The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Before half the South End converted their gardens and basements and outbuildings to medical marijuana production, the era of the boutique nurseries flourished. They specialized in everything from stingless nettles to thornless blackberries, figuring the hordes of immigrants new to the area would welcome their hybridized species.

Some folks, like Camano Natives Nursery, sold only what was here already. Oh, the salal was popular, and some folks bought little potted sword ferns, but most of them just let the back forty spread to the lawn if all they wanted was the local horticulture. Island Botanicals went the other direction, marketing everything from blue poppies to swamp cypress. The first hard freeze or month long drought or hurricane force winds usually killed the little transplants, but then a lot of the newcomers had had enough too and moved on to more exotic climes where those plants were already Old Growth.

Avant-Gardens, a co-op run by artists with a chartreuse thumb, more hortichuckle than horticultural, sold an eclectic variety of strange herbs, quasi-hallucinogenic plants, odd garden ornaments and large variety of found objects, weird art and advice for alternative living. In a few years they were broke and discouraged and scattered to the far ends of the known universe — well, mostly scattered down here on the South End.

I guess Avant-Garden was where the 60’s hit the Sound, scarcely a sizzle when their cooling lava reached the beach. Their commune broke up, their greenhouses tilted and fell, their yurts and tipis and geodesic domes finally succumbed to the weight of moss and leaf mulch and the neighbors’ hostile gossip. If you know just where to look, you can find a path that starts near the Head and winds through the nettle forest past a couple of VW vans peeking headlights through the blackberries and finally you’ll arrive at a clearing by the bluff. The ragged polyethylene of the greenhouses wave off their bent PVC poles like Tibetan prayer flags of the insane or hopelessly lost. A few beds of periwinkle have escaped into the woods. Some lilies of the valley made a stand next to the big cedar and in the spring, the native bleeding hearts carpet the clearing, their pink flowers a nostalgic reminder of the dead dreams of so many of us old hippies back then.

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Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.

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