The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Tea Party Ted, my neighbor here on the Don’t-Tread-On-Me South End is doing some major Martha Stewarting on his high bluff property. He’d had a little problem with water draining into his house so to solve it he trenched along the side, dropped in what we call a French Drain (what Francophobes prefer to call a ditch with perforated pipe) and shunted the water away from his hacienda.

Like a lot of us down here, Ted’s not much for permits. Course, Ted’s not much for anything except Ted. The Law of the Jungle works pretty well for the Teds of the world, you just need to own more guns than the rest of us and be twice as mean. I was down at his place the day he was laying pipe. The pipe ran off into the shrubbery, made a sneaky left turn and headed toward the bluff where I assumed he’d hooked up a ‘tight line’, a solid pipe that would reach to the beach below so the run-off wouldn’t erode the bluff.

“To hell with that,” Ted replied to my inquiry. “Same water, same bluff.” I wandered over for a look-see. “What’re you?” he growled, obviously irritated. “The *%##@! EPA?” Ted had put his run-off over toward the edge of his property, but above his neighbor down the hill whose house sat precipitously close to an unstable bluff. The last thing they needed was more water working on the erosion beneath them.

There was a time — about when I first got here — when there were so few of us it didn’t much matter what we did, it didn’t affect any neighbors. I miss those days, I really do, but with boys like Ted still playing outlaw down the road, I’ve come to appreciate a few rules. Saves me strapping on the gunbelt, if nothing else.

They say those who forget history … are doomed to repeat it. Maybe most places, but not on the South End! You get a Second Chance, a Do-Over, a Mulligan. Which is why the South End String Band is back at the Stanwood Area Historical Society’s Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center playing another fundraiser: they figure someday they’ll actually get it right. That, or the Floyd will wise up to their shenanigans.
Probably neither., but meantime, come join them for some Camano roots music, good food, adult beverages and a glimpse of what history could’ve been if we weren’t in such an All-Fired Hurry to move on to tomorrow. Like the band famously sez: the future isn’t Prologue, it’s just Prolonged.

Sat. Feb 7th , 2015 at 7 PM at the Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center. Finger food and appetizers will be served and beer and wine will be available for purchase. Apologies, if necessary, will be forthcoming from the Band. Suggested donation: $15.

Address: 27130 102nd Avenue Northwest, Stanwood, WA 98292
Phone:(360) 629-6110

The truth, the whole truth and nothing butt the truth…

Check out www.southendstringband.com for more historical records.

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!