The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back about 1989 I got my first Washington Arts commission, an elementary school in Wenatchee, a really small budget, about $6000, but believe me, I could see a bigger door opening up with the potential for an escape from the residential glass commissions for sidelights and bathroom window privacy. I met with the school committee along with Richard, my arts liaison, to discuss potential sites for my artwork. Just inside the front door was a curved bank of windows 7 feet high and 15 feet wide for the library. I immediately said let’s do those.

My arts guy Richard hauled me aside and said, “I know this is your first project with us, but understand, you won’t get any more money, it’s a fixed budget.” I said I understood that but hellfire, I’m just excited to do something bigger than what I’ve been doing up til now. He shook his head sadly, said as long as we’re clear, no more money.

We went back to the committee and talked about designs and such, me mostly cracking wise, horsing around, the usual stuff I do. No talk of artistic philosophy, inspiring influences, none of that egotistical song and dance, even though Richard kept trying to steer there, I guess figuring that was part of the drill, impressing the unwashed masses. Who wasn’t impressed was Richard, probably used to dealing with real artists with real portfolios and real egos. Me, probably a hopeless case, some flash-in-the-pan soon to be forgotten.

The final design was delivered to him by Karen, my wife, down in Seattle where she worked at the time running a department in the Univ. of Washington library. Richard was going to be in town that day so it saved me a trip down. At the handoff he told her, for what reason I can hardly imagine, that I should take myself more seriously. Karen is a quiet, reticent woman, anything but confrontational … but she said to my handler, “Maybe you should take him more seriously.”

To this day I smile when I think back on this conversation. I cannot thank her enough for standing by her little man. Since that first commission with the State, I’ve had 10 or so more, most much larger than that library window in Wenatchee, one 70 feet long and 20 feet high. All told I’ve put glass in 50 or more buildings from Florida to Alaska. Personally, I still don’t take myself too seriously as an artist but damn, I love that she does. And believe me, I love her for it. And Richard? Well, my guess is he still thinks of me the way I do myself, mostly a chucklehead.

When I first arrived on the South End, my biggest concern was finding a job. I’ve always maintained, and still do, that the only thing worse than work is looking for work. The best days of my life are those where I quit or gave notice or just walked off. The worst were the days following when it dawned on me I would now have to go searching for another dead end minimum wage position.

I had driven school buses back in rural Wisconsin and in Seattle and Gomorrah. I’d even driven metros so it seemed like I’d be able to get a job with the local school bus company, which proved true and before long I was chauffeuring children into town and back twice a day. My boss was happy to hire an experienced driver … until I let my hair grow and then a beard and he finally realized I wasn’t the cleancut young man he thought he’d hired. At which point he wanted me gone. Twice a week I was summoned into his office next to our break room to answer charges of driving recklessly, driving drunk,  driving on drugs, driving onto the shoulder, driving toward oncoming traffic, slamming the brakes, kicking kids off the bus miles from home, outrageous accusations that I refused to take seriously, but he wanted me to know were serious offenses if true. I would roll my eyes and he’d fire another accusation purportedly made by the parents of my kids. I suspected they were made by him, but really, what difference did it make? I knew my days were numbered as a professional driver.

We had a bus driver on a Stanwood route who had a reputation as a real ballbuster of a disciplinarian, at least according to him most days in the coffee room after the routes. When he came down with pneumonia, I subbed in for him. Holy Bluebird, the kids on that bus never heard they were spozed to use the seats to sit on. I never saw anything like it. Took me a whole minute or two to pull over and have a short chat with the little attention deficit folks, something to the effect that I might be taking them home for a free vacation day, maybe see if their parents wanted to babysit instead of go to work. After that, we didn’t have much trouble.

On the last day of my short career with the company the supervisor came up to let me know rumor had it there might be a water fight on the bus and I should be watchful. I said I sure would, boss. You better believe he wasn’t going to be my boss much longer.

At a convenient stop that’s now the Visitor Center I pulled my 40 foot long yellow Bluebird over, turned off the motor, set the brakes and turned to my charges. Okay, I said, give it your best shot. We went at it for ten minutes, water pistols and cannons, even a couple of half gallon jugs I brought for the finale. When we’d finished, I opened the front door and water poured out of that bus like a mini-Niagara, cascading down the steps onto the ground. My supervisor asked me when I got back to the barn if there’d been any trouble. No, I said, no trouble at all…. Thanks for the heads-up. That, happily, was the end of my bus driving career. Course, the next week I was scrounging for the next miserable job. Without, needless to say, a good reference.

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…..

Karla’s Kut Above sits below the WindyRear real estate offices right across from the fire station. We don’t have much commercial on the South End so space is limited and rent is astronomical. Karla does okay, despite the overhead. She has a couple of stylists who rent chairs, Billie and Veronica, neither from around here, which keeps the gossip almost under control.

Veronica kept saying Camahno for Camano the first year, but tomahto, potahto, who cares? One of the recent candidates for Island County Commissioner pronounced it Camahno too. Who knows, maybe Veronica styled his hair? Actually we do know cause he said he’d never been here before. It’s an odd name for an odd island. Billie called it Commando Island and still does.

Karla figured she’d get to experiment a bit on styling, become the tonsorial artiste she’d dreamed of being. Course, mostly she does perms and blue hair touch up for our more geriatric crowd. It pays the rent, but she would be the first to tell you it doesn’t exactly set her soul free, but hey! life isn’t a chick flick.

Veronica plans to move on soon, so she says. Set up a salon herself closer to Seattle and Gomorrah, maybe draw a hipper, younger clientele than here. Course, the competition is worse, rents are even higher and there’s that whole nuisance of accounting, advertising, payroll and hiring, stuff that sort of ruins capitalism for her. Me too, if you want to know….

Billie’s my stylist … although maybe that’s not the most accurate description. I get a Lop Job about once every 9 or 12months, depending on my need to look halfway respectable at finalist art presentations, what you might call job interviews. The rest of the time I wear hats in various stages of decomposition. Hair style is pretty much moot. I know Billie’s been at the Kut Above a long time because she’s cut my hair 3 or 4 times. Might explain why she never remembers me. Well … at least until I put the hat on over her tonsorial artistry. Also explains why I always leave a generous tip.

Quite a few islanders ask me if they’re South Enders or not, thinking, I guess, there’s a geographical demarcation, a Mountain View/Dixon Line. I usually tell them it’s more a psychological barrier, but then they think I mean psychotic and before you know it, misunderstandings turn into subtle hostilities and they decide they don’t want to be one of us after all. It’s not exactly a social club. Most of us down here didn’t choose to be South Enders. These things just happen.

Nevertheless, it does get a person to thinking: maybe we should annex a few acres here and there, suburbanize the backwashes and the bayous, zone them as Free Thinking refuges, then while we’re at it, liberate the gated communities trapped behind remote controlled bars and alarms with their high def TV’s and their BMW’s. Lower their taxes, if nothing else, fair compensation for the loss of their overvalued self esteem. Get em off their High Horse and their high property tax.

Hellfire, sometimes I get grandiose and imagine we could bring our enlightened way of living clear up to the north end, maybe even Stanwoodopolis. A little Shucks and Awe or maybe Aw Shucks and Law, liberate them from their backward ideas on government and philosophy. South End Exceptionalism! The 21st century’s answer to Manifest Destiny. I know, it sounds good to me too.

But then I pause and think: if we break it, we own it. Iran just went to pieces this week and if we couldn’t bring those folks some good old fashioned American Values, how do we expect Utsaladians and Camalochers to get behind our South End Ideals? They got their tribal ways, entrenched for decades and barely hanging together by a thread. Upset the delicate balance and we’ll reap the whirlwind. Onamac vs. Finistere, grabbing for that northern gas pipeline. Juniper Beach sweeping down on Twin City Food, overtaking its strategic barricades on the river. Terry’s Cornermen capturing Cascade Lumber. It would make Middle East sectarianism look like Wednesday night women’s mud wrestling at the 282 Pub. No, I think to keep the peace we need to keep the boundaries defined. You folks envious of us South Enders, well, you probably need to talk to a realtor down at Windy Rear. Or just wait til you lose your job. You’ll find your way here….

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

I was following a Cadillac SUV with a bumper sticker that read: YOU’RE THE REASON YOU’RE SUFFERING. This is bad news indeed for most of us down here on the South End, but at least now we know who to blame for our misfortunes. Although … I don’t think I care for the Winners in the Game of Life telling us Losers we deserve what we got. Some of us sure do. And I’m one. But I don’t ask for favors … or sympathy … or welfare either. I’m not going to make it to the 1% and I’m not gonna work myself to death trying.

But there are folks like Janet down the road, two kids in preschool and daycare, a husband John back from the Oil Wars with one leg and a head bounced too many times in IED explosions who’s pretty much a permanent casualty. She’s trying to hold a job and hold things together too. She’s 24 going on 60 and I seriously doubt she thinks her suffering is on account of her.

Joe the Plumber — and no, not that Joe the Plumber — has meliosomethingorother, the cancer from breathing asbestos when he unknowingly worked with the stuff in his youth. I doubt he’s going to take kindly to a Cadillac bumper sticker that thinks his Attitude must be to blame for his disease.

The rich think the rest of us are lazy, I guess. The 1% think the losers are takers. The corporate boyz think they made it on their own, no help from the education system, no assistance from the government that built the infrastructure, no subsidies or tax credits or loopholes in the law. They got theirs and if it happens to suck up most of yours, well, tough. You coulda done it too. Course, you might have been born black or Hispanic, you might be autistic or handicapped, you might be a single mom or a laid-off worker, you might get sick, you might be discriminated against, you might have been born on the South End.

We all want to believe we’re the captains of our destiny. But the waters we sail are more treacherous for some. It doesn’t take much compassion to pick up survivors in the water from the lifeboat off your yacht. Course, when the time comes we take the yacht away from you, I hope you’ll understand, it’s going to be your fault.

When I bought my truck about 16 years ago, the nice salesman wanted to sell me a warranty, I forget exactly, but parts or labor, once the original guarantee of 50,000 miles for the drive train expired. I said, gee, I sort of expected not to have problems with your fine line of vehicles. And declined the offer.

Warranties, seems to me, are insurance policies. Against breakdowns, accidents, fires, hurricanes, you name it, against Fear. Maybe you’ve noticed how much your car insurance went up recently. Or your homeowners’ insurance spiked. Or, get ready, your health insurance going through the roof this month now that Obamacare subsidies have expired.

Our new dryer just broke down, nothing I can fix, and yeah, you guess it, I turned down the warranty, thinking this expensive appliance would last longer than 6 months without requiring repairs. The nice man asked if I wanted that extended warranty. Covers parts, not labor. Or vice versa — I never remember. Of course I declined the offer, what, me worry?

Plane reservations, vacation rentals, auto reservations — you want the policy if anything comes up, sickness, death in the family, temporary insanity and god forbid you can’t make it, only a good chunk of the fees to relieve your anxieties, save you losing a bundle, even a marriage, possibly that sanity you hold so dear.

Nearly everything now comes with a proferred warranty. Lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, power tools, cookware, new children. Why take a chance?? Why risk owning a defective product, a lemon, a missed vacation flight? When, for a few extra bucks, okay, a lot of extra bucks, for a signature on the dotted line, that gizmo you bought, when it breaks, when it blows up, when it leaves you stranded on the side of a rush hour freeway in the pouring rain, you know that company that sold it to you will make it good.

If you believe that, call me, I got a warranty for their warranty. You’ll sleep a helluva lot easier.

The Little Church of the Ravine has a huge flock down here on the sin-saturated South End. The new pastor, Rev. Jeffrey, recently removed from his post in Eastern Washington, preaches on the side of punishment over redemption. His new parishioners figure those wheat farmers must have responded better to prods than to penance. The rest of us know Jeffrey has a rough row to hoe if he thinks South Enders are going to respond to Fear. If abject poverty hasn’t scared us yet, the good Reverend is tilling soil dryer than Eastern Washington’s.

Faith takes a lot of forms down here and the Little Church of the Ravine is only one of many. We got spiritualists and Ouija Boarders, Tea Leaf Readers and Palmists, Y Ching Tossers and the just plain superstitious. You name it, we probably got one or two back up the holler. Most of em don’t mind admitting to some faith based mysticism, they just want to believe in Something. Mostly we accept each other’s cosmology — even if Rev. Jeff makes it plain where he thinks that leads.

Jerry the Card Counter lives a half mile up the road and throws in with us boys occasionally at our weekly poker game. Jerry plays the odds mathematically, analyzing probabilities in his engineer’s head. Don’t even ask if he buys lottery tickets. Jerry usually goes home a winner. Partly because he never plays a hunch and partly because he drinks less than the rest of us, a good combination for profit, but not for fun.

Jerry is a believer in science. Which is fine. But he doesn’t like it when I say, peering over my 4 sequential cards and going for an improbable straight, that science itself is unprovable and so it too is essentially faith based. Jerry, nearly apoplectic at such heresy, forgets the odds of his own hand to unleash a spirited defense of Empirical Inquiry, then meets my raise by raising me back. The boyz all fold at the high cost of calling bluffs and embroiling themselves in epistemological exercises. “You can’t prove anything, Jerry,” I say calmly, looking at the last card Fearless Fred dishes me. I bet 3 bucks, the limit for our games.

Jerry can’t help himself, meeting my 3 and raising 3 more. “Science is fact-based, Skeeter!” he yells, thumping down a puny 2 pair when I throw my money in the pot, aces over eights, all black, ‘the dead man’s hand’, what Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot down.

“Not true, Jerry. The Uncertainty Principle. The experimenter affects the results on the quantum level. It’s a strange world down there, Buddy. Believe what you want — it might make it come true.”

Jerry’s watching as I lay down a ten, then the jack and the queen, both lining up with the king next and I hold the final card until he can’t stand it any longer.

“Dammit!” he explodes when I lay down the Ace of Hearts with a gentle slap and big smirk. “What a lucky bastard!”

I smile as I rake in the big fat pot. “Sometimes, Jerry, you got to bet the hunch and hope the quarks line up. It’s all about believing. Next game is 7 card stud, gentlemen. Jokers wild. My deal.”

Pushing my loaded grocery cart up to the checkout aisle this morning, I bumped into an old neighbor from yesteryear hunched over his own small cart, no groceries, just cashing in some card for cash near as I could tell. The cart was for leaning on since he could hardly walk. “I’m all stoved up,” he said when the how ya been’s were over. “Got arthritis. Taking insulin for my diabetes. Hard to get out of bed in the morning.”

Keith’s three years younger than me, meaning, he’s an old man. Long hair, wild beard, pushing 300, 350 pounds, sleep apnea, quit drinking 10 years ago. He’s living in the duck shacks on the Skagit delta. Last time I was there, there was no power, water had to be hauled in, heat was firewood. What you got back along the dike was total privacy, a wilderness oasis only a couple of football fields from the highway and two or three miles from the interstate. He said his woman had left him and so had the subsequent ones. As he so eloquently explained concerning his now preferred bachelorhood, “the price of pussy has gone too damn high.”

Same old Keith, a happy redneck Norwegian, mostly angry at the world but at least able to laugh at his own miseries. His son, he said, died awhile back and when I asked how, he shook his shaggy head. “Heroin. Od’d.” The kid had been riding his motorcycle, evidently had spilled gas on his pants and the muffler ignited it. Burned him terrible and they medi-vacced him to Seattle, skin grafts and finally oxycontin for the pain which he became addicted to, subbing heroin and fentanyl when he was discharged, a too familiar story. His daughter lived not far away, north of Seattle, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years.

For half an hour we stood by the liquor lockup at the end of the checkouts and caught up the past 20 years, mostly a chronicle of friends and acquaintances who’d died. Heart attacks mostly. Most fairly young. Most bad diets, no exercise, too much boozing. Whoever said the good die young didn’t know our buddies.

I finally said I gotta get going and reluctantly he wheeled himself with the cart as crutch out the side door. A yellow lab pup was in the driver’s seat of a late model Toyota pickup, a leather muzzle mask over its mouth. “Chew’s everything. Steering wheel, upholstery, anything.” “Well,” I said, “good to have a companion.” “Yep,” Keith said, “I just wish he wasn’t a chewer.” “You can’t have everything, I guess.” Some of us, though, don’t have much of anything….