The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You live in the 19th century the way we pretty much do, you heat your place with wood. We heat the entire house, the woodshop, our old shack (now a glass studio) and the sauna. We keep 5 woodsheds. Six if you count the house we bought next door and yeah, it has a woodstove too. Probably got about 30 cords of wood stored right now, maybe more. When the carbon footprint police come for us — and they will — we’ll be the folks in the ten league boots. We’ll plead guilty, no question about it, but maybe the judge and jury will be merciful considering how hard, how incredibly hard, it is to heat with wood. Probably they’ll throw the book at us, if we still print books anymore, or just beat us with a Kindle.

I’m not even going to try to soften your hearts with tales of chainsaw mishaps, massive peavey lifts, endless days of log splitting with an 8 pound maul, wheelbarrow haulings, wood stacking, the endless work of bringing in cordwood. Instead I’ll tell you a tale of the dangers of burning the stuff.

Our first sauna was a chicken coop. The mizzus came out from the tundra of Minnysota in the winter of ’77. By spring we decided we needed an addition. But first! she wanted a sauna. A sauna? I asked, bewildered, not really sure what a sauna was having never been in one. But she was of Finnish heritage and by god, by jiminy, she would have a sauna, yah shure, u-betcha. Being a dutiful husband, I tried arguing, explained we could better use the resources for an addition, but no, a sauna she wanted. And a sauna she would get, I assured her. Just tell me how the damn thing worked so I could build a South End version.

You need a building and you need a stove. If you can, you pile some rocks on the stove for pouring water to make steam. You can go out and roll in the snow when you’re hot enough or you can jump in the lake or stream. All we had was a hose for a cold water shower. It’s simple really. I cleaned out the chickenless chicken coop and added benches up high, plumbed in our old shack heater, built a change room outside with the hose from the well and voila, we had a sauna. I admit, I was skeptical, but maybe my Scottish ancestors had vacationed in Helsinki back when, because I liked it a lot. We started taking sauna once a week. We sweated mightily and we were purified. It was almost, but not quite, a religion. At the least, an island sweat lodge.

I liked it so much that after a few years I remodeled it, paneled the coop, put in nice flooring, added a covered change room with a big stained glass window in it. Put another cedar shake roof on both and added insulated stovepipe for the new stove. My mistake was figuring the insulated stovepipe could have cedar shakes right up to the pipe. So about the first big firing, the roof caught on fire when the pipe was blisteringly hot and right up to the very flammable cedar shakes. I came out to put another load of wood in only to find flames had engulfed the roof and the entire sauna was ablaze.

The mizzus wanted to call the VFD, the volunteer fire department, but I said why bother, they don’t call em ‘basement savers’ for laughs. So instead I went out and took photos of the conflagration lighting up the night sky. The fact no neighbors called 9-1-1 tells you how many neighbors or passing cars we had back then. While I was doing my photojournalism I noticed the adjacent wellhouse was smoking, its paint blistering off, and I thought, geez, maybe we should’ve called the VFD. If the wellhouse caught fire, then our water supply was gone too and the shack was about as close to the wellhouse as the wellhouse was to the sauna. I grabbed a hose, the one with the end burnt off and smoking from the changeroom now engulfed, and for an hour I watered down the wellhouse. In the end nothing was left but the blackened body of the cast iron stove and a few odds and ends.

The mizzus could only shake her head sadly. Probably for the loss of the sauna, not for my idiocy. I figured she was getting used to the idocy by then. Course … later I’ll have to tell you the tale of the chimney fire.

Our anniversary is coming up tomorrow. 34 years. No, not our wedding anniversary, the day the mizzus rolled onto the South End and into our love shack. Love shack. Put the emphasis where you want, but my god, it really was just an old dilapidated shack, warped floors, swaybacked roof, dryrot and cracked linoleum, standing on stumps and pier blocks at the end of the road. At the tail end of an island on the shore of a continent. You don’t believe in romance or the power of love, you should listen up, stories like this’ll melt your cynicism, maybe give you faith that life can always get better.

Thirty four years ago we were dirt poor, both of us. I had a part time job as graveyard orderly in a hospital 40 miles away with nothing in the bank. Karen had just finished a Masters degree in librarying. No job. Some student loan debt. She rolled in with $40, a suitcase and a set of skis. Maybe she thought we had winters here on the coast. Our $225 a month mortgage was hard to meet and it felt like the wolves were waiting outside the back door. You want to find out if your relationship is strong, live in poverty awhile, you’ll find out. Pretty quick.

But those were great years, those love-struck, hardscrabble years back in the early 1980’s. The South End was pretty remote back then, not many neighbors, not many friends. We spent most of our time together, working in the yard and the gardens, patching up the shack, adding a few additions. Family and friends who came out to visit us probably felt sorry for us living that close to the edge in a rundown hovel hard to keep warm. But me, I never was happier than those early years. Love will make you forget a lot of troubles the same way money won’t make you forget you’re lonely.

A lot of women wouldn’t have stuck it out. Okay, most women wouldn’t have stuck it out. Not only was I no prize, the shack wasn’t exactly a honeymooner’s dream home either. Couple of strikes right there. And any career possibilities for a prospective librarian … well, they were few and far between and a miserably long drive away. Staying meant some serious sacrifices.

Looking back, we’ve done okay. Karen found some library work, even ran a department at the University of Washington’s prestigious library. Long commute though. Too long. She’s become the area historian by dint of 30 years of research and writing and she still is a librarian. Me, I quit my orderly job after 10 years and spent a couple building a house to replace the shack she lived in with me for 13 years. Folks who see the place now can scarcely believe it. Here? they ask. This dump? Yeah, I say, this old shack.

It makes me smile to think back on her arrival 34 years ago. Stormy night, power blown out, the old homestead lit by lanterns and oil lamps, the wind howling against the paned windows we could see our reflection in. We ate fresh crabs and drank champagne in the flickering golden light. The woodstove crackled and we started our future together. I think maybe we’ll do that again this year. The windstorm is already here.

A friend of mine, Ginny Johnson, down the road whose mom had died recently after a three month stay at the Mabana Sunset Villa asked me who’d be taking care of us when we needed a rocker and a drool bucket. She didn’t have kids and neither does yours truly. Me, I don’t have much in the way of paternal instincts and anyway, most of my so-called adult life I never felt fit to be a parent. Course now that I’m well past child rearing age, I look at most of my neighbors who did raise children and think if all those dope-smoking yahoos could manage it, how much worse could I have been?

Well … probably a lot worse. But we make our beds and now it’s time to lay in em. Hopefully with a little time left to bounce in em too.

Nevertheless Ginny has a point. Who’s going to help us when our teeth loosen up and our joints harden and erectile dysfunction is the least of our worries?? She was thinking maybe a favorite nephew, offer a hefty cut of the will as a carrot. Carrot? We barely got turnips. Our nieces and nephews, ma and me’s, they got their own lives thousands of miles away. Last thing in the world I’d inflict on them is our health care. No, my suspicion is all us old farts will have to take care of each other down here on the crusty South End. Give us something to do between Gilligan’s Island reruns and the next adult beverage, if nothing else.

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I agree, but it takes one too to care for the elderly. Used to be we could send gramps off on the next iceberg when the ‘time’ came, but with global warming, that option’s melted off the table.

I know it gets harder the older we get. My own view is you just have to get tougher too. We didn’t move to the end of a once remote island to live the life of Riley. We moved here to live like pioneers. Some of it’s been hard. We never thought it would get easier. And like my pals down at the Diner like to intone when one of us codgers is complaining about the last operation or wants to show his newly minted surgical scars: old age ain’t for sissies. Gonna be a lot of headstones with that chestnut engraved in granite.

I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.

Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.

I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.

Up behind us and through our woods there’s a road that snakes into the interior, got a few houses back there, even some folks who live there full time. Marge was one of those. She moved here when the clearcut ruined her own woods down by Lake Stevens. Course, about a year later, two or three of her neighbors cleared their 2 and a half acres and she felt like there was really nowhere to hide anymore.

She asked me to come up one day. Her husband was there in the livingroom with a whisky glass and the TV tuned to a game show. It was about 10 in the morning and he was drunk as a purple skunk and friendly as most alcoholics, meaning he wouldn’t say hello or shake hands. Marge made muted apologies, said he was a boat skipper, gone a lot of the time. From what I could see he was gone most of the time, even when he was in the room.

Marge shot herself a few years later, I can pretty much guess why, sad deal, sad woman. Her husband offered the place to his no-account kin, some punk pedophile the sheriff warned us neighbors about. The kid ran around with a crossbow, putting arrows into the neighbors’ houses, killing deer and leaving them to rot. He had parties the neighbors complained about, but he told them to jam it, he’d do what he wanted. The cops weren’t much help, pretty typical, so for four or five years we had this drug addict Chester the Molester for a roommate on the South End.

A few years ago Marge’s husband stopped by my shack during our annual Ma Day Studio Art Tour. Said he was moving, just wanted to say so long. “I haven’t been much of a neighbor,” he said sheepishly, “but I’ve quit drinking and I’m starting over. Wanted to apologize and say goodbye.”

A better man might’ve accepted that hand and that apology. But … I’m not that man. I leaned in on him and said, “I’m sorry too, Charlie, but it’ll be a better place with your sorry ass gone and your evil kin too. Adios, man. Move a long ways away, be all right with me.”

I believe in second chances, I really do. But I’m not one who believes an apology necessarily makes things right. I know he didn’t hold the gun to Marge’s head. I know he didn’t kill her, she killed herself. But I’ll be damned if I’d shake his hand and say good luck. I said instead, good riddance. Like I mentioned before, a better man …. that’s not me.

KINK, the 500 watt AM radio for the South End, recently received its FCC certification to broadcast as a bona fide public radio station. The station manager, Rhonda Bodley, made a short introduction yesterday morning at 8 a.m., something to the effect that finally the South End had its own voice. Course, for the last two years, that voice was intermittent, coming as it did from pirate broadcasts. If you happened to turn your AM dial to 490, you would have thought the Dark Ages had come to a crashing conclusion, that the rock had rolled off our cave entrance and that finally we had joined civilization. Never mind that podcasting had rolled the rock back.

Wolfman Chuck volunteered to be KINK’s first DJ. Well, the first legitimate disc jockey, spinning platters of his favorite old stuff, Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King, Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt, all the albums and 8 tracks he’d listened to stoned out of his head, at least any that were now out on CD’s. The first song to hit the South End airwaves was White Rabbit which he introduced as ‘our theme song’. “If you remember where you were when you first heard this,” he declared, “you didn’t hear it in the 60’s. Those memories were all … ERASED!” Wolfman would laugh his psycho laugh, usually ending in a coughing jag interrupted by another song.

Wolfman’s program is called Radio Free South End. “Where the truth comes to die.” Wolfman likes to announce it as four hours of Not-So-Easy-Listening, which is true, not so much for the music format as Chuck himself. He tends to ramble between songs, reminisces about the Golden Age of the sixties, extols acid rock and waxes nostalgic over everything from the Peace Movement to Timothy Leary, all in a sleepy stoner baritone punctuated by embarrassingly long pauses. He screws up the song credits, mangles syntax and punches wrong buttons for station ID when he meant to hit a public service announcement.

But … as Wolfman likes to tell us every few hours, “They pay me exactly what I’m worth. Nada. Zilch. Zip and zero. Speakin of which, this next tune is a million dollar winner … Cripple Creek with our own South End String Band!”

Like the man sez: not so easy listening.

Well, it was only a matter of time, of course, before the social media clamor for more of Skeeter went viral. You can blame yourselves or congratulate you and your Facebook ‘friends’, but either way, expect a full scale frontal cable assault and You-Tube blitzkrieg for that 15 minutes of fame we all so desperately yearn for. Okay, not for you. Roll over Kardashians, Skeeter’s got the news.

Reality TV and its attendant sponsors surely have their fingers on the pulse and wallet of America, possibly the world, more than these poor pathetic politicians vying for the scraps of our attention spans in their sad quest for the Presidency. You think Kim Kardashian would trade places with the Commander in Chief? When every newsstand, Twitter feed, internet ‘news’ spots and Entertainment Tonight covers her every wardrobe, romance and dietary inclinations in minute detail??? The President maybe gets a 20 second spot on what we now think of as the liberal media and endless hours on Fox as their favorite evil dart board. Kim’s nobody’s fool.

And Skeeter’s nobody’s fool either. Awhile back one of the honchos of Island County politics ran into him at a charity fundraiser he was attending incognito and she asked if he knew this Skeeter fellow. He said he did indeed. She asked, “Are you Skeeter?”

“Sometimes,” he answered cautiously, sensing dangerous tectonics. She confided that the Democratic Party wanted someone from Camano Island to run for county commissioner and would he consider? She had heard from her sources that he was a potentially popular candidate. Skeeter said her sources were either unreliable or drug addled. Undeterred, she assumed he was joking. “I’ve heard you have quite a sense of humor,” she chuckled. Skeeter pointed out that there was nothing funny in politics these days. “All the more reason to throw your hat in the ring,” the party charwoman retorted.

Skeeter actually ran for commissioner a couple years earlier. As a joke. Even got a campaign poster in the Stanwood/Camano News and still receives write-in votes to this day. The editor at that time eventually ran — and won — the commissioner seat, never suspecting that Skeeter would be a stalking horse in the campaign, one that he had inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.

But no, politics is not a hell Skeeter wants to inhabit. He has bigger fish to fry as we say down on the South End. He has his sights set on What Matters, what’s important, what moves the public’s imagination in this 21st Century hive mentality. He’s taking on Duck Dynasty, the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, Dancing with the Stars and American Idol. He expects to be the next Big Thing. By the 2016 presidential elections, good luck to the candidates. If we even remember their names…..

Down at the laboratories of the South End industrial parks, our scientists are working 24/7 to catch up with the head start all those government subsidized research labs got on us. You might think we’re at a disadvantage, but you haven’t factored in the leg up our innovative crew of experimenters get from the creative ricochet of living near all those artists we got. Practically a Petri dish of teeming mutating e-volved thinking. Ordinary folks should probably suit up in bio-hazard gear. That, or vaccinate themselves with high dosage Prozac.

Our teams of specialists are working on stem cell research. You take some cell tissues, see, and you train em like circus fleas to behave like brains or bones or eyeballs or whatever you need right then and you give the patient a spoonful or two and I tell you what: you got a whole new lease on life, and if you got insurance, well sir, you might as well grow a few spare parts while you’re at it.

Now, we got folks who picket the lab. Neighbors who think we’re in the Frankenstein business, cloning mice and sheep and two headed humans. I tell em we’re not cloning, we’re stem celling. Stem cell selling, actually. Nothing to worry about. We’re curing diseases. We’re making a little money.

Cloning — now that’s putting a hard edge on it, dontchathink? Stem cells, that isn’t a real person, exactly. Dumb as a rock, most stem cells, but the protestors say so are most South Enders – which, I have to admit, is a pretty convincing argument …. Until you think of the lives that could be saved. And the money too, coincidentally. What IF, I say, we could make stem cells SMARTER than us South Enders. What’s so wrong with THAT?? And THEY say, your little friend would have YOU doing the chores while they did the thinking.

I got to admit, it’s a complicated issue. Personally I think we better go slow. Make my little friend not too smart. Maybe just smart enuff to do my chores,,,,,

I overhear the bearded man say to the man of the cloth
what he asked the Disbeliever:
how do you explain You?
And the two of them, conspirators now, chuckle with smug certainty
while a chill wind fans flaming leaves from a nearby woods
into the autumnal park we stand in.

Answers demand questions and science demands religion
and nothing ever ceases, not the chicken, not the egg,
not God and not Galileo.

Nothing is not nothing.

The wind that blows through the hardwoods forces me to believe in Time,
but what is Time?
What is anything but what Is?

What Isn’t, now that’s a bit harder.
An answer is only another question.

The sky never falls, Humpty is the broken egg.

I want to ask my two Believers what answers they never searched for,
What part of This is not them.

But of course they’re not entertaining questions
and Dumpty will never be completely whole again,
not inside this park anyway….

As regular as swallows to Capistrano or buzzards to Hinkley, Ohio, the South End String Band is returning to the South Grange (2227 S. Camano Dr.) for its annual benefit concert. Mark your calendars for Saturday, Nov. 7th at 7 PM for the South Grange Hoedown, a night of ‘music to set your boots on fire’. (Last year’s Strange Grange Ganja Gig caused so much distress among the Literal Minded that this year we add the following disclaimer for those with misaligned funny bones: YOUR BOOTS WILL NOT BURST INTO FLAME. However, your hair might.)

Join us for an evening of old time Camano roots music with a decidedly South End flair. The South End String Band is Erich Schweiger on fiddle, Don Mailloux on bass, Mike Hilley on mandolin, Monika DeNasha on 6 string guitar and Jack Archibald on 5 string banjo. Beer and wine will be available legally and snacks will be served. We’re clearing a dance floor and we’re cranking up the tempo. Hope you can make it. $10 at the door. Free parking. Funny Bone Massage Available.