The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I don’t want to frighten people, but I think it’s important the citizenry of our area know the truth.  The truth is this:  the Pearson House at the Stanwood Area Historical Society has a ghost.  About once a week the Paranormal Societies call up for information about this spirit, but no one down at the Un-Hysterical Society wants to cause a panic so they never return those calls.

A year ago a woman was ‘hit’ by this poltergeist.  Coming down from the attic she felt a whack on the back of her neck at the the top of the stairs and she had a red spot to prove it.  Witnesses swear she was sober.  Now …. I’m like a lot of us South Enders —- I got plenty of skeletons in my closet and I’m not about to exhume my own boneyard, although I realize I’m whistle blowing the Casper down at the Pearson House.

We all believe pretty much what we want to believe.  Mostly, these days, it’s what we don’t believe that’s most frightening to me.  We don’t believe what we read in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette or the N.Y. Times or even the ever trustworthy Crab Cracker.  We don’t believe politicians, not even our homegrown Commissioner, and she doesn’t believe in government even though she was elected to be the damn government.  We don’t believe in other folks’ religion.  We don’t believe TV or most of the internet.  We don’t think advertising is true.  We apparently don’t believe in science and we certainly don’t think the future is very bright.

But we do believe in ghosts.  Which is why you need to know what’s being hidden up in the attic of D.O Pearson’s house.  Maybe it’s okay for now, but what if they leave the front door open one night?  How many missing cats are unaccounted for in West Stanwood?  Are lights turning themselves on at night?  Are your children SAFE?  Are any of us safe from this swamp spirit prowling restlessly the Pearson widowwalk all hours of the night???

The truth, as the TV show X-Factor always told us, is out there, bumping in the night.  Where is our Chamber of Commerce when we need them?  There’s money going wasted.  Tourism lost.  Build the Paranormal Convention Center and they will come!!  And I don’t mean just the spooks….  At one time the C of C was going to put its office in the Tolin House between the Odd Fellows Hall and the Pearson Ghost Central.  But at the last minute they bailed out.  I suspect they KNEW the truth even then.  The Stanwood Chamber of Horrors.  Somebody needs to tell them you sometimes have to take risks to make profits.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/audio-french-fried-physicians.mp3[/podcast]audio — french fried physicians

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We got a lot of folks down here on the South End who can’t afford health care insurance.  You can bet your next CAT scan bill it’s a hot button topic from the Marina and Bait Shop to the Pretty Pooch Pet Grooming Salon.  You’d be pretty lucky to get more than minimum wage anywhere down here — which may or may not explain either the high rate of unemployment or our entrepreneurial zeal — but you can surmise for yourself what the health care benefits are for any employees lucky or unlucky enough to have a job.  Even the owners of what few businesses we have left down here rarely have their own coverage much less cover some group plan for all two employees.

Oh, it goes without saying that our rural lifestyle, our lack of stress, our generally upbeat esprit de corps, should assure us plucky South Enders a healthy, doctor free existence.  But accidents do happen and none of us can be certain what creepy genetic pre-disposition has in store for us.  And so, when a neighbor falls prey to a stroke or cancer or some other malady not even nettleopathy can cure, we have to circle the wagons and form a tighter knit community to deal with expenses and carpooling to the clinics or generally just helping out.

A lot of the newcomers with health insurance aren’t accustomed to living in an outback where hospitals are 40 miles away and 911 call might arrive 30 minutes after the onset of their heart attack.  They want clinics and paramedics and they want taxes raised to pay for that.  But definitely not to pay for our health insurance.  Don’t want government in that!  Although, in all honesty, even a lot of us without insurance don’t want government involved either, if the chatter down at the Diner is an index of public opinion.  I tell em maybe lay off the chicken fried steaks and the four egg omelette a couple times a week, put that money in the stock market and you’d be pretty much on the road to a health care plan.  Hazy Jake says, ‘Are you kidding me?  You think I could save enough money that way to pay for even a sprained finger much less cancer?’  He’s got a point, of course, but I was mostly thinking about avoiding that next French fry heart attack.  Then again, the stress of playing the stock market might be even worse….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/audio-the-moss-palace.mp3[/podcast]audio — the moss palace

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I built my palace about 20 years ago when we finally realized we probably couldn’t outlive our shack no matter how much remodeling and maintenance we were willing and able to do.  It was sagging faster than me.  And I’m sagging fast.  So I got out my trusty 16 ounce finish hammer and my leather toolbelt, powered up my bent Milwaukee skillsaw and set up a 1940’s ½ horsepower Sears table saw and went to work.

Two years later I had us a nice little two story cabin, brand new, mostly cedar and finished with curly maple.  We had a view of the Olympics and Saratoga Straits and Whidbey Island.  You haven’t built your own home, you can’t imagine the pride you would feel that first night sleeping in it, knowing you built it all by scratch.  The house that Jack built….

Course, after time, that new car smell goes away and after a decade or two, here we go again, trying to outlast and out repair the rot and rust, the whole entropic cycle of decay and depression and death.  Plus, I still got the original shack on life support.  And about 15 or 17 — I lost count — other buildings leaning and sagging and on living wills from the mailbox back to the trail to Tyee Store.  So I don’t want the old ‘new’ house taking shortcuts on me.  Which is why I went up on the roof 20 years later to see what kind of moss plantation I had thriving up there — and let me tell you, it was a mossologist’s paradise from gutter to peak.  Reds and greens and exotic flowers — an entire alien ecosystem above our heads completely colonizing our roof.

Twenty years in moss life, I bet, is like 500 for a Doug fir.  And, oh yeah, I had a forest of them too, but mostly just the dead bonsais, a valiant attempt at aerial reforestation of the South End, but even on our lush roof, not really an ideal growing climate in the summer droughts.  Moss, like rust, never sleeps.  It naps.  But only til the next fog or sprinkle or mist or gullywasher.  It is the Big Lebowski of the South End.  It abides.

I puttered around up there reminiscing about the day I nearly collapsed the roof by horsing around, making the rafters sway wildly.  But finally I climbed two stories down the ladder, left the gutters gorged with rich black compost and decided to simply co-exist.  We’ll see who lasts longer, me or the house…. But I tell ya, I’m putting my money on the moss.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/audio-cemeteries-in-the-woods1.mp3[/podcast]audio — cemeteries in the woods

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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….

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

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