The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You live in the 19th century the way we pretty much do, you heat your place with wood. We heat the entire house, the woodshop, our old shack (now a glass studio) and the sauna. We keep 5 woodsheds. Six if you count the house we bought next door and yeah, it has a woodstove too. Probably got about 30 cords of wood stored right now, maybe more. When the carbon footprint police come for us — and they will — we’ll be the folks in the ten league boots. We’ll plead guilty, no question about it, but maybe the judge and jury will be merciful considering how hard, how incredibly hard, it is to heat with wood. Probably they’ll throw the book at us, if we still print books anymore, or just beat us with a Kindle.

I’m not even going to try to soften your hearts with tales of chainsaw mishaps, massive peavey lifts, endless days of log splitting with an 8 pound maul, wheelbarrow haulings, wood stacking, the endless work of bringing in cordwood. Instead I’ll tell you a tale of the dangers of burning the stuff.

Our first sauna was a chicken coop. The mizzus came out from the tundra of Minnysota in the winter of ’77. By spring we decided we needed an addition. But first! she wanted a sauna. A sauna? I asked, bewildered, not really sure what a sauna was having never been in one. But she was of Finnish heritage and by god, by jiminy, she would have a sauna, yah shure, u-betcha. Being a dutiful husband, I tried arguing, explained we could better use the resources for an addition, but no, a sauna she wanted. And a sauna she would get, I assured her. Just tell me how the damn thing worked so I could build a South End version.

You need a building and you need a stove. If you can, you pile some rocks on the stove for pouring water to make steam. You can go out and roll in the snow when you’re hot enough or you can jump in the lake or stream. All we had was a hose for a cold water shower. It’s simple really. I cleaned out the chickenless chicken coop and added benches up high, plumbed in our old shack heater, built a change room outside with the hose from the well and voila, we had a sauna. I admit, I was skeptical, but maybe my Scottish ancestors had vacationed in Helsinki back when, because I liked it a lot. We started taking sauna once a week. We sweated mightily and we were purified. It was almost, but not quite, a religion. At the least, an island sweat lodge.

I liked it so much that after a few years I remodeled it, paneled the coop, put in nice flooring, added a covered change room with a big stained glass window in it. Put another cedar shake roof on both and added insulated stovepipe for the new stove. My mistake was figuring the insulated stovepipe could have cedar shakes right up to the pipe. So about the first big firing, the roof caught on fire when the pipe was blisteringly hot and right up to the very flammable cedar shakes. I came out to put another load of wood in only to find flames had engulfed the roof and the entire sauna was ablaze.

The mizzus wanted to call the VFD, the volunteer fire department, but I said why bother, they don’t call em ‘basement savers’ for laughs. So instead I went out and took photos of the conflagration lighting up the night sky. The fact no neighbors called 9-1-1 tells you how many neighbors or passing cars we had back then. While I was doing my photojournalism I noticed the adjacent wellhouse was smoking, its paint blistering off, and I thought, geez, maybe we should’ve called the VFD. If the wellhouse caught fire, then our water supply was gone too and the shack was about as close to the wellhouse as the wellhouse was to the sauna. I grabbed a hose, the one with the end burnt off and smoking from the changeroom now engulfed, and for an hour I watered down the wellhouse. In the end nothing was left but the blackened body of the cast iron stove and a few odds and ends.

The mizzus could only shake her head sadly. Probably for the loss of the sauna, not for my idiocy. I figured she was getting used to the idocy by then. Course … later I’ll have to tell you the tale of the chimney fire.

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Down at the Norse Village in Stanwoodopolis the liquor store has sat shuttered ever since the voters of Washington decided we should get government out of the business of selling alcohol. Actually most of the Norse Village is pretty much out of business. Got a Dollar Store and a laundromat, all of it anchored now by the ever resilient Uff-Da Shoppe, purveyors of find Scandihoovien knick-knacks.

I noticed recently the Chapel of Praise has moved into the vacated liquor store. We all know it’s not the building that’s important, it’s the Spirit that moves inside. Or spirits in this case. But … ever since I moved here in 1977 the only liquor store in town was this building and this location. And now it’s a House of God, a concrete block sanctuary for folks the liquor store probably brought to their inebriated knees. With a bottle, now a hymnal.

Bernie Slivovitz, my neighbor down the highway, is a newly minted convert. He’s been pretty religious about his AA meetings at the toxic mold county-run Blue Building, formerly the Senior Center, every Thursday night and now he’s washed in what he calls the Blood of the Lamb. Sounds like a meatpacking house to me, but I don’t make light of Bernie’s newfound salvation. His drinking cost him more than a couple of jobs plus a wife and his kids still won’t talk to him, they aren’t as forgiving as Jesus. They think his sobriety, like always, is as temporary as the rain and wind stopping in November. The wagon he’s riding, driven by Jesus or Bobby Ryder, his best friend who takes him to the grocery store after the last DUI, will knock him to the ditch sooner, not later.

Maybe so, but Bernie’s doing okay so far. A little righteous for my cynical tastes, but hey, you think you found the Right Path, you hate to see your pals and family wandering, lost and forsaken. The road is narrow, Bernie’s pastor tells him. And for those who stray, get ready for the Big BarBQ in the sky.

“It does seem strange,” Bernie confides to me one day last week over a cup of black coffee and his ever present cigarette, “to attend services in the old liquor store. But ya know, the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

Being a South Ender, I couldn’t agree more.

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Our anniversary is coming up tomorrow. 34 years. No, not our wedding anniversary, the day the mizzus rolled onto the South End and into our love shack. Love shack. Put the emphasis where you want, but my god, it really was just an old dilapidated shack, warped floors, swaybacked roof, dryrot and cracked linoleum, standing on stumps and pier blocks at the end of the road. At the tail end of an island on the shore of a continent. You don’t believe in romance or the power of love, you should listen up, stories like this’ll melt your cynicism, maybe give you faith that life can always get better.

Thirty four years ago we were dirt poor, both of us. I had a part time job as graveyard orderly in a hospital 40 miles away with nothing in the bank. Karen had just finished a Masters degree in librarying. No job. Some student loan debt. She rolled in with $40, a suitcase and a set of skis. Maybe she thought we had winters here on the coast. Our $225 a month mortgage was hard to meet and it felt like the wolves were waiting outside the back door. You want to find out if your relationship is strong, live in poverty awhile, you’ll find out. Pretty quick.

But those were great years, those love-struck, hardscrabble years back in the early 1980’s. The South End was pretty remote back then, not many neighbors, not many friends. We spent most of our time together, working in the yard and the gardens, patching up the shack, adding a few additions. Family and friends who came out to visit us probably felt sorry for us living that close to the edge in a rundown hovel hard to keep warm. But me, I never was happier than those early years. Love will make you forget a lot of troubles the same way money won’t make you forget you’re lonely.

A lot of women wouldn’t have stuck it out. Okay, most women wouldn’t have stuck it out. Not only was I no prize, the shack wasn’t exactly a honeymooner’s dream home either. Couple of strikes right there. And any career possibilities for a prospective librarian … well, they were few and far between and a miserably long drive away. Staying meant some serious sacrifices.

Looking back, we’ve done okay. Karen found some library work, even ran a department at the University of Washington’s prestigious library. Long commute though. Too long. She’s become the area historian by dint of 30 years of research and writing and she still is a librarian. Me, I quit my orderly job after 10 years and spent a couple building a house to replace the shack she lived in with me for 13 years. Folks who see the place now can scarcely believe it. Here? they ask. This dump? Yeah, I say, this old shack.

It makes me smile to think back on her arrival 34 years ago. Stormy night, power blown out, the old homestead lit by lanterns and oil lamps, the wind howling against the paned windows we could see our reflection in. We ate fresh crabs and drank champagne in the flickering golden light. The woodstove crackled and we started our future together. I think maybe we’ll do that again this year. The windstorm is already here.

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