The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sometimes I lose track of time. Not just the days of the last week. I forget how old I am, all those years behind me. I’ll be looking at one of our Doug firs and think, my god that’s one bigass tree, neglecting to consider that it was fairly large when I came here 47 years ago. You stop and think how much difference half a century made the first half of last century, then how accelerated change was the second half, trust me, future shock is real.

We live down here in the backwash South End of Camano. What was a fairly desolate tail end of the island is now filling in with Boeing and Weyerhauser retirees, Dot.comers who cashed in early and refugees from California whose house back when it cost a couple hundred grand now makes them multi-millionaires up here. I suspect if we sold our homestead we could probably be the Nuevo royalty in Kansas or upstate Alabama. But then who wants to be King of the Louisiana swamps or Duke of the tundra in Upper Michigan. I already left those places — sure don’t want to go back just to own more acreage of swamp or snow drifts.

But … you stay put, the world doesn’t. I’ve resisted change ever since I parked my hippie ass down here, just wanted to be left the hell alone, good luck to the rest of so-called civilization. Still don’t have a cellphone but the mizzus does. I finally had to learn how to use a computer, got one on my desk up at the house I built 30 years ago. All those homesteader skills I learned, everything from plumbing to electric, carpentry to woodworking, they’re all mostly anachronistic now. 3-D printing, Artificial Intelligence, 5-G networks, drone warfare, hundreds of satellites orbiting, electric cars, social media, driverless vehicles, gene manipulation, not all of it bad, just the relentless push of progress, technology ascendant, all of us wired, connected to the Hive.

My father, recently deceased at 100 years old, told us boys on one of our Huck Finn Mississippi River houseboat trips back through the Wisconsin/Minnesota and Illinois/Iowa cliffs, he thought he’d lived in the best of times. Despite the Depression and World War Two. I think maybe I’ve lived through the tail end of those times. What’s coming next will be totally, unpredictably, different. Personally, I’m glad I’m old.

My brother and I are about to make a long road trip back to Northern Maine where our family is from up next to the Canadian border. We’ll have our parents’ ashes in a couple of matching urns which we’ll have interred in the graveyard a block away from where our Old Man was born, not exactly a homecoming but a full circle nevertheless. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, clichéd or not. Our mother’s family graveyard is 7 miles north up Highway 1, not more than a quarter mile from where she was born at the farm nearby. She died a few years ago and the Old Man died a month ago. Time to make the journey back, I guess.

Those cemeteries go back to the early 1800’s. A lot of relatives buried there the past few centuries, two more on the way, but I doubt my brother and I will be buying plots for ourselves. Don’t think because we’re burying our parents back there we have plans to join them. Or the rest of the clan. We’re just honoring their wishes. I suppose the only requiem, the only memorial, if we can call it either, will be a weeklong reminiscence between just the two of us.

After Dad died, folks asked if I was okay. Sure, I said, the man was 100 years old, had a good life, survived World War Two, had a very successful career in the Forest Service, lived alone until a couple of years ago and still drove, still cooked for himself, wasn’t in any pain at the end, died in his sleep, an easy exit. What, I should want him to last a few more years, become a vegetable? He got to die with dignity, nothing to be sad about. We should all be so lucky…. Our mother, not so much. And still, not that bad either.

There was a poet, a guy named Bly back in Minnesota, who started some drug circle thing, men getting in touch with their inner selves, who claimed a man could never truly be a man until his father died. What a cart of horseshit! My brother and I took weeks off most years to boat down the Mississippi in houseboats, up the Suwanee and St. John’s Rivers in Florida, into Canada for fishing trip, camping up the eastern seaboard, listening to the Old Man’s life. We’d let him skipper the boats, sometimes to our peril. Great trips. All of them. We’ll take one last one together. Coming home it’ll be just us boys.

Desperation may very well be the mother of invention but the South End Sinerama’s dream of an outdoor cinema showing soft core x-rated porn is proof that desperation may lead to even worse straits. When the vaudeville circuit dried up for the once infamous Dr. Daring, fire eater, sword swallower and bed of nails expert, he was forced to seek creative outlets beyond the archaic stages of his youth. You don’t run into fire eaters often down at the South End — probably for good reason — but if you’d ever seen the death defying Dr. Daring take a sword down his throat, you’d never forget it, even if you’d never want to witness it a second time.

Doc Daring, for who know what reason — possibly fleeing demons or debt collectors — ended up a long stone’s throw from me. He built a primitive house at his acreage down the road, then slowly filled it with dead automobiles, rusting RV’s, rotting boats, bikes, motorcycles, deceased appliances plus a menagerie of various animals, all the junk and detritus he apparently needed to keep. Hard, I guess, to let go of the past.

Doc made the occasional appearance at alternative fairs and events, mixed in his political patter with flame throwing, but the money was too little and too far between. His life was rapidly becoming its own bed of nails. One stoned night he must have had the inspiration for the Sinerama. He erected a big top style canvas tent, built a frame for a plywood screen he painted white, ran an extension cord out from the shack and started advertising his 16mm vintage porn palace.

Any fool among us South Enders could have told him — as if he would listen — that the Little Church in the Ravine would come howling out of their pews to put a stop to what front page news as far away as Seattle called Camano and Gomorrah. Oh, a few bored teenage boys came once or twice but smirking in a drafty tent on crappy lawn chair lost its novelty pretty quick. Doc eventually got the message after multiple visits by the sheriff’s deputies looking for underage kids and after the attendance dwindled to near nothing.

Lately he’s been showing old ‘30’s fare, Betty Boop cartoons and Laurel and Hardy movies, which draws a few local folks with their kids, probably the ones who never heard of the Sinerama’s heydays. The past, I guess it’s safe to say, is always prologue on the salty South End. Or at least prolonged….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/audio-work1.mp3[/podcast]audio — work

The South End is pretty much the Petri Dish of Entrepreneurial Experimentation.  You got folks like myself who think employment is a capitalist conspiracy and a semi-voluntary gulag, you’ll get every mutation, hybridization, and variant on self-employment, from mail order scams to drug dealing, from con-artists to glass artists.   Work, in the immortal words of our idol Maynard G. Krebs, is a four letter word used basically as an interrogatory.  If we’d been looking for JOBS, we sure wouldn’t have moved to the tail end of an island that’s zoned 99% residential.

Still, a person has to pay the rent, a person has to eat, a person has to buy gas just to get back home.  So we have to live by our wits.  I know, trust me, I know! how disadvantaged that makes us.  But like a good scientist will tell you — even failed experiments are worthwhile.  It sets a Dead End sign up for the next grant writer.  There are lessons to be learned from us!

We’ve tried most everything.  Boat building, puppy pampering, organic nettle supplement sales, expresso shops that open at noon, art galleries that rarely open at all, specialty plant sales, llama ranching and ostrich herding, ziplines over the Tyee trout pond, outdoor movies back in the swamps, quail factories next door to me, mushroom starts in rotting alder, free range clam beds, ferret kennels, stained glass repair, website design, chainsaw sharpening, kayak rentals, Cajun catering, moonshine merlot distilling, pond engineering.  Just to scratch the surface…..

In the end we work as hard as all immigrants.  We escaped the Time Clock and the supervisors only to enslave ourselves to the new overlord — us.  The missus sez if you worked a ‘real’ job, you’d work half as much and make twice the money.  Even if she does have a point, she misses the real one, the crux of it, the kernel of eternal truth, the wisdom behind our apparent folly.  We don’t think of it as work.  And if the point needed proving ….. neither does the IRS.

I thought by now this gun control issue would’ve settled down.  But judging by the debates down at the Diner over breakfast, I’d say it’s only gotten worse.  The arguments are so heated, Big Larry doesn’t bother turning on the gas for the grill in order to fry our bacon and eggs.  And even so, they taste burnt to me.  Jenny, the owner, posted a sign LEAVE YOUR GUN TALK OUTSIDE.  ORDER OF THE SHERIFF.  Sort of meant to be humorous, but not totally.

Walter, the first morning of Sheriff Jenny’s edict, shouted, “Now what?  They’re taking away our first AND second amendment rights??!!”  And so the café was filled with the porcelain decibels of pounding coffee cups, pointed forks and knives, veiled threats and hurled insults.  The biscuits and gravy crowd squared off against the oatmeal and wheat toast faction, but both sides had higher blood pressure by the time they paid their bill.  Poor Anita, the referee and waitress most mornings, got about half her usual tips.  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” she would say to every guest.  “I’m not taking sides — I’m just an innocent bystander!”

Walter wore his NRA cap every day and threatened to bring his weapons to breakfast, as was his right and even his civic duty, according to the Constitution according to the gun lobby, according to Walter.  Big Larry made it absolutely clear that wasn’t going to happen on his watch, not on HIS grill.  Happily, Walter, despite overwhelming firepower against Larry’s spatula and scraper, decided to leave his arsenal at home.

Last breakfast Walter was ranting about the government doctors asking patients if they owned a gun, if they ever felt depressed, if they ever had violent thoughts.  Hank, our local attorney, looked over his coagulating oatmeal and said, “All they’re trying to do is intervene in a potential suicide before some depressed slob shoots himself.  Which,” he added, “is a helluva lot of people.”  Walter posited that no, it was just an excuse to make a list of gun owners so they could take our weapons away.

“Well, said Hank, “ if you’re so all-fired worried, why are you telling all of US you got guns?”  That, it goes without saying, sent Walter off on a caffeinated rage.  I didn’t really help by adding that personally I was all FOR suicide by gun and all those poor Rambos with paranoia might consider similar relief.  Needless to say, Walter and I aren’t on speaking terms, but I don’t consider it an abrogation of our first amendment rights.  You’re just as free NOT to speak and maybe a lot of us ought to exercise that a little more often.