The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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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.

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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.

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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?

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