The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Darlene’s Antique and Collectibles was once an honest to Abe vintage emporium. One hundred year old oak chests of drawers, apple cider presses newly oiled but still glowing with the patina of fruit juices, rusting resort signs, ornate brass beds lascivious with untold stories, dollhouses from the Victorians, real stuff, not facsimile. Old wood stoves she bought from South Enders converting to heat pumps, wringer washers still able to churn a family’s laundry, coil top refrigerators cooled by sulpher dioxide rather than Freon. The one I bought from Darlene punctured a line a year later and the SO2 in combination with moisture, what we chemists call H20, formed sulfuric acid, what I called when I dragged it outside hissing like Assad’s assassins: Chemical Death. Foliage turned brown Right NOW in an invisible line snaking into the woods.

Darlene was a huge woman. Sitting at her table by the front door where her brass cash register sat like a South Sea icon ready for sacrificial offerings, she was half Cajun voo-doo queen, half posterchild for diabetes and definitely mostly intimidating, especially after you got to know her. She had a network of pickers who scoured the thrift stores and junk shops and garage sales throughout the state. And she had a steady supply of sellers, mostly neighbors broke and desperate, willing to part with the mizzus’ prized china or her mother’s silver, rarely some good tool of their own. She could burn a Tennessee horse trader, sell you a knockoff you’d never learn wasn’t really old, spin you a yarn that was finer than spider thread. You had to be on your toes with Darlene. She had the scruples of a southern politician and the aim for the jugular of a gypsy car salesman.

When E-Bay drove her prices down and she wearied of watching the city slickers – what she called ‘cidiots’ – checking prices on their I-pads and tablets, she began to carry ‘gifts’ too, junky look-alikes of vintage signs, antiques knickknacks and craft items –what she called ‘crap’ items – but her sales plummeted despite watering the trade down and she closed up finally.

Rumor has it she moved down to Sedona or maybe Taos and opened up a high end art gallery for tourists. One of my neighbors told me she’d bought a Georgia O’Keefe signed print from a woman with 6 chins wearing a Navajo blanket shawl and enough silver earrings and turquoise bracelets to start a jewelry store. I’m guessing Darlene is still nicking us South Enders, just a longer drive for us to get fleeced.

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I notice lately I’m growing old. Middle age has been a prolonged era for this goofy geezer. I shouldn’t be surprised. Adolescence lasted 2 or 3 decades and Adulthood sometimes still seems as elusive as a job. I never wanted to grow up, much less grow old.

But … I bet even Peter Pan is whiling away his days in an assisted living home with a drool bucket and a big screen TV, wondering when Tinker Bell is coming back to change his adult diaper. Probably got a hearing aid with dead batteries. You better believe when the crocodile with the ticking clock in its stomach comes around, old Pete won’t hear it til he and the clock are part of a belly full. Too late then….

They say Old Age is a state of mind, and to a degree, it is. Nevertheless, whether I keep seeing the world like a kid with zits, my eyes are developing cataracts and I wear bifocals. My knees ache, my rotator cuff is a mess, my teeth are crummy and …. Well, I don’t want to make this a saga. Let’s just say there’s a reason why we die.

I know people who want to live forever. Holy rabbits, I assume they’re figuring on a Whole Body Transplant. No way do I want to live 500 more years in this package, attached to it as I am, and as far as transferring my brain into a fresh vehicle, well, I’m not sure the old engine on my shoulders won’t need a rebuild too. I’m sure I’m not going easy into that Good Night, but hey, there’s only so much room on the planet and I’ve used up more than my fair share in this one lifetime. I say let the kids have their turn. If they get to live 250 years, I’m not gonna feel like I got the short end of a stick.

But I want to warn you, if you’re going to live like Methuselah, pace yourselves! My generation likes to lie and say we never thought we’d make it past 30. You’ll be saying, gee, I never dreamed I’d get past 300. All I can say is I hope science can regrow brain cells. But good luck to ya!

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There comes a time in every man’s life, even a South Ender’s, when a living has to be earned, not made.  Filthy lucre, root of all evil, the spoils of Mammon, etc etc.  But you can only barter your unsalable art for so long, you can only eat the scrawny leftover beans in the garden until not even the snails and the slugs have much to pick over, you can only scavenge the mussels and the free range clams so long before they’re on the local endangered species list … but the time will come when a homesteader worth his salt has to throw down the hoe and accept defeat at self sufficiency.

That time, I’m not happy to report, has come knocking.  The fat sassy days of an indolent summer are gone and now the rains are here driven by the storms that drive them.  The time has come to pursue the greenback of dollar, not moss.  So … for a few days old Skeeter has to put his tail firmly between his legs and mosey up to moose country where, rumor has it, there may be a job waiting if everything works out right.  Last time, things didn’t work out right, but … ever the infernal optimist, I’m going back.  Wish me luck, take a few days to go cold turkey on this blog site, expect some chilly arctic stories when I get back.  Maybe we all need a break ….

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Some folks think these stories are mostly made up, that the wild wild South End disappeared long ago, domesticized under the yoke of cable TV and social networking. They think we all conformed, threw up the white flag of surrender to county government and the gated communities. Oh, a few packed it up and migrated to less populated places where the taxes are cheaper and the neighbors farther away. But the South End, for all its latter-day gentrification, still howls late at night, still barks at strangers. And I don’t just mean me….

Gyppo Paul stopped by this spring. Paul’s what you’d call an outlaw. Pretty much ignores societal rules and fairly regularly breaks the law. I’m not saying he’s a role model, I’m just saying he lives here on his own terms. When Paul drops by, I figure trouble’s coming in the door too, semi-invited. What he wants, when he finally gets to it, is he needs to unload some old growth logs he’s managed to cut off the stump, haul out and section into 27 and 21 foot lengths, winch onto a trailer and move into a side road where the trailer tires are squashed deep into the mud.

He needs money and he’s willing to let these go cheap. In my younger days I lived in a ghetto. You want to see unbridled capitalism, go down to the Mean Streets. Paul would prosper there. Commerce, barter, theft; everything’s fungible. Everything! I figure Paul poached the tree. Dead old growth. Absentee landowner. Who’d care?  I said go talk to Pete, I’m not set up for this action.

Story short: Pete buys the tree. He’s got a place that once was the Benz sawmill. His house was built by Benz and built out of lumber milled on a 4 foot sawblade powered off a chain driven by a 350 horsepower Chevy engine. My shack has cedar lumber milled there too, same blade marks. Most of me and my neighbors don’t have a way to deal with a 27 foot long, 4 foot diameter log, much less two of them, that weigh about the tonnage of two or three of their travel trailers. Those logging days are long gone — or so they think.

But I’m talking about the South End and Pete’s a certified — or certifiable — South Ender. He builds boats, kayaks, cider mills, furniture, you name it, the man isn’t intimidated by any lack of experience. What he needs to learn, he learns. He didn’t come here to retire, that’s for sure. By summer he’s got a portable mill rigged up, a two man operation with 2 chain saws driving a 4 foot bar with a chain that rides on top of the log and slabs off 27 foot lengths two inches thick. It takes him two weeks to whittle down a fir 470 years old.

Scoff if you like at the mythology of the South End, but trust me when I tell you: this is the last old growth that’s gonna be milled on the island, logged by a gyppos after the pioneers first arrived. You think the South End is nothing but Tall Tales, well …. you’d be mostly right.

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