The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A few years back I gave a talk at the Everett Auditorium to about 1500 kids and their folks who were there for recognition in the arts in this area, the Scholastic Arts Awards ceremony. Gail Merrick, our fine art instructor up at the High School, asked me to be keynote speaker and in a moment of weakness I acquiesced. This, among lots of other things, is what I had to say to these poor impressionable youths.

I been racking my brain what I want to say to you folks today, something maybe inspirational that would make you want to give your whole lives to ART. Or maybe go the other route and say, holy rabbits, RUN while you still can…. Get a well paying job, buy a nice house, a fancy car, live the American Dream.

When I was exactly your age, I had a speaker come to an assembly like this that I went to. It was for the Wisconsin State Debate kickoff for that year, 1967, down at the State Capital, Madison, and our speaker was a well known defense attorney. He asked how many of us planned to go into law and most of us, including myself, raised our hands. Then he asked how many wanted to be defense attorneys and most of us kept our hands up. He proceeded, in the next half hour, to tell us that he thought probably we didn’t have a very accurate notion of what that meant, probably sort of movie stuff, Clarence Darrow or Perry Mason, get the innocent guy off at the last minute. And he spent most of the rest of his talk telling us about baby killers and mother rapists and all the horrible people we would be defending who were actually guilty. And probably had done way more than they were even charged with. Cruddy bottom feeders, creepy criminals, the worst! But who, nevertheless, were entitled to legal counsel.

By the end of his speech, I knew I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, that’s for damn sure. That guy changed my life. The trouble was, I didn’t know what else to do when my vague little career path veered into the ditch, crashed and burned. Ten years later, I still didn’t. I’d run out a string of dead end jobs, busted up a marriage, run my crummy cars to death, kind of a typical loser story of dereliction, some scrapes with the law, stuff at your tender age I won’t scar you with. I took the last of my pride and the last of my money and I bought a shack with 7 acres down at the South End of Camano Island. Sad backwash of a place, but a place where I could start my life over.

What I’ve learned in the nearly 40 years I’ve been down here, is that you can always start your life over. For me it was about becoming an artist. An artist sees the world a little differently than most people. The point of art, the Only point that matters to me, is re-making the world thru your eyes, your consciousness. You are re-imagining, re-creating, re-inventing, whatever words work for you. What I learned was an artist can remake that world. An artist can reimagine it. Rewrite the narrative of his life. And then, if you’re persevering enough, or very passionate or just plain crazy, you can inhabit that narrative. You stop and think about it, we’re all artists. We’re all creating our lives.

This is what gives art its power, its nobility, its magic. Creation! Embrace that notion. Have the courage to create the place you want to live in. It’s a way more fluid world than you might think.

Have faith! In yourself, in your own creativity, in your own personal vision. It isn’t about success. It isn’t about money. It isn’t about fame. It’s about exploration. Corny as it sounds, life is a great voyage of discovery.

Most of all, have fun. Not all art is built on pain. Make yourself laugh. Make yourself love. Make your life joyful. Why not? Trust an old timer on this, you’re only limited by your imagination. So dream big.

I wish you all the best of luck. I hope a lot of you will pursue a path in art and all of you will create meaningful lives for yourselves. Maybe 40 years from now one of you will stand in front of an auditorium full of young hopeful faces and tell the story of how long ago you listened to some old fart yammer on about his so-called career in art and it made you rethink everything you’d planned and turned your life around and ultimately led you to a long and prosperous career … in Law. The rest of you, good luck!!

SKEETER DADDLE BLUES: Confessions of a South End Banjo Whacker will be read, in part, by its xenophobic author at the Snow Goose Bookstore on Friday, Dec. 13th at 7 pm. Book signing and South End revelry will follow. Bad luck too, probably.

Jack Archibald continues his rants and ravings in this sequel to his Skeeter Daddle Diaries: Reflections of a South End Nettle Farmer. These are the further memoirs of Skeeter Daddle, a latter day Huck Finn tromping Camano Island’s backwash in search of an America long thought lost, a banjo on his knee and a grudge against Mark Twain for marooning him in a childhood that’s no longer a sanctuary. Older now, but certainly no wiser, the Curmudgeon of Mabana lobs wet sack sarcasm and moonshine philosophy from the bunkered safety of his sagging old shack.

These are stories of his life on the South End, where he went to discover if frontiers still existed and if there might be a pioneer inside himself. In the end he had to reinvent himself. More than a few times. Who the hell IS Skeeter Daddle? Is he fictional? Is he an alter ego? Is he prowling the old growth nettle forests in search of Life’s Ultimate Meaning or just whistling Dixie on a rocker with a homemade 5-string?

Who knows …? Skeeter thinks we all create ourselves, more or less. He thinks we fashion our lives the way an artist creates art. And then the art changes the artist. Fiction? Oh, yeah, he’s made up. Just like the rest of us…

Sit a spell with him. He’s got some stories to tell.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 35 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 35 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

You got an island like ours, not much here, you need major creative minds in the Chamber of Commerce to promote its possibilities for tourism. We don’t have a charming little seaport town. We don’t have cute little gift shops or seafood restaurants. We don’t even have, on 60 or 70 miles of waterfront, a public wharf or a dock or a marina. No, you pretty much need to drive to this island. Our old motto ‘The Island You Can Drive To’ was really a real estate pitch. More truthfully, it should’ve been ‘The Island You Have To Drive To’.

We have two really nice state parks side by side on the west coast. Only about twenty miles from the freeway. One is the old Cama Beach Resort, restored now and its cabins usually rented, making it one of the few state parks that runs a profit, which, in these fiscally challenged days, is pretty amazing.

When folks ask what there is to do on Camano Island, I say Not Much, Just Living. I’m happy as a free range clam, but I’ve got a beach to walk and a woods to hike and plenty to keep me busy. A visitor to our fair island, well, a couple of rainy days and the suburbs they left behind start looking mighty inviting.

No malls, no movie theaters, no taverns, no night life, not much of anything but inaccessible beaches and summer houses and us year rounders. Probably seems like a vacation in a desert, only one with water, not sand. No, it’s a hard sell when the San Juans beckon and Whidbey next door has quaint 150 year old villages and tourist trap and ferries going hither and yon. We got a few Mom and Pop grocery stores, plenty of real estate offices, speed traps and miles with nothing but scenery. People don’t yearn for that anymore, I guess. It’s why they carry phones and I-pads and laptops wherever they go. ‘The Place To Do Nothing’, our now abandoned ad slogan, just isn’t going to draw a crowd. Okay by most all of us. Except maybe the realtors….