The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The toilet won’t quit running, she says, so I say I’ll take a look. I pop the tank lid and the gizmo that regulates the inflow, hell if I know what it’s called, is spurting water out the top and I wonder if that’s normal or not. The ball float on its brass lever has been bent down multiple times but now it keeps the tank so low the crap won’t flush completely when you pull the handle. The mysteries of plumbing, I sigh to myself and head to the hardware store for a replacement gizmo, full knowing this is only the beginning of what will probably be a series of cascading plumbing issues.

I decided back in 1974 to be a homesteader. I had no interest in a career or a traditional marriage or a bourgeois lifestyle, not me, not that kid who wanted to blaze a new trail, make the world his own, leave the suburbs of his folks’ last few moves behind. I wanted to be a writer maybe, a school bus driver probably, an itinerant worker of dozens of jobs but none too long, plenty very short. So we hauled our hippie asses up to a farm in Northern Wisconsin and planted a garden, pumped our water, built our outhouse and left mainstream America in our wake. But it doesn’t take long to realize how ill-equipped for that alternative lifestyle you are, about the first truck repair when it won’t start and you have no idea whatsoever how things work. How an engine combusts, how to frame an outhouse, how to fix a pump, how to repair most anything and everything. When you’re poor because you don’t have jobs that make money, you best believe you will need to learn all those skills you didn’t learn in the suburbs and I don’t mean calling the repairman.

I got hold of a mail order correspondence automotive course’s books, studied them and began to learn auto repair. The army pickup truck I bought from some sweet lady who turned out to be a used car salesman’s daughter gave me ample opportunity for hands-on experience. School of Hard Knocks and Knuckle Busting, the very definition of a continuous education. When I bought the shack here on the South End, my graduate courses came fast and furious. Well pump repair, chainsaw use and maintenance, small engine diagnoses, house framing, electrical installations, furniture building, plumbing, concrete work, tree felling, woodworking, remodeling, you name it, I took the exams, sometimes failing, but after a few attempts, passing even if barely.

Over the years I added additions to the shack, rooms out the back, a kitchen off the front, a dormer upstairs. When I learned stained glass I built a shop back in the woods far from the prying eyes of the building inspectors. I built a sailboat in 1990 or so, built some kayaks, built plenty of outbuildings on the 7 acres, then built our house up on the hill. I guess I’d learned enough to feel confident to tackle a two story building, although I will tell you, most of it I learned along the way, reading the week or night before how to California frame a corner or wire a 3-way switch or plumb a vent for the toilet or tile a bathroom floor or caulk in windows or hang an overhead fan. Took me two years working most every day. Learned how to build a door, lay hardwood floors, build cabinets and bookcases, all this from library books before Google came along. It was hard. It was also the most fun I ever had, this building our own house. It was, like all the hardscrabble stuff that homesteading requires, the building blocks of my life, the life I wanted to build from scratch, the one I would call my own.

So I’m down under the toilet hacksawing apart the threaded pipe that holds the gizmo that’s leaking for no apparent reason, catching the water left in the reservoir, most of it, the rest running down my sleeve. Yah, it’s a funny life all right. Things fall apart, entropic as always, and who ya gonna call? Me, I’m not calling anybody.

The Beer Hunters are getting long in the tooth. This Hunt is our 40th and when we took our first, we were young bucks, mostly in our 30’s, men who could thin the herds of ales and IPA’s at night in local watering holes up in the mountains, then hike the hills for miles and miles the next day without complaint or hangover. Not so much in these later years, not after a couple of us have had heart attacks, broken backs in skiing accidents, multiple injuries after passing out and driving off the road, knee replacements, eye cancer, sepsis and other assorted ailments and health issues.

One of us is in his 80’s, most are in their mid to late 70’s. Two are morbidly obese, one is blind in one eye. Another lost his spouse this year and came down with a clot in his leg today. The Hunters have definitely seen better days. Nevertheless, the Hunt is ON again this year and my brother and I are on route to meet up with the boyz at a cabin on Hood Canal in the shadow of the Olympics where we’ll do our hiking and hunting. The tradition endures.

The Hunters met in law school back in the mid ‘80’s. Some went into private practice, one became a judge, another a prosecuting attorney and myself, none of the above. Only one of the lawyers still practices law, the rest have retired. And me, I’m not sure what I am these days. Other than older….

Some years others have joined our core group. Usually only for one Hunt. Many are called but few, as they say, are chosen. A drunk driving charge on a Hunt in Arizona finished Curly. Roy, an army buddy of Mike’s, went into rehab and AA after his first and only weekend with us. Dave’s son and a friend came once — they held up to the drinking but withered on the hikes. Jim lasted one Hunt and never returned. Doug, Tom’s fishing buddy, a right winger, hated all us card carrying commies, left the Hunt and moved to Tennessee where like-minded Trump loyalists run the state, good riddance.

Today we rendezvous once again, our rag tag geezer gang, compare ailments, reminisce about Hunts of yesteryear, hike the Olympics, drink less and continue the tradition. Wish us good hunting ….

I’ve heard it said there’s nothing new under the sun. If that’s true, us artists might as well drop the charade, lose the paint brushes and get a job selling door-to-door encyclopedias, the jig is up. Creativity was a sham at worst, a self-delusion at best.

I had clients who commissioned me to do a stained glass entryway for their high end house up at the gated North End, transom, double doors, sidelights, one unified design. I showed them past work, various styles, choices in glass and color. When they landed on a door I’d recently done propped against a back wall of the studio, I said great, I’ll work off that. A month later we installed the panels, they were pleased, I took pictures, we shook hands and hugged, all was well in my little corner of the universe.

Until … sometime around a year after they saw the door they’d originally liked, the one I’d used as inspiration for theirs, for sale in a gallery on the island. This, they told me, was outrageous. Theirs was no longer an original, it was an imitation and I had plagiarized myself. I tried to explain that their design was derived in part from the one they liked, that art was an evolution of sorts, each design a continuation of style, but this fell on deaf ears. They were, they declared, gravely disappointed.

Apparently I had been exposed as the fraud I most certainly was, an art thief who stole from himself, a Picasso whose every painting was a phony baloney copy of what came before, a con man who needed to be turned into the Culture Cops.

Since my art tutorial had failed to convince them, what was I supposed to do? No point in removing the fake artwork — the next would be a fake too. I offered them their money back and removal of the glass panels, but no, they loved their entryway. In the end I agreed to their demand to remove the original door for sale in the local gallery and had to promise never to show it again or sell it in the future. No contract was required and no attorneys were hired.

That door still sits in my shack, unsold as promised, a constant reminder that art is definitely in the eye of the beholder and a finger in my eye, to which I say: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Although … someone else said it first. At least I stole it from someone else.

I got a new neighbor recently who bought the farm next door to us so naturally I wandered over to introduce myself, a one man South End Welcome Wagon he may have mistook for a snoopy neighbor. The 17 acres, barn, shops and 1930’s house went on the block after its previous owner declared bankruptcy for the 3rd time, obviously a slow learner, but like he always told me: No Brains, No Headache. I assume he’s poor now but migraine free. When he went under the last time he owed me a few thousand dollars. I still have a small headache. And trust me, I’m no smarter.

“So what do you do?” I asked my new sharer of a long property line he’s just had surveyed. He’d recently been laid off, he told me, not certain if he was required to testify against himself, maybe plead the 5th. He had a wife, kids in college, another house down in the City. I could see he was growing uncomfortable under the wilting barrage of questions I interrogated him with, maybe he should talk to his attorney first. He admitted he intended to build a house up on the hill, but money was tight with college tuitions, other mortgages and no job. I nodded my understanding.

“So what’s next?” I demanded, relentless as a prosecuting attorney turning the final inexorable screw before extracting a confession. “Well,” he said, “I’m thinking maybe starting a microbrewery or, I don’t know, a nano-distillery up here at the barn.”

“Lemme get this straight,” I laughed, boring in now. “A brewery? Hellfire, man, you came to the exact perfect place!”

“What do you mean?” he asked, truly alarmed now he’d spilled too many beans.

“You got no job, money’s scarce, kids are in college, your wife’s working and you want to build a house … but first, you plan to open a distillery or a brewery. What I mean is, “ I explained, smiling broadly, “ you’re a kindred spirit. You got the same dream as all of us South Enders. Welcome to La-La Land, neighbor!!”

It’s good to know — at least for this Old Timer — the newcomers will carry on our time honored traditions. Long live our Southern Values!

‘Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?’
‘Woodstock’

It’s been 50 years since the hippie uprising bloomed in San Francisco and wilted shortly after. I went out to Haight-Ashbury in 1975, only 8 years too late. By then Flower Power was dried and pressed, steel bars were on the storefronts and the streets were filled with zombies too drugged to leave in time. I left in a few hours, scratching my long haired head where to go next.

Hunter S. Thompson famously said in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that there was place in the foothills above Frisco where a person with the right kind of eyes could see where that bohemian utopian tidal wave crested and finally broke. I’m pretty sure I found the archaeological proof of that highwater mark. Just turned the truck around and headed ‘home’, a fictional place as it turned out, an old Polish farmhouse with a barn, summer ‘kitchen’, well and hand pump, plus an outhouse. Cut wood for the hard winter to come and settled in to work on a divorce. We wore icicles in our hair, not flowers. We picked at our marital wounds and by spring the Summer of Love was long since dead and buried.

But — and yeah, Virginia, there’s always a caveat — but some of those seeds from that era, passed bong to bong or secreted away in the short stints at communes, something remained fertile of those ill-formed dreams we had, some lyric or other took root and grew in my personal darkness until finally it emerged, a full blown song, tentative at first, I realize now, then more vigorous in the damp country air of the Pacific Northwest. We did go back to the land, we did set our souls free. We did realize, in the end, we are stardust, we are golden. And we finally got ourselves back to the Garden.

Camano Island 50 years later