THE WILD SOUTH END: stanwood/camano visitor guide

June 21st, 2006

Once a fog shrouded, isolated old growth nettle region off the beaten path of Camano Island’s autobahn, the South End has shown signs recently of a Cultural Renaissance. Few tourists venture to the tail end of the island, no doubt frightened by disturbing tales of elephant heads crashing out of art galleries in old garages or fiddle bands playing in the parking lots of mom and pop grocery stores demanding tips, or blacksmiths bent over bellowed forges pounding strange ingots of red hot steel into space ship bus stops back by the last Tipis on Camano. Wild jackasses forage in the newly imagined Hutchison Park managed now by the aptly named South End Cultural Oxymorons. Little wonder the few visitors lost in the narrowing blacktop tell of a fantastic place lost to time and sanity, where creativity springs from the ditches as salvage yard sculpture, tongue in cheek mailboxes, or eccentric bus stops.

Although the South End may harbor the last lost tribe of aboriginal artists back in the ravines, their work can be found at the History of the World Gallery, at Tyee Grocery, in the Back Room antique store, along the highway, in Hutchison Park or in studio-shacks scattered in the blackberry wilds. The wells run deep down here, some hand dug over 200 feet by thirsty pioneers, and future archeologists may well postulate that some deep reservoir of elysian elixir might explain the abundance of creative energies that criss cross the narrow tip in electromagical wavelengths that warp TV transmissions.

The South End is where time stands still and the stills still stand, a place where the past is not so much prologue as it is prolonged, a territory where fact and fiction and fantasy ebb and flow with the tide and the moon. The interior of the island there is home to coyote and sculptor, raccoon and painter, deer and gardener, the occasional cougar and the persistent banjo.

Perhaps no one knows the true history of the South End, long gone to rust and rot and ruin, but the legends are being told in the firelight of glowing burnpiles where the South End String Band play their fiddle tunes to the wind and spin their tall tales. In the old oral tradition, they pass down the stories of the Big Dig, an unsuccessful attempt to connect Port Susan to the shipping lanes of Saratoga Passage with the Elger Bay Canal, a boondoggle gone awry but not totally gone away. They sing Odyssean shanties of Skeeter Daddle’s unsuccessful bid for Island Commissioner and his notorious distillery up in the nettle hollers beyond the reach of revenuers. They regale the next generation with the saga of the South Grange organizing the l949 community event to build the Camano State Park in one day with nearly 1000 citizens, a story that resonates today with the Friends of Camano Island State Parks still building parks and the Cultural Oxymorons too and the artists and businesses that built the Visitor Center and Freedom Park. They recount fantastic yarns of free range clam ranching, wild nettle festivals that went for weeks on end, alpaca poaching, aboriginal artist sightings, nocturnal raiding parties on the bistros of Langley, Rendezvous Days where the lost pioneers and the otter trappers and the few remaining Original Peoples, the fearsome Southendomish, gathered for a meeting of cultures.

Today the South End remains a refuge for Camano, a wilderness sanctuary from not only the gated communities and the real estate frenzy, but from reality itself. Its denizens rarely venture north of the Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement, but late at night, when the wind settles into the fir boughs and the tide nibbles the bluffs of the dot.com mansions, a listener can hear them back in the glacial scrape of alluvial fingers chanting and howling in all night bacchanalias. Their songs are the music of moonshine, their stories are the hardtack of legend, and their parties give hope to those who still care that perhaps the Wildlife of the South End can be forever preserved.

Entry Filed under: after the rapture (apocalypse then)