The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Awhile back, deep in the recesses of a once fevered brain, I fell into a semi-coma building banjos. Started out as a whimsy, a little test to see if a raw amateur woodworker could possibly cobble together a musical instrument. I’m a banjo player in an old time fiddle band. Old time music, not old time players. Although, strictly speaking, I guess we’re geezers now some 20 years since starting up the band. So a banjo seemed like a worthwhile endeavor.

The first one was a curly maple model, brass tone ring, played okay and sounded, well, like a banjo. Banjos are, to the untrained ear, basically a banjo. Loud, possibly obnoxious, an acquired taste. The Band tells the joke about how I left mine in the truck unlocked when I went into a local store, realized my mistake and hurried back. Sure enough, my worst fears were realized and there, parked in the cab was another one someone had donated.

Me, I didn’t wait for some wag to drop their unwanted instrument on me, I just went ahead and built three more after the first one. Banjovirus! I don’t know how many banjos a man needs and science hasn’t studied the affliction up until now, but I can safely say 6, which is how many I have, is plenty. You might think once the fever died down, I would have a certain immunity, antibodies aplenty. But you would be wrong. You would be very wrong.

A year ago I fell into another trance after I had learned how to bend wood in a steambox repairing the oak ribs on an old 1920’s Alaska fishing boat and so naturally I got to wondering what else could I bend wood for. Who wouldn’t, right? And about that same time a buddy gave me a book about an Appalachian good old boy who made some of the finest instruments in the world in his crummy shop back in the hollers. If he could do it … well, one thing led to another and next thing you know I was bending wood for acoustic guitar sides and constructing gitboxes without much understanding of what, actually, a guitar really was.

I’ve always figured if you put your mind to it, most anything is possible. Right. So go ahead and build a cyclotron, why don’t I? People go to luthier school for years to learn the craft. They buy the proper tools, learn about the tonal qualities of various woods, study bracing strategies, all those esoterics. Me, I knew how to bend wood. And even that, trust me, proved harder when I began to experiment on figured exotic hardwoods that did not want to bend even after steaming.

I won’t bore you with my multitudinous mistakes. Suffice it to say I was in way over my head. Each guitar was unique so learning from the mistakes of the previous one didn’t necessarily offer hints on the next one. But dammit, I wasn’t trying to be a factory, I wanted an artistic design for each instrument. You know, a cyclotron that was a rectangle, then maybe a figure 8, see how the electrons behaved in a knot. I learned a lot. Trouble was, not necessarily how to make a great guitar.

‘Whatcha been up to this week?’ my old pard Guitar Bob used to ask about every weekly musical session and beer binge. ‘Logging,’ I told him most every spring, at which he would let out a mocking laugh. ‘Oh right, logging. Paul Bunyan, right?’

Guitar Bob burns wood just like me, but he buys his wood already split and delivered after one long year of manhandling a maul that mostly manhandled him. We have cut up logs together, one time sliding down a ten foot high pile of stacked and snotty logs, but Bob is no logger. And despite his sneering cynicism, I am. Year after year I cut alders, maples, firs and deadfall back in the woods, buck it up, stack the slash, split the sections with an 8 pound maul I’ve prized for decades, haul it by wheelbarrow or garden cart up to the woodsheds and let it age for two years before burning it. We’re talking 10 or 12 cord a year, a cord being, for you not familiar with dendritic measurements, a stack 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.

In other words 10 cord is a helluva lot of wood. And a helluva lot of work. So when Guitar Bob mocks me, I don’t find it amusing coming from a man who buys his wood cut and split. Paul Bunyan? Trust me, there are years when I feel like that, just wish I had a Blue Ox Babe to drag the trees out of the back 40. I’m turning 70 in a couple months. Those 10 cord get bigger every year and sometimes I think I could learn to envy Guitar Bob, just order up some aged maple, stack it in the shed and use my time for something more useful and way less strenuous.

So just when I get to thinking this way, a storm comes along and topples trees back on my trails and yeah, I could just let them rot, home to pileated woodpeckers and raccoons, but a couple years in and the woods would be a debris field of branches and impassable trails. This year we lost two huge maples in the last storms, the biggest with a trunk easily 3 feet in diameter. I own 3 chainsaws but none big enough to cut through the barrel of that base. Some of it is going to sit and rot, it looks like to this old timer. The rest is enough to fill one year of woodsheds, what I’m working on now and will be working on for the next few weeks.

The truth is I didn’t move out to the island to live an easy life. Maybe I thought I was the son of pioneers or just liked the fantasy. Maybe I just didn’t want a suburban or urban lifestyle, turn up the thermostat and watch TV. Maybe I really didn’t give it much thought, which is probably closer to the truth. It’s been 50 years now, cutting trees, planting more, burning firewood to keep warm, both the house and the studio and the woodshop. It’s so much a part of my life I usually take it for granted. Well, at least until every spring….

When this primary season started, I prayed to my gods for one miserable thing: give us someone young. Mayor Pete, well, I liked Mayor Pete but when I said young, I meant someone out of diapers. Experience does count, although judging from the current regime, not always…. One by one the kids fell by the wayside, victims not so much of gaffes and wrong-headed convictions, but a general anxiety pervading the land that this wasn’t the year for experimenting. Gays, women, candidates of color — sorry, no need to apply. We wanted something safe, a known entity, no surprises, nothing but white bread men would do. Old white bread evidently.
I tell you what. I’m about to turn 70, but if I was 50 years younger, I’d be sick and tired of the line of bullshit I get from these old shits. I’d be sucking tear gas again like we did in the 60’s. I’d be out in the streets screaming bloody murder about this Trump turd and his shit-eating little family of privileged hangers-on. I’d be outraged over income inequity, racism, welfare for the rich and I’d be hollering to get rid of these old farts who have no clue what the future is bringing.

But the truth is, I’m an old white guy myself. The world has accelerated past my wheelchair and hurtled out of my bi-focal line of vision. When the Grammy’s announced their winners, I hardly recognized a name, much less the music they sang. When the Super Bowl half time comes on, I think I’m watching soft core porn shows, not listening to great musicians. C’mon, I’m part of the problem now, not any sort of solution.

White guys, old ones, voted in Trump. Not gonna vote some woman, definitely not some woman named Hillary. Nope, rather have a dope. Drain the swamp, shake the tree, tell it like it is. Like it is is stupid. Ignorant. Anti-science. Conspiracy theories. Mumbo jumbo jingoism. Racist and ugly. That’s what the old white guyz voted for. Bring back coal, bring back the textile factories, bring back the 1950’s. Close the borders, exile the immigrants, build a Wall. Dumb and dumber, that’s what us old white guyz were selling. That and fear.

Well, now we got the Pandemic. We got fear, all right, plenty to go around. And we got the Doc-in-Chief, a know nothing idiot who worries more about his poll ratings than a death toll, more about the Dow Jones than the coronavirus. This is what you get with old white guy morons. Talk is cheap, but the toll will be heavy.

So yeah, we’ll run Uncle Joe. Nice old Uncle Joe, steady, calm, predictable. I’ll vote for him, sure. But this is the 21st Century and maybe, just maybe, we could use someone who looks to the future, not a grandpa from the last century.

The good reverend of the Little Church of the Ravine is standing up for his belief that his flock should be allowed to congregate for Easter services under Freedom of Religion. Pastor Paul told the assembled fellowship this past Sunday that he felt Rome should keep its nose out of God’s business and God will keep his nose out of theirs. “If prayer in this time of Pandemic isn’t essential,” the minister declared, slapping his well-worn leather-bound King James, “then I surely do not know what is. If the Bud Hut can remain open to sell Satan’s marijuana merchandise, how is it that this church of God is considered dangerous?” A hundred amens rang out in the old steepled church.

Well, I don’t have a great answer to the Bud Hut burning question of the day, but … most of us South Enders are quarantined up, avoiding friends and family, shopping once a week with masks and gloves. It’s not like the virus is epidemic down here. Yet. But why take chances? Even the South End String Band quit practicing together, not because we were worried about achieving early perfection, but after that choir up in Mt. Vernon gathered together to sing joyful noises and ended up with 3 dead, 4 in intensive care and two dozen infected, we thought practicing at home by ourselves might make more sense. Thankfully none of us have suggested Zoom for cyber practicing. A little hiatus will be just fine.

Easter is this weekend and even though the President once told the True Believers the pandemic would be over by then and businesses would open, it doesn’t look at this point that this will come to pass. Except for the Little Church of the Ravine, looks like. I guess these folks and Pastor Paul aren’t watching secular news from the temporal world. That, or they assume the Good Lord will be watching out for them. I kinda worry She may not be watching out for the rest of us, maybe bring plague to our neighborhood through the Typhoid Marys of their little church. Plus it sets a bad example for the sports zealots who want nothing more than to get back to basketball tournaments and baseball openers. You want True Believers, check out the Pilot Lounge down at the South End Marina on any given weekend before the Pandemic shut it down. They’d be willing to risk a virus or two and maybe the bubonic plague to congregate once again in front of that 52 inch big screen TV over the bar. Half of the boyz think the alcohol in their glass is better preventative than hand sanitizers. They figure Pastor Paul is passing out sacramental wine he buys from the liquor store. Another essential business, they notice. Churches and bars, open up them pearly gates!

We are Americans, rugged individuals, don’t tread on us!! We built the Empire State Building and the trans-continental railroad. We drive Range Rovers to our office job. Nobody can tell us what to do, we’re too rugged, too individual. Sometimes we wear socks that don’t match, usually by accident, but we won’t apologize for the fashion gaffe! No, we’re tough, we’re independent, we’re Americans.

We ride Harleys and we wear black leather jackets. Even the motorcycle gangs all wear black leather jackets, not to look the same, but to look different than You, because they’re the Wild Ones, the Different, the Dangerous, not anything like You. We wear sports jerseys, sports ballcaps, sports sweatshirts and jackets, not the same ones but ones with the number of our favorite player on our team, not your team, not your favorite player.

We live life on the Edge. We let the Costco toilet paper run down to only a few rolls before we buy another 40 roll replacement, that’s the kind of rugged individuals we are. We all buy sports utility vehicles because you never know when we’ll swerve off the highway and take the road into the wilderness. Or we might not, you just never know. We drink Bud Lite. I think that speaks for itself, don’t you?

We bought a house with a different color door than the other houses in the neighborhood. We had an affair with the neighbor too, just so you understand we’re not tied to conventions. We’re our own person, not some cookie cutter version of a TV sitcom. We don’t care how many Likes we get on Facebook even though we check the count. Some days we don’t even color coordinate our wardrobe! We use underarm deodorant to spare you our rugged odor. We have a stylist cut our hair once a month and sometimes we even change the style. That, my friend, is our wild hair! Feeling our oats. Not playing it safe. Because, yah, you guessed it, because we’re rugged individuals!!

Some nights we even watch foreign movies with subtitles on Netflix! Not kidding, we do! Crazy stuff like that, like going to Burger King instead of McDonalds or ordering something other than the burgers. Chance Takers, that’s who we are, the progeny of the pioneers who tamed this country. Any given day we might quit our stupid job and hit the road, never look back. Tell the boss to shove it. Take the risk. Because we’re Risk Takers, we’re tough as a Chevy truck. We vape tobacco and maybe we even still smoke cigarettes, because nobody is going to tell us what to do. We’re the Marlboro Man, Stetson on straight, burning our way across the landscape, solitary riders on the American plains, we’re independent, we’re free, we’re the new cowboys, same as the old cowboys.

Giddy up and Go, that’s our motto. Not that we have to giddy up and go anywhere, you understand. If we want to stay home, by god, we will. If we want to babysit the grandkids, that’s what we’ll do. If we want to read crap on the internet half the livelong day, you got it, we will. Nobody tells us what’s what. We’re Americans, dammit, we’re rugged individuals so don’t tread on us.

Maybe some of you are of an age where you get senior discounts at various retail stores and, a reward for surviving the travails of living. With the coronavirus plague shuttering those places and menacing us in even the most trivial of errands out there in zombieland, the local grocery stores here have embarked on offering us geezers an early jump on shopping, figuring we probably get up early since we don’t sleep well anymore, and more importantly, we need to keep our distance from shoppers carrying the seeds of our early death. I, for one, appreciate the thought.

Actually, no I don’t. But … in one instance I acted on this offer. Costco. For weeks I have been hearing about traffic backups, long lines to enter, enforced separations, limited shopper numbers, more long lines, enough rumor to convince me to avoid the enchanted warehouse. Forget buying bulk, I growled, I’ll pay more for less at the local markets. But after a month I realized I needed half a dozen items that would make it worth my while to return to the consumer cathedral and so when I heard they had Geezer Hours early in the morning three days a week, I set an alarm and drove up to the nearest Costco from me, about 40 miles or so.

I got there an hour after they opened but even so the store was wonderfully vacant. I cruised a couple of aisles with the other geriatrics, snatched my required items, queued up with only one cart in front of me and sailed out in the unheard of time of 7 minutes, no doubt a national Costco speed shopping record. Not that I got any medals, but… I had reward enough.

These are strange times in Plague Town. Driving through Stanwoodopolis, like most towns around here, the scene is post-apocalyptic, a dystopian glimpse of a future we thought only existed in sci-fi. Gas stations are open with unheard of llow prices we haven’t seen since the golden years of the 60’s, but they’re basically empty since no one is driving much of anywhere with no stores, no malls, no shopping other than groceries and cannabis, the essentials. Pretty soon they’ll pay you to store their excess gas in your tank. And as incentive, offer you a free roll of toilet paper now that toilet paper is more precious than gas or gold.

Personally I’m waiting to fill up … til they offer geezer incentives. Adult diapers, not toilet paper.

This is going to come as a shock to many of you, but … the government has determined that my little guitar building shop is not really an ‘essential’ business. This was not really a surprise to me, to be brutally honest. For one thing, I never sold a single stringed instrument I made over the years, not that lack of profit has ever deterred me in artistic pursuits then or now. And for another, the government has also determined my glass shop is non-essential too. Art, music — we can all live without them, I’m being told. Nothing new there.

The fiddler in our band, the South End String Band (soon to be renamed the South End Non-Essentials), builds violins. Exquisite instruments of incredible craftsmanship. I asked him once, however, why he always made them out of flamed maple. Why not some other kind of hardwood? Because, he explained, Stradivarius made them out of flamed maple and so when he learned luthiery, he was taught to construct his violins with the exact thickness, measurements and dimensions that the Master used. I wondered aloud why not be a little more, oh, experimental, maybe more artistic, maybe shake things up a bit. He looked at me like I’d just climbed out of a tree searching for nuts. People who buy these instruments aren’t looking to stand out in the orchestra, he said. They want what Stradivarius had. And I want, he explained, to sell them, not put them in an art museum.

Well, I guess I could have absorbed that advice when years later I decided to try my untutored hand at making banjos. All kinds of exotic woods, multiple strategies in construction, various experiments with shapes and sizes. A banjo pretty much sounds like a banjo. You could string up a tin box with a neck and you got yourself a banjo. A guitar, not so much. Don’t ask me why I decided to build one. Hubris, I suspect. Or maybe I figured I’d build a work of art rather than a musical instrument. I don’t, in retrospect, really remember the thought process. If there even was one.

Five guitars later I understand why my fiddler keeps making copies of Stradivariuses. My guitars each had different woods, different bracing systems, different necks, odd sound holes, each its own little experiment. I was the monkey at the typewriter pecking away hoping to write War and Peace. I had no fine woodworking skills, I had no luthiery background, I didn’t in the beginning know what was inside a guitar or how it was constructed. I guess I thought it was like building my house, just get a hammer and saw and start building, you’ll get it built eventually.

My last guitar got strung up yesterday. It’s a koa guitar, back, sides, with a spruce top and a neck laminated from padauk and maple and madrona. I played it expecting the worst but hoping for a miracle. It has good action, it even has good sound. It’s a keeper. Course, so are the others since none are really marketable. I got my own little luthiery museum.

The brain fever is dying down now and the government is probably right to deem this as non-essential. But for a couple of years, more than I care to admit, building guitars was, for one of us, pretty much essential. For those of us in the arts, that is the sad but passionate truth. I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Out here on the Left Coast we have slightly different sets of priorities than the Heartland. When the Governor shuttered all but ‘essential’ businesses to quarantine us citizens from superfluous gatherings, one of those businesses was the cannabis stores. Apparently this was because they offered medical treatments. Both physical and mental, I guess. Yesterday I read that liquor stores previously closed would be allowed to reopen. Grocery stores were reporting that shelves of beer and wine were bare and so … once again the argument for medical treatment must have applied to liquor stores.

When the going gets tough, as the saying goes, the tough turn to medication. I’m fully expecting oxycontin stores to open soon, a last ditch panacea for Forced Isolation Syndrome. Surprisingly the restrictions on church services are still in effect, but then, like I mentioned, this is the Left Coast. More likelihood yoga classes will reopen before mainstream and fundamentalist churches. And today in the newspaper that still gets delivered, obviously an essential service, I read that the gun rights folks are up in arms, or possibly without arms, over the closure of gun stores.

When the going gets tough, buy an assault rifle. They argue that in this era of pandemic panic, they have to protect their families. If that isn’t essential, what is? Well, cannabis, evidently. And liquor, obviously. Their rights are being violated, they howl, as if being restricted to their homes is somehow not a violation of their freedom of assembly. I feel their pain, I really do. When the toilet paper runs out and the peasants take to the streets, pitchforks in hand, how do they protect themselves and their huddled family? Throw empty liquor bottles at the mob? Explain patiently that they must cease and desist, return to their quarantined shelters, go home? Without brandishing a weapon to make their case?

When this epidemic has run its course, one thing we will learn from this disease: what exactly is an essential business. My pals in the business, so-called, of art, or of music, well, if they didn’t know already their true value in this society, they do now. I just hope they aren’t the ones lobbying for those gun stores to reopen.

These are polarized times, as you readers of the Cracker undoubtedly know, enough so that the Editor is forever nervous about what grenade this Moonshine Wisdom and Wet Powder Wit column might drop in his lap. But you know… and I do too… these times call for courage. If men of conviction do not speak up, how can we look ourselves in the mirror when tyranny takes root? No, ladies and gentlemen, my allegiance is larger than just loyalty as a writer for the Crab Cracker. My allegiance is to justice. My allegiance is to truth. That is what a sardonic sense of humor represents. As I think you all know by now….

Today —despite the fears and admonitions of my fellow South Enders – the time has come to speak out. Damn the consequences! Oh, I know, we dare not weigh in on impeachment hearings, climate change, Middle East assassinations, trade tariffs and the upcoming elections. But we cannot stay silent on the burning issue of our time. No, trouble has come to our fair city, little Stanwoodopolis. I’m not talking about the decay of Viking Village, I do not refer to the suburban take-over up on Haggen Hill, I won’t even mention the need for a new library. I’m talking, of course, about a crematorium right here in River City, capital C, rhymes with T and stands for Trouble … if I can quote the Music Man.

And worse, as I’m sure you’ve all heard, the downtown Dust to Dust Ashes to Ashes Crematorium, fully approved by the City Council, now is applying to use the Hamilton Stack in order to meet the anticipated demands of its human incineration, their argument being that noxious aromas would be greatly mitigated with that higher stack. Pollutants would be carried out to Port Susan where only the seagulls might be troubled. And the occasional crabber.

It’s time to nip this in the bud. This isn’t just about carbon footprints. This is carbon whole body prints. This is Grandma Jenny going up in smoke, wafting on the offshore breeze down as far as the South End for heaven’s sake. Say no to the Hamilton Stack Incinerator! Call your mayor, call your city planner, call the lady with the alligator purse, but call somebody before they all go up in smoke! Do it for a Carbon Neutral Future! Do it for the Pioneer Cemetery! Do it for Grandma!
[Paid for by the Committee to Stop the Hamilton Stack Human Incinerator]

Now that the edict has been passed down requiring us South Enders to quarantine ourselves, concerned friends and relatives call or email to inquire if we’re okay, worried that prolonged isolation down here with nothing but the beach and the woods confining us to a primitive existence, well, it might lead to, oh, mental instability. Or worse.

I tell them we’re fine, we’re all right, we’re really okay, nothing to worry about, we’ll manage just hunky dory. Got plenty to do here, wood to saw and split and haul, repairs to be made, garden to be planted, hardly enough hours in the day to get it all done. Don’t worry about us. Life goes on pretty much the same as always.

What I don’t mention is the guitar in the shack. The one I’m building while I’m also repairing the last one I built. Today I tore apart the first one I made, popped the walnut back and went to work on the guts. Three of them are sitting in various stages of assembly — or disassembly — on the tables down there. Parts are strewn from front door to back, necks are lying around, pickguards are being varnished, tailpieces are drilled, strings are everywhere. I know, it probably looks like the Mad Hatter’s luthier shop. But … nothing to worry about. I’m fine. Busy, as you can see.

Do I need a 5th homemade guitar? Why do you ask? It’s just a harmless hobby. Something to keep myself occupied. No, I don’t think it’s an obsession exactly. An addiction? C’mon. It’s hardly an addiction. Okay, no, I guess I’m not sure why I started this last one. Boredom maybe. One more chance to get it right, this guitar building. You know, learn from the first four mistakes. Improvement through practice. Yeah, I see that the last one was worse than the first three, so what’s your point? I’m repairing that one, aren’t I? Maybe when I’m done, it’ll be better. A lot better. Maybe so much better I’ll wish I hadn’t starting building the fifth one. Okay, I know, that’s what I said about the first one when I was half done with the second and already tearing down the first one but it did sound better and all right, I’m inside that one for the third time and now there are two more not quite done and … what? It seems like I’m going backwards? Does it? No, I don’t agree. I have two that are finished. What? Yeah, I tore those apart too but … what’s your point?

No, I’m perfectly fine. Just got a little hobby to while away the pandemic plague. If you’re interested in purchasing an instrument, just say so, I can probably have one ready by the time the virus has run its course. Got to use your fiscal stimulus money on something, right? I’d make you a deal on multiples. Take the whole lot, big savings. Very big savings. Might even save me.