The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some folks think these stories are mostly made up, that the wild wild South End disappeared long ago, domesticized under the yoke of cable TV and social networking. They think we all conformed, threw up the white flag of surrender to county government and the gated communities. Oh, a few packed it up and migrated to less populated places where the taxes are cheaper and the neighbors farther away. But the South End, for all its latter-day gentrification, still howls late at night, still barks at strangers. And I don’t just mean me….

Gyppo Paul stopped by this spring. Paul’s what you’d call an outlaw. Pretty much ignores societal rules and fairly regularly breaks the law. I’m not saying he’s a role model, I’m just saying he lives here on his own terms. When Paul drops by, I figure trouble’s coming in the door too, semi-invited. What he wants, when he finally gets to it, is he needs to unload some old growth logs he’s managed to cut off the stump, haul out and section into 27 and 21 foot lengths, winch onto a trailer and move into a side road where the trailer tires are squashed deep into the mud.

He needs money and he’s willing to let these go cheap. In my younger days I lived in a ghetto. You want to see unbridled capitalism, go down to the Mean Streets. Paul would prosper there. Commerce, barter, theft; everything’s fungible. Everything! I figure Paul poached the tree. Dead old growth. Absentee landowner. Who’d care?  I said go talk to Pete, I’m not set up for this action.

Story short: Pete buys the tree. He’s got a place that once was the Benz sawmill. His house was built by Benz and built out of lumber milled on a 4 foot sawblade powered off a chain driven by a 350 horsepower Chevy engine. My shack has cedar lumber milled there too, same blade marks. Most of me and my neighbors don’t have a way to deal with a 27 foot long, 4 foot diameter log, much less two of them, that weigh about the tonnage of two or three of their travel trailers. Those logging days are long gone — or so they think.

But I’m talking about the South End and Pete’s a certified — or certifiable — South Ender. He builds boats, kayaks, cider mills, furniture, you name it, the man isn’t intimidated by any lack of experience. What he needs to learn, he learns. He didn’t come here to retire, that’s for sure. By summer he’s got a portable mill rigged up, a two man operation with 2 chain saws driving a 4 foot bar with a chain that rides on top of the log and slabs off 27 foot lengths two inches thick. It takes him two weeks to whittle down a fir 470 years old.

Scoff if you like at the mythology of the South End, but trust me when I tell you: this is the last old growth that’s gonna be milled on the island, logged by a gyppos after the pioneers first arrived. You think the South End is nothing but Tall Tales, well …. you’d be mostly right.

We seem to have a culinary problem down here on the café depleted South End. Oh, sure, the Diner is as constant as the rains in winter, but otherwise, every restaurant, pub, café or eatery withers on their vines in the inevitable drought of patronage. Could be there’s something in the water the Health Dep’t. hasn’t found, but I suspect it’s something less to do with the food and more to do with our gastronomical idiotsyncracies.

We’ve tried gourmet ‘vanity restaurants’, Bible reading seminaries inside the cafes, vegetarian menus, even a café that served macadamia nut waffles and good coffee before Starbucks addicted the now heavily caffeinated world. Lots of coffee but no bathroom. I guess maybe the waffles were expected to sponge up any bladdery excess. Course when me and my buddies got done with that excess, their parking lot looked like gutters of a Mexico City barrio. We’ve had high end and low end and plenty of hind end, and if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s failure. Usually fairly quick. If I knew why, I’d have my own TV show, Hell’s Bitchin, throw spatulas and obscenities, humiliate the staff, change the food, haul in Porta-Potties, make them a successful profit-churning money machine in the time it takes to yell 2 Burgers! Fries and a Pint of IPA!!

I ran a snack bar/grill in my early careers. Plus a dining hall. They hired me, a guy with a useless degree in English. Right there you can see the warning lights, sirens, a disaster coming down the tracks. We had a rash of food poisioning that got tracked down eventually to the potato salad I put under the warming lights. I like my spud salad warm. How did I know mayo has eggs and spoils PDQ?? You think I studied that stuff in Chaucer 101??

Nobody died. Not that I heard about. Life is a gamble. On the South End, so is the restaurant biz…. Anybody’s interested, I got a killer recipe for potato salad.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Welkommen-Wagon.mp3[/podcast]audio — Welkommen Wagon

I notice lately the bank I’ve been going to the last few years started saying hello.  This is possibly good news, then again, maybe not.  The last time the folks of Stanwoodopolis suddenly knew my name was at the now defunct Thrifty Foods, my hometown grocery store of, oh, 25 years or so.  The first 25 years they never even said hello before they started ringing me up.  I was as anonymous as any unwanted immigrant to  them.

Then the first big chain grocery rolled in.  Lower prices, shiny new store, more groceries, better options.  The hometown store looked like a bowling alley for zombies, about 5 of us prowling the aisles in search of stray items left over in their slow but continual downsizing.  The newspaper began running editorials to Shop Local.  Support our local biznesses.  The usual ballyhoo boo hoo.

Gimme a break.  I’ve lived in plenty of small towns from sea to shining sea.  Almost all of them fear the Newcomer as the vanguard for Genghis’s hordes.  But some of them warm up a little after a year or so.  Oh, they’re not going to invite you to Sunday dinner, but the librarian might engage you in a lively discussion on the book you check out, or the hardware guy might wonder what your 2×6’s are going to be used for, or the drugstore clerk might comment on the weather.  30 years in this Welkommen burg and nothing as radical as that.  Not so much as a hello, how are you today?

Until about a month before Thrifty Food Store closed the doors …. Then, much to my amazement, it was hello, it was Hi, Skeeter, did you find everything you were looking for?  They knew my name!  They’d known it all along, of course, but now with the Wolf breathing down their neck, their jobs about to end suddenly, they tried a belated stab at hometown friendliness, one last gasp, throw away the pride.

Maybe a week prior to Armaggedon, Stanwoodopolis will discover a service ethic, manners, a welcoming demeanor.  You know, just before WalMart opens….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-why-they-invented-porta-potties.mp3[/podcast]audio — why they invented porta-potties

Cafes come and go on the island about as fast as the weather. Open up one day, seems like a month later they’ve put the CLOSED sign in the window, locked the doors and another business bites the beach sand. When I first got off the banana boat down by the Yacht Club, a boutique café hung a shingle where the first Senior Center thrift store would eventually take over. Seeing’s how there wasn’t much food service on the island, you’d figure a breakfast and lunch joint would have a pretty easy time making a success of it.

But you’d be wrong. The yuppie couple who ran the place offered macadamia nut waffles, strong fresh ground coffee (long before Starbucks ruled the world) and a menu of fresh vegetables, sprouts, whole wheat breads and local eggs and meats. They were maybe half a century ahead of their time.

I took a boatload of pals up from the smog-smitten city who were crashing at the shack for a wholesome breakfast and a little relief from the hangovers from the previous night’s revelries. We ordered big mugs of coffee and the owners went around the table studiously writing down our orders. Since they were the chief/cook/ and bottle washers, we waited a long time for our servings even though we were the only customers, but the coffee was refilled, our lethargy seemed to subside and life on this side of our foggy island was good once again.

At some point – about a gallon into the coffee – one of us inquired where the restroom might be. We were solemnly informed there was none. This was dire news indeed for nearly all of us. We shrugged it off and waited patiently for our breakfasts. And waited for our breakfasts. When they came, they came one at a time, with five minute intervals in between. Fine fare, however, and we ate our plate’s worth, individually as the rest watched enviously while our bladders swelled like a Guernsey at a dairy where the farmer overslept.

We ate fast. We refused further refills. We crossed our legs and slapped ourselves with knives and forks. We began low moans. I couldn’t tell you if the food was good. Maybe. Probably. All I know is 8 guys stood in the parking lot as soon as we could pay our bill and let loose the floodgates right beside our Volkswagen bus. If we left a tip, that was it, but near as I can tell, they never took it. A month later the café was closed and another dream bit the dust. Well, hit the mud….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Passports.mp3[/podcast]audio — Passports

I recently renewed my passport and got all the necessary documentation, photos, fingerprints, police records, everything … so I could enter the North End without sneaking across the borders. It’s not as difficult as sightseeing in North Korea, but then again, getting through those gated communities and roads closed to the public is no cakewalk in Pyongyang.

Most of the time we can drive the main road to the Plaza without inspection units or impromptu roadblocks. After all, they want our business. The Plaza is a strip mall that replaced the Hopkins family store awhile back, an iconic little mom and pop whose main draw was crab bait, mostly turkey and chicken parts crawling with E-coli and hopefully unsalable as edible food products. The new Plaza IGA still carries crab bait, a nostalgic nod to the glory days of a maritime North End. And the hardware store annex has crabpots and gear for the weekend Dungeness warrior. Down the mall there’s a good drugstore, a salon and the empty storefronts of a what were the upscale kitchen boutique, the old Copy This/Snail That and the video store before Netflix saved movie addicts that hellish trip of three or four miles. Or ten for folks by me. Many an entrepreneur has broken a bank account on the promise of ‘Camano’s HomeTown Store’, the Plaza’s motto. The SeaGas Art Gallery has been replaced by another real estate office, no doubt fueled by rental income from the ever morphing mall. But the gas station with its oil and lube bays and high priced convenience store waiting open-jawed seems to plug along year after year, a testament to the old motto for Camano : ‘The Island YouCan Drive to’. If you want to leave, you’ll need gas. And they’re the main station for most folks who neglected to fill up where prices were more competitive off island.

The North End, for all its chest pounding, might have higher real estate prices than us who live a day’s drive from the Reach of Rome, but when it comes to commerce, we’re pretty much all in the same leaky boat. We lost Tyee Store, but they’d already see Utsalady Store shuttered and razed. Terry’s Corner Commons took a run at being the next Gilmore Village, but now most of its commerce has gone the way of the galloping gooeducks.

Most of us down here wouldn’t need passports if we traveled off island by boat — the way the folks before us did. But to reach the fabled city in the sewage lagoon, the closest metropolis with fast food chains and even more ‘HomeTown’ businesses just over the new bridge that doesn’t charge a toll (at least not yet), we really haven’t got much choice. It is, after all, the ‘Island You Also Need to Drive Off of’.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/audio-Riding-the-Range.mp3[/podcast]audio — Riding the Range