The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Stanwoodopolis is a fine town. IF you’re from there or still are…. If you’re not, it’s a little less than friendly. When I first moved here I had a buddy roll in and I said, hey, let’s go to town for some pizza and beers and a few laughs, just like the old days back in Wisconsin. So about 8 or 9 at night we rolled into Jeno’s Pizza, what’s now Jimmy’s, a family place. Jeno’s had a liquor bar and all the 21 year olds liked to drink there and get sloshed quicker. Rough place some weekends.

Me and my pal ordered a pitcher of beer and a pizza. We were the only two in the joint, it being a Monday night, We did a little catching up on the old days, ordered a second pitcher and pretty soon we were laughing and reminiscing and laughing some more. Pizza came and we ate and told more war stories, laughing so hard our pizza grew cold. Pretty soon we noticed a policeman watching us. Wasn’t much ELSE to watch other than the cook and the waitress.

Some folks think cops are there to protect THEM. I’ve never really thought that way. I mostly think they’re there to protect THEM from ME. Maybe it’s the 60’s, you know, tear gas, riots, cops and National Guard rioting too. I just like to avoid the law and if that means going the speed limit and behaving myself, it’s a small price to pay. In fact, I recommend it to most of you citizens.

The cop watched us for 10 minutes or so, mostly us telling jokes and stories , sitting in a back booth, nobody to bother. He finally went over to our waitress/bartender and said, “They seem okay to me.” Our waitress obviously didn’t think so, but the officer left and we were alone with Miss Sourpuss. I guess she preferred the drunk kids fighting in the parking lot after being overserved — you know, so long as they were Locals.

We paid our bills, left a tip even, and drove back to the shack. I never went back much to Jeno’s. And tell you the truth, I don’t go to Jimmy’s either. I’ve decided once an Outsider, always an Outsider. I think we both

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The Umpcrickomish live in government housing in the valley they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us in UpCreek would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the Otter Creek Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Whitehorse Mountain where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

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As an itinerant and persistent South End researcher, I was called this week by my old pal Bob Friel, the author of the Barefoot Bandit, now a documentarian for an environmental group up on Orcas Island, the Sea Docs. They’re making all manner of films about the Salish Sea and had heard South Camano was where the grey whales came into our shallow tidelands to feed on the ghost shrimp, scooping huge craters of sand into their baleens and capturing tonight’s dinner, thousands of the mud shrimp. Needless to say, Bob and his pal Joe Gaydos needed an experienced guide for the hike out to the whale holes to avoid the ever dangerous quicksand shallows that swallow boots and shoes, threatening to trap the less vigilant adventurer. Plus they needed a dummy who would carry half their gear. Which was about as much as what a Hollywood movie scene would require….

The grey whales migrate every year from Mexico to the Arctic but some take a detour into our neck of the woods … or sea … to fatten up for a month or so before hurrying to catch up to the herd already up north. We got about one zillion sand shrimp out front here, so many the sand is porous from their burrows, making walking out to the eelgrass where the crabs rule a hazardous and arduous endeavor. The old timers here remember playing baseball on the flats when the sand was firm but in my 47 years here I haven’t seen any ball games out there. Or many people either, the quicksand is plenty intimidating.

Well, we did some filming, scooped up a few shrimp, wandered the whale holes and pondered the whole whale/shrimp relationship to firmness of the beach and health of the greys. The boyz had hip and chest waders recently purchased for this excursion but I went barefoot, a nod, I suppose to the Bandit of Bob’s book. Three hours later I couldn’t feel my toes. Small price to pay for science. But in the course of filming and studying, I realized there was a bias favoring the whales. The poor shrimp, well, they were just a food source for our heroic cetaceans. Didn’t seem right, didn’t seem fair. Granted, I was freezing more than my toes off and maybe my deductive reasoning was being sucked up along with my feet out there on the sand barrens, but dammit, an injustice is an injustice! And so I have vowed to start my own environmental foundation, the Save Our Shrimp, SOS!

Bob and Joe had collected a few of the clawed creatures from dredging the sand with their homemade suction gun, a remodeled giant water squirter, deposited them in a special container and when they left the scene, drove the samples back to Orcas. Don’t think for a South End minute I didn’t understand their motives. They were bringing undocumented immigrants back to the San Juan Island beaches in hopes of luring the grey whales to their islands. They were shanghaiing our shrimp for their own nefarious plot!

This cannot stand! Donate now to the tax deductible Save Our Shrimp foundation. The San Juans may not include us in their archipelago, but we’re no pushovers either. Instead of an apartheid archipelago, wouldn’t it have been easier just to include us? Rather than steal our shrimp.

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One of the latest trends in trend-crazy America is to create a personal library in our domiciles. Not to amass a collection from our reading list (if we even have one) but to impress our visitors with volumes of literature and non-fiction. A well-stocked library should subtly send the message that its owners are erudite readers with broad and eclectic tastes. Sprinkle in a few Booker award novels among the classics, add some poetry anthologies, spice the biblioteca up with an encyclopedic array from the sciences, philosophies, a few avant-garde pieces and certainly oversized art books. Wow them with your extensive and expensive tastes!

But before you hurry out to your nearest Goodwill to find the raw materials for your Jeffersonian library, l should add that if you really want to impress your friends and neighbors, just piling dog-eared books on a make-shift shelf really isn’t going to do the trick. No, you need the equivalent of an oak paneled room, floor to ceiling shelving, preferably behind glass and if you have the ideal height, one of those rolling ladders necessary to access the hard-to-reach collection of rare books up at the top. First editions are a must and signed copies de rigueur in these unenlightened times of Google and Wickipedia. You are a person of discriminating tastes, my friend, not one of the yammering yokels who would ask why they would need a community library when they have a laptop.

Suffice it say it would be imperative to have a well-used armchair with adequate lighting beside it as well as a sturdy stand with one or more books ‘in progress’ even if you never plan to open another book to read in your entire life. The gesture is what counts. And hopefully your guests will never query you as to that current reading. If so, simply tell them you have only begun Chapter One and to make judgement at so early a stage would be foolish. You, needless to say, are not foolish. The library itself will attest to that. No, you sir are of finer mettle, a lord in the land of the Kindle, a giant among the unread. Relish your place above the unwashed masses. You’ve earned it!

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