing Stanwoodopolis like I’d hoped. Imagine — if you can — our disappointment down here on the ferryless South End. Another few decades of stop-and-go through the town that thinks of us basically as Trespassers. We cause the rush hour traffic jams, we crowd their stores, we clamor for art and culture when all they ask is some peace and quiet.

Used to be no stoplights or stop signs from the freeway exit to the South End. Sure, Stanwood had a Welkommen sign back then, but basically they hoped we’d keep on going over the sewer causeway and on to the Mark Clark bridge. If you stopped for gas or groceries, they weren’t particularly friendly. You were tolerated, but just barely. I always noticed a Welkommen sign wasn’t put up for those of us coming back. And we were all, unfortunately, coming back.

Times change, of course, and now there’s 5 stop light through Stanwood Town, 2 more than the island. Times might change, but not the Attitude so much. The big chains are friendly, but the old retail, good luck. Most of us South Enders keep on going. Mt. Vernon, Everett, Smokey Point. Those 5 stoplights about double the driving time.

So when that roadwork started digging down I saw my dream finally coming true: a tunnel under Stanwoodopolis, a subterranean bypass. A Big Dig. A win-win. For us and the fiercely independent tribesmen of Stanwoodopolis. Now those pretty dreams are dashed. The road isn’t descending, it’s rising. Down in Seattle and Gomorrah, Big Bertha’s broken and their dig is deferred indefinitely. No doubt this is why we won’t get our tunnel — the drilling machine won’t be available for who knows how long. My lifetime, I’m figuring. And probably 5 more stoplights.

I was up at a farm on the North End recently and a couple of us homesteaders got to swapping chicken stories. Roosters, mostly. You think maybe chickens are silly little cacklers scratching up worms and grubs for dinner or they’re benign little birds dropping eggs for your breakfast, you haven’t been properly introduced to the male of the species.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Cock of the Walk? That’s these bad boys. Vicious attackers of the unwary. Aggressive, fearless birds that come at you with beak and spurs. They’ll open you up before you can say chicken cacciatore. And you’ll never turn your back on one again, trust me.

Well, we swapped a few whoppers before Professor Bob mentioned he’d been up to Darrington for the cockfights awhile back, a couple hundred Tarheels betting their moonshine earnings on birds bred for vicious violence. When I first came to Camano Island, the cops were busy busting cockfighting rings in Stanwood and Gomorrah. I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this sort of bloodsport die out in the 1800’s? And the answer is apparently NO. Down south where I grew up, they fight dogs in Dixie. Yeah, it seems barbaric. But … we still got boxing and now we got kickboxing. And if you want mayhem, tune in some Sunday to NFL football. They’ll study us someday like we were Romans, professional gladiators. Only real difference is we figured how to make it profitable.

Maybe the cockfighters need to sell television rights. Line up some advertisers. Sell beer and hotdogs. Make it respectable for more than the Tarheels and a few UW professors. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t generate a mass audience. After all, we got politics now 24/7 if you like your violence vicious. Course, maybe they should sell beer and peanuts and advertising rights. Monday Night Congressional Cockfights. Probably take a few months to balance the budget with the profits. Think about it is all I’m asking.