The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you’re one of those cynical folks who think social media and the internet killed off American crafts in the 21st Century, you haven’t met the women of Camano Island who still gather in their quilt clubs to exchange ideas, techniques and fabrics at their bi-monthly meetings in the Grange. The Queen Bee Quilters alone number close to 60 dedicated quilt makers. Before the state closed Cama Beach’s historic resort cabins, every one sported their quilts on each and every bed.

Lori Jurgenson, the current President of the Queen Bees, dropped by my glass shack a week ago with Darlene Abercrombie, the current V. P. What they wanted, hell if I knew, but when Lori called out of the blue, I thought maybe I had a potential client, a rarity these long winter days. “I thought it was about time we met,” she said over the phone shortly after disclosing without much encouragement that she was Queen of the Queen Bees. Sure, and I’m the Emperor of Ice Cream, which I did not say, fortunately. Lori, it turned out, was pretty much a no-nonsense, draw between the lines, hard driving head of the largest quilt club north of Seattle and Gomorrah. Or so she said. At least the part about the largest quilt club … the rest was obvious within our first five minutes.

With nary a sideways glance at the glasswork strewn in every nook, cranny, hidey-hole and corner, she announced that she had heard of me. What she wanted was to offer me the opportunity to design quilts based on my glasswork.

“Well,” I said, a little knocked off my expectations, “when I started stained glass, you know, first learning the craft, I used library books on quilting patterns. Geometric stuff, simple straight lines. Both are like building a puzzle, cut the parts, solder and sew them together.”

“Exactly, Mr. Daddle. Which is why we want to ask if you would provide the Queen Bees some of your patterns.” Darlene jumped in here to second the motion. “Think how many of your wonderful designs could be sewn and stitched by our group!”

“Of course most of the Club prefers the more traditional quilts,” Lori hastened to add. “Your work, I’ve heard, is a bit more ….” She paused to search for the right characterization. “Contemporary,” she finally added.

Faint praise indeed. A savvy businessman might have entered into serious negotiations at this point, worked out the details of design remuneration, royalties, all those fine points of the Art of the Deal. But when Lori launched into the benefits accruing to the use of my designs by the Queen Bees, practically guaranteeing future fame and fortune for my lucky self once the quilts became public, well, I could see the good ladies of the Bees were merely trying to help my floundering enterprise achieve the success it would never attain without their assistance.

With great reluctance I assured the ladies that I would give it my utmost attention and thanked them for their interest, promising to get back to them in the near future. The near future, needless to say, wouldn’t come anytime soon. Walking them to the door, two double doors actually, neither women commented on the large design that encompassed both panels of glass. Probably too busy imagining that in fabric, I supposed. Or just anxious to make an exit.

The toilet won’t quit running, she says, so I say I’ll take a look. I pop the tank lid and the gizmo that regulates the inflow, hell if I know what it’s called, is spurting water out the top and I wonder if that’s normal or not. The ball float on its brass lever has been bent down multiple times but now it keeps the tank so low the crap won’t flush completely when you pull the handle. The mysteries of plumbing, I sigh to myself and head to the hardware store for a replacement gizmo, full knowing this is only the beginning of what will probably be a series of cascading plumbing issues.

I decided back in 1974 to be a homesteader. I had no interest in a career or a traditional marriage or a bourgeois lifestyle, not me, not that kid who wanted to blaze a new trail, make the world his own, leave the suburbs of his folks’ last few moves behind. I wanted to be a writer maybe, a school bus driver probably, an itinerant worker of dozens of jobs but none too long, plenty very short. So we hauled our hippie asses up to a farm in Northern Wisconsin and planted a garden, pumped our water, built our outhouse and left mainstream America in our wake. But it doesn’t take long to realize how ill-equipped for that alternative lifestyle you are, about the first truck repair when it won’t start and you have no idea whatsoever how things work. How an engine combusts, how to frame an outhouse, how to fix a pump, how to repair most anything and everything. When you’re poor because you don’t have jobs that make money, you best believe you will need to learn all those skills you didn’t learn in the suburbs and I don’t mean calling the repairman.

I got hold of a mail order correspondence automotive course’s books, studied them and began to learn auto repair. The army pickup truck I bought from some sweet lady who turned out to be a used car salesman’s daughter gave me ample opportunity for hands-on experience. School of Hard Knocks and Knuckle Busting, the very definition of a continuous education. When I bought the shack here on the South End, my graduate courses came fast and furious. Well pump repair, chainsaw use and maintenance, small engine diagnoses, house framing, electrical installations, furniture building, plumbing, concrete work, tree felling, woodworking, remodeling, you name it, I took the exams, sometimes failing, but after a few attempts, passing even if barely.

Over the years I added additions to the shack, rooms out the back, a kitchen off the front, a dormer upstairs. When I learned stained glass I built a shop back in the woods far from the prying eyes of the building inspectors. I built a sailboat in 1990 or so, built some kayaks, built plenty of outbuildings on the 7 acres, then built our house up on the hill. I guess I’d learned enough to feel confident to tackle a two story building, although I will tell you, most of it I learned along the way, reading the week or night before how to California-frame a corner or wire a 3-way switch or plumb a vent for the toilet or tile a bathroom floor or caulk in windows or hang an overhead fan. Took me two years working most every day. Learned how to build a door, lay hardwood floors, build cabinets and bookcases, all this from library books before Google came along. It was hard. It was also the most fun I ever had, this building our own house. It was, like all the hardscrabble stuff that homesteading requires, the building blocks of my life, the life I wanted to build from scratch, the one I would call my own.

So I’m down under the toilet hacksawing apart the threaded pipe that holds the gizmo that’s leaking for no apparent reason, catching the water left in the reservoir, most of it, the rest running down my sleeve. Yah, it’s a funny life all right. Things fall apart, entropic as always, and who ya gonna call? Me, I’m not calling anybody.

At the end of the ‘60’s Viet Nam was at its peak, 500,000 of us fighting a losing cause halfway around the globe against an ‘enemy’ that mostly wanted an end to colonial rule. Our presidents, both Democrat and Republican, knew the war was hopeless by then but refused to admit both defeat and poor judgement. In the ivory towers of universities, the Draft swept through like a plague pandemic, galvanizing the apathetic into militant reaction. At my college, the Univ. of Wisconsin/Madison, demonstrations broke out and the National Guard bivouacked on the campus grounds. A student strike was called and the university basically ground to a standstill.

In Ohio at Kent State the Guard killed four demonstrators who were guilty of nothing more than watching a protest against the War.

Looking back over half a century, I’m not sure our protests ended the war any earlier. They ended Lyndon Johnson’s chances at another term and the police riot in response to the Chicago Democratic Convention closed the door on his successor, Hubert Humphrey, and gave Nixon the election. So I’m a little conflicted about protest movements’ effectiveness.

Nevertheless… this week Trump wants a military parade on his birthday. Already he’s sent 2000 National Guard into Los Angeles to protect ICE and their deportations with 200 Marines activated just in case the L.A.cops and the California state patrol can’t handle the mostly peaceful demonstrations, more a test run for future illegal use of the military to quell legal protests. The war this time is not against an overseas enemy — it’s against the rule of law, the Constitution and ultimately the very foundations of what seems to be an extremely precarious democracy.

All over the country thousands of demonstrations are planned to protest this President and his anti-American regime. Do I think they’ll make a difference? Maybe not. But the time has come to say what Congress hasn’t said, nor the Supreme Court: enough is enough. We the people need to speak up now. We didn’t vote for this and even the folks who voted Trump. It’s time to vote again — with our feet. I’m hitting the bricks this weekend. Again. Enough is enough!

I have a sequoia I planted below our house, down where the hill levels out into a ravine. I planted it as a seedling instead of buying a wedding ring for myself since I really dislike a ring. At least one on my finger. Ten years later we built the house up on that hill and from a second story perch I’ve been watching it reach up over the woodshop below, then slowly rise to the new house’s level, go beyond the height of the barn across the ravine and above our own house.

I have to step forward into the window now to see its top. At 43 years old it’s still pretty much a baby so far as a sequoia goes. On our anniversary Karen and I wrapped our arms around its trunk and barely locked hands. With any luck it’ll outlive us by, oh, 500 years or so. In my own lifetime, with a little luck, it’ll be the biggest tree on the place, which is no mean accomplishment considering the five redwoods we planted from seed, a few humongous big leaf maples, some second growth firs and one cedar that, for now, holds the title at a circumference of 13 feet and must be the oldest tree by far on our seven acres.

I’d like to think when we no longer prowl this property, it’ll be a forest again, not some logged off scabwoods the way it was when we first arrived. The field that once grew alfalfa for our goats is now a small arboretum of oaks and maples and beeches, rhododendrons twice as high as us, walnuts and hickories, a carpet of shamrocks and periwinkle growing underneath.

We are definitely shaped by our surroundings, I know that much. And it’s no small pleasure to return the favor by shaping them. The orchards, the flower gardens, the riot of 150 rhodies all blooming over a slowly unfolding spring, the vegetable gardens, the shrubs, the back woods —- all of this becoming as much a part of us as we became part of it. If you were to ask if I was an environmentalist, I would have to say no, probably not. I’m mostly just part of the environment.

A buddy just wrote me that the Trump Library had burned down and both books had gone up in flames. The sad part, he said, was that the President hadn’t even finished coloring the second one.

Other than the gossip section of the NY Post, chances are our President hasn’t read much of anything. When asked once what his favorite book was, he famously replied the Bible. Other than, of course, his own ghost-written book Art of the Deal. In response to the question of naming a few favorite passages in the Good Book (presumably the Bible), he didn’t want to get into that, more a personal matter, next question.

So the idea of a Trump Library, that repository for his memorandums, logs, meeting notes, private collection of books, etc., well, the notion is nothing if not oxymoronic. Or totally moronic, if you want to be harsh. The man destroys his notes and memos, no doubt the influence of the mafia attorney Roy Cohn, to eliminate the potential for incriminating evidence. History will not be kind to this man of few letters and constant words. It will, of course, have the Trump Bibles and his many ghost-written books for sale. Along with the rest of his merch.

When the design concept goes out for bid on the architecture of the place, I’m going to submit my own renderings. Like the Viet Nam War Memorial, mine will be subterranean, descending down into the earth, windowless, probably a very small footprint, say, 1000 sq feet maximum to give the space a sense of being ‘full’, floor to low ceiling. Inside, past the admission desk where visitors will be charged for the privilege, maybe a couple of computer stations but more likely banks of televisions mounted on the walls with Newsmax and Fox still fawning over the huuuge accomplishments of a second Administration. And of course, bigger-than-life cut-outs of the Donald with John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. For an additional entry fee visitors can watch all episodes of The Apprentice, not sure why they’d want to since they never really disappeared to syndication, just became the new politics when reality TV actually became real.