The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you used to write Christmas Cards , the one time of year you actually put pen to paper and wrote a note to old friends, family members, school chums, co-workers and anyone else you hated to lose touch with, good opportunity to keep a thin thread of connection. Happy Holidays! Some of you typed up a chronicle of what you and the spouse and kids did over the past 12 months, a huge yawn to most of those not in the immediate family circle, but it saved you all those handwritten notes even if it bored the pajamas off the rest of us.

One year I sent a mock chronicle of the Daddle Family’s year long escapades, a summary of drug rehab, chronic depression, school dropouts, cult joining, a litany of the exact opposite of the usual success stories of the kids and their beaming parents. A few of the recipients who actually read this were confused and later remarked they never realized we had children. We don’t. So much for satire in the era of text messaging.

Or you could do like a lot of my lame relatives, use one of those family group photos, pay Shutterfly to make a few cards, then send it with no note whatsoever, maybe not even sign the damn thing and call it good for another holiday season. Bah humbug, I say. What a waste of a stamp. What a statement to the recipient. We’re too busy to scribble a single thought on this hectic holiday but we managed to address the envelope. Thanks, y’all, thanks not at all. Thought that counts, right?

Now, of course, we get e-mail Holiday Greetings, some with music and individualized identifiers of us as the recipients. Merry Christmas, Skeeter, followed by some corporation’s cute and humorous video, no doubt a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards, updated for the 21st Century and the social media crowd.

I just finished sending 3 dozen handmade Christmas cards, all with a long personal letter to folks who will probably not send anything this year and if they do, count on it, just a store-bought card with their signature under the Happy Holiday text inside. My shirt sleeve relatives will send the family photo card and no message, probably not even a signature. They figure I can identify them in the picture, I guess. Every year I say I’m not going to do this again. And so, I’m saying it again. Oh, if you’re reading this, have a great holiday. Sorry I didn’t include a family photo but Susie’s still in rehab and Wyatt’s commune doesn’t allow picture taking. Maybe next year….

Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. He kept on digging the hole he was digging. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl, the night bartender, will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

Christmas on the South End isn’t like the movies, all tinsel and presents under a twinkling tree, eggnog and caroling. Unless you wanted a chunk of coal you didn’t bother putting up stockings by the chimney for old St. Nick to fill. Us kids just figured we were all naughty, not nice by somebody’s standards, so we got what we deserved. Pretty much nothing. Whoever decided Santa was judge and jury anyway?

Oh sure, sometimes we got a gift card from Tyee Store. Swell, thanks Mom, Thanks, Dad. Thought that counts, right? No, Christmas wasn’t our favorite holiday. Must be some folks’ favorite, though, judging by the strings of lights hanging all year long around the neighbors’ houses. Why bother taking them down when the nouveau riche have a consumer holiday 365 days of the livelong year?

Christmas down here now is a lot like Amazon. It gobbles up all the other little holiday competitors. Used to be Christmas started right after Thanksgiving. For those of you who quit using math, that’s about 30 days of shopping. A month, an entire month. I was in a store last year that started putting up the Christmas decorations right after Halloween. This year most of them did. And some, I kid you not, started before Halloween. That’s over two months, 60 days in case you don’t have the calendar app. That’s a lot of Bing Crosby muzak.

My neighbors who never take the strings of lights off their gutters all year round, maybe they celebrate their own birthday for a couple months, I don’t know. Presents every day for weeks and weeks. We got Black Friday, Internet Monday, the holiday that never really ends, whoopee! Did I say Christmas was a little like Amazon? Amazon IS Christmas, 365 days, don’t forget Leap Year. One day delivery. Drones, not reindeer, next year, count on it.

And oh yeah, before I forget, Merry Christmas one and all. From now until eternity.

Well, Christmas on the overcast South End is gonna be a little less jolly this year. Naw, not because most of us can’t afford presents for our loved ones, what with this half decade recession keeping us in the ranks of the chronically unemployed, but because of the news that Santa was being investigated by a grand jury on insider trading charges with MasterCard, Visa, Capitol One and American Express. Turns out old St. Nick was nicking all of us all along.

Tis the season, I guess. The media blitz for total consumer obedience is cranking up earlier than Thanksgiving now, urging us to buy buy buy whether we can afford it or not. Personally I like the car company ad that has the kids on Santa’s lap explaining to the bewildered old poop in his droopy cap and fat guy velvet suit how they want a full size pick-up truck or a fully equipped sedan. Captures perfectly the true spirit of the holiday, you ask me. Cash or credit on that? Hmm, Santa probably figured out which side his toast was buttered either right then and there or else it was the umpteenth millionth kid with the minimum wage parents wanting an X-box and a few thousand dollars of video games.

Even worse news for the soon-to-be indicted Mr. Claus and his sweatshop up in the Arctic Circle is the rumor of a class action lawsuit by his undocumented elves for withholding overtime pay and denying them sick leave. He may ultimately avoid legal sanctions and some frigid prison time if he’s got a good attorney, and you can bet he does, but the brutal publicity may take some of the shine off his squeaky clean grandfatherly image. The wolves are circling up there at the Circle and there’s little doubt the Justice Dep’t. will soon start investigating that offshore account of his, North Pole Equities, to see where the money leads. Even if it’s all perfectly legal, the spokesman for Christmas Past and Christmas Present may not get the nod come Christmas Future. The Powers That Be don’t need a cloud of guilt hanging over their pitchman and potential sales threatened by scandal.

After all, Christmas is as American as an ATM machine and the Lotto. For all the bogus controversy about the government clamping down on what might once have been a religious holiday of some sort, let’s be honest with ourselves, it IS about religion. Capitalism. Whatever else it WAS has been swept asunder under a consumer juggernaut that feeds the economy. Keep playing Bing Crosby songs at the mall and haul out the cute reindeer for a few months, most of us are so anesthetized we’d gladly go deeper into debt to shut off the saccharine insanity. This year, put an automobile under the tree. Santa’s getting 1% kickback on every credit card purchase. This year, let’s help the old guy out…. and the economy too. Fa la la la laaaawyer, as we say down here.

You might find it hard to believe, but the South End used to be a Destination Spot. The whole island did. The island you could drive to, one developer in the 80’s called it, but 50 years before that, the resorts promoted it the same way.

Camp Grande, Diane, Tyee, Cama, Madrona, Indian Beach, Camp Lagoon, Sunset Beach, Utsalady Beach, Camp Comfort. The poor miserable sweltering city folks could escape their sizzling apartments and rent a cabin for the week. All day long the menfolk would do what menfolk have done since Cro-Magnon dropped their tails and descended from the branches of the nut-trees. They’d sit on their butts and drink. Course we modernists call it FISHING. Which is really a euphemism for Drinking.

When the boat was full of empties and dead salmon, the boys would pull up on the beach and wobble up to the mizzus with their trophy salmons and do what menfolk have done since the 2nd day they hit the ground. Order the womenfolk to cook up the catch.

Back then they had these cute pioneer woodstoves in every cabin. Women must’ve really liked this. Their menfolk, being he-men, could split up the firewood with an axe, probably whacking off a couple of fingers and toes, and she could stand over a 500 degree stove in a cabin with all the doors and windows open and the kitchen about 400 degrees, and she could fry up some smelly fish for the whole squalling family. Later she could wash the burnt-on skillets and the rest in water boiled on the stove. She probably had the time of her life playing pioneer mizzus.

The resorts are all gone now, end of an era on the South End. Some say the fishing dried up. I say the women finally got fed up.