Archive for September, 2007
September 22nd, 2007
Now the whole point of bringing back this Harvest Jubilee which was a three day event in the 30’s, was to celebrate farming. Some of you might have heard of it. ……Farming, I mean. You old codgers probably remember the song Old MacDonald, had a farm. E –I-E-I- OH. Nowadays the kids would bet dollars to donut holes the next line would be: and on that farm we had, naw, not a pig, not a cow, probably a Big Mac with fries.
Other than subsistence nettle farming, the South End has lost most of its farming heritage. Sadly. Oh, we got some indoor growers using hydroponics and hi watt halogens to grow medicinal marijuana —you know, just in case…. But sustainable agriculture? It’s mostly dried up. My neighbors still raise cows and they got a great old barn but they’re part of a dying breed.
Someday we’ll look back at the heyday of the South End — the glory days of the 5 acre chicken farms of Mabana, the free range clambeds of Tillicum, the annual crab roundup when we drove the Dungeness herds to the packing houses of Stanwoodopolis. We’’ know what’s been lost. And what’s never coming back.
So you folks, good on ya for celebrating farming in the area, making it, hopefully, sustainable for your kids and their kids to come. Sure don’t want the next generation celebrating MacDonalds Happy Meal Days and the glory of the fast food era.
September 22nd, 2007
I know you folks have probably heard the news: Stanwood wants to bring a 4 year college to the area. Univ. of Stanwoodopolis. Higher degrees in Lefse Rolling, Lutefisk Engineering, and Storage Unit Management.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. The town’ll be over-run by eggheads. Professors taking over the barstools at the Stanwood Hotel, ruining our rural backwash hick ambiance. Expecting political discussions, not fishing stories. Wanting napkins with their hand-crafted malt beverages and hors douerve plates, not peanuts. The Snow Goose bookstore will sell 5 pound tomes with 5 dollar words nobody but the PhD’s will understand. FOR 50 DOLLARS! With titles like the Socio-Economic Dialectic of the 3rd generation Scandihoovian in the Stillaguamish River Drainage.
The whole town’ll go to hell in a hurry. Just when the fast food franchises were giving us a glimmer of hope of joining mainstream society. All those student shops will take over now. More art galleries. Boutique soap stores. Boutique clothing stores. Boutique furniture stores. Head shops. Movie houses, Art movie houses. Fancy pants restaurants. Ethiopian Epicure. Persian Pizza. La De Da Linguini.
Gonna look like Berkeley in the 60’s. Long hair. Free love. Dope smoking, anti-war, bohemian anti-establishment types. Weird clothes. Weird music. Weird period. Weird as a Way of Life.
Which….. if you stop and think about it, is a perfect description of the South End. Which … if you been following our logic here, is exactly why the new campus should be located down by us – the University of the South End, Tyee Branch. Save em from hiring new professors. The woods are thick with em. The Band alone could be a quarter of the art faculty. Think about it. It’s the obvious location — and it’ll preserve the Stanwoodopolis we all love……
September 22nd, 2007
The whole point of this Harvest Jubilee is to make sure agriculture and its heritage isn’t some historical footnote in the near future. As, sadly, it is on the tideflats of the once proud South End.
The South End wasn’t always the Backwash Dead End far flung terminus of Camano Island. Back in its heyday, about 1915, it was a thriving port with a 1000 foot wharf jutting proudly out into the storm tossed Puget Sound. The Atalanta and other mosquito fleet supply boats moored up for deliveries and mail 2 or 3 times a week, dropping shipments and taking on passengers.
Mabana—– crown jewel of the Saratoga Straits. The Seattle classifieds advertised 5 acre parcels perfectly suitable for chicken ranching. So the Roaring 20’s on the South End were more the Cackling 20’s. The wharf, of course, sticking out into the full fury of the Sound, got whittled down to the piling stumps you can see today at minus tides, stubby footprints leading far out to Davy Jones’ Locker and away from the Lost Civilization of Greater Metropolitan Mabana.
Oh, we still got a Port of Mabana, a one lane road sloughing its way toward obliteration. And we got 3 Port commissioners, ditto, a kind of vestigial South End government about as pertinent to our lives as the Island County regime that’s barely conscious of Camano much less our South End.
But as always, we seem to manage, if not quite thrive. History is like the tides, an ebb and flow, or in our case, an egg and flow, and what WAS might easily be reduced to rubble and ruin. Or pilings and rebar. The South End rose once toward soaring heights, Chicken Capitol of the Far West. And if that grandeur is lost now, we can take some small comfort in knowing, once, in a lifetime not that long ago, in a place not too greatly changed, we raised the cholesterol level of the world a notch or two. Not much to crow about, I know……. Unless you’re a South End chicken farmer.
September 3rd, 2007
Now some of you folks might be asking yourselves WHY IN BLUE TARNATION should anybody ask a gnarly old fiddle band to play for a wedding? I mean, isn’t it more appropriate to get a quiet guitar and a sweet voiced diva and sing something sappy? Sappy, maybe that’s putting too hard an edge on something meant to be a precious musical keepsake for the newlyweds. What I really meant was something quietly inspiring. That’s what I meant really…..
But the truth is Julie and Rod understood that the South End String Band comes from a tradition that looks at marriage, not as bubblegum A.M. radio ding dong love song, but as a full flowering of mature emotion. We don’t pretend to be Perfessors of Matrimony, but we been down the Aisle to the Altar, most of us more’n once. WE know that marriage isn’t all June and Moon. When they slipped in the part about For Better or Worse, well, that’s just the fine print we expect in any contract. You want a 30 day warranty, go on down to Roy Robinson or Dwayne Lane…. And good luck there too.
I been married all of my so-called adult life. And I’m not one of these yahoos who think it’s just a ball and chain. Marriage is sort of a job sometimes, I’ll admit, but mostly it’s a comfort and a joy. And in the good times –and even the bad – there’s a Twining, there’s a wrapping of roots between two people through the years that you won’t have with anyone else. I sometimes think we don’t really ever get to know another person completely, not totally, and that’s probably good, but we know our spouse better’n anybody else. That’s something that grows deeper with time. That’s something that transcends time. Even if does sound maybe a little sappy.
So here’s to Julie and Rod, starting out on what we all hope is a long road down a lifetime of each other. And now Wende will sing the Wedding Song with Chaim’s guitar accompaniment. Naw, here’s ………………
September 3rd, 2007
Now the Band here gave considerable thought to our songlist. We’ve never played a wedding before so it was a bit of a stretch. We decided early on we’d take out the murder songs. A lot of those, it turns out. You think today’s headlines sell papers with violence and mayhem, some of these songs musta been Top 40 in 1850.
So then we figured probably we don’t need the drinking and gambling tunes. Which probably caused the sex and violence songs. Seemed like maybe half our repertoire was about Sinning. Which explains why we never get invited to church socials. We did Frankie and Johnny awhile back for an elementary school. Nice song. Got a pimp and his girlfriend. Got adultery and a killing. Probably we shoulda been more judicious. More thoughtful in our selection. Oh, I don’t mind not getting invited back. But those lawsuits from irate parents holding us accountable for teenage pregnancies and delinquent behavior…. That’s a different matter.
So a wedding —- we decided to take it serious. Sure don’t want subpoenas from Rod and Julie’s divorce attorneys down the bumpy road of marital discord. Accusations that Cripple Creek ruined their chances for a normal, healthy relationship. No, our legal defense fund looks as stretched as the National Guard.
But I got to tell you — and I hope this is in confidence, not admissible in a court of law—- I got to tell you we just didn’t have many songs that are appropriate. And we sure hate to play two songs twenty times each. So if you get a man in a bad suit asking you to sign a small disclaimer, that’s Bubba Frisk, our attorney, and we’d sure appreciate your signature so we can provide a full 4 hours of contractually obligated musical entertainment. Thank you, This next song really isn’t a love song, but nobody in it gets hurt, either.
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