The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

This month Washington is opening its first pot shops since we legalized marijuana last year. It’s been the Hot Topic at the Diner, almost as polarizing as global warming and Affordable Health Care, two topics Anita, the current owner, has turned into gold by changing her menu to include Obama Omelettes and Polar Bear Burgers. No doubt we’ll be seeing Killer Kannabis Hot Wings and other items shortly. The Diner is a regular debating society most breakfasts and lunches. At least indigestion isn’t blamed on Big Larry’s cooking.

Marijuana hasn’t exactly been a scarce commodity down here, legal or not, although if you listened to Charlie Griper’s apoplectic rants that legalizing the stuff will lead society inexorably down the toilet, you’d think liberals had just cloned a few plants from terrorist pals in Afghanistan and smuggled them onto the island. “How you gonna keep it out of the kids’ hands when we let dopeheads sell the stuff right up north? Might as well hand it out in the high school cafeteria!”

Harley Bob laughs. “Charlie, trust me, they won’t buy it at the Bud Hut — they’ll get if for half the price where they get it now. It’s not like buying rotgut moonshine when you can pay more for something that doesn’t blind you and tastes like turpentine strained through a dirty sock.”

“What are you talking about, Bob? We just told em it’s okay to fry their heads when we legalized it. We classified it as one of the most dangerous drugs out there as long as I lived. Now we’re spozed to think it’s okay. Like taking an aspirin. Jeez, gimme a break.”

“I guess you put too much trust in the government, Charles,” Bob laughs, knowing Charlie’s a card carrying anti-government Tea Party member. Charlie practically gags on his cheese Glacier Melt, a meal vaguely reminiscent of those Here’s your brain on drugs commercials a few years back.

“Laugh all you want, Bob. You’d laugh if they legalized heroin.” Bob taps his empty coffee cup for a refill. “Hit me again, Brenda,” he calls over to our morning waitress. “And hold the meth this time.”

Yes, it’s a New Day down at the South End.

I was chatting it up with an old friend today who drove me over to the house she’d finished building this year. I’d last seen it back when she started, over a year or more ago, back when she was laying up bags of sand or cement or god knows what, building up a wall she could plaster over with a mix of 15% Portland cement and 85% dirt to create a dome structure, part igloo in shape, part serpentine, mostly free-form and wild.

She was worried about not getting a building permit that first site visit and asked what I thought since I’m sort of an expert on permitless architecture. Most of my structures, shops, studios, wellhouses, boatsheds, rootcellar, bike buildings, woodsheds, outhouses, greenhouse and saunas are what you might call — but I sure don’t — illegal.

Illegal. That’s a strong and seriously unsavory description. Not one I much care for, you want to know the truth. I’m not building a Taj Mahal down here — not even a slam bam condominium we can list on AirB&B to make some fast bucks. We’re building with the Full Expectation these are Temporary Structures. Sure, I could haul in an old shipping container, maybe drag up a single wide, set up shop, store our treasures. But no, I erected a small, inconspicuous, aesthetically pleasing edifice instead. And yeah, shoot me, I didn’t ask the County if it was okay. Jeez….

I told my friend, don’t worry about permits. You don’t need no stinking permit! Nobody’s going to imagine, not in a thousand bourgeois lifetimes, this alien, 300 square foot concrete igloo is going to register on the County Radar as an actual house. A domicile. A place which humans would actually live. No!

But … it is. It’s an exquisite example of Building Outside the Box. It is, without a doubt, a work of art. Glass and metal and found objects all made their way into the walls. And! The dwelling is insulated far beyond Code, requiring only a match and a fart to heat on a cold winter day.

Is it legal? If you stand inside its curved and organic walls, you wouldn’t ask if it’s legal — you’d think, it’s strangely beautiful, it’s sculptural and it’s other wordly. My friend built this by herself and she’s understandably proud. It’s an amazing feat. And more, it’s her home and it’s paid for. Well, everything but the permit fee.

Harry works down at the O-Zi-Ya Body Shop. He’s an artist with bondo, makes a ‘total’ look brand new after pulling the dents and replacing crushed quarter panels, has a real nice touch with an airless in the spray booth. Back about 4 years ago, Harry was a ‘he’. Six foot four, muscular in a lithe sort of way, moved car parts around like baskets of daisies. I didn’t know him real well, I guess, mostly because my beater cars never got treated to the Body Shop make-over. Dents, scratches, bullet holes —- I’m not spending money for pigs’ lipstick.

So imagine my surprise when Harry walks up my drive during our annual Mother’s Day Studio Tour … in high heels, a tasteful above-the-knee pleated skirt, grey blouse and a matching handbag. “How you doing, man?” I ask nonchalantly and Harry explains, no doubt for the 1000th time, he’s no longer a man. Course, judging by the 5 o’clock shadow of a beard, he’s not quite a woman either. Which, he tells me earnestly, will take the hormone treatments some time to kick in.

Even on the live-and-let-live South End, this was, well , this was … different. And we’re accustomed to different. Harry toured the studio and we chatted it up and when he left I gave him a manly sort of hug and said, “Good luck, man,” and immediately corrected myself. Harry gave me a wink and a laugh and sallied forth down the drive.

Harry quit the Body Shop — not because the boyz couldn’t deal with The Change — they still speak fondly of him. Her. You know what I mean. She wanted a new life to go with the new her.

A couple of years ago I ran into Harry. Harriet now. She was installing fountains. Hauled the rocks, dug the ponds, wired the pumps, plumbed the waterfalls. “I’m an artist, Skeeter” she declared. She was welding sculptural components, creating light shows, running her own business. “Life’s good, then?” I asked.

She broke into a radiant smile, one I never saw at the Body Shop. Leaning down to whisper in my ear, she fairly bubbled, “It’s a joy my boy, it’s a joy!” All I can say is the path to happiness is a whole lot harder for some, even on the salty South End, but it isn’t impossible.

Me and Sky Pilot Larry are cooling our heels here in the Ford dealer garage waiting room at Fairbanks, a lavishly appointed corner of the main bays with coffee and a popcorn machine. But … they have a bathroom and a couple of chairs and a desk with internet hookup. Fairbanks is wired! Course, it’s the first cellphone coverage since the bubble in Prudeau provided courtesy of Alyeska.

We got truck problems, a hub grinding away in the front wheel where a 4 wheel drive assembly balked at the Dalton Highway’s mud and grit and thrown rocks. The road to Prudeau is called the ‘Haul Road’ because most traffic is semi-load of material for the North Slope drilling. Tourists are mostly nuisances to the big rigs — that, or potential roadkill targets as they sluice and slide down mudsloped roads like amphetamine hogs in a 9 degree trough. The fun is swerving away suddenly like a matador’s cape and not drive off into the tundra.

You pay a price for a fevered run at the Arctic Ocean. We got two chips in the windshield, broken sidelights, perforated trailer shell, mud in the truck bed back to the floor of the trailer. And this busted 4 wheel drive hub…. We got off light. This morning we spent an hour washing thick mud off everything stem to stern. The rig looked like a good ol’ boy’s offroad 4×4 up some river bottom, roof to muffler in permafrost mud. So did we.

Larry’s truck is a 4 wheel drive diesel brute, double gas tanks, high riding, 8 ply tires, extended cab, but no match, really, for the Alaskan Outback. It takes cojones and a copious amount of happy-go-lucky insanity to go mano y mano with frost heaves, drop-offs, sloughing shoulders, wayward moose, aggressive Kenworths, heavy fog, potholes the size of mastodon footprints, rockslides and mountain passes. If you asked either Larry or me, we both would do it again in a South End minute. Who says you get wiser with wisdom?? Sometimes in life, wisdom should take second fiddle. Otherwise, where’s the adventure?

I got a buddy who’s required to take a drug test before he’s hired on as a consultant for an oil consortium.  He worked ramrodding the construction site for the same oil companies for decades up at Prudeau Bay where part of his job was making sure the riggers stayed drug and alcohol free through long days and longer nights.  Sorta like Wyatt Earp asking the cowboys to stick with Coca-Cola Saturday nights, if they wouldn’t mind….

So now that he’s retired and going back for consulting, I guess the Big Boyz are worried he’s fallen into decadence and drugs along with the rest of us South Enders.  The required test is given in Bothell so my pal dutifully makes an appointment, navigates the I-5 bumper car gauntlet, arrives with a full bladder of freshly filtered latte which he desperately wants to unload ASAP, but, unsurprisingly, is told to wait.  Short time later, long past that anguished outcry of a Guernsey with 10 gallons of unpasteurized backed up past an udder while the farmer is out drinking with his Scandihoovien reprobate buddies, the secretary comes in with the bad news that the urinary nurse in charge of the drug testing doesn’t come in on Fridays.  Yah, shure, you guessed it — it’s Friday.  Can I leave you the sample? he asks through clenched teeth, bent over in pain and growing anger.  And … well, sure, you guessed right again and no, sir, that would be against the rules.

My buddy is almost 70 years old, drug free as a priest, a loyal employee and now he’s made to stand hunched over, practically peeing his adult diapers and trying to come to grips with What Is Wrong With This Picture?  Do they suspect him of Viagra dependency?  Do they merely want him to understand his real place in the corporate hierarchy?  Are they testing for latent homicidal urges, maybe see if he’ll snap in the lab offices where only a contract worker will be sacrificed, not a VP of operations?

All I can say is, my buddy must really want to avoid retirement to endure this kind of knee-jerk, low brow humiliation.  The rest of us on the South End … well, let’s just say the drug tests down here are only for quality control.

So okay, Sky Pilot Larry and I decide we’d run up to the Arctic Circle, take a picture at the 66 degree latitude, turn around and head back to Fairbanks. But … we thought, hellfire, we’re all this way north, we’d kick ourselves for not driving the extra 500 miles to Prudeau Bay, check on the drilling rigs, maybe see a few musk oxen, find out what the northernmost one third of Alaska looks like. The pipeline snakes alongside the highway, perched on steel platforms with gizmoes on top that disperse the heat of the flowing crude oil to keep it from melting the permafrost and causing the cradle to tilt. Pump stations come up every 50 miles or so, don’t ask me how they push this stuff down the line.

We crossed the Yukon River on its only bridge in Alaska, a wooden one no less. We got diesel at Coldfoot where in 1971 the temperature hit minus 82 degrees and froze truck tires so hard they became brittle and shattered, according to one old boy we talked to. At Atigun Pass we traversed the Brooks Range, an east to west mountain range that descends into a coastal plain of permafrost, tors and pings — these rock formations that look like hiding spots for Cro Magnons huntin g wooly mammoths tens of thousands of years ago — endless tundra, then a vast table top of low vegetation that runs to the Arctic Ocean broken only by the ‘Sag’ River that offers the only break in the topography.

We camped on its eastern edge and watched a herd of musk oxen forage in the delta the way our forebears did who knows how far back in time and memory. This, I’m telling you, is prehistoric land, cruel in the winter, harsh in the summer. It is barren and virtually devoid of life or traffic. And then we arrived at Deadhorse at Prudeau Bay, a surreal oasis of trailers, pumps, drill rigs, modules, caterpillar tractors, equipment of unknown use, airport, shuttles, trailer housing and hotel, an industrial complex the way one would look on Mars if we could mine there, alien in every possible way. It was 37 degrees with a stiff wind off the ocean. We tried to imagine winter — 24 hours of night, 60 below, a frozen hell. 3000 people work here. Good money, I guess. Very good money, I’m betting.

We turned around and headed home.

I haven’t done any serious camping since about 1976 when I spent a summer on the road and part of autumn living out of a tent. This month my road buddy Sky Pilot Larry and I are wending our way through the mosquito fogs of Alaska, setting up camp and cooking on campfires beneath glaciers, alongside salmon spawning streams and near tourist towns.

For you retired backpackers and tent pitchers, you’d be surprised and maybe saddened by how things have changed. We just drove through a Forest Service campground of 59 units, all full, no tents, just 30-40 foot mobile homes with steering wheels, dish antennas, generators, full kitchens, baths, 3 bedrooms, walk-in closets and a rec room. Hardly a soul was outside by a campfire even though the skeeters aren’t bad, the sun is shining and the nearby stream is drop dead, picture postcard, write-back-home gorgeous. I mean, are you kidding me here??? They’d rather sit inside their drag along home and watch TV beneath all these mountains and glaciers?

Maybe there’s too much beauty to take in all day long for these adventurers. Or maybe TV has stolen their brains. Hell if I know.

I do know the drone of the generators running across from us drowns out the babble of the brook and the sound of the wind off the glaciers stirring the spruce and the fir and the cottonwoods. So okay, we can’t hear the mosquitoes either, but not our idea of a fair trade-off. It’s a free country and those with the most money apparently are the most free. No law that says you have to come to the great outdoors and enjoy it. At least not when you can watch Wheel of Fortune in the comfort of your livingroom with all your neighbors in the ritziest ghetto outside marinas filled with yachts.

Sky Pilot Larry and me are going to head backcountry soon, not so much to adventure in the wilderness as to escape the one here. Most of these humans in the 21st Century must think wilderness is just a place they can’t get TV.

We’re up on a job in here in Alaska putting glass in a fire station headquarters and another in a University of Alaska Science Building. We’ve run into some obstacles, some not worth mentioning and some that would have been potentially fatal to the project. Or me personally. Except … we’re in Alaska. These folks don’t shrug their shoulders and say good luck. They don’t cite union rules or insurance liabilities as excuses to help. They don’t see just their part in the big scheme. Naw, they say ‘we’ll get her done.’

I hate to extrapolate from a couple of incidents the entire ethos of the North Star state. But I’m going to hazard a guess that living on the frontier in a frozen tundra with a winter that must seem endlessly dark makes these folks as communal as an Inuit on a lot of levels. It’s like the South End that way — we’re all in this together even as we treasure our independent pioneer ways. We’re connected.

I had a neighbor once, a second father really, who would drop whatever he was doing when my truck broke down or my outhouse needed repairs or the firewood ran low. Me, I was just a wet behind the ears pup who thought he could go in-country and make a fresh start. Any interruption in MY day was a major annoyance, but Eddie, he’d flow out of his current task knee deep into my dilemma. Life wasn’t some straight line serious drive to go from A to B ASAP, it was all those turns and wiggles, those surprises and setbacks, those detours and backroads.

Eddie taught me that B wasn’t the destination at all. B just made any change of plans a total aggravation instead of the natural meanderings of a happy and curious traveler in this world. When Eddie died years ago, I would’ve liked him to know that he made a huge difference, no doubt to more folks than just me.

So when folks need help now, I hope there’s nothing I’m doing that’s more important, nothing that can’t wait until we fix whatever problem needs fixing. The best trips by far are the ones that go astray often. The best lives are too.

I guess the sun sets up here, but we don’t see it if it does. Just the opposite of my years on the graveyard shift. Go to work in the dark, get home in the dark, live like a mole or a miner. Up here the dawn merges with dusk and it’s definitely disorienting. Maybe if I was a plant I’d love it, but I feel sorry for the owls who have about 30 minutes to catch dinner or go hungry.

I’m still trying to adjust to exactly when to eat my own dinner. The other ‘night’ is was 11 pm or so when we put on the feedbag, thinking it must be about 7 or 8. Lots of folks are wandering the streets at 2 am, but I’m sure they’re not up early for breakfast. Me, I never know when to get up. All I know is, it’ll be light out.

Frankly, I’m not sure I like this. I know I wouldn’t like winter up here, probably explains why they don’t call it the Land of the Noon Moon. Today I woke up at 9 am. I think it was A.M.. Since I don’t carry a watch or a cellphone with one or a laptop with the time, I’m working on how high the sun is. Outside on the highway near our room-by-the-week, the motel sign has a red digital time readout. I think I see why now. Folks who park here probably can’t afford their own clocks.

If environment is culture — and it must be to a large degree — this seasonal tilt might explain why Alaskans don’t consider themselves a true part of our stateside America. They’re not just a completely different time zone, they’re operating in a twilight zone. Einstein was correcto, amigo — time is relative. I figure he must’ve vacationed up in the 49th where everybody knows this, they just didn’t work out the equation….

Most folks think art is a relatively safe pastime, sit at an easel with an iced tea on a side table and capture that sunset over Saratoga Passage in gentle watercolors. Unless the bluff gives way or the easel collapses or the paint brush has a dangerously sharp end, nobody’s going to get hurt. Art — just a quiet stroll in the park. Yah shure, you betcha.

Larry Bach and I just got back from the wilds of Alaska. Larry’s the minister up at Merrill Gardens most Sundays who’s been with me before on high wire installations. Sky Pilot Larry – one hand on the lift truck and the other on the Bible he always carries. We installed the Christian Motorcycle Headquarters and Chapel down in Arkansas two years ago and now we were headed north to Anchorage some 2500 miles away in his big diesel Ford towing his covered trailer with too many of my eggs in one basket up the dreaded Al/Can. Larry’s unbridled optimism is a perfect antidote to my fretful cynicism.

We got the Chugiak Fire Station Headquarters installed no problem, confirming Larry’s predictions of smooth sailing, but at the Univ. of Alaska’s Science Building, my worries were confirmed when the quarter million dollar lift truck, the only machine in all of the 49th state capable of reaching over a protruding canopy to go up 50 feet and extend 70 feet arrived, but without a specially trained operator we were promised.

No problem, the Facilities Director said, we’ll show you the dashboard and the joystick, then it’s all yours. Five minutes later, Sky Pilot Larry and I were soloing into the dizzying atmosphere high above Terra Firma, building new mullion systems for a 35 foot by 15 foot stained glass mural. For 5 days we swooped and dove and flew without harnesses or hardhats, experience or common sense, just two artistic acrobats high up in the Big Top without safety nets below.

You think art is a walk in the park, let Larry take you for a ride. He just built a secular cathedral guaranteed to take more than your breath away and he did it mostly on faith. Art — not for the timid, let me tell you.