The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as ‘view property’.  You look around and times haven’t changed too much.  Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.

Folks wonder why it took so long to discover’ the island you can drive to’ never knew our history as an exploited backwash.  The developers didn’t worry about zoning here.  Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.  Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.  Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.  It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.

Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.  Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you’d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.  Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.

Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.  Won’t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.  Thank you boys!

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I know, you’re wondering how all these people around you have decided logic is bogus, crackpot conspiracy theories are real, Donald Trump is still their President and climate change caused by billions of CO2 spewing humans in a greenhouse planet couldn’t possibly be happening. And the reason you’re still wondering who stole their brains is simple. You don’t listen to hot talk radio. No, you’re too busy tuning into podcasts and FM jazz on NPR, thinking here’s serious news and quality music. Let the buffoons listen to Info Wars for all you care, you got better things to do with your time.

The trouble is, millions of your fellow countrymen, your friends and family and neighbors, tune into the rantings and the ravings of the Glenn Becks, the Sean Hannitys, Alex Joneses, Laura Ingrahams, Dan Bonginos and dozens of other angry anti-vaxx, anti-government, deep state paranoids who feed on fear and resentments. You probably never even tuned in to Rush Limbaugh. But if you did back in those good old days before Trump, you might not have been surprised that the guy won.

There’s plenty of profits in pandering to fear. Forget about journalism, we’re talking entertainment for the aggrieved, for those folks who think the country has been sold down the river by immigrants and gays and people of color, by Hollywood or the elites, by Moslems, by outsiders, by communists or the news media. The Nazis used the same tactics, the Tutsis demonized the Hutus, it’s the same old story, find a scapegoat for your fears and anxieties, make them your enemy, rail against them daily, feed the beast, crank up the volume, stoke the furnace.

Folks listen to these demagogues all day long on their radio while you’re getting your unbiased news feeds or reading your morning newspaper, happy no doubt that you’re able to make rational judgements on the events of the day. Give me a break. These people are talking civil war, insurrection, putting Trump back in the Oval Office … and the ones who are paying attention are the politicians who fear opposing them. Better to be a hypocrite and stay in office. Better to subvert the Constitution, suppress votes, rig the system than to stand up for principle. The Culture Wars are here to stay. Whether they remain non-violent is a little less clear. Turn your radio dial a little further to the right some days. You won’t like it but it’ll give you some idea what’s happening.

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Most of our crime on the South End is local. You got basically one way off the island, even most criminals can figure out how easy it is to put up a Roadblock by the bridge. But occasionally we get Outside Trouble. Rare, but it happens. Last year one of my old band members, who rents his castle a little to the south of us, dropped by his tenant where he planned to meet his realtor so he could discuss why his house hadn’t sold in, oh, four or five years.

His tenant, when he knocked on the door and finally shouted inside, came down the stairs in a state of disrepair, having been tied up, pistol whipped and shot in the shoulder by two ‘friends’ from Seattle who’d purportedly come by at 7 or 8 in the morning to, what she claimed!, give her some money they owed. Instead, I guess they decided to keep the money and take hers. Happens all the time …. Just not a whole lot on the South End. Did I mention our victim denied being shot?

It’s probably lucky for us that most criminals think the police are as dumb as they are. If not decidedly dumber….

My ex-band member — I did mention EX band member, didn’t I? — believed every word, even if the deputies who arrived later were somewhat more suspicious. Still believes she wasn’t shot, last time I talked to him, even when I asked about the hole in her shoulder, entry and exit. Probably doesn’t believe the Band 86’d him either. So when she gets released from the hospital, he takes pity on her and lets her stay rent-free until she can get back on her feet.

About two days later he gets a call from another ex-band member, neighbor Jim, who informs him there’s a box truck loading up in the driveway and maybe he ought to come on down and see what’s what. Which he does. Only to find two guys busy loading his artwork and furniture into the truck. He politely tells them this stuff belongs to him and they apologize and say they’re helping his tenant load her stuff and didn’t realize. All a misunderstanding, an honest mistake, see? He puts his stuff in the garage so they won’t misidentify it from hers, goes home satisfied that things worked out, and of course, they load up all his paintings and furniture and hit the road, where, since he’s a trusting sort, no roadblock awaits them at the bridge off the island.

If there’s a moral to this story, hell if I know what it is. Other than to say, if you’re ever starting your own Band, be sure you audition your prospective musicians.

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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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