The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m building an apple cider press. Simple enough, you might think, a little wood stand, grind up some apples, squeeze the juice, put it in gallon jugs and voila, apple jack! Drink it now, ferment it, freeze it, nothing to it.

I have an old 1890’s 2 barrel, double geared, high volume press that’s long ago rusted and rotted. Twice, actually, since I rebuilt it once, then left it outside. I’m using the old yoke from that that carries the wormscrew to make the press. I got a more modern ‘grinder’ from a 1920’s cider mill, turns a set of metal teeth through an opposing metal mesh and is housed by its original hopper. The catch barrels are finished now, cedar strips screwed to steel bands up and down, one for catching the crushed apples while the other holds the squeezins. Move one forward and replace it with the other: a 2 barrel operation.

I’m constructing the 4×4 cedar framework, building a body to secure the grinder and hold the press, then adding a ‘floor’ to catch and drain the juice, probably plywood and maybe clad it in metal so we can clean it. E-coli apple juice doesn’t seem too appealing … although I suspect not too many orchardists died of apple jack poisoning before the advent of ubiquitous antibiotics and anti-bacterials in every cleansing agent known to man and industry.

I suppose we could juice with a household blender for all the cider we’ll probably make. But dammit, that’s not the South End Way … and sometimes traditions, sensible or not, are worth saving. Besides, you build it, you’ll go out and find neighbors who want to press their fruit, maybe turn it into an annual event. We still grow apple trees — doesn’t seem too great a stretch to utilize the harvest. If nothing else, I can always donate it to the museum, a cider press spanning 125 years, cannibalized , hybridized and worth nothing on Antiques Roadshow. Sort of like most everything else we still use around this place…..

So my neighbor Pete and his blue ox Babe got those two chunks of 470 year old oldgrowth fir sawed up into two inch slabs, some measuring in at 27 feet long. Perfect for a board room conference table at, oh, Boeing headquarters or Microsoft. I’d been watching this operation since the day I discovered the two logs down a sideroad out of view of the prying eyes of the Island County Sheriff’s Dep’t, if I’m guessing right, one on a lowboy trailer sunk deep into the mud and most of its tires ready to explode from the weight. The other was off to the other side, deep in ooze, a La Brea tarpit for dinosaur trees.

The purported owner later dropped by to see if I might be interested in fencing the timber. Actually, to see if I’d buy it. He claimed ownership and I had no doubt he’d been the boy who had the skill to take it down off the bluff on the east side from me, skid it out, get it up on the trailer and haul it away from the scene of the crime. A storm a few years back had broken the upper hundred feet or more clean off and left the trunk standing to dry and wait for the right gyppo to come along with an idea and a four foot chainsaw. After all, this is how the West was won. And the Midwest. And the East Coast. And now the Amazon and the wilds of Borneo. Global warming’s got nothing on an entrepreneur with a big ass Stihl.

There is, to a dyed-in-the-wool South Ender, a romance to the idea of a tree that was growing here long before Jacinto Camaano sailed by. I have no doubt this will be the last old growth milled up down here in my life time and the lifetimes of all those who will follow after. Call me sentimental and slap me with a dinosaur femur, but I had to have a piece of that tree. So after watching Pete and his brother-in-law Pittsburg Mike spend two weeks on each end of an Alaska portable sawmill, two big saws powering a four foot chain and bar, I said I’d like to have first pick of the slabs if that would be all right.

Now, I have a pretty nice hunk of wood for a dining room table. One with a great history of having traveled from Alaska to Reno to Hawaii and back with stops in between. And the mizzus rightly mentioned that we already have a pretty nice table. But nevertheless, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to jump on a vanishing piece of history. A different man might’ve listened to his wife. A better man certainly would’ve. But … well, I don’t have to tell you what I had to do, now do I?

So I have an eight foot slab on my shop table. It’s 3 feet on one end and tapers down to 3 feet on the other. I spent a day hand planing it. White curls of old growth fir filled the floor around me. I imagined myself building a boat, shaving the hull, planing the gunwales and sanding the deck. There’s a fertilizer for the imagination in this wood, a geography laid out in the continents of its sapwood, topographical swirls in the grain. Dinner, I assure you, will be an adventure from now on….

[Speech introducing Karen to the Save the Schoolhouse breakfast where she was honored for her work on Camano History]

When they asked me introduce the mizzus, I knew I was taking a terrible risk. More nights in the doghouse — or in my case, the old shack — with the mice and the spiders, sleeping alone, cold and exiled.

But… I said I’d do it. Mighta been bad moonshine, but a man is only as good as his word … and I sure don’t need any more ratings drops.

Karen and I go way back to 1973. She came out here to Camano in 1981. For you mathematicians, that’s 32 years ago. For the rest of us, it’s a hell and gone long time ago. She left her librarying job back in Minnesota — I assumed, to pursue a new career in Romance. There weren’t a whole lot of libraries on Camano back then. About what it’ll be soon enough again, looks like… Between looking for work and getting her PhD in Romance, she took up Local History. Living on the South End, she could see there wasn’t much written down, just stories and lies, what we illiterates call Oral Tradition. She joined the Stanwood Area Historical Society and immersed herself in everything a good librarian can find on a given subject.

Needless to say, it became a full time job. Since it didn’t pay anything, it’s what we call PASSION. That’s romance lingo for Below Minimum Wage. Meanwhile she worked at the Univ. of Wash. Library, even became a Department Head there for a year. The commute in her beat up cars got a little old after a few years and soshe opted to work for Sno-Isle Libraries as a part-time sub. They wouldn’t hire her full time, probably not qualified enuff I suppose, so later she took a job – the one she’s got now — up at Burlington Library’s fancy Biblioteca. But … in all those years she kept digging out the history of Stanwoodopolis and Camano. Wrote a few pamphlets, edited and wrote the Hysterical Society’s newsletter which became way more scholarly than the old meeting minutes and who brought the cookies, helped the Society catalogue photos and artifacts and set up museum displays, wrote a history of Camano, served three years as President of the League of Snohomish Museums and still spends every spare minute and hour she can on research and writing. She’s passionate about this history, trust me.

I know a little something about Passion. And I don’t just mean Poverty….. Karen Prasse IS the Historian of this Area. She knows where the old river channels were and when they changed, she knows the old pioneers and their families that are still here. She can find photos of long lost shingle mills and bootlegger stills or lumber yards or seafood canneries or nettle farms, what that building used to be and when the old Volunteer Fire Station got moved across the highway, how the Stanwood library was once the Stillaguamish Band’s meeting hall once IT got hauled into town and is now the Gun Club up at Cedar Home where it got hauled last, who’s granddad was mayor and whose son’s were ne’er-do-wells, what year the old oyster company started up and why it closed down.

Karen knows where most of the bodies are buried and what skeletons are in whose closets. She’s like the fireman in Fahrenheit 451, one of those people who memorize a book after they were banned and burned and in doing so become that book . She’s a Living History.
When the folks who follow after us look back for their precedents, for what led up to their Here and Now, for some of the Causes and maybe the Effects, the person they’ll be reading, the knowledge that was saved, a lot of it will be Karen’s. Most of us don’t leave much legacy. We’re just the folks history forgets unless someone cares enough to write it down and catalogue it and give it some kind of persepective, put it in the proper flow of Time. I know this: we owe a lot to those who do.
It gives me no little pride to be here today to honor Karen Prasse for giving us a solid footing in the past, showing us where we’ve been and making this a richer place to live.

It’s Halloween and I’m out on the mean streets where the kids are going store to store with their mom or their dad or even both before sunset. They’re pint sized fairies and waist high pirates, sawed off goblins and short skeletons. They’re way cute, mostly 4 or 5 years old, still unspoiled, I’m guessing … or just hoping. My bartendress where I’m currently holed up for a pint of my own spirits is garbed as an Old West hooker. Ah, innocence.

I suppose I could reminisce about my early Halloweens, packs of us kids in sheets and homemade outfits, going door to door, trick or treat, mostly treat. But I’m remembering instead my first weeks at the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, fall of 1968. Everyone seemed to be in costume. Bell bottoms and hippie gear, wild hats, long hair, biker boots, an academia of Fellinis and Timothy Learys, strange trips, acid music —- Halloween every crazy day before the riots and the bombings and the rage. I was the kid from the small northern town, naïve as a polyester fairy holding out my pillowcase.

I’ve grown old since then, but occasionally find myself in a place cast adrift from normality, wide-eyed, a little fearful, the ground grown mushy. Who knows? The world isn’t what we think — we just pretend. We hole up, stay put, find routines, all in the unstated hope we won’t discover our life wasn’t what we thought, wasn’t what we thought at all!

It’s Halloween. By dark the kids will be back home watching TV, eating too much crap candy. I’ve still got chores, places to be, a long drive back down the highway where the giant goblin maple leaves will skitter and swirl in the rain and wind, ghosts in the headlights. The lights will be out when I park at the top of our hill drive. The house will be nothing but a creepy silhouette in the moonless night. Fir trees will tower overhead. In a dark corner, barely discernible, a shadow might move, a future just imagined, a dream not yet dreamed. Trick or treat!

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Reinvent yourself!  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So maybe  it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

I’ve been out here in the wilds of the Arkansas backcountry, tromping hills and woods, creekbeds and pastures, scaring up turkeys and deer, even the occasional armadillo and roadrunner. Vultures patrol everywhere, gleaning the dead. The woods are littered with washed carcasses, bleached skulls, scattered bones.

You might think this is a slice of Americana glimpsed through a lens from 1850. Hard men and tough women. And they are. Plenty of bad dentistry hereabouts. Lots of suspicious, distrustful looks. Life is lived closer to the dirt here and the dirt isn’t so much soil as it is chipped rock without much nutrient. Not many gardens to be seen. Not many orchards either. Homes here are small, patched and made to serve the purpose. Rusty sheet metal siding, rotted clapboard, plywood never painted. Some are nice enough, but you won’t find a large home or one on the Architectural Digest reject list. There’s no money here. Towns have 350, 402, 569 people, man, woman and child. The grocery store calls itself a ‘trading post’, more aptly, I guess. Churches outnumber bars a thousand to one. Actually, a thousand to none. You want a drink here, you drive to Oklahoma for 3.2 beer. That, or you make it yourself. I’m not here long enough to get Set-Up.

Religion and poverty usually go hand in hand. You got to believe in something and these folks aren’t playing Lotto. A sign on the highway read: I’M NOT RICH ENOUGH TO BE A REPUBLICAN. I doubt it meant he was a Democrat either.

Today I walked past a half dozen deer stands, structures up on stilts or in trees, near a field or a pond ten to twenty feet up, a small room with a view to kill. Salt blocks have been laid out all year so the deer come there. Opening day of season, free salt will carry a high price. These boys aren’t hunting for sport, I assume. I sure hope not. There’s nothing sporting about it. One I climbed had an office chair, swiveled and padded. I don’t have to wait a couple weeks to know they’ll have a scope on their rifle. Jesus provides.

Some of us forget that America isn’t mostly a suburb, that folks are living hand to mouth, that poverty exists and the living is hard. Some of us scream bloody murder that the middle class is under assault, that union jobs are suspect, that government jobs should all be eliminated, that our 401-K’s have been raided and lost.

But … it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of us who don’t get pensions, who don’t get to ‘retire’, who don’t have health care, who don’t live in fine houses with huge mortgages, who don’t drive new cars, who don’t use credit cards or cellphones or own computers. They live in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in Detroit, in upper Michigan or Maine or the South End or backwash anywhere. They don’t ask for much, but they don’t give a good goddamn about folks who overspent or didn’t save or never appreciated the Good Life when they had it. They’re fellow citizens and life is a lot harder for them in this Land of Plenty. It’s worth remembering next time we’re whining is all I’m saying.

I got a wild hair this spring, no doubt from lack of legitimate work, and decided I’d build myself a banjo. I play one so I’m familiar with the basic form. Bunch of strings, thingamabobs to hold em to the end and more up at the top so you can tighten or loosen em. I mean, even a banjo, it helps to be in some kind of tune. It’s got a round pot made of wood and some have a round brass metal piece on top of that to give it a ‘ring’. Banjos have a skin head or a store bought plastic job pulled down over the pot and you need some kind of gizmos to hold it down tight and better yet, to be able to tighten it up like a drum. Then there’s a neck that has the fretboard and the peghead and this has to fit up against the pot and something has to hold it at the right angle so you aren’t playing strings about half a foot off the fretboard which makes playing a lot harder than it already is.

I don’t mean to make it sound complicated. I mean, early banjos were made out of gourds with some catgut for strings and a stick neck and you just wailed on that thing like beating a drum. Banjo! Not exactly as complex as a harpsichord or a saxophone. Seems doable. Seems like a person with the right attitude and a little nerve could just go at it and a few days later might come out the other end with all his digits intact and an instrument that would sound at least okay, if not totally tolerable to most listeners.

I think life is a little like that. Meaning, sometimes you have to wade out into the water. It isn’t as deep as you think and worse case, you can dogpaddle. Too many of us think we’re going to drown, just flounder out there when the bottom drops out and then flail until we’re worn out and finally just sink down into a watery grave. Why risk it? Why take a chance when there’s all this dry ground to stand on and just look at the beach and the water from a safe distance? Well, lots of us do just that. I mean, I don’t mountain climb and I don’t race Formula Ones. Some things do seem risky.

But … nothing ventured, nothing gained, my old man used to tell me. Course, he never figured I’d apply that to a career in art and he probably felt bad for steering me down a rutted road. I remember when I told him I was building my own house. The silence on the other end of the phone was all I needed to comprehend his horror. Poor Karen, he was thinking, or so he told me later when he and Mom came to visit and view this construction debacle firsthand and he fully expected some plywood lean-to drafty as a chicken shed and leaking the first rain. Instead he drove up the drive to find a two story house, sturdy and durable and handbuilt with slate floors, mosaic tiles, curly maple staircases, stained glass transoms and sidelights, custom made doors, brick fireplace, handcrafted furniture, birdseye maple cabinetry, hardwood floors, cedar paneling on the interior walls, cedar on the exterior. A nice house, perfectly comfortable. Took two years to build. Best years of my life.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. Sometimes a purpose and a little faith in yourself will carry the day. Most things in life aren’t rocket science. Although that seems to be changing. Too often we’re just afraid of failure. I guess I’m not. It seems like it’s one way to learn what you need to learn to be successful. And anyway, sometimes they’re not totally different. That’s what art taught me. You have to be your own judge, finally, even if other people will be too.

So … I’m making banjos. Some play well, some not. Some sound sweet, some not. Some are beautiful, some are a little like your kids, beautiful maybe only to you. Could I sell them? my friends ask, wondering I guess, who needs this many banjos. Well, that wasn’t my original intention. But then again, when I started making stained glass, it wasn’t going to be my career either. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to build houses for a living. I’m probably not going to be a banjo luthier. What I’m doing is what any kid does, just following my nose, trying stuff out, seeing what’s fun and what isn’t. In the meantime I get to live in my house. I get to play my banjos. And hopefully my life will be my art. It’s about all I can ask.

One of the reasons there’s only a handful of folks on the South End is you used to have to hand dig your wells. My well’s l05 feet deep, dug by some poor pioneer with a shovel, a bucket, a rope, a light and somebody up top he trusted more than I trust ANYBODY. You look down my well hole – it’s 3 feet in diameter and swerves a bit – and shine a light down to the bottom, you see a teeny, itsy bitsy reflection the size of a silver dollar. That’s what daylight looked like to my well digger.

Personally, I’d drink gutter water collected in a dirty wood barrel before you got ME down a damp hole that could cave in any second. There are wells on the South End hand dug over 200 feet deep.. Light in those looks like a star at the end of the galaxy only Hubble can see….

Water’s always been a problem on the South End. We’re surrounded by it and we’re rained on by it most of the time and it always seems to leak its way into our shacks, but finding enough to drink, that’s another matter. My neighbors have Water Associations. Big wells. Giant holding tanks. Huge headaches. Saltwater intrusions. Government regulations. Plenty of opportunities to have contentious meetings and increasing dues and nasty lawsuits.

They wanted me and the mizzus to join up a few years back. Give em 10,000 dollars and I could enjoy the privilege of being ruled and regulated and taxed. I thanked em, but said no thanks, our pitiful well would just have to do. After all, it’s been working okay for 80 years, we might make it last a few more. A month later they sold a different neighbor that water share for 3000 dollars. That definitely puts a chill on the neighborhood picnic… I suspect they’ve got some kind of prejudice against loud thirsty banjo players……

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but other than self-employment, there’s not much work down here on the South End. The neighbors think retirement is Hard Work, but other than paying well, it really doesn’t qualify. Even under our bohemian standards. Hell, everyone practically’s retired down these parts. We just don’t get a pension or Social Security yet.

The best way to make a so-called Living here is to find something the retirees need. Pet grooming. House sitting. Lawn care. Koi pond maintenance. Security system installation. Probably not preschool or daycare. Although …. Down the road we’ll need adult daycare. Half of us do now. We just won’t admit it and if we got cable TV, we can bluff our way a little longer.

Freddie the Handyman is a good example of ‘filling a niche for the rich’, his unspoken motto toward his clientele. He can repair a garage door or add a deck out over the bluff, he can replace a garbage disposal someone tried grinding a spoon in or change out the original sink. I worked a few years with Freddie, mostly the dumb end of a shovel or the crawling part of a crawlspace work. When Freddie needed a second pair of hands or just someone willing and desperate enough to tackle the gruntwork, I was his boy. We replaced rotted beams under old homes, we installed electric water heaters, we built additions and we tackled leaky roofs, although Freddie would take a look, shoot some caulk or smear some tar, but roofs, he said, were a money pit, probably lose on the callbacks. So we stayed near the ground mostly. Too near, in my case. I was always face in the dirt, burrowing my way through decades of spider webs beneath floor joists, doing god knows what Freddie had contracted for.

“When I retire …” was Fred’s favorite topic at lunch breaks. “This will all be yours …” was his second favorite as we munched sandwiches on the tailgate of his beat up Ford pickup. Ladders, extension cords, toolboxes, chopsaws and all the detritus of the current remodel awaited me like a City of God, if you believed Freddie.

Well, Fred retired and moved to California to be near his daughter. Said the cost of living was cheaper, which might be true. Sold his house in the Country Club and rented a space in a mobile home park for more than some mortgage payments. The living might’ve been cheaper, but probably not easier.

He would ask, when I’d call every month or two, if I’d carried on the business or was even considering it. “You were the brains, Fred,” I’d say, “and I was the grunt. Too many water heaters hooked up backwards, I guess.” “Learn on the job,” he’d advise. “Good money!”

Folks ask me all the time for the name of a good handyman. I tell em Freddie’s gone and there isn’t anyone I know. Although, since the recession, most of the house builders are available. Until the economy heats back up, there’s probably a glut. Just costs twice as much as Freddie…

I read a letter to the editor recently from a newly minted graduate of our school system railing about that same school system as mostly purveyors of communist propaganda. It forced him to learn about Islam but didn’t teach the Bible. It taught him Egyptian history but never, not once, mentioned Moses parting the Red Sea. Apparently his science teachers wouldn’t touch it either, afraid, probably it would subvert the shaky foundations of rationalism.

I’ve lived here long enough to remember when those commies used to bring in Creationist speakers and when evolution was fairly taboo, days our Graduate would like to bring back. Religion, I’ve learned the hard way, is a tough subject to tiptoe around. Any religion. Just not an amusing topic for the True Believer. So mostly I just pick a safer target and hope not too many toes are stepped on.

But I hafta say, in a country that vents mightily about the Taliban or extreme Muslimism, it is troubling to realize the folks who hate the false gods and beliefs of others would gladly set up their own religious schools and maybe make 2nd class citizens of their Jewish classmates or their Sikh or Hindu or B”hai or Buddhist or Catholic or …. Well, anybody but their particular sect. They want freedom of religion all right. Theirs, not yours.

I wish religion WAS the opiate of the masses, but sadly, it’s the testosterone. Maybe if we didn’t have religious beliefs to fight about, we’d wage wars over scientific dogma instead. The Big Bangers vs. the Multi-Dimensionalists. Eat this theory, blasphemer!!

Facts, though, don’t seem to matter, just fervent faith. I can’t prove it … so what? I believe it so it’s true. Obama’s a Muslim, evolution is a fraud, the moon landing was hoax, God is a Christian, the universe sits on the back of a tortoise, aliens are among us, the world banking system is controlled by Zionists, the Stanwoodopolis school system is a communist conspiracy.

It’s nice to know that our taxes have done a fine job educating our children. I think they’ll be ready to take their place in society. Sometimes, honest to your God, even on the South End, there’s no place to hide from these people.