The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Used to be, in the spring, we’d haul our firewood in.  The winter storms blew part down and we’d cut the rest.  The slash, we’d stack up and burn.  Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for nearly a week.  Keep dragging the downfall over to a bed of coals so deep it’d catch the root systems of the long-gone old growth firs on fire and they’d smolder for weeks, spreading along 500 year old tributaries of pitch, sort of an underground river of fire.

We knew every square inch of our nettle forest.  The places where the bleeding hearts had gotten established.  The gullies where nothing but ferns grew beneath the cedars.  The salmonberry savannahs and the nettle jungles.  We found the old shelter where Yazel’s kids had made a fort and built a temple with homemade idolatrous animal gods.  We discovered the pioneers’ dumps with the old dishes and the linament bottles.  We knew what their favorite whisky was and when they got lightbulbs.

You explore your woods and you discover the past.  The stumps of those giant Doug firs with the gash still there where the loggers shoved a springboard so they could saw above the rock hard wood at the base — you still see em.  You find the barbed wire strangling a maple, then finally it’s swallowed inside where the fence line kept the cows.  Cedar snags charred from the fire of the 1890’s when the entire South End burned.

Some of the past is too far gone.  The old barn didn’t have good timber left.  The pig pen barely did.  Some of my own shelters and outbuildings are long gone now, leaving not a clue for the next folks.  The woods is a history book.  It’s a museum going to ruin.  It’s a lesson to me every year that what we do will be swallowed and lost and forgotten.  Something about that I find a comfort, I guess.  Knowing that we’ll disappear back into the rot and the rust as surely as the trees will fall — something humbling about this.  Something part of something relentlessly ongoing.

Every year we go back in there.  And some day we won’t come out.  Someone else will burn the tree that grows on me.  Someone else can warm themselves on that…  I just hope they pay a small respect.  We aren’t the first.  We sure aren’t the last….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/audio-recession-hits-the-south-end1.mp3[/podcast]audio — recession hits the south end!!

Like Dylan’s songs says — and the South End believes — when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.  So naturally we figured we were totally immune to the ravages of the Great Recession.  No jobs, no layoffs….  No hopes, no disappointment….  No woman, no cry…..    Hellfire, we’re practically an ascetic Zen monastery down here, one hand clapping.

And then the Unthinkable happened.  Tyee Store is about to close its doors.  I’ve lived here since 1977 and except for a Christmas or two, Tyee Store was OPEN, rain, shine, hell or high water.  From the Snowdens, who built the original store back in the Dark Ages,  to the Bartletts who made it the economic juggernaut of the South End, to Helen and Don who retired the E-coli dog rotisserie in favor of homemade Texas BBQ sandwiches, the store has been a Permanent Fixture, an icon of the South End Way, a testament that money can still be made the old fashioned way.  No, not hard work.  By selling cigarettes and alcohol and lotto.  Tyee was the prototype for every 7-11, Quicki Mart, Stop N Shop, Kwik Stop convenience store in America.  Their motto —  Fast is Worth More – spread faster than the Bird Flu Pandemic of 2008.

Somewhere in the Heartland, the original Golden Arches still stands, a living monument to American genius in slick advertisement, assembly line cuisine and tasty non-nutritious fare served on a white bread bun in a white Styrofoam take-out container that is easily tossed from another American icon, the very large gas guzzling automobile.

Tyee Store, soon to be shuttered, OPEN neon dark, outhouse next door locked, will stand as mute testament to that era of the South End when we didn’t need no stinking permits, we didn’t need fresh vegetables, we smoked what we wanted when we wanted, we considered Lotto our only necessary 401-K and we all knew, every man woman and child of us, where to go to get it.  If they didn’t have it, we didn’t need it.  Sure it cost a little more.  That was the Tyee Store.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/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/2012/04/audio-tulip-co-op.mp3[/podcast]audio –tulip co-op

Some of you aging hippies out there probably remember the old Skagit Valley Co-op when it used to sit down on the other end of town.  Close to the jail so the sheriff could keep an eye on who came and went, all us young longhairs would come out of the jungle once a year to get provisioned up.  Fill in what we couldn’t grow …. And catch up on the current events here in Mt. Vernon and Gomorrah.

I tell you what, that was a historic place, that old Co-op.  Sure didn’t have room for a fancy Deli or a free range meat section or specialty cheeses from around the world.  Don’t remember much of a Beauty and Cosmetic section.  Mighta been a magazine rack with Mother Earth News, but that’s all we needed really.  Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Naw…. Our shacks were beyond Martha Stewarting…..

Over the past 25 years the Co-op’s grown up along with us.  Its belt kept expanding one notch at a time until finally they just bought the whole damn block.  Sort of downtown Mt. Vernon’s answer to Wal-Mart.

You think back to those humble beginnings, the cramped bins of grain and the teeny-weeny check-out stand, the loyal customers and the always great staff, you can appreciate how far they’ve come.  And maybe us too.  I know I’ve baked about one million loaves of bread ground from their grains.  And even tho my homebrewing has diminished a bit since they got the giant beer and wine section, a lot of fond memories were from those moonshining Co-op days — even if those memories are starting to slip.

Mt. Vernon, I don’t need to tell you, took a different route than its neighbor to the north.  Kept its history.  Kept its soul.  For those of us who still make the hard trek in from the hinterlands, we want to say thanks.  And if there’s any sheriff deputies reading this, I was just kidding about that moonshining……