The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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We got a tradition down here on the South End that when we want to purge our bounty, clear out our closets or empty our sheds, we drag the unwanted possessions down to the highway, slap a FREE sign on the treasures and let the passing motorists fight for the spoils.  Usually only takes half a day before someone slams on their brakes, jumps out of their pickup, does a cursory investigation, then grabs what items would fit in their closets or their sheds.

Sure, we could haul the stuff down to the thrift stores up north but they would charge money selling them to pay for their overhead and rental so why not skip the middleman and reach out directly to our fellow indigents?  I carried out two nice maple colonial chairs circa 1950, cushions reupholstered, mint condition (okay, pretty good condition), set them at the end of the driveway with a woman’s Schwinn bicycle and a rug.  The rug was gone in an hour, the bike in a day and the chairs — well, I suspect the new owner needed to find a truck or van, but they disappeared today, two days later.  Saved me that hellish trip into town, saved the scroungers mucho bucks, probably saved the planet too although I don’t want to get overly carried away here, just doing our part, no need to thank us or even throw a good review on Yelp or whatever social media you still think is worth the End of Democracy and Civilization as You Know It.

All I’m saying: down here on the island’s Banana Belt, capitalism has evolved.  The barter system still works, garage sales outpace the mercantiles now that Tyee Store is ancient history, non-fungible tokens have taken root at the History of the World Gallery … and roadside thrift stores bypass the backlogged goods waiting in ports from San Diego to Vancouver.   Future economists, no doubt, will study us.  Meanwhile, anyone need a perfectly good microwave, come on down tomorrow.  Satisfaction guaranteed!

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I was visiting a friend who has a farm on the north end of the island last week, got a tour of the new calves that will be hamburger for us next year, a spin around the gardens and orchard, then a detour past a dilapidated building he planned to tear down.  He figured he could just jerk a couple of beams in the middle with his tractor and the whole kit and caboodle would collapse, easy as pie.  Naturally I told him about tying a rope to my old shed, hitching it to the pickup and driving away … only to have the entire shed, instead of collapsing in a heap, fall toward my truck, missing me by only a couple of feet.  Always happy to give advice based on my own idiotic misadventures….

Which got me to telling the story of the day when I had already finished framing and roofing our new house back in the last century and needed to cut away some studs in the downstairs for the massive masonry stove’s brick wall to be exposed to the bedroom for heat.  No big deal, I thought, as usual neglecting small details like bearing loads and beam calculations, just knock out a 2×6 or two, probably add some structural support …  you know, later.  But after removing the first stud, I didn’t notice the adjoining studs were starting to bow.  At least not until I knocked out the second 2×6.  Then I could actually watch the next ones in line bending with the weight they couldn’t support by themselves.

I tried to jam the last missing stud back into place but too late, the first story floor had descended too far for that so I ran into the next room, lopped off a few inches of the 2×6 and rammed it into place.  Whereupon it too began to bow.  If you can imagine what it’s like to watch your entire house slowly collapsing, you might have some notion of the panic I was feeling.  The question that ran through my fevered head went something like this:  at what point do you save yourself even if you lose the house, your life’s savings, your months of work and sweat?

One more shortened stud, I figured, and if that didn’t work I would have to get out from under the falling tonnage of a two story house succumbing to gravity.  It too was bowing once it got in partly in place and I’d beaten on it with an 8 pound maul I used for splitting rounds of firewood.  Amazingly, miraculously, the slow descent of the house stopped.  I rammed another stud into place and listened for creaking or cracking.  Nothing.  Completely wasted, I sat down to ponder what had just transpired.  And to count my lucky stars.  Later I would have to rebrace that bearing wall.  But … definitely later.

There is a nearly incalculably small margin between luck and catastrophe, success or failure, happiness or misery.  For me that margin is about an inch and a half.  The distance I never quite managed to raise the floor back to its original level.  It’s okay, it’s just fine.  You watch your world tilt on its axis, you maybe won’t mind if it doesn’t come back completely to its former orbit, just so long as you weren’t spun off.

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This past week eco-activists protested the fossil fuel industry by lobbing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunfowers’ in England’s National Gallery.  Their purported goal was to demand a halt to all new oil and gas projects so when they finished glopping Vincent’s iconic painting then they superglued their hands to the museum’s walls.  The tomato soup was Heinz brand, which was too bad when they could just as easily have splashed Campbell’s, channeling the Warhol silk screens, possibly giving credence to some smattering of legitimate art criticism along with their environmental concerns.  The Van Gogh was protected by glass so no real damage was done to the painting.  Heinz got some free advertising and the protestors were hopefully hauled off to remedial art classes.

“Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” one of the protesters asked.  Well, as a so-called artist myself and a lover of tomatoes too, I can try to speak for my fellow planet killers to say, gee, I don’t really know.  If the choice is between Vincent and the death of the earth, I might go with Vincent.  If it’s between Warhol and a can of soup, I’m with the soup.  So … kind of a hard call if you’re lumping all art against the extinction of life as we know it.  At least for me.

Now maybe if the eco-activists had superglued themselves to a gas pump and asked which I preferred, driving my old pick-up vs. the slow broil of the planet, now, that would give me some pause.  I suppose I could hitchhike into town for my supplies.  You know, if it would save the Earth.  I’m selfish, I realize, but not that selfish.  Although, don’t ask me to move into town.  Stanwoodopolis is not my idea of life worth living.

What does seem certain is that sooner, not later, the generations following ours are going to demand some real action on our part, not lame excuses.  Maybe the painters can use water based paints, not oil, and okay, it’s not a great leap forward for mankind, but hey, we could show we care.  Somehow, though, attacking art seems a bit misdirected, kidz.  Just saying, even if I am prejudiced.  Next time trash a guitar.  Or burn books.  But don’t use gasoline.  We got enough hypocrites in my generation, we don’t need more from yours….

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You live long enough in one place, trust me, you’ll spend your golden years repairing the things you built.  Fences, outbuildings, roofs, gates, probably all of it if you were an itinerant carpenter like myself.  I didn’t really build stuff to last, don’t ask me why, just figured fast is good, go for the artsy-fartsy, don’t worry, be happy.  I did try to build our house to last, maybe the only thing I figured might be worth the additional effort.  And forget about that chestnut of Ben Franklin’s: any job worth doing is worth doing well.  Total BS!  Let’s move along, Ben, not every damn job is worth killing yourself over.

Needless to say, now that I’m a senior citizen, what down here on the salty South End qualifies as an Old Fart, half my time is spent tearing down, repairing, salvaging and otherwise wrestling with my too many buildings, old fences, rotting wellhouses and odd experiments in architecture and art.  It’s not as if I didn’t expect to outlive these things, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around future maintenance issues.  Probably figured when they go to rust and rot and ruin, hell, build another one.

I wouldn’t say Laziness is a virtue, but in my case, it seems to be a creed of some sort, one I probably wouldn’t recommend to the kids, but at this late date, I really hate to spend my last years re-evaluating life choices or character traits.  Besides, I have fences to rebuild, roofs that leak, orchards to prune, hedges to keep back, plumbing problems and … well, hell, the list is endless.  At some point I may have to let the past go.  All those regrets, the disappointments, even the successes … the fences can’t  be mended, what was kept out will eventually come on in, let it go, just let it go.

With luck you won’t question why you built the fence in the first place.

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