The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

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