The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I wrote here awhile back that WalMart was moving to the old Tyee Grocery strip mall. A neighbor thought it was true — and boy, howdy, did she ring my ears with outrage. She wanted that WalMart and now she’s stuck with a Marijuana Dispensary there. Course, when I wrote a year ago that South End Greenworks WAS going in there, a guy drove all the way down the island to find it. Yep, he was hacked it was all a joke.

I mentioned hunting season was opening up in a few weeks one April issue of the Crab Cracker — on alpacas. I got some serious threats from one particular herder that I would be billed for every one of the cute little buggers killed. Okay by me so long as I get the meat. When we built the new bridge onto Camano, I wrote that it would be named the Colton Harris-Moore Bridge and our commissioner at the time had his ears scorched by irate citizens. He said, Skeeter, you got to stop writing this stuff, folks think you’re serious.

Course then we ran Skeeter for mayor. Of the South End. The commissioner lost by a few votes and he thinks folks voted for me by accident. Maybe so. The line between reality and fiction is gone now. Political e-mails are so blatantly lies but nobody seems to mind. Hot talk radio has managed to pull the rug out from under what was once ‘unbiased’ reporting. If we think ALL news is skewed and biased, why not just make it ALL opinion? In an effort to give both sides, network news has quit making the call on what’s true or not. Let the Liars talk and you can make up your own mind. Except now we’re so saturated with prevarication, exaggeration and outright chicanery, half of us can no longer see the difference. Or worse, we no longer care.

Skeeter, needless to say (or so I thought), is a joker. He’s not advocating, he just thinks April Fool’s Day never ends. Sadly, in this Information Age — or Misinformation Age — it apparently doesn’t. Trouble is, folks out there on the blogosphere, on the internet, on the news, on the talk shows, they aren’t kidding.

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I never wanted to live in a small town. I have a few times and I hated it. Everybody knows your Bizness …. or they think they do. Now I live on a small island. Used to be I felt reasonably anonymous. I kept a low profile the first few decades, no photos in the paper OR the post office. I still try to keep that part. Folks might know my name, but usually they don’t have a mug shot to go with it.

Still, you live in one place long enough, you’ll lose any anonymity you might once have prized. Folks come up to me all the time in town or the local grocery, saying Hi Skeeter, how ya doin’? Hell if I know half of them — embarrassing, for sure, but I’m getting, if not used to it, at least not losing sleep later. I just plead geriatric dementia. Pretty soon it won’t be a ploy, it’ll be a diagnosis. At least I’ll have years of acclimation.

I shouldn’t mind, I suppose. Not like I’m a Class 4 predator in the neighborhood. Although … that banjo I play might qualify for some community meetings with the sheriff to warn everybody. You can’t be too careful these days.

But let’s face it — privacy is a precious commodity, not one we should relinquish easily. Sure, we can grow a thicker skin, ignore the parochial paparazzi, try to keep our heads down but focused on the Goal, whatever the goal might be. Folks can think what they want … even if we’ve tried to create an Image.

Comes a time, though, when public opinion starts to challenge our self image. Fame, even small fry, small town notoriety, seems corrosive. Like having a mirror on the wall you try to ignore, but … you peek. And the reflection isn’t what you see when you brush your teeth.

I suppose I could pull back in. Or move away. Or change my name. It’s appealing some days. Except that I love it here. I’ve been back in the woods this month. Logging. Planting trees. Lining the paths with bleeding hearts. It’s a great escape. It might just be a start. Until the raccoons get too familiar with me.

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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…..

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Our brass bed came from an old Polish homestead in Northern Wisconsin. I bet it was a prized possession when it was new. The Cat’s Pajamas. It was black with corrosion back then, but I spent a week with brass cleaner, steel wool, elbow grease and constant cursing to make it shine again.

I’ve slept in that bed since 1971. For you mathematicians, that’s a long time, a world of snoring, a universe of dreams and plenty of whoopee. You can get attached to a bed after that long.

So it was a surprise when the mizzus wanted a new one. Mostly she wanted a queen size and since the brass bed is a double, well, maybe you can see my dilemma. I suppose I could buy a bedframe or salvage one from Habitat for Humanity’s store — and actually I looked — but what I saw wasn’t going to replace the hole in our bedroom when that brass bed got hauled down to the shack. A bed, it seems to this old snorer, is a pretty personal item. It’s not a fridge or a table. Not even a sofa, although sometimes the couch is the bed when we fall asleep watching movies.

Anyway, I decided to build our own. A friend had given me two pickup loads of old oak and maple and madrona lumber, pretty gnarly, bark on, warped and cupped and bowed. Plenty enough to build a bed. Or two. One for us, one for the little 40’s house we just bought. One out of madrona, one out of oak. Both big. Queen-sized, actually. I won’t bore you with the construction details. Let’s just say I’ve been at it a couple of weeks. And they’re still not done.

I’m hoping the new bed will be like the new house when I built it back twenty years ago, the house I wasn’t really confident would replace the shack I’d loved for 17 years, shack ornot. I suspect it will. That’s the best part of homemade anything — you’ve built yourself right into it. And besides, I’ll put the brass bed back in the shack. Just the way it was when the mizzus first came out here. Might even plan a 2nd honeymoon. She can pick the bed….

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