The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Amid rumors that our commissioners have decided to divest the county of its parks, the South End Environmental Koalition (SEEK) has begun a campaign to Save Our Parks (SOP). Ginny Davis, the newly appointed president, spoke at the South End Chamber of Commerce, arguing that parks mean tourism and tourism means dollars. Ralph Hinshaw asked if she thought our little 5 acre park —Hutchison Park — really brought tourists into our ‘economic sphere’.

“Seriously, Ginny,” he asked, “who the hell comes to that park except teenagers doing drugs and having sex? You think they’re going to fuel the economy down here?” Ginny realized she’d maybe gone down the wrong cul-de-sac, citing economic growth where economics barely existed, but Harry Walton, owner of Tyee Megastore, stood up and declared he sold a lot of ice cream bars to the bicyclists who stopped at the store and he’d seen more than a few eating popsicles at the picnic tables down at the park an eighth of a mile north.

Ralph avowed how he’d never seen a soul down there much less a motorcycle gang with sweet tooths. Ginny, who didn’t catch the humor in that, asked, “What do you think, Ralph? Sell the park for a building lot? Not much revenue in a single house on a lot zoned for 5 acre rural residential.”

The South End only has this one park. Course it only has one store. One diner. One hair salon. And two art galleries. Which are extraordinary if you’ll allow me to play art critic. We got plenty of art studios, some good, some not, but they all add to the mythology of the fabled South End, if not, admittedly, to the tax base.

Personally, I think the park should stay. I don’t give a fig or a fart if folks throng to its short trails and its unused BBQ grills or notice the flowers or idiosyncratic sculpture. Some day when this is an art mecca for weary urbanites, they’ll have a place to pull in and check the GPS for how to get home. Meanwhile the teenagers got a place for backroad sex.

Some years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.

ome years back the South End Chamber of Commerce got an injection of enthusiasm when Brenda Bodice joined up and was made President at her first meeting. Being president, some folks think, is a grand honor. Those folks never joined an organization in their lives, obviously. Never been to a meeting, never served on a Board, never got out much. Presidents are people who like the title the way a rich guy likes a Hummer. It gets rotten mileage, it drives like a tank, it looks like a Toy for Testosterone Challenged Idiots. But … it’s big, it takes up most of the highway, and … you can’t help but notice it.

Brenda, though, God bless her heart and the proudly displayed breasts it beats beneath, wanted to vitalize the Chamber of Commerce Board. She was owner of the Pampered Pooch, a spa for dogs whose owners hated that battle in the tub with Fido every month where both ended up soaking wet tail to snout, or who wearied of clipping toenails and hitting the ‘quick’ and watching Fifi turn from a cute Pekignese to a vicious snarling miniature pit bull in self protection.

Until Brenda, the past Presidents were mostly realtors who figured any tourism meant potential clients. Which is why they gave out free maps at Windy Rear Realty at the ‘Y’ where the loop road closed back on itself and the people without GPS could navigate back off the island without satellite assistance. Brenda, though, wanted to organize annual events. Tyee Pioneer Days, the Nettle Festival, a Shrimp Derby, a Yacht Club Regatta, the Flatheads Vintage Car Club Show, an Art Detour Tour to compete with the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, on and on. “We could apply for grants, hold fundraisers, advertise like crazy. The South End — a destination, not a dead end!! Whaddaya say??”

A year later and about a dozen brainstorming meetings, nobody had very much to say and nothing much had moved off the dime. Nobody knew how to write grants, nobody wanted to organize an event, nobody really understood publicity and advertising tactics, nobody really had any time. By then Brenda herself was a little tired, way more cynical and mostly wanted OUT. She asked who would like to take over the Presidency next year and was met with averted eyes, muttered excuses and shuffling feet.

Brenda has been President now 3 years. She says she’ll do it one more, but that’s IT. With any luck someone new will join.

I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo … but c’mon, this Groundhog’s Day business, let’s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously. Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd. Even if we had groundhogs! This thing just gives Science a bad name. And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, fake news, impeachment trial, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.

Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity. Hellfire, if this Covid lockdown makes every day the same as the last one and the one coming tomorrow, we figure there’s no point in fighting endless monotonous inevitability. We’ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait patiently for our vaccinations. This is how civilizations thrive: they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and earlier happy hours.

The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs —- I KNOW you’re going to point out they’re illegal this time of season, but listen, we’re putting em back when the data is collected. Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any dog, any breed, random sampling, see? And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans. No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots. And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy’s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring. The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in. Or six more months of a spiking pandemic. Probably both.

Simple. Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it’s correct. And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding. We’re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring or the end of Covid for the entire country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd now has science as its bedrock foundation. We’ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it. Crab Dog Day. Nice profitable ring to it, don’t you think, kind of like a cash register. If we can keep PETA at bay….