The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I never wanted to live in a small town. I have a few times and I hated it. Everybody knows your Bizness …. or they think they do. Now I live on a small island. Used to be I felt reasonably anonymous. I kept a low profile the first few decades, no photos in the paper OR the post office. I still try to keep that part. Folks might know my name, but usually they don’t have a mug shot to go with it.

Still, you live in one place long enough, you’ll lose any anonymity you might once have prized. Folks come up to me all the time in town or the local grocery, saying Hi Skeeter, how ya doin’? Hell if I know half of them — embarrassing, for sure, but I’m getting, if not used to it, at least not losing sleep later. I just plead geriatric dementia. Pretty soon it won’t be a ploy, it’ll be a diagnosis. At least I’ll have years of acclimation.

I shouldn’t mind, I suppose. Not like I’m a Class 4 predator in the neighborhood. Although … that banjo I play might qualify for some community meetings with the sheriff to warn everybody. You can’t be too careful these days.

But let’s face it — privacy is a precious commodity, not one we should relinquish easily. Sure, we can grow a thicker skin, ignore the parochial paparazzi, try to keep our heads down but focused on the Goal, whatever the goal might be. Folks can think what they want … even if we’ve tried to create an Image.

Comes a time, though, when public opinion starts to challenge our self image. Fame, even small fry, small town notoriety, seems corrosive. Like having a mirror on the wall you try to ignore, but … you peek. And the reflection isn’t what you see when you brush your teeth.

I suppose I could pull back in. Or move away. Or change my name. It’s appealing some days. Except that I love it here. I’ve been back in the woods this month. Logging. Planting trees. Lining the paths with bleeding hearts. It’s a great escape. It might just be a start. Until the raccoons get too familiar with me.

I know you’re probably sick unto death of hearing me ramble on about my little projects. Home improvement, self-improvement, who out there cares and why should they? The stuff I do, everybody used to. At least before TV and computers made my world boring and anachronistic. Sure it’s nice to pretend I live up some holler a stone’s throw from the 19th Century or that someday they’ll name my crappy pond Walden Too. Truth is, that pond will maybe hold a footprint of mine in its mud, a future fossil drying up and of interest only to archeologists back to explore the planet. Hominid South Endosaur, bipedal, semi-upright, omnivorous, small brain, tool user from the Menopausal Era before the global warming extinctions.

They won’t find much of us, I’m betting. They’ll make bad guesses from my middens before the mizzus made dump runs mandatory when she arrived on the scene. I don’t even want to tell you what I buried back then, but let’s just say you piece together as much of my civilization as the folks who dig through the Jamestown dumps in the Virginia colonies. I find artifacts myself from prior pioneers. Hell, my shack is an artifact, built over 100 years ago. Up the ravine we’ve found 17 brass beds, an old Studebaker, empty liquor bottles, a copper washing machine tub, assorted glassware, coffee pots, zinc canning jar lids, you name it, it’s out there. I buried a cast iron wood/electric Monarch stove too heavy for me to lift, but okay to roll into a hastily dug grave.

So I was gonna tell you about making a bed this week. I planed rough cut madrona, designed a headboard and a footboard, ripped the wood but saved the ones with bark, assembled them, finished it and hauled it up to the house we just bought next door. You’re thinking, Big Deal, so what, shut up already. You can buy a bed in Goodwill. Or get a job and go buy a nice bedstead downtown at the furniture store. Who in holy hell makes a damn bed anyway?

My father-in-law, visiting a couple months before I finished the new house I’d spent one and three quarter years building already, found me making homemade doors. I was on Door #2 or so with 9 total to build. He said I could buy those at the hardware store and maybe move into the new house before me and his daughter died of old age waiting to finish building it. He had a good point, I guess.

But I’m not much for advice, especially when I’m knee deep already in a project. I finished 7 more doors, hung them and moved on to artsy fartsy floor tiling, stained glass transoms, maple floors, window casements and slate in the entryways and the hallways downstairs. Tedious work a lot of it. We did manage to move in before our demise, I’m happy to report. Course now I’m building an oak bed to replace our brass one. I guess it’s always going to be a race to the finish, one I’ll eventually lose. Like they say, you made your bed, now lay in it. I’m trying…..

Our brass bed came from an old Polish homestead in Northern Wisconsin. I bet it was a prized possession when it was new. The Cat’s Pajamas. It was black with corrosion back then, but I spent a week with brass cleaner, steel wool, elbow grease and constant cursing to make it shine again.

I’ve slept in that bed since 1971. For you mathematicians, that’s a long time, a world of snoring, a universe of dreams and plenty of whoopee. You can get attached to a bed after that long.

So it was a surprise when the mizzus wanted a new one. Mostly she wanted a queen size and since the brass bed is a double, well, maybe you can see my dilemma. I suppose I could buy a bedframe or salvage one from Habitat for Humanity’s store — and actually I looked — but what I saw wasn’t going to replace the hole in our bedroom when that brass bed got hauled down to the shack. A bed, it seems to this old snorer, is a pretty personal item. It’s not a fridge or a table. Not even a sofa, although sometimes the couch is the bed when we fall asleep watching movies.

Anyway, I decided to build our own. A friend had given me two pickup loads of old oak and maple and madrona lumber, pretty gnarly, bark on, warped and cupped and bowed. Plenty enough to build a bed. Or two. One for us, one for the little 40’s house we just bought. One out of madrona, one out of oak. Both big. Queen-sized, actually. I won’t bore you with the construction details. Let’s just say I’ve been at it a couple of weeks. And they’re still not done.

I’m hoping the new bed will be like the new house when I built it back twenty years ago, the house I wasn’t really confident would replace the shack I’d loved for 17 years, shack ornot. I suspect it will. That’s the best part of homemade anything — you’ve built yourself right into it. And besides, I’ll put the brass bed back in the shack. Just the way it was when the mizzus first came out here. Might even plan a 2nd honeymoon. She can pick the bed….

Well, time to make a run to Wisconsin to see my folks.  I’m not sure they have internet access in the manure fields of corn stubble so bear with me if these blog entries get iffy.  Meanwhile, mull over those election results and see if you want to quit watching the pundits for a couple years.  I was in the eye clinic with me ma yesterday and a pretty irate character expounded vitriol about the current governor and his ilk.  I said, so you must’ve voted multiple times, eh?  To which he admitted he wasn’t going to vote at all.  I presume if he’d had a gun he would’ve shot himself in the foot to show the bastards what exactly was what…

I got a pal who wrote a really good book on the Barefoot Bandit, well researched, tautly written, humanely told. He’d hoped to parlay that into a movie with the Academy Award winning screenplay writer of Milk and J. Edgar, but something went sour beside the kidney pools of Hollywood and the movie lapsed beyond the internet interest expiration date. He’s holed up at his cabin on Orcas, doing what most of us artists do, waiting for the phone to ring.

Ten years ago I had breakfast with a local artist here on the South End. He’d just finished a huge mural at the new theater and their outside lobby of the restaurants that ringed the place. He was depressed, he said, now that the project was over. He couldn’t understand it, big artwork installed to great acclaim, good money, all good. And now he was depressed. He poked forlornly at his chicken fried steak. That project was a yearlong undertaking and he figured it would open the floodgates to more of the same. Fame and fortune would surely follow.

I gulped at my 3rd refill of coffee, set down empty and said, “Post partum depression.” He looked at me with a mouthful of heart attack and said, “What?”

“You got the afterbirth blues,” I said with some authority. “You’ll look at the other stuff, the usual paintings, as piddly-ass. The big stuff as an adrenaline rush. When it stops, the rest seems blasé’ It’ll pass … or else you’ll get another big one.”

I just went two years in withdrawal. They don’t make methadone for this. There’s no cure. And there’s no prescription. You wait for the Next Project, cold turkey and sweating in the wee hours of the night in a blood fever.

Like I told Orcas Bob, you’d think it would get easier for us Old Hands. But it doesn’t. I like to think — when I’m partially rational — the hunger let’s us keep an Edge. Too much success, we’d get fat and lazy. Probably go to socialite parties, get accustomed to the applause and the alcohol, then squiggle out the next artwork by rote and routine. Maybe we’re actually the lucky ones. You know … if that phone ever rings again.

Little Jimmy was preaching at the South End Marina’s Pilot House Lounge the other night, carrying on about the upcoming elections. “It’s like we got two Halloweens,” he was orating to about 8 of us layabouts who weren’t quite ready to go home and face the music. “One with goblins and then the one we vote for spooks, no treats.”

“Yeah,” Biker Bob threw in, pounding his Bud bottle on the formica table, sending suds onto the pulpit. “And then you got 4 more years of Halloween every damn day.”

Some of the boyz, especially after more than a couple, don’t much believe in the democratic system we got. “Throw em all out, I say,” says Ralph from behind the bar where he’s filling in for Joey, the usual weeknight bartender and referee. Joey never takes a side in a political discussion, wouldn’t say Poll with a mouthful, which explains why the place stays open in these partisan times we live in and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette isn’t half obits of patrons shot in the parking lot.

George next to me sits pensively peeling the label off his beer bottle before venturing, “You mean everybody but YOUR guy, don’tcha Ralph?”

“Oh, my guy’s okay,” Ralph agrees, wiping his hands on a dirty apron. “He voted to kill that Gun Bill this year.” Ralph’s a big NRA fan, something he usually espouses this side of the bar most nights until Joey tells him to pipe down. Ralph can get pretty agitated without much counter-argument even. Argue with him and he can get scary as Halloween in an Ebola isolation unit.

Half the place votes for their guy, it turns out. The other half are too disgusted or apathetic to even vote, especially mid-term. They’d vote if they could vote out the president, but nothing’s going to change, why bother? they think. So Ralph’s vote should count double, a fact that makes him happy. And me … I take the point about a prolonged Halloween in the Land of the Brave.

Professor Jimmy was on his 3rd pint at the  newly opened Knockaway Tavern next to the golf course up north, deep into a tutorial on plagues, quarantines and his newest conspiracy theory that the government was behind the Ebola pandemic, when Big Barry interrupted him halfway through a muddy plot to decimate the Republican electorate. “Correct me if I’m wrong here, Jim,” the bartender cut in, “but wasn’t it you who thought 2 weeks ago Ebola was an internet virtual bowling game?”

Jimmy magnanimously acknowledged his mistake but claimed he was ‘up to speed’ now. I was going to observe he hadn’t budged off his barstool once all night, maybe speed limits were unnecessary, but I was hoping to hear his conspiracy theory to its comical conclusion, save me listening to Fox News yet another year.

“They brought it here to infect us!” he fairly shouted. “They want us to believe it isn’t airborne but they’re working on that, you better believe. They’ll have an antidote, but not for us!” Jimmy took a long, purposeful gulp of his beer, probably his idea of a hedge against airborne transmission.

These are scary times down here on the oblivious South End apparently. Jimmy’s not the only Paul Revere sounding the alarm. The county commissioners are considering quarantining the islands. Surgical face masks are as prevalent as Halloween costumes. Or maybe they are Halloween costumes…. The neighbors are stocking up like Mormons and Rogue River survivalists. The pawn shops are out of guns and ammo and even the vast armory at Cabela’s is depleted. The storm clouds are gathering on cable news and the forecast is for the sky to fall.

Big Barry wiped some of Jimmy’s spillage off the fir countertop and tossed his rag into the soapy sink beneath the bar. “Can’t be too careful, Jim. You aren’t showing symptoms Now, but … you do seem a bit lathered up.” Flathead Fred guffawed from two stools down, which infuriated Jimmy. “Go ahead and laugh,” he protested. “That’s’ what the government wants. Sheep. Dead sheep!”

I never did hear the end of the conspiracy. Jimmy hasn’t been back at the Knockaway since. Barry says he’s been quarantined for 21 days. Fred figures he’s dead already, just like that Liberian in Dallas. Rumor has it Texas is a lost cause now and Oklahoma has closed its borders. All I know is the government should be working on an antidote for panic.

Back when crabs weren’t an Endangered Species, I used to walk the eelgrass beds at minus tides sometimes as early as late March or early April. Barefoot, wearing shorts, but an Eskimo parka on top. My feet would go numb, but … those first Dungeness of the year were muy delicioso and worth a little frostbite. Every year the season started later and ended earlier, the price you pay for an overpopulated Puget Sound and too many commercial crabbing licenses. By the time the season starts now, 1st of July, the tribes and the commercial boyz have pretty much cleaned the bottom.

I’m not complaining, mind you, just stating the facts. I don’t make my living off seafood harvesting, but harvesting seafood does help me avoid seeking honest work by knocking down the grocery bills. Back when crabs were the size of pitbulls and plentiful as buffalo, I probably ate too many of the monster bottom feeders. Since they were top of their foodchain, I hate to imagine the toxins they managed to collect down there by the Everett Navy base and the paper mills. The shortened recreation crab season might just add a decade or so to my life.

If you walk for crab the way I always did, you’re at the mercy of the tides. Unless you scuba dive for the buggers…. So lately I’ve kept a dinghy down at the beach and drop pots like all my neighbors do. Course they got 10 horse motors on theirs and I got homemade oars. My row out is about 5 or 6 football fields, maybe a third of a mile one way, good exercise, a nice workout. In calm seas.

Last week my brother was here and the day before he left I wanted crab for his bon voyage dinner. The wind was blowing hard, but being the sons of a Navy father, we hopped in and rowed into the gale. Which promptly picked up to whitecaps. We were a bit overloaded, us and the boat, but by Neptune, we were going to eat crab that night! Half an hour into this my brother starts asking questions like what do we do in case of a capsize, swim for shore or stay with the boat? I didn’t tell him it’s every man for himself, but I could see he was weighing whether crabs were worth drowning for. On the South End they are. Where he’s from, hamburgers looked pretty good, which is what he suggested we consider.

I’m not the world’s most courageous sailor, but I’m right up there with the most foolhardy. My brother isn’t a coward — I don’t recall him ever being scared, except maybe drive-in horror movies we’d go to as kids — but we finally decided about 10 feet from the buoys that Mom and Dad didn’t need a double drowning at this stage in their dubious parenting career. Those hamburgers sounded pretty darn good. Even if we did have to drive to the store when we rowed back into shore. Just had to be careful lighting the barbecue.

In my 64 years I’ve lived a lot of places around this country. Eight states, 3 or 4 times that many towns. Most of these had a library. Even a few of the more remote places. One was only open one day a week for 4 hours. You can bet where I was that day.

When I first arrived here on the South End, I was 18 miles from the old Stanwoodopolis Library, but first thing, I went into town for a card. The librarian back then in 1977 wouldn’t loan me a book until I could prove residency. She wanted a letter sent to me with my address. I guess Stanwood had a lot of book thievery from out of town transients — that, or she didn’t like my long hair and shifty looks. I didn’t much care for her dismissive attitude or officious bearing so I guess we were even.

A week later I came back with an envelope bearing ‘proof’ of residence. I think I sent it to myself, but if the mailman trusted me, that was plenty for the librarian. Well, not really. She made it pretty clear I was still under suspicion. I made it clear she was too.

The Stanwoodopolis Library and I have held a truce for 37 years. And because the mizzus is a librarian and even worked there a few years, I got to be friends with most of the librarians over the years. When their levy to build a new library failed by a few votes, no one was more bereaved than me.

A lot of Stanwoodopolis library boosters think now that we got a library on Camano, they’ll never get a new one. In a week the townsfolk vote to raise their taxes or not to support their library. It’s a complicated issue and what most of those beleaguered taxpayers who probably are going to vote NO don’t realize is that the Sno-Isle system is going to pull the plug on their home-grown, home-owned library if they don’t vote YES. The city council knows this, the Stanwoodopolis Gazette knows this, but you won’t hear Word One what the implications of a NO vote are, mainly that Stanwood is going to get cut loose from the larger system and its resources. I’m even betting my old crabby librarian will be coming out of retirement when salaries and staff and services are cut. If nothing else, it’ll keep library users to a minimum. That, and maybe the Stanwood folks will have to prove residency to use ours. Save your mail and your letters, is all I can advise.

Back when Island County had 3 commissioners from Whidbey Island and Zero from Camano, I ran my alter ego, Skeeter Daddle, for commissioner. The Stanwoodopolis newspaper’s editor John Dean even ran my campaign poster showing a disoriented character propped, legs out, against a 1950 Chevy panel truck carcass in the weeds. STOP OUTSOURCING OUR COMMISSIONERS, it read, followed by THIS AIN’T IRAQ, HOW ABOUT A LITTLE DEMOCRACY?

The next week I penned a letter to the same editor, who ironically enough, would be our commissioner 5 years later, ranting how Mr. Daddle was totally unfit for public office. John could see where this was headed and he asked if I would cease and desist before reality became hopelessly skewed for his readership, at least the ones not brainwashed by Fox ‘News’. A wise decision, I told him, and essentially withdrew my battered hat from the political ring.

A year or so later one of the Democratic politicos from Whidbey approached me at some function or other, looking for a dark horse candidate, and asked if I were Skeeter Daddle?  I am, I said, mostly amused, at least until she asked if I would reconsider running for Island County Commissioner. I suppose in these faith based times where e-mails are forwarded as position papers for the wildest of extreme beliefs, where a sizeable portion of the voting population believes the president is a Muslim, a foreigner, a Socialist and a terrorist, running a fictional character for county office would raise not one eyebrow.

I’m not sure what Skeeter’s platform might’ve been. Probably nothing too tectonic other than moving the county seat to our South End, digging a canal at Elger Bay to Port Susan with drawbridges and tolling stations and possibly declaring Camano an Eco-sensitive zone with full moratoriums on future residential and commercial development. Nothing really radical. Nevertheless, Skeeter said if nominated, he would not run; if elected, he would not serve — although if paid, he would cash the checks. John Dean did run, but lost to a Tea Party candidate on the run to a second term who sued her own county and John for enforcing the law requiring her to get a building permit for her illegal addition. John blamed a write-in campaign for Skeeter for confusing an already wobbly electorate and losing him that re-election. Although … he seems much happier driving shuttle bus at the State Park. Pay isn’t great but his passengers don’t yell at him.

Skeeter couldn’t have scripted a comedy half as hilarious as this. Even if it’s not really funny….