The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a friend who was kicked out of Catholic Seminary many years back for admitting he was gay. I guess if he had been a pedophile too, he could’ve been a priest. Even a gay pederast known to his parishioners would’ve been okay, although the bishop or cardinal or the Pope might want to move him along to other parishes that didn’t know his history. Like they say, it takes a lot of faith to be religious.

My buddy lost his faith. He couldn’t quite square up a church that professed love for his fellow man in the abstract but not in the particular. All I can say — as an outsider and even an infidel — they lost a good man, a thoughtful man and a man with a very big heart.

Religion is a topic best left alone, I’ve learned the hard way. For awhile the South End Diner had the Bible study group descend on two of their too few tables. They only ordered coffee, no breakfast, and drank refill after refill without leaving much of a tip or a thank you either. Anita, the owner back then, watched her business going downhill, mostly when her other regulars got sick of the debates over Leviticus. She finally asked them to go somewhere else, they were curdling the eggs.

“And besides,” she told them, “morality shouldn’t be as hardboiled as you gentlemen make it.”

Live and let live, but nevertheless she wanted them to live somewhere else half the damn mornings of the week. Jezebel, they called her. But not to her face, of course. Anita was much loved down here and known by all as tough but fair. “Take it back to the church,” she told them, “and if I want to join, I will.”

We actually got a little church on the South End, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, a non-denominational congregation that ministers to quite a few of us sinners. Comfort and fellowship come in many forms and myriad faiths. Debating which one is the correct one, well, I leave that to the righteous. Me, I just try to do as little harm as I can and stay out of their way. Figuring out the universe, trust me, that’s not in my pay grade.

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When I built our palace over two decades ago, I installed a brass bathroom faucet for the marble sink surround we’d hauled by homemade sailboat across the treacherous straits of Saratoga from Whidbey Island. The spout of that faucet was a little shy of reaching completely over the sink so I was forced to do my first renovation. The faucet I replaced the first one with finally gave out, don’t get me started, but with a sigh I tore out the entire marble sink so that I could access the water inlets and the drain stuff, all that plumbing we hide in the cabinet and put out of mind until the leak starts.

I decided to win some gold stars from the mizzus with the next evolution of fixtures, so I bought a pricey little Kohler number. Kohler is a Wisconsin company and since we lived in their fair state long ago, we have even toured their factory and admired their half acre wall of toilets mounted horizontally like some art installation gone monumentally absurd with bathroom humor. It took me a day to disassemble and reassemble the sink, but it looked worth the effort once I stood back to admire my plumbing skills. At least until I turned on the water. A trickle like an 80 year old with advanced prostate problems dribbled out the spout. I turned both faucets full volume, but the flow stayed miserably small.

If you’re a modern handyman like myself, you go straight to Google and start asking questions where, hopefully, you will find real plumbers, not fellow idiots, responding with cogent and useful answers. I discovered, thanks to BillyBob Hosebib, professional roto-rooter from Boston, that my aerator was to blame for the low flow. He even told me the gizmo was difficult to remove and had a few helpful suggestions. God love Google!! Two hours later I had mangled my plastic aerator which refused to unscrew the way Billy B had told me it would. Undaunted, I managed to get a needlenose on the little blighter and got it far enough out to be able to snip it from its tube which was all one unit. Needless to say, I crushed the tube. A few hours later I opened the thing up, but …. apparently I had pulled the tube from some important connection and now no water whatsoever came out.
In disgust I threw the faucet out the back door in a small but cathartic rage, then drove 40 miles back to the big hardware store up north and purchased another faucet, but definitely not a Kohler with its cheesey plastic tube guts. No, I bought a nice little brushed nickel number. A day later and a couple of marble sink surround removals and installations later, I had that baby in and operational. I liked it, the mizzus liked it, guests liked it and so, we had another successful home plumbing project completed.

Until the power went out and the well sat idle. When the power returned, so did the grit and sand and loosened rust from the water lines. The new faucet now had very little flow too. I grabbed a shop vacuum and blew out the lines from the spout, reconnected the supply lines and now had worse water flow. I tried sucking from the other side, then blowing from the spout, etc. etc. When I finished, hardly any water came out. What in the name of Price Pfister !!??

So again I went to Google. Where I learned ALL new faucets now are mandated by FEDERAL LAW to have Low Flow. Which is fine if you are a city dweller on municipal water. But it’s a killer if you are on a well that pulls sediment and kicks grit when the power is off and comes back on. The Google experts recommended buying new valve cartridges if blockage occurs. Probably only 20 or 30 bucks apiece each power outage. Pretty easy to put in, they said. Not too expensive, they said. Easy for them, charging $100 an hour for their labor.

I could bore you some more. Hell, I could bore you for days telling you how I went and found an older faucet, pre-EPA, actually illegal now so that most recycle stores won’t sell you one unless you tell them you have a utility sink, something to do with lead content in the solder pre-2009. My first vintage faucet — and it’s too long and sad a story — was destroyed in the refurbishing. When I went looking for its replacement, I found virtually none so when I laid hands on two up north about 75 miles from home, I bought both. Call it insurance. Or just pessimism.

An hour ago I managed to put one of those in the sink, dropped the marble surround with it installed back down into his frame and turned on the taps. Not only didn’t it leak, but water roared out its spout, just another success story in my quest to be my own repairman. Sure it cost me two new faucets, three used ones and maybe 6 or 7 days of labor. Course I paid a psychological price too high to calculate. Probably it nearly cost me a marriage. But now I too can post advice on Google for fellow idiots to read and follow in my drippy footsteps. Home Repair: Not necessarily easy, but oh so very satisfying.

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I was driving past the Plaza IGA — our ‘hometown grocery’, meaning, I guess, a monopoly for higher prices — when the transformer blew in a windstorm. The rest of the drive down to the tail end of the island was dark except for my headlights casting wild beams on tormented branches and roadside bushes come to life like amphetamine goblins. It would be a long time before PUD got around to us, that was a given.

Slipping off the grid for a few days hurtles us back to the early years here. Ordinary life comes to a sudden stop. No more TV, no more internet, no phone calls, no e-mails. The world shrinks inward, lanterns come out, candles are lit, the homefires are kept burning. All those devices we amuse ourselves with to ‘pass the time’ are put on the backburner, the one that operated on electricity but doesn’t now.

Most of the neighbors have invested in generators. Fifteen minutes after the power blows, the ‘hood here sounds like a hornets’ nest hit with a baseball bat. For them the diversions halt briefly. For us, it’s a few days of nostalgia, memories of wild howlers, crashing waves, trees toppled, neighbors comparing damage, the whine of chainsaws up and down the highway.

We read books we hadn’t finished, play instruments that sat for too long, stoke the stoves, carry water, talk, go for walks. It’s 1977 down at the wild South End once again. A time before cellphones and computers. A time only 40 years or so ago. But the world has changed. Not the way it did with our parents or grandparents. It changed completely.

Me, I like knowing no matter how inexorable its march into a digital future is, it can stop dead in its tracks, if briefly. But it feels like time has stopped and the natural world has reasserted itself. Today, I spoze, we’ll go back to the Future. If nothing else, we won’t have to listen to a dozen damn generators.

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The temperature hit 60 degrees today, a couple weeks before the vernal equinox. 60 degrees, for any of you who live in less temperate climes, is basically a summer day here, what we call unseasonably warm. On days like this we drop what we’re doing and we get our butts outdoors. Which I did. Which is where I am right now, sitting at our picnic table, pen in hand, beer at the ready. I know, it’s a tough life … but save your pity for those poor souls who have jobs, indoor jobs anyway.

Seemed like a good day to wander into the Pea Patch so I did. Cut up potatoes and planted them in mounds. Sowed seed for salad. Hauled the scarecrow over to a new spot. Roto-tilled. Put up the pea fence. Gentleman farmer, that’s me.

Every year I say I’m going to cut back, grow only the stuff that grows well with our cold maritime nights. And every year I plant the whole she-bang all over again. Corn that barely ripens, artichokes that have heads the size of a pingpong ball, tomatoes that stay green. If I didn’t, I’d think I was Backsliding. And when you reach my ripe old age, you want to keep any forward momentum going even if it’s de-accelerating faster than reverse glacial accretion. It’s the same with woodcutting. I think, gee, maybe I’ll switch to propane heat. Save hauling 10 or 12 cord of wood out of the back 40, just hit a thermostat when I’m chilly. But I know it’s a slippery slope. And that slope leads to a Laz-y-Boy and a channel changer.

What I think is you have to see the future as Potential. As Progress. You have to have something to work Toward. And don’t mean tonight’s PBS programming. Me, I’m growing dinner. I’m splitting my heat for a warmer winter. I came to the country so I’d be tuned into the seasons, I’d till the land, I’d plant orchards and I’d make firewood. Sure it gets harder every year. Damn right it does. But not near as hard as the day when I sit here looking at an overgrown garden gone to grass and weed again because I can’t bend down far enough to poke seeds into the ground.

But today feels like spring and as we say on the South End, hope springs eternal. My salad days aren’t over yet and my woodsheds are nearly full. I’m even betting this will be a good tomato year. Like I bet every year….

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Wanda and Ed Zurik own 20 acres past the Diner, mostly cleared land in the South End’s remote interior. Ed grew alfalfa and grass for his six head of cattle, but a few years back he came out to find a perfect circle burnt into his field, what he later learned was a ‘crop circle’, one of those mysterious geometries created with no trail in and no trail out. One of Ed and Wanda’s cows was missing as well. Ed and Wanda contacted the AREA 51 organization who sent an investigator up from their Arizona headquarters to verify that the circle had all the hallmarks of a UFO landing. (The cow was found a day later back in the nettles where it had gotten through an opening in Ed’s barb wire fence.)

The Camano Head, it turns out, is one leg of a Bermuda Triangle of reported sightings of UFO’s, the other legs being Mt. Rainier and the Bangor Naval Base. Ed and Wanda began to devote time and money to the AREA 51 folks, at least until Wanda was abducted one night by aliens while Ed slept the sleep of the innocent. He awoke to find her missing from their bed and found her traumatized out by the barn, barely coherent, telling him in a terrified voice how she had been ‘taken’ in a blinding pulsing light, to god only knew where, and probed and poked by unseen beings. It was, she told Ed and later the AREA 51 team, horrible. She showed them marks on her arms and legs made by syringes that took fluids from her body and shot unknown fluids back in. She was certain they were experimenting on her. Worse, she was certain they would return.

Those of us who inhabit this Triangle know it to be a strange place, all right. Maybe not an ‘entry point’ for extraterrestrial intruders, but some kind of magnetic disturbance that pulls the weird and the deranged from their ordinary lives. Ed was a former insurance salesman who decided one winter day to become a farmer, closed his office that same afternoon, sold his suburban ranch house a week later and moved here where the ‘emanations’ seemed strongest. Maybe we all felt that same pull, who knows?

When the farming proved too hard and the cows not too profitable, the Zuriks did what a lot of us do down here. He kept on digging the hole he was digging. Ed took up drinking as a second job and of course his first job suffered. Occasionally Wanda calls in a missing human report on Ed to the sheriff’s department those nights he doesn’t show up before dark, but the deputies know to check with us down at the Pilot Lounge. “You aliens got Ed Zurik?” Carl, the night bartender, will holler to us layabouts and, more likely than not, if we don’t, we soon will.

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