The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddle at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

You want to learn something about Failure, ask an artist. We been there, we done that, we’ll probably do it again. Some folks think failure is an excuse to quit, chalk it up to hard knocks, move on to something else. Artists, we have ourselves on the line. We’re painting, we’re writing, we’re singing something, integral to ourselves. We can’t sell it, we can’t get approval; we can’t make others see what it is we see, the beauty of it, the truth of it, we can’t just walk away, shrug it off, pick up a hammer and become a carpenter. If we do, the house we’re building becomes the art. And I bet you dollars to Degas we aren’t going to become bond traders next.

The trouble with failure for us artists is we’re forced to make sense of it. It’s not really external, some quirk of bad luck, even if, for awhile, we rationalize it. We live in a market place society, for good or bad. We live and die by the cash register. And that society doesn’t much care about any art other than Mass Commercial Art. Odds are pretty certain, you’ll fail. So you have to ask yourself, why go on?

I had two gallery owners on the island tell me their definition of art was simple: it’s what sells. The Van Gogh earlobe ‘myth’ of a guy killing himself with only one sale to his name, then becoming discovered, was hogwash, they said. Sales, that’s the measure, darling, that’s the bar to reach if you want to be a success.

I know too many South Enders who are fine artists who don’t rack up sales. A couple are great artists and they make the least money. I would cry out loud and flush my credit card if they quit because revenues were paltry. We do what we do out of a need to recreate the world, to make it over to resemble ourselves, to make manifest that inchoate yearning we feel and need to express in some way or other. On the South End this is fairly normal — most other places, this a definition of failure. No need to tell you, but …. I sure don’t plan to move any time soon.

Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

Awhile back I ran into one of my new neighbors out taking the air. I introduced myself as the guy across the road and he told me his name. “So, Bernie,” I asked, figuring this was his retirement house after years in a career, what he’d been saving that nest egg for and whoopee, the Golden Years had finally arrived, “how do you like retirement?”

Bernie looked a bit bemused over the spectacles he peered over to take ‘the full measure of me’, some impertinent upstart probing too deeply on first contact. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added a little impishly. He took a little while, either pondering the question or wondering whether to dignify it with an answer.

“Not much,” he said finally. “It’s harder to accustom to than I thought it would be.” I asked why he felt that way and he said he’d had some prestige in his former career that was now suddenly missing. “I demanded respect,” he said sternly, “and I got it.”

“Well, Bernie,” I grinned, “I’d get over THAT. Nobody down here gives a hoot or holler what you did before. You get to start brand new. Nobody’s gonna salute the old generals now and anyway, the war’s over. Take a load off. Enjoy the sunsets. Walk the beach. It’s why we call it retirement.”

I don’t know if Bernie ever did get over it. Some folks hang their awards and medals on the wall, hoping, I guess, to just keep on re-living their Glory Days. Me, I say high school’s come and gone, good riddance. The South End’s a funny melting pot, mostly us yahoo retirees bent on figuring out how to make the rest of life interesting without hauling along the weight of the past. Retirement’s hard enough starting from scratch and not driving the mizzus insane being underfoot. And I know for a steel hard, take-it-to-the-bank fact, the mizzus isn’t going to salute either. Down here, we’re all privates in this woman’s army.