The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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My brother once told me, late in our cups, I had the craziest friends he’d ever met. He’s from the extremely flat state of Wisconsin and was an attorney most of his life. HIS friends, he informed me, were boring and straight. Perfectly normal people, in other words. My brother thought maybe living on an island might be some root cause of abnormality.

The very idea of Wisconsin as the epicenter of Normality in the known universe is as risible as Compassionate Conservatism was around the time of the Iraq War, the Sequel. Show me a roomful of normal persons and I’ll bet just below the epidermis lurks weirdoes, psychos, wife beaters, shopping addicts, child molesters, oxycontin fiends, binge gamblers, superstitious astrology readers, philanderers, petty crooks, white collar criminals, religious converts and … well, you get the picture. Folks who believe in UFO’s and alien medical probes, hoarders, agoraphobics, conspiracy theorists, John Birchers, shoplifters, alcoholics, festishists, TV junkies, computer zombies, you name it, they’re in the room, waiting for the lights to go out.
Normality is what you got before the stool got kicked out from under you, before your wife had a miscarriage or your job was axed or your kid was arrested for petty theft. Reality slips a cog or two, then the world starts to lurch, the ground liquefies, assumptions no longer seem so linear and obvious, religion is an ocean with no bottom.

Maybe the South End IS a little closer to Escape Velocity, possibly very close to moving away from the Mainland with every tide. But the whole continent has set sail too — the tectonic plates underneath are piling up and the pressure is building. I like to think we islanders have already made adjustments. Although … I’m pretty sure we haven’t. Otherwise, well, we’d be normal.

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Down here in the hortichuckled South End, we’ve been working tirelessly in our bio-tech greenhouses to get a leg up on the competition for artisanal medical nettle in preparation for full legalization.  The naysayer would add pessimism to persistent fogs, pests and piracy for our prickly perennials, but our agrarians won’t be deterred.  Certainly not in the face of hoped for profits when the crops are paroled when their many medicinal attributes overcome the fears of a paranoid anti-itch society.

Admittedly we have an uphill climb.  Anecdotal horror stories of recreational nettle users overdosed and overscratched back in the ravines days after their unsupervised experimentation still serve fodder to those without scientific understanding of our latest advances.  Superstition still surrounds the eight foot itching posts that darken the interior of the South End trail system.  Many of the neighbors assumed the Barefoot Bandit, like his mythic predecessor D.B. Cooper, had perished in the nettle jungles trying to escape the relentless dragnets of our inimitable law enforcement officers.  More likely he used the nutritious plants for survival and herbal remedy.

Thanks to our researchers’ unravelling of the genus Urtica’s genome, we’ve engineered strains of nettles scarcely irritable to a baby’s backside.  Now, hopefully with a healthy influx of venture capital from investors who can realize profits heretofore unimaginable, we can begin the P.R. campaign to bring Medical Nettle out from under its pharmacological reputation as the Bad Boy of Invasive Plants to a more reasoned and sane understanding by the general public. Nettleopathy, the gentle application of epidermal stimulation, may soon be as accepted a healing technique as acupuncture (without the needles!)  Fear and ignorant superstition will give way to scientific method and enlightened medical practice.  The Dark Ages, my friend, are over for the South End.  Artisan Nettle:  Better Living Through Genetic Modification.  And coming to a shop near you….

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You live down at the far end of a skinny island, you learn pretty quick how important water is. Agua agua everywhere and not a drop to drink is no laugh down here. We’re surrounded by it and it’s salty. Dig a well and use too much, you pull saltwater and then it wants to stay that way. All of us are on wells. Me, I’ve got a hand dug 3 foot diameter hole in the ground that goes down 105 feet. You can push the metal cover to one side and look down with a flashlight to the water below. That 3 foot hole looks about the size of a silver dollar at the bottom.

Us oldtimers all have hand dug wells — although some have upgraded to drilled ones, usually deeper. The new folks have water associations, big holding tanks, pumps, purification systems, filters and lately, computers that calculate tide tables and the optimum time to pump so as to avoid pulling saline. Used to be, the neighbors all watered their lush weednfeed fescue day and night, but they got saltwater intrusion and boy howdy, they learned the hard way why all of us conserve water, not take it for granted. We’re all on the aquifers, although not necessarily the same one. Ours isn’t as deep as the neighbors – or as reliable, but at least I’m not punished for their landscaping dreams. Not yet anyway.

When we first came, we still had the 1930’s piston driven pump. Ka-chug, ka-chug, 50 year old oak rod sections connected to a foot valve down at the bottom, a heartbeat we always paid attention to and that always needed attention. Packings had to be replaced, foot valves too, pressure sensors regulated, tanks repressurized. If the power got knocked out, we could draw water by turning the flywheel by hand. Now we’ve got a submersible pump. 220 volts, no water if the electricity fails. The price we paid for modernization.

But … we don’t pay water dues and we don’t fight with the neighbors over association bylaws. Freedom sometimes is as precious as a glass of clear water. And as fragile….

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A few years back I gave a talk at the Everett Auditorium to about 1500 kids and their folks who were there for recognition in the arts in this area, the Scholastic Arts Awards ceremony. Gail Merrick, our fine art instructor up at the High School, asked me to be keynote speaker and in a moment of weakness I acquiesced. This, among lots of other things, is what I had to say to these poor impressionable youths.

I been racking my brain what I want to say to you folks today, something maybe inspirational that would make you want to give your whole lives to ART. Or maybe go the other route and say, holy rabbits, RUN while you still can…. Get a well paying job, buy a nice house, a fancy car, live the American Dream.

When I was exactly your age, I had a speaker come to an assembly like this that I went to. It was for the Wisconsin State Debate kickoff for that year, 1967, down at the State Capital, Madison, and our speaker was a well known defense attorney. He asked how many of us planned to go into law and most of us, including myself, raised our hands. Then he asked how many wanted to be defense attorneys and most of us kept our hands up. He proceeded, in the next half hour, to tell us that he thought probably we didn’t have a very accurate notion of what that meant, probably sort of movie stuff, Clarence Darrow or Perry Mason, get the innocent guy off at the last minute. And he spent most of the rest of his talk telling us about baby killers and mother rapists and all the horrible people we would be defending who were actually guilty. And probably had done way more than they were even charged with. Cruddy bottom feeders, creepy criminals, the worst! But who, nevertheless, were entitled to legal counsel.

By the end of his speech, I knew I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, that’s for damn sure. That guy changed my life. The trouble was, I didn’t know what else to do when my vague little career path veered into the ditch, crashed and burned. Ten years later, I still didn’t. I’d run out a string of dead end jobs, busted up a marriage, run my crummy cars to death, kind of a typical loser story of dereliction, some scrapes with the law, stuff at your tender age I won’t scar you with. I took the last of my pride and the last of my money and I bought a shack with 7 acres down at the South End of Camano Island. Sad backwash of a place, but a place where I could start my life over.

What I’ve learned in the nearly 40 years I’ve been down here, is that you can always start your life over. For me it was about becoming an artist. An artist sees the world a little differently than most people. The point of art, the Only point that matters to me, is re-making the world thru your eyes, your consciousness. You are re-imagining, re-creating, re-inventing, whatever words work for you. What I learned was an artist can remake that world. An artist can reimagine it. Rewrite the narrative of his life. And then, if you’re persevering enough, or very passionate or just plain crazy, you can inhabit that narrative. You stop and think about it, we’re all artists. We’re all creating our lives.

This is what gives art its power, its nobility, its magic. Creation! Embrace that notion. Have the courage to create the place you want to live in. It’s a way more fluid world than you might think.

Have faith! In yourself, in your own creativity, in your own personal vision. It isn’t about success. It isn’t about money. It isn’t about fame. It’s about exploration. Corny as it sounds, life is a great voyage of discovery.

Most of all, have fun. Not all art is built on pain. Make yourself laugh. Make yourself love. Make your life joyful. Why not? Trust an old timer on this, you’re only limited by your imagination. So dream big.

I wish you all the best of luck. I hope a lot of you will pursue a path in art and all of you will create meaningful lives for yourselves. Maybe 40 years from now one of you will stand in front of an auditorium full of young hopeful faces and tell the story of how long ago you listened to some old fart yammer on about his so-called career in art and it made you rethink everything you’d planned and turned your life around and ultimately led you to a long and prosperous career … in Law. The rest of you, good luck!!

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