The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every year the editorial staff of the Crab Cracker comes to me and asks why don’t we run a South End Man and Woman of the Year? Mary Jo Permkowski begs them to run that contest so she can win South End Businesswoman of the Year for her Pedicure Salon, Mo-Toe Mojo. She figures she’s practically the only business left on the South End, a virtual shoe-in, she thinks, assuming South End Greenworks, Two Toke Tom’s semi-legal cannabis dispensary isn’t considered a legitimate candidate. Mary Jo’s kidding herself — Two Toke probably would win Man AND Business of the Year both.

I tell them let Stanwoodopolis run their little contest. High School’s over down here. We don’t elect Prom King and Queen — none of us were the captain of the football team or the most sexually active cheerleader. We know how the Game is rigged. And not just Yokel of the Year —- I mean the Big Game. Why do you think we live down here? To win popularity contests? Or to escape em …?

Oh, I suppose we could run our own easy enough. Best Moonshiner. Best Gyppo. Best Nettle Farmer. Best Hydroponic Cannabis Cultivator. Best Trailer Court. Best Old Hippie. Best Dandelion Show Garden. Best Poacher. Best Meth Lab. Best Rehabbed Felon. Best E-Bay saleswoman. Best Illegal Crabber. Best Friend of Colton Harris Moore. Best Glass Artist Who Plays Banjo and Writes Articles for the Crab Cracker.

But NO! we’re not gonna stoop to that. If all we wanted were a pack of sycophantic friends to vote us their favorite yokel or their best underground business, we’d sign up for Facebook and get all our neighbors to “Like” us. Probably mostly end up with hits from the FBI or the IRS anyway. No sir, let the popularity voting go on without us another year. We may not be the cutest or the most athletic or the smartest or the friendliest, we may not have a South End Fan Club or 2 zillion connections on Linked-In, we may not get invited to those catered North End soirees for the rich and famous winners of last year’s People of the Year, but we’ll just struggle on. And Betty Jo — you didn’t have an atheist’s prayer against Two Toke anyway, I don’t care how promiscuous you are.

Up river from Stanwoodopolis maybe 30 miles or so, a mountain of mud slipped … and in 3 seconds covered up the roadway, 30 houses and the entire flow of the North Fork of the Stilly River. As of today 14 people are dead, but over 100 are missing. Flashflood warnings are up and the towns of Oso, Arlington, Silvana and Stanwoodopolis are on evacuation alert. If the backed up Stillaguamish lets loose suddenly, a deluge will descend downstream like the Johnstown Flood.

On the news I hear folks starting to point fingers. At the state. At geologists. At the timber company who clearcut above this slide. At the County Planning Department. At the folks who allowed citizens to build under a known danger. At the Fire Department for not doing enough. At Emergency Management for not allowing volunteers to wade into the square mile of muck and mud that is more like quicksand than not, making volunteers more like victims than not. It is, to say the obvious, a mess.

We hate government these days. We hate it regulating us. We hate it enforcing their rules. Then we blame it for not doing enough. One of the dead is the leader of Freedom County who railed for years about government intrusion in his life. I wonder what he’d have to say now? We blame government for not saving more lives, we blame it for not preventing those deaths. But we’re glad hundreds of firefighters, state troopers, medics, cops and engineers are up there working 24/7. No doubt we’ll sue some of them soon enough….

It only took two days before the fault-finding started, no pun really intended. We don’t even have the bodies recovered, the road cleared or the river undammed. I was out fishing along the coast of the South End yesterday. I couldn’t help but wonder how the folks in the bluff houses were sleeping. Or the ones below the bluff. Were they cursing the Island County Building Department for issuing a building permit? Were they calling their insurance agent? Were they eyeballing the banks beneath their precipice and noticing the previous slides? Were they already on the phone to their attorneys just in case the worst happens???

I don’t know … but I’d be wearing a seat belt to bed. And I would not be sleeping soundly. Pun intended.

I know a lot of South Enders who fight with the Tax Assessor. Fighting with the Tax Assessor is akin to fighting with a cop. You might get a few curses out or even land a punch, but it’s a Loser’s War. They’re gonna win, guaranteed, end of argument. But no, when the TaxMan comes around, they abuse them or they threaten them, they videotape them or they cry No Trespassing! They end up going down to the courthouse to protest their assessment with the Equalization Board. I won’t say they never get a reduction, but the couple who did saw it go back up the very next year.

I got a buddy, cheats on his taxes, wheels and deals on every purchase, builds the South End Way, meaning, he skips the permits then when he’s done, boards it up so the Assessor can’t look in. Or, actually, makes the Assessor all that much more curious. When I first came, I noticed the Assessor found everything I’d done, from plumbing a hot water heater to building a crummy porch — he was like a precursor to the NSA. I might not have to get a permit, but you better believe I was going to be taxed. I decided this was an okay bargain.

So when Fred found me busting knuckles behind the shed on an antique  5 horse boat motor, he introduced himself at the Tax Assessor and said he used to repair motors down in Florida, what was the problem? Good guy, Fred. Didn’t fix my 1950 Johnson, but he had some good advice: Junk It and buy a decent motor. I said, Fred, if I could, I would.

Years later I had built our palace up on the hill, million dollar view, permitted even on the owner builder permit plan, and Fred found me down at the shack working. “Got some bad news for you, Skeeter,” he said. “Well, sir, hold on then, I’ll get us a couple of homebrews, take the sting off the wound….” We shot the breeze awhile, drank our beers, then I said, go ahead, hit me. He said the neighbor’s new house across the ravine was assessed as of an hour ago at over one million dollars. I said, “So?” Fred rolled his eyes and I asked, “You mean that affects my piddly little house? Fred could see he was dealing with a real yokel.

“And that’s not all,” he started. “Wait!” I said, “there’s more?” And when he said, oh yeah, I got us another 12 ounce anesthesia. We swapped a few war stories, compared notes on the neighbors who hated him, had a few laughs, then I cut to it —- “So what’s the other shoe?”

“Bet you thought you had a final on your house, didn’t you?”

My heart skipped three beats. Yes, I did. My taxes had gone up, but not near what I’d feared. Now he was telling me why they hadn’t. “Well,” I said, “if I’m gonna live with millionaires, I guess I better pay my fair share.”

Fred commiserated with me over the gentrification of the South End, we had another cold one, shook hands and that was the last time I saw Fred before he retired. Our property valuation came in the mail a month or so later and I opened it with serious trepidation. It had barely budged. I won’t tell you a little courtesy, a welcoming smile and a couple of beers makes a difference to a Tax Assessor — they are, after all, paid professionals doing a miserably hard job — but I suspect Fred cut us some serious slack. And Fred, wherever you are, Thanks from a poor nettle farmer!

After three and a half years of public hearings, federal regulatory changes and zoning clearances, Camano is poised to break ground on its new and controversial 65 acre landfill. Angry residents made their voices heard regarding perceived exorbitant transfer station fees while complaints from the gated community of Island Hills concerning obnoxious summer odors wafting up from the odoriferous collection site made the decision all that much more urgent.

In a return to the past, Camano will no longer pay to have its refuse trucked to off-island dumps. Various sites for an intra-island depository were considered over the 42 months of head scratching by numerous county, state and federal agencies, but in the end, a panel comprised of health officials, citizens’ groups and local area water associations voted to purchase the 65 acre tract of ‘nearly useless’ land eight miles south of Elger Bay Store in the island’s virtually uninhabited interior. In a prepared statement, the Camano Recycle and Refuse Committee (CRRC) argued that “given the remote location and relatively non-utilitarian potential for economic development of the land, Camano would be best served if these tracts near the Camano Head were used for on-island disposal of indigenous trash”.

Some committee members, in a separate dissension, worried that hauling recycles from one end of the island back to the north would be exorbitantly expensive, given the distance from the current King County Recycling Station. They voiced concerns about inadequate drainage in clay subsoils as well as vandalism by nearby residents of the South End. “We don’t want to create a Little Cairo of dump pickers down there,” one committee member stated to this Crab Cracker reporter.

Nevertheless, the property has been purchased, permits have been issued and this May bulldozers will begin the arduous task of clearing old growth nettles, clandestine white supremacist enclaves, two abandoned meth labs, a remote county park used and maintained by one elderly volunteer, multiple bottle dumps, illegal residences and a tire dump.

The ad hoc group NOT ON OUR SOUTH END! vowed to continue their lawsuit to stop the new landfill, but Natalie Nimbee, group spokeswoman, admitted they were running dangerously short on time and cash. Their only hope now, she said, was that the Southendomish Tribal Council might weigh in, but so far, they seem reluctant. Chief Net’yl Skratchum stated on the record, “Same crummy deal since the Mabana Treaty of 1918 giving us 50% scrounging rights. Half of what the landgrabbers leave behind…. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Officials indicate the new landfill will meet strict EPA guidelines and should be fully operational by the end of 2015. The site of the current transfer station will be restored to its former natural setting and eventually converted to a county park.

Some of my builder buddies tell me they have trouble hiring the local graduates for their trades. I hear the same thing from pals in the restaurant biz. Jobs get advertised, but few apply and half those that do don’t show up for their interviews. I guess the jobs the kids want aren’t physical labor. Not when they could be video jockeys and computer cowboys. Why break your back and your neck framing houses, hauling concrete, doing lawnwork, cooking over a grill or serving dinners?

Me, I sort of went the opposite direction. I left academia, I quit my teaching job, I guess I dropped out …. to learn carpentry, woodworking, boatbuilding, mechanics, plumbing, all that stuff it takes to live closer to the land. Won’t say I got real good at any of them, but in a specialized world, it’s gratifying not to be specialized. I even learned a skill to make a living working with my hands. I’m not saying the kids are wrong — just saying there’s a satisfaction in making things, fixing things, building things. Oh, I know, you can do that in the virtual world. I work there too. When I have to ….

Course, there’s a lot of manual labor that isn’t too rewarding. You ask me, most labor isn’t, but then, you didn’t ask me. When I left the job force, I never expected to find anything that would pay me AND give me satisfaction. They seemed like polar opposites. So I count myself lucky. Blessed, if I can use a word so freighted with blissful la-la connotations.

The young folks I know struggling to find a niche in this consumer-crazed world, I tell em keep searching, don’t accept defeat, fight for meaning, don’t sell out or sell yourself short, you’ll find something you can invest your time and yourself in. Who knows, maybe it’s true if you believe it. I do. But then, I was willing to be poor. I don’t know many folks who would choose poverty over a soul-sucking job. Then again, they may get both.