The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-a-destination-not-a-dead-end.mp3[/podcast]audio — a destination, not a dead end

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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.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-thermostatic-paradise.mp3[/podcast]

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This is the time of year when I usually bring in next year’s firewood. Actually, the year after next’s…. Just about the time the first nettles poke up out of the leafmulch, I start to panic. In a month they’ll be a foot high and vicious. In two months they’ll sting through my jeans. I need to get the trees cut, split and hauled away before the nettles grow fangs and claws and can pull down unsuspecting prey.

Most winters I’m picking up the blown down trees from the autumn storms. Usually that’s all I need, although occasionally I have to fell some alders to top off the woodsheds. One stormy year I had to build extra sheds just to accommodate the 30 cord of wood that was knocked down. 30 of these, split and hauled out of the woods by hand, is a helluva lot of wood. A cord is a term soon to leave the language, probably when us oldtimers die or when we all move to propane or electric heat. It’s a stack of cordwood 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. Or about what fits in a Chevy pickup with high rails. It sounds like an exact measure, but folks who buy wood from gyppos or woodscroungers will tell you, it’s more than slightly inexact, just like the quality of each cord varies from green to half punky, alder to doug fir. I’m a maple man myself — it splits easy, it’s clean and being a hardwood, it burns hot — but the missus’ll tell you I burn anything that’s flammable, rotten or not … and she’s correct. As usual.

When the burn bans come more often, we’re one of those exempt in the disclaimers the newsguyz give: Sole Source Wood Heat. Not gonna make us any new friends with the neighbors, but I don’t complain about their generators during power outages. I suppose guilt will eventually make me reconsider our heating strategies, especially when the neighbors become more plentiful than my trees. At least that’s what I’ll probably use as my excuse when my aching back and shoulders and legs get wore out from the sawing and the splitting and the hauling and the stacking.

Be nice, maybe, to turn a thermostat and help save the environment too. You know, if you don’t mind fracking or damming the rivers or burning coal or creating nuclear waste to get your heat. Maybe by then I won’t.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/old-pals.mp3[/podcast]old pals

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Every now and then the Past comes calling. We have old friends who, like family, invite themselves, their kids, their kids’ kids and now grandkids, dogs, other friends, the whole menagerie, all looking for a South End Get-Away from their humdrum, their psychotraumas, their own Present. I’m not sure what they see in our Shangri-La-La here, but they’ve watched it for over 30 years grow from a blackberry and nettle menaced world of shacks and varmint to whatever it’s become now. They came then and they come now….

I’m a nostalgic S.O.B. if you want to know the truth. The South End for me is really the place I came to in 1977 as a lost soul, an unemployed bum, a failed writer, a boy just divorced. As bleak as my old shack looked in the dreary winter I came, it was a salvation, a safe harbor, a new beginning. Maybe we always get second chances, but I didn’t think that was necessarily so back then. I thought if I could just have one more chance…. If I could just learn from my many mistakes, if I could just re-start, if I could just sit down and put the pieces back together in a better way….

My old friends remember the old me. They bring that mirror along with the fine wines and specialty chesses, the hundreds of stories of our wild days they see as their mythology. They moved on to careers and family. Me, I moved here. I dug further into the wild. I suspect I remind them of their youth, even though we all have grown old. But the real truth is, we are the kids we were then, grown along different paths. We hold mirrors to these others and imagine different destinies.

If we did it right, we’re glad we’re not them. They’re old friends. They’re our past and of course our present too. We’ve grown older than we wished and maybe not so wise as we’d hoped. We’re like the roots of ancient trees wrapped into one another, those trees all pushing toward the light above, all leaning on each other.

We’re an odd little woods.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-black-mold-blue-building-bingo-parlor.mp3[/podcast]

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We got a hue and cry going up from the north end all the way to the south end. Folks near and far are up in arms that the old Camano Senior Center, that blue metal icon of early island days, is going to be turned over from public usage to the Sheriff’s department. You’d think, listening to the outcry and the wailing that we’d taken a Taj Majal and converted it to a public restroom.

Oh, I know, it’s a prime architectural example of early pole building, probably destined for the Historic Register. You know, if it doesn’t rot first. And yeah, it’s been a cheap rent for every group from the A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous) to the C.A.A. (Camano Artists Anonymous). Most folks don’t remember when we built it back in 1979, put a thermometer out front to keep track of the fundraising efforts, the top goal being somewhere north of $500. We used it for 20 years as the Senior Center, although most folks driving by thought of it as the Bingo Hall. Which, at least partly, it was.

I spent more than my fair share of pain time down at the Blue Building with my 12 step artist colleagues, half the agony just the nature of watching artists becoming bureaucrats over themselves and the other co-existing with the toxic balck mold that currently has full ownership of the building, I don’t care if the County considers it legally theirs or not. It’s a nasty place, cheap rental for damn good reason, but most likely a lawsuit by the cops who will trde their lovely modular sheriff station for a horror movie Killer Spores from Section 7. Folks who ask me would I lend support to the task of Saving the Sporehole have me mistaken with someone who values rotten single-wide trailers or schoolbuses devoured by blackberries down behind the Diner.

That ain’t me, Babe, no no no that ain’t me. Oh, I know, the Hysterical Society will stand some day in front of the wrecking ball the day demolition begins. And I’ll surely miss those heady days of bingo and political caucuses, A.A. gatherings and the eternal Mother’s Day Tour meetings. But if truth comes to shove, I’m for getting three or four of us South Enders, putting our shoulders to it and knocking it down. After that I think the EPA can declare it a Superfund site and do what’s necessary. Good riddance by me …

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audio-yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-barber-shop.mp3[/podcast]audio — yelling fire in a crowded barber shop

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