The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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My grandfather on my mom’s side was a potato farmer all his life in Northern Maine a few miles from the Canadian border. Folks think of Maine, they think the rocky coast of the Atlantic, they conjure up white clapboard houses in a quaint bay, they think lobsters. His fields were rocky, all right, but the ocean was nowhere to be heard. In the winter, though, he had waves of snowdrift piling onto his snowfences that didn’t abate until late into the spring. By May or so he could start plowing that year’s crop. No lobsters migrated up toward his fields and the houses were anything but Norman Rockwell quaint.

Until the day he died, he plowed his fields with a horse, not a tractor. All the other farmers up there in Aroostook County moved into the 20th Century soon as they could get a loan for one of those newfangled Farmall tractors, but not my grandfather, no siree, he had his trusty horse Sarah and he stuck with her til the bitter end. Hard life, spud farming in rocky ground, harder yet working with a horse and harness. Give the man credit, he was a stubborn old codger. When we visited each summer, he’d take us grandkids for a ride in his ‘caddy’, an old battered Chevy that he drove the whole quarter mile into town on U.S. 1 where he’d pick up feed or just shoot the breeze with the other farmers gathered at the grocery or the mill. Small town life, talking weather, catching up on gossip, complaining about the price of a barrel of potatoes. How’s your garden doing? Hear about the Godfrey kid? Randall farm hit with blight, probably lose half his crop. Too much rain, too little rain, no rain at all.

You better believe us kids could never, not in a thousand lifetimes, imagine living in a small town or working outside on a rundown played-out farm. So how was it I found myself 20 years later buying a shack on logged off acreage at the butt end of an island that basically was its own small town? ‘Crazy world’, my 97 year old father likes to say every day when I call, as if that sums up anything and everything inexplicable. If I had a better explanation, I’d let you know, but I don’t.

The other day I was hauling in wood for the stove and got to reminiscing about Grampy, this tired out old North Woods farmer who sat in the evenings in his favorite rocker smoking his pipe, the man who plowed with horses in the late 20th Century, barely made a living, raised a family in hard times, worked til he dropped. The mizzus asked the other day why I don’t quit hauling firewood, just get a propane stove, sell off the 30 cords in the woodsheds and make life easier for myself. And her too, I suspect.

Crazy world, I could have said, but didn’t. But I think I understand in some vague way the need to hang onto the old ways even if life is harder for it. Hard isn’t the worst thing in the world but it does keep you in it. The ground anyway, probably quicker than I’d like.

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A Little Library History

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Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center a decade ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…

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It’s the holiday season and nothing says holiday quite like Covid. If you watch any news on your favorite media platform, hardly matters which, you’ll see the crowds at the airport massing up for Thanksgiving travel, off to see grandma, no doubt a family reunion right out of Norman Rockwell, big fat gobbler, plenty of cheer, pass the cranberry sauce, please. What I’m seeing is a spike in the pandemic numbers a week from dinner, an economy starting to sputter and stall without any stimulus package in sight so long as the stock market cranks up the capital gains for our legislators, unemployment relief ending soon and plenty of folks who won’t be checking their stock portfolios but will find coal in their Christmas stockings.

Half the country thinks Trump won the election. By a landslide. And that same country thinks Covid is a hoax, a strategy to keep their guy from winning the election. I have no inkling what they think the death numbers mean, over a quarter million, but obviously they’re not too worried grandma might be next. Just a bad cold maybe, nothing to worry about, nothing to make them wear a mask. Like the governor of West Virginia said, first the mask, then they take your guns. Seems sane and logical to me….

I live in an insane country during insane times. I see a bad moon rising is what I see. But … not to sound too pessimistic, there is a vaccine on the way. A couple of them actually. With a 90 to 95 per cent effectiveness. Which, if you study immunological breakthroughs, is a freaking miracle. You could easily imagine in a few months we could stop this pandemic in its tracks, get back to work, socialize again, put kids in schools, return to some kind of normal. Except now I read where nearly half the doctors and nurses wouldn’t necessarily take the shots, not enough testing for long term side effects. If they won’t take the vaccine, take a guess how many of the public won’t either.

I feel like I’m living in Pakistan where the citizens refuse to take the smallpox vaccine, might be a CIA trick. Or in Africa where the folks think the vaccine for Ebola will actually give them Ebola. I live in a country where the President is basically a white witch doctor, don’t wear a mask, it’ll just keep the evil spirits inside you! The doctors are part of a deep state medical monstrosity, don’t listen to that Fauci fool! Send your kids to school, they won’t socialize properly if you don’t!!

Me, I’m ready to offer myself up as one of the first recipients. I’m waiting for that vaccine with a sleeve rolled up right now, mister. Right now! I know, I know, if half of us don’t immunize ourselves, the pandemic will still roll on, the economy will stall, the folks who lost their jobs will be evicted from their houses and apartments, this plague will linger for who knows how long. But I’ve lost hope waiting for Godot. He isn’t coming. I’m waiting instead for that vaccine.

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Fat Phil spent most of his days down at the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop where all the layabouts mostly got in the way of Bondo Billy’s crew who were required to wear plague masks even though the visitors never did. Phil and the other malingerers thought this pandemic stuff was a crock and a hoax. Well, at least until Wally came down with the Covid, exposing at the Flathead Car Club who frequented Bondo Billy’s to a potential death sentence. Wally ended up in the ICU for a week on a respirator where no visitors were allowed, mask or no mask, and the boys were banned from Billy’s until their quarantines were ended, two weeks, Billy declared when they complained.
Wally recovered. Sort of. Scarred lungs, the docs said, but lucky to be alive considering his underlying conditions, meaning his obesity, his ravaged liver and his years of three pack a day smoking. If you think the boys started wearing masks, you’ve been smoking more than tobacco. Naw, they let the mizzus haul to the store for beer and food when masks were finally required.

Fat Phil visited Wally when he got released from a week’s rehab at the Mabana Sunset Home and found him propped up on pillows in his trailer’s livingroom, watching daytime TV, Fox News it looked like. ‘How ya doin’, Walter?’ he asked. Wally had lost 20 pounds it looked like and his eyes were sunk back in their sockets, making Phil fidgety and already regretting coming over, but then, after all, what are friends for?

“Not real good, Phil, not good at all, you want to know the truth. Grab yourself a beer,’ he gestured feebly toward the fridge.

“You want one, Walter?’ but Wally shook his head no. ‘Doc says lay off the sauce.’ Later Phil would tell the boys down at the Pilot Lounge Wally looked like death warmed over twice. ‘Underlying conditions,’ Little Jimmy said, sipping his drink. Underlying conditions, they all agreed. Thank god, each man jack of them thought to themselves, I don’t have those. ‘Drink up, men,’ Phil cried, ‘the next round’s on me.’

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A lot of us shut-ins during this latest spike in the coronavirus are turning our attentions to the cages we’ve found ourselves locked down in these past months. Gutters need cleaning, windows need it too, closets need organizing, repairs need to be made, roof needs replacing, hell, maybe a complete kitchen remodel is in order. What else you gonna do for a year or more cooped up in the old shack?

If they had the money, they’d build an entirely new house, one with a separate entrance for the kids who have been learning now ‘virtually’, meaning, I think, they’ll be about a grade behind when sequestering ends. The grown kids are back too and a mother-in-law unit in the backyard would make everyone a little less irritable. The family that stays further apart is a bit more likely to stay together.

These are tough times on the cramped tail end of the island. No place to go, nobody to visit, only ‘essential’ services still open for business. We can take a drive to the grocery or hardware store, wear our funny face masks, but that’s about it. No grabbing a beer at the saloon, no sharing a lunch with a friend, no movie nights out, no strolling the mall, none of those flimsy trappings of a vanishing civilization. All that’s left is a desperate attempt to Martha Stewart the trailer. Mail order new curtains, fix the rotten tread at the bottom of the porch stair, grab some rocks off the beach and make a rockery for the flower garden they’ll plant next spring. Spring, you better believe, seems a million miles away right now, somewhere the other side of Venus.

Little Jimmy, half crazed from listening to his wife’s daytime TV soap operas and game shows and touchy-feely roundtable gossip, blasted the wall out in the living room and built a shop off the house where he could shut the door and escape and work on his model airplanes addiction. His mizzus was none too pleased at having a hole punched in her living room wall for her hubbie’s mancave. Ruined the feng shui, she kept muttering, and the whine of power tools and dremels and small gas engines didn’t add much to the contemplative atmosphere of her TV room cocoon either, she told him.

Jimmy didn’t help his cause much by dragging out the construction for months. Once he got it framed, roofed and insulated, his pace slowed glacially, a little molding here and there, caulking a window, lay some tile, no rush, that’s for sure. The door might never have gotten installed if Natalie hadn’t melted down in the middle of her favorite game show watching her hero dragging tool boxes around the shop for half an hour, scraping the floor, driving her nuts.

Next day Jimbo had a door on, you better believe it. With a lock. That he used. Once the beer fridge was plugged in, Jimmy breathed a deep sigh. Paradise, he said. Out loud. For awhile, at least, paradise, no pandemic. Natalie, you might have guessed, might not agree….

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