The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Not many people realize it, but the old schoolhouse now serves as the Museum of the South End. Sure, it’s a little oxymoronic, a museum for a place that barely exists now much less Back When, but like most places big and small, we wanted to preserve the Past even though apparently we still live it. For awhile the Tourism Board thought it would serve as a sort of Visitor Center, but when even the locals never visited, that idea was shelved faster than grandpa’s shaving artifacts.

They put a big old growth log section out in the front yard which now is pretty much rotted, the pins showing where Columbus landed or Jesus was born are rusted and the labels gone. The old manure spreader is half hidden in the unmowed grass and kids passing by have used it for decades as a Dumpster. Every now and then Emily Watkins, the old schoolma’arm’s granddaughter, hauls out the OPEN sign by the highway and spends a day sweeping and dusting and clearing out the cobwebs. Occasionally a visitor wanders in and Mrs. Watkins stops her chores and has them sign and date the guest book by the front door, which, after all these years, is open to page four. Then she points out the various exhibits, mostly rusty logging tools, crosscut saws, peaveys, giant sawblades from the Mabana Mill, foxtailed fphotos of men on stumps or picnics at the Grange, the struff every museum from Alaska to California has on display.

There’s a little canning jar for donations as empty as the backroom which Emily uses as her ‘office’. The restroom is the outhouse leaning into a cedar out back, too perilous for use except in an emergency. The toilet paper has to be kept in an old coffee can to keep the squirrels from using it for nest building.

Occasionally Emily finds a scythe or a sewing machine left on the front porch by someone cleaning out an attic with a scrawled note: “Aunt Mary’s cherry pitter” or “Grampy Murray’s homemade cigar box banjo.” She makes a card for each and every one and files it into a recipe box which itself has a card: “Betty Cox’s Mother’s Recipe Box — donated June 7, 1978”. Who Betty Cox is or if her heirs still live here is unknown.

When she leaves, Emily always puts the CLOSED sign on the window of the front door. It’s been there now more than a year. Someone should probably check on Emily…..

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Art-Bubble.mp3[/podcast]Art Bubble

Some of the boyz down at the Marina got to talking about that Ma Day Studio Art Tour that’s been building steam since before the turn of the century, hauling traffic in for 14 years and now has expanded not just to 3 days instead of the original 2, but 2 weekends instead of 1. Before long, Cap’n Jack worried, it’ll become the Mother’s Day to Father’s Day Art Tour, an entire month of traffic backed up from the South End Diner to the Stanwoodopolis freeway exit, all those art lovers and their U-Hauls for carrying back their purchases to Bellevue, Seattle and beyond. They remember when the Tulip Festival was just a small bulb in the imagination of the growers …. before cars eventually outnumbered the flowers. And it makes em nervous.

It should! The South End Economic Development Council holds secret meetings at ReFlux Realty, scheming to sell properties to art aficionados who, in turn, will become artists themselves in the primordial paint soup of the South End, buy easels and brushes, learn raku, break glass and build stained glass panels, sculpt auto wreckage and ultimately double, triple, who knows, the size of the Tour. It’s a self-replicating Beast. And when they all begin to starve through overpopulation, they’ll still need to pay those mortgages on their dream studios. The only other ‘jobs’ here, of course, are real estate agents. So the vicious circle completes itself. More artists, more art, more wannabees, more starvation, more real estate agents, more sales, prices rise, properties subdivide, underwater mortgages swell …. and so the bubble becomes bigger than the egoes of the artists who planned this Tour back in the 90’s.

Some of the Marina layabouts wanted to stop this in its tracks before there was no turning back. Keep the missuz from going studio to studio Mother’s Day weekend. Course, the Tour was planned from the Get-Go to be their default escape from marital duties. Let Ma go traipsing through the art while they’d watch some ballgames. And now, 14 years later, they’re only starting to realize the true price of their mistake. Too late, guyz!! Way too late now!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-petal-power.mp3[/podcast]audio — petal power

I remember about 30 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields. Pretty amazing. Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner. It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island. For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that. I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into. Tulip Fuel. Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow. Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel. The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended. So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell. The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps. High pollen octane for the BMW crowd. Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival. Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help. Something that should’ve been done long ago. You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power —- think about it!

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-60s-in-the-rearview.mp3[/podcast]audio — 60’s in the rearview

Before the advent of mega-nurseries, the South End experimented with alternatives to the Big Box Plant Sellers we got now. Half of us back then thought we could grow our way to prosperity, skip a real job and just tend our Gardens of Eden. Avant-Gardens was a Mother Earth, granola munching collection of disillusioned big city emigres bent on subverting the capitalist system by starting a communal garden on Camano. They pooled their meager resources, piled into a 1963 VW bus painted with flowers and vines that broke down once on the way, bought 10 acres of prime nettle land with a 1920’s shack leaning romantically toward the edge of a bluff that fell straight to the Sound.

For years the old hippie bus could be spotted in various locations, broken down once again, a herd of itinerant repairmen at work in the rear end’s engine compartment, usually with a VW Repair Manual for Total Idiots open to smudged and torn pages. It was rumored they could pull a blown engine and replace it with another equally unreliable one in 15 minutes flat, side of the road, pouring down rain. Practice, any VW mechanic can tell you, makes perfect.

The old bus hauled specimens the Avant-Gardeners collected at old homesteads, back in the woods, up creekbeds, culled from neighbors’ cuttings, which the merry band transplanted, propagated, divided, moved to new beds they were forever making from land reclaimed temporarily from blackberries, nettles and salmonberries. No one knew how they got money to live on, but we all knew they never sold much of what they grew. Speculation ran rampant that they raised cannabis in a backroom of the shack under halogens, but it was never substantiated, meaning, they didn’t sell it to us if they did grow it.

Over the years the Avant-Gardeners became synonymous with an era long lost, an anachronistic group who most of us other transplants considered kindred spirits. We mostly wished them luck. Luck, of course, runs its limits. The old VW still sits, now a relic in a vigorous blackberry patch. You look in there you can almost read AVANT-GARDENS painted on its side. Somedays you can almost see the 60’s looking back at you out of the opera windows as the bus navigates the berry boulevards headed toward the bluff.

Since most of the staff here are too young to remember the days back when we built the first Senile Center, they asked an old codger like myself to address all you youngsters, maybe give a short history lesson. So pay attention, I don’t want to have to repeat myself and change the facts due to an overactive memory overload.

Back at the dawn of time, the Camano and Stanwood Senior Center were one and the same, what they cleverly called the Camwood Senior Center, what is now the Stanwoodopolis Senior Center still up at the old Lincoln School, but in 1973 Camano’s population of geriatric insurrectionists seceded from the group and formed the Camano Confederacy, what they called the Senior Services of Island County to make this look legitimate. Like a lot of secessionists, they struggled. They had a pitiful little office in where the 2nd Chance Thrift Store is today, they had a senior social worker available at a desk they rented at the Plaza, they served meals at the Lutheran Church, and they rented freezer space at the Plaza for Meals on Wheels.

In the late 70’s the Seniors decided it was time to put all these eggs into one basket. They put up a thermometer and raised the matching money to build that beautiful blue box of a building the county’s probably gonna tear down soon. It was built as a Multi-Purpose Building, only part Senior Services, but a lot of other functions too in order to qualify for the grant they got. To qualify for senior center matching grants required 50% matching money but a multi-purpose facility only needed 25%? Money talked real loud back then. This served as the hub of Camano activities for two decades and probably should be preserved as a National Historic Site. You know, Early Metal Pole Building, late 20th century, the blue period. That, or a museum to toxic black mold and bad septic. Admission free. Just sign the disclaimer.

Well, we’re talking about 1978, bout the time Jimmy Carter was contemplating an early retirement himself. The County donated the land and like I said, we had that big thermometer for fundraising and before you knew it, we got the donations to help the County finish off the blue building most everybody thought was a Bingo Parlor. Cost $98,000 and change in 1978 currency.
When we built the first Senile Center and Camano Casino in l978 we didn’t have much else BUT retirees on the island. Marla Ries and me were practically teenagers then, probably not even voting or drinking age. We didn’t have schools on the island back in those simpler times… which might tell you how many kids lived on Camano. Which is why we built a Senior Center and not a Youth Center. So Marla and me didn’t get a place of our own to smoke in back of with all the other juvenile delinquents.

About l980 or so I was just starting my career of being Chronically Unemployed when I got wind the Senior Center needed an assistant director. Part time, low pay. Perfect for a retired fella like myself. I put my ponytail down the back of my best fairly clean shirt and interviewed with the Director. She told me in no uncertain terms she couldn’t hire a man for the job. Scare the bejabbers out of the elderly ladies. Probably true. Probably still is. But …. A clear case of Re-Verse Discrimination. Sure, I could’ve called the ACLU, I could’ve gone to the Supreme Court, I could’ve forced them to take me on, but I’m a South Ender and a South Ender eats what’s put on his plate, no complaints, just glad for supper. Boiled nettles, whatever. So my chance for Marla’s Ries’s job slipped away …. I’d have to say mighty damn lucky for Camano.

Say what you will about that ugly old blue box, those folks inside worked wonders with what they had. The testament to that, you might think, is this fine Taj Majal they built for the island. Fancy pants fireplaces and a library nicer practically than Stanwood’s Sno-Isle Day Care Center and Book Drop. State of the art kitchen and nettle steamers. Beautifully landscaped grounds. Sparkling indoor restrooms…. with no backdrafting odors.

But like the Olden Days, the building isn’t the real show. The truth is with all the programs they administer and the events they put on and the classes they teach and the meals on wheels and the outreach social services and I could go on all the live-long day, these folks are the heart and soul of this island and that’s a fact. So …. It’s good to see you troops massing here today! The Band and me are proud to stand here with you. Altho …. Next time, if we’re gonna dress up, maybe we could all get some decent hats…..

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-big-yellow-schoolbus.mp3[/podcast]audio — big yellow schoolbus