The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of the boyz down at the Marina got to talking about that Ma Day Studio Art Tour that’s been building steam since before the turn of the century, hauling traffic in for 14 years and now has expanded not just to 3 days instead of the original 2, but 2 weekends instead of 1. Before long, Cap’n Jack worried, it’ll become the Mother’s Day to Father’s Day Art Tour, an entire month of traffic backed up from the South End Diner to the Stanwoodopolis freeway exit, all those art lovers and their U-Hauls for carrying back their purchases to Bellevue, Seattle and beyond. They remember when the Tulip Festival was just a small bulb in the imagination of the growers …. before cars eventually outnumbered the flowers. And it makes em nervous.

It should! The South End Economic Development Council holds secret meetings at ReFlux Realty, scheming to sell properties to art aficionados who, in turn, will become artists themselves in the primordial paint soup of the South End, buy easels and brushes, learn raku, break glass and build stained glass panels, sculpt auto wreckage and ultimately double, triple, who knows, the size of the Tour. It’s a self-replicating Beast. And when they all begin to starve through overpopulation, they’ll still need to pay those mortgages on their dream studios. The only other ‘jobs’ here, of course, are real estate agents. So the vicious circle completes itself. More artists, more art, more wannabees, more starvation, more real estate agents, more sales, prices rise, properties subdivide, underwater mortgages swell …. and so the bubble becomes bigger than the egoes of the artists who planned this Tour back in the 90’s.

Some of the Marina layabouts wanted to stop this in its tracks before there was no turning back. Keep the missuz from going studio to studio Mother’s Day weekend. Course, the Tour was planned from the Get-Go to be their default escape from marital duties. Let Ma go traipsing through the art while they’d watch some ballgames. And now, 14 years later, they’re only starting to realize the true price of their mistake. Too late, guyz!! Way too late now!

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-petal-power.mp3[/podcast]audio — petal power

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I remember about 30 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields. Pretty amazing. Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner. It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island. For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that. I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into. Tulip Fuel. Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow. Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel. The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended. So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell. The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps. High pollen octane for the BMW crowd. Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival. Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help. Something that should’ve been done long ago. You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power —- think about it!

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-60s-in-the-rearview.mp3[/podcast]audio — 60’s in the rearview

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Before the advent of mega-nurseries, the South End experimented with alternatives to the Big Box Plant Sellers we got now. Half of us back then thought we could grow our way to prosperity, skip a real job and just tend our Gardens of Eden. Avant-Gardens was a Mother Earth, granola munching collection of disillusioned big city emigres bent on subverting the capitalist system by starting a communal garden on Camano. They pooled their meager resources, piled into a 1963 VW bus painted with flowers and vines that broke down once on the way, bought 10 acres of prime nettle land with a 1920’s shack leaning romantically toward the edge of a bluff that fell straight to the Sound.

For years the old hippie bus could be spotted in various locations, broken down once again, a herd of itinerant repairmen at work in the rear end’s engine compartment, usually with a VW Repair Manual for Total Idiots open to smudged and torn pages. It was rumored they could pull a blown engine and replace it with another equally unreliable one in 15 minutes flat, side of the road, pouring down rain. Practice, any VW mechanic can tell you, makes perfect.

The old bus hauled specimens the Avant-Gardeners collected at old homesteads, back in the woods, up creekbeds, culled from neighbors’ cuttings, which the merry band transplanted, propagated, divided, moved to new beds they were forever making from land reclaimed temporarily from blackberries, nettles and salmonberries. No one knew how they got money to live on, but we all knew they never sold much of what they grew. Speculation ran rampant that they raised cannabis in a backroom of the shack under halogens, but it was never substantiated, meaning, they didn’t sell it to us if they did grow it.

Over the years the Avant-Gardeners became synonymous with an era long lost, an anachronistic group who most of us other transplants considered kindred spirits. We mostly wished them luck. Luck, of course, runs its limits. The old VW still sits, now a relic in a vigorous blackberry patch. You look in there you can almost read AVANT-GARDENS painted on its side. Somedays you can almost see the 60’s looking back at you out of the opera windows as the bus navigates the berry boulevards headed toward the bluff.

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Since most of the staff here are too young to remember the days back when we built the first Senile Center, they asked an old codger like myself to address all you youngsters, maybe give a short history lesson. So pay attention, I don’t want to have to repeat myself and change the facts due to an overactive memory overload.

Back at the dawn of time, the Camano and Stanwood Senior Center were one and the same, what they cleverly called the Camwood Senior Center, what is now the Stanwoodopolis Senior Center still up at the old Lincoln School, but in 1973 Camano’s population of geriatric insurrectionists seceded from the group and formed the Camano Confederacy, what they called the Senior Services of Island County to make this look legitimate. Like a lot of secessionists, they struggled. They had a pitiful little office in where the 2nd Chance Thrift Store is today, they had a senior social worker available at a desk they rented at the Plaza, they served meals at the Lutheran Church, and they rented freezer space at the Plaza for Meals on Wheels.

In the late 70’s the Seniors decided it was time to put all these eggs into one basket. They put up a thermometer and raised the matching money to build that beautiful blue box of a building the county’s probably gonna tear down soon. It was built as a Multi-Purpose Building, only part Senior Services, but a lot of other functions too in order to qualify for the grant they got. To qualify for senior center matching grants required 50% matching money but a multi-purpose facility only needed 25%? Money talked real loud back then. This served as the hub of Camano activities for two decades and probably should be preserved as a National Historic Site. You know, Early Metal Pole Building, late 20th century, the blue period. That, or a museum to toxic black mold and bad septic. Admission free. Just sign the disclaimer.

Well, we’re talking about 1978, bout the time Jimmy Carter was contemplating an early retirement himself. The County donated the land and like I said, we had that big thermometer for fundraising and before you knew it, we got the donations to help the County finish off the blue building most everybody thought was a Bingo Parlor. Cost $98,000 and change in 1978 currency.
When we built the first Senile Center and Camano Casino in l978 we didn’t have much else BUT retirees on the island. Marla Ries and me were practically teenagers then, probably not even voting or drinking age. We didn’t have schools on the island back in those simpler times… which might tell you how many kids lived on Camano. Which is why we built a Senior Center and not a Youth Center. So Marla and me didn’t get a place of our own to smoke in back of with all the other juvenile delinquents.

About l980 or so I was just starting my career of being Chronically Unemployed when I got wind the Senior Center needed an assistant director. Part time, low pay. Perfect for a retired fella like myself. I put my ponytail down the back of my best fairly clean shirt and interviewed with the Director. She told me in no uncertain terms she couldn’t hire a man for the job. Scare the bejabbers out of the elderly ladies. Probably true. Probably still is. But …. A clear case of Re-Verse Discrimination. Sure, I could’ve called the ACLU, I could’ve gone to the Supreme Court, I could’ve forced them to take me on, but I’m a South Ender and a South Ender eats what’s put on his plate, no complaints, just glad for supper. Boiled nettles, whatever. So my chance for Marla’s Ries’s job slipped away …. I’d have to say mighty damn lucky for Camano.

Say what you will about that ugly old blue box, those folks inside worked wonders with what they had. The testament to that, you might think, is this fine Taj Majal they built for the island. Fancy pants fireplaces and a library nicer practically than Stanwood’s Sno-Isle Day Care Center and Book Drop. State of the art kitchen and nettle steamers. Beautifully landscaped grounds. Sparkling indoor restrooms…. with no backdrafting odors.

But like the Olden Days, the building isn’t the real show. The truth is with all the programs they administer and the events they put on and the classes they teach and the meals on wheels and the outreach social services and I could go on all the live-long day, these folks are the heart and soul of this island and that’s a fact. So …. It’s good to see you troops massing here today! The Band and me are proud to stand here with you. Altho …. Next time, if we’re gonna dress up, maybe we could all get some decent hats…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-big-yellow-schoolbus.mp3[/podcast]audio — big yellow schoolbus

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My old bus driving friend Cindy was down at the Mabana Pottery Studio the other day, throwing a new line of ceramic vessels and testing some new glaze she’d read about on-line. Cindy and I go way back to the halcyon days we both drove school buses that are now vintage. They were then too. Crowns and Bluebirds. Big snub-nosed diesels lumbering down the empty blacktop backroads in search of kids standing out in the rain, hoping we were on schedule.

I guess we both went through our share of itinerant jobs back then, everything from waitressing (her) to stripping furniture (me). We both got divorced, we both tried to find some way to make a so-called living at something that wouldn’t drive us crazy, and we both ended up stumbling into art.

Cindy’s pottery studio was her old barn. She bought an acre over by the South End Marina with her husband before he lost his job at the Onamac Body Shop and started drinking heavily. Kind of a bad combination, unemployment and alcoholism, but not uncommon down these parts. By the time he’d had his second DUI and was a charter member of AA, Cindy had pretty much had her fair share of abuse. She kept the shack and property — he kept his fancy 4 wheel drive pickup truck he loved more than Cindy those last few years. Fair trade, they both figured. Real estate back then was a bit less precious than now, even after this ongoing Recession.

We all travel roads not on the GPS of life, I guess. Cindy and I, well, we must’ve found the same detour, the one that took us down the highways most folks don’t use: Art.

Cindy’s doing fine. Got herself a part-time boyfriend and a job she loves. She’ll tell you the job doesn’t pay, but she’s got an understanding boss, she can pay her bills and she’s happy for the first time in a long time. ‘Art’, she tells me, squeezing my arm conspiratorially as if I didn’t already know, ‘it won’t make you wealthy, but it’ll sure make you rich.’ Who knew us old bus drivers would grow so damn wise….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/audio-madame-rita-reads-my-palms.mp3[/podcast]audio — madame rita reads my palms

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