The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yes, it’s that time of year again when the South End Yacht Club opens its very exclusive membership to qualified applicants.  Commodore Jerry and his shipmates down at the Marina invite any seaworthy skippers among you to apply for a berth among the elite few at our fabulous dock and its newly refurbished ‘Wheelhouse’, once a thriving cannery for the world famous South End Free Range Clam Company.  Before the clams made their untimely escape.

Situated on the leeward side of Camano Island and protected from the storms of winter and the radioactive tsunami debris of Japan, South End Yacht Club offers year round moorage and E-Z access to the area’s unmatched water playgrounds.  Discover the hidden waterfront of Stanwoodopolis, only minutes away by boat, or venture to fine picknicking at the Head where fishing and crabbing are abundant.

Membership includes year round moorage with water and electric available, live-aboard rights, lighted boat ramp accessible at most high tides, clean Porta-Potties provided and maintained by South End Water Loo, plus free admission the many gala events planned at the Wheelhouse once repairs are complete.  Scheduled events this year include Sunday breakfast buffets by Chef Bluebeard and his spatula savvy sailors, the annual June nautical auction and Lost and Found Sale, the ever popular Summer Salsa Dance and Rum Slam, plus much much more.

If you act soon, you’ll receive, as part of your initiation package, a free life preserver, South End Yacht Club epaulets and Captain’s cap in your choice of colors and one free drink at the Backwash, the Wheelhouse lounge ‘where liquor is liberal and the prices are conservative’.  Join us now and wet your rudders and your whistle.

South End Yacht Club  — the island’s most exclusive gunkhole.  Sail to a new adventure on the fabulous South End!  Apply today.

They’re in a terrible kerfuffle down at the Flame-Ons! now that Lottie Johnson quit the post of Women’s Fire Auxilliary President.  Resigned in a huff, a snit, a flame-throwing kiss-my-caboose departure right in the middle of the June meeting  to decide what to fundraise for in the coming annum.  When she hit the door at the VFD meeting hall, the vacuum swept 4 or 5 others out with her in full irate sympathy.  The ladies left on their metal folding chairs with paper dessert plates half finished in their laps said not a word for at least two minutes, exchanging raised eyebrows and hesitant smiles.

“Looks like you’re the new President, Connie,” someone finally said, breaking the silence.  Connie said no, No, NO, someone else, anyone else.

The trouble is, there’s the Old Guard auxiliaries, the women who remember that era when the station was pretty much Party Central for the South End fireboyz, beer cases stacked higher than fire equipment up the wall, Tuesday night ‘practices’ pretty much a kegger.  Their mothers had served in the Auxilliary and this was their club.  But new arrivals to the area had joined, exhibiting civic pride and plenty of zeal, hoping to make a difference.  And make it quick.  Way of the World, I suppose, but old blood and new blood don’t mix.  Type A’s vs. tired blood.  You see it in the South End Historical Society, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, down at the Bizness Association.  Who ARE those nouveau riche pretenders and what do they want from us?  It was a sociable group before, a lot of fun and friendship — it’s a political nightmare now.  What was tea and cookies now has an evangelical air.  We need to organize, we need to fundraise, we need to lobby the commissioners, we need to get active!  The old plant sale just wouldn’t do.  Would NOT DO!

Now they had a fire district with paid fire fighters at every station.  Well, not the South End station.  They were building or upgrading new stations all over the island.  Well, not the South End station.  It was getting hard to find volunteers when up northcountry the firefighters were being paid handsomely.  Times were changing, Lottie would say, time, ladies, for us to change too.  Oh yeah, there’s a fire smoldering down at the Station, she liked to say, and it was up to us to put it out.

Well, Lottie is gone now, at least for a time.  And that burnt rubber smell in the Flame-Ons! meetings won’t go away soon.  That fire is still smoldering and the trouble is, they got rid of all those cases of beer years ago.  Who knows if it would’ve helped put out this fire.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-singin-to-the-choir.mp3[/podcast]audio — singin to the choir

Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm.  Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel.  It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently.  The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run in with a six point buck  four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers.  Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed.  She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip.  Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot.  Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill.  “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked.  Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point.  Something to consider.  Definitely something to consider.  Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor.  If he stayed long enough.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/AUDIO-SENILE-CENTER-SURROGATE.mp3[/podcast]AUDIO — SENILE CENTER SURROGATE

We don’t really have a Senior Center on the South End.  The Diner is sort of a substitute, but you need to at least buy a cup of coffee before you park in a booth or belly up to the counter for the daily gossip specials.  The vintage car guyz, the Flatheads, fill the joint Wednesday morning.  Tuesdays the Bible study crowd rolls in and most of the regulars roll out.  It’s not that they’re religious averse, but like Freddy the Freeloader sez, Sunday’s plenty.  Freddy gets his disability checks first of every month.  He’s a busted up stump jumper chain choker from the days when logging was man’s work all right but good luck living to be an old man.  If he had his druthers, the Diner would be church a-plenty.

The AA used to congregate on Fridays, but Brenda, the Diner’s owner since 1987, finally asked them to find another meeting place.  She was losing money on their endless coffee refills and the parking lot out front looked like Pittsburg in Carnegie’s day, the smoke from their unfiltered Camels hanging heavy on air inversions.  Plus, she and Big Larry, the grillman, had quit drinking years ago and the new AA members’ determined but usually hopeless drought between benders or DUI’s depressed them mightily.  Half them ended up in Bible study anyway so AA didn’t complain very vocally, just moved it on up to the toxic mold blue Camano Center the County rents cheap and never cleans up.

Thursdays now the Zumba crowd pulls in after an hour of aerobics at the nearby South Grange, mostly post-Mom women desperately fighting the midriff bulges and Michelin Man thighs.  After a morning workout they replaced the calories lost with Brenda’s Blue Plate Specials, burger baskets with fries and slaw and fountain Coke they could get refills on for free, sort of a zero sum gain.  But without the guilt.  They earned every calorie!

We been thinking about maybe fundraising for a Senile Center.  Lot of work.  Lot of money.  Something ever happened to the Diner, maybe we’d motivate.  Meanwhile, the coffee’s cheap and the gossip’s free.  You ask me, we got the best of both worlds.  Without the Book of Revelations or the 12 step program.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-boom-city-prognosticatian.mp3[/podcast]audio — boom city prognostication

Now I know there are a lot of economic indices the government uses to track the ups and downs of this recession we’re in, everything from unemployment figures to manufacturing exports to consumer confidence statistics to balance of trade ratios. If nothing else, it creates employment for unemployed economists and down-on-their-luck statisticians so I guess it’s a small step forward toward ending the current recession.

Down here on the collateralized and leveraged South End, we got our own tried and true methodologies, tested over many years and virtually foolproof, which, if you know many of us South Enders, is a priority if not a Must. What we do is sort of skip the Dow Jones rise or fall and just get right to the Meat of the Matter. Forget adjusting for inflation or what the euro is doing against the dollar —- it’s just fiscal mumbo jumbo and if the Smart Boyz were so damn smart, why are we in a recession in the first place? Which, if you stop and think about it —like we do — you just answered the question.

Our economic analysis is pretty straightforward. What we do once a year on the 4th of July is grab a few adult beverages, a cooler full is best, and head down to any convenient bulkhead toward dark. We sit there and watch the neighbors’ firework displays. And Whidbey’s. And Mukilteo’s. All those bombs bursting in air. This year the neighbors spent the approximate GDP of Slovenia and Slovakia combined, way more than last year and far more than the couple of previous ones. You got money — discretionary income — to blow on spinning bees and kamikaze komets and screaming banshees or magnum bangums, don’t tell us what the price of gas at the pump is or how many housing starts this month or what the bankruptcy filings or bank defaults are. We can see with our own two eyes and hear with our own two ears the economic recovery in full kaleidoscopic Technicolor view.

Three years ago these poor waterfront patriots were reduced to pathetic hand held sparklers and shot a few fizzy Roman Candles. It was a sordid show of pessimistic patriotism, even by South End standards. This year, Whoo-EEE, the gated communities cleaned out Boom City and the Chapel Fireworks Stand too. Blew em off well into July 5th. It looked like Baghdad that first aerial saturation bombing back in the days when America had more money than it knew what to do with. You want to know if the recession is really over — take a whiff of the cordite wafting up your bluff. That’s the smell of new money, buddy.