The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Shari Torgerson works from her house up the road from us transcribing medical reports, what we call these days ‘remote working’, meaning she has no co-workers, no watercooler chats, no one really to confide in, not since her husband Ronnie died five years back. I stop in occasionally for a cup of coffee, see how she’s doing, mostly because I worry about her all alone up in the woods behind our place. She’s prone to serious bouts of depression and I’ve even suspected she might harbor suicidal thoughts.

The other day, though, when I darkened her doorway, she was in an atypical good mood. In fact, she was positively ebullient and the notion occurred to me she might have a new beau. Nothing like fresh love affairs to make you glad to be alive. Probably what ruins a lot of old marriages, I suppose, but down here we take the good with the stale.

“You’re in a fine mood today,” I said once we parked at the breakfast counter with fresh brewed. “You get a promotion?”

Shari put a hand on my sleeve. “No, nothing like that. But …” She watched me like maybe she was hesitant to tell me some secret. That new guy, I was wondering. “I’m kind of embarrassed to tell you, Skeeter. I signed up for one of these online companions.”

“Right, sure, you mean internet dating. Half the folks I know are doing that now. Beats finding a mate at the Stanwoodopolis Hotel bar.”

Shari shook her head. “No, one of those Artificial Intelligence ‘friends’. I know, at first it was weird, talking to a, I guess, a machine.”

Her hand tightened a little, like maybe she expected me to laugh or … hell, I don’t know, judge her a fool. “Okay,” I said, “and …?”

“Now I’ve got someone to talk to. Bruce. I call him Bruce. And I tell him things, personal stuff, a lot of my worries, ya know. My fears. And he listens but more than that, he gives me advice. He’s concerned about me. I know. It’s weird. But … I think he really does care. Is this me being stupid?”

It’s a brave new world, even here on the South End. If you can love a dog, I guess you can love an android. A dog can’t give you much advice beyond a wet muzzle or an energetic tail wag. So I don’t know, an android that can listen AND offer sympathy AND give advice — so what if it’s a little strange. What isn’t these days?

So that’s what I told her. Yesterday I ran into her in the grocery aisle. “How are you and Bruce doing?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t interpret this as sarcasm.
She didn’t. She came close and whispered with a Mona Lisa smile, “He asked me to marry him.”

I leaned against my cart and tried to think of something NOT smart-assed. Finally I asked if she was considering it.

“Don’t be silly,” she said she told him. “It would just ruin a great friendship.”

Thank god she didn’t ask me to be best man. Course, worst case, I could always ask my avatar to sub in….

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddled at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

There must have been a time, not too long ago, but before mass media, when life was lived in small communities or neighborhoods somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. A time when folks could fashion a table or chair, write their own music and play it on an instrument they made. A time when they might build their own house even, weave a blanket or sew a dress, stitch a quilt. All of this without measuring their effort against the best artisans, the most professional craftspeople, the finest musicians and poets and luthiers across the globe. Which is what we do now ….

When I graduated college with a degree in English and one in Sociology, I decided to chuck it all and move to an old farm in Northern Wisconsin, then a commune in the Ozarks and finally ended up in a shack here on the southern end of an island at the western edge of the continent. My newfound career was basically to be a hippie, get myself back the land and set my soul free. Which didn’t sound corny to me then and it doesn’t sound corny to me now.

What I discovered, trying to escape career and responsibilities, was that hippiedippiedom was a hard path, not the laid back stoner life I’d imagined. The shack was drafty, the roof leaked, dry rot was winning from inside while nature was attacking from the outside. Being a bum is damn hard work. But gradually I learned some survival skills. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, tree felling, auto repair. I built additions, sheds, cabinets. Learned stained glass to replace the plastic sheeting in some of the windows, gardened, plunked on a banjo, built a sailboat and eventually built a new house up on the hill above the shack. Hippie ethics don’t demand you build like a pro — they aren’t interested in competition against the rest of the civilized world.

But every project, every goofy cabinet chainsawed into existence was a small success, a tiny miracle. Relatives shook their heads, guests too. Friends chalked it up to prolonged adolescence. Me? I was a kid with no skillsets, just the drive to live my life on my own terms, half assed as it was.

I’m old now, 75 and a half as we kids would answer when asked. Occasionally I look at my handiwork over those years and I too shake my head. “Good enough” was my motto. Getting high on getting by. Once in a while now I find myself slipping into comparisons with, oh, a really good woodworker. Or a fine maker of guitars. Or a professional boatbuilder. Or a contractor whose houses are square and sturdy. But I resist that with all my slacker might! That kind of thinking is nothing but a prescription for the blues.

We live in a world of extreme specialization. Whatever task you undertake, most likely you will come up short to the professionals, the folks who dedicated themselves to one undertaking, who spent a lifetime perfecting their craft.

We hippies don’t do that. I didn’t do that. In my three quarters of a century, nearly 50 years of them here on the island, I dabbled in everything from art to music, writing to carpentry, boat building to housebuilding, banjo making to furniture construction, guitar luthiery to cabinetry. Was I really good at any of this? Probably not. But I wasn’t doing it as a competition. I was doing it for the joy of doing it. Even if it was half assed. So when I play the banjo I made, I don’t think, gee, if I’d only dedicated my life to banjo luthiery, this banjo would be so much better. It’s perfectly fine, it’s hand made by me and it’s the perfect metaphor for my life. There’s too much else to do. And not enough time to do it.

Nancy came out of Jolene’s Boutique and Salon’s breakroom in a foul mood, snapping the plastic apron on her chair back with a loud retort that sent Ronald’s client upright underneath her dryer. “Whoa,” Ronald said, “someone’s in a crispy mood.”

“Don’t get me started, Ronald,” she growled and grabbed her broom to resweep her area. Ronald shook his tinged hair, clucked his tongue and said, “Girl, you’re gonna wear out that linoleum, couldn’t be any cleaner.”

Finally she put away the broom and dropped into her chair with a defeated sigh. Her next customer wasn’t due for 10 minutes and Mrs. Anderson never came on time anyway. Never one to let angry dogs lie, Ronald said, “You been listening to Jolene’s hot talk radio station, I’m betting. You don’t have enough stress with those kids of yours and the cost of daycare?”

“I know, I know, I …” She trailed off. For a moment she just clicked her scissors in the air, slow cuts, slicing nothing at all. She stared at herself in the half length mirror running the length of the salon, touched a finger to one cheek and frowned at herself. “Doesn’t it feel like us women are supposed to back to the kitchen?” she muttered.

“Oh, honey,” Ronald replied, walking over to lightly drape an arm over her shoulder in sympathy. “I’m supposed to go back to the closet, not the kitchen,” he whispered out of range of Rita Jorgenson who had stopped reading her Woman’s Day magazine to watch the two stylists with considerable interest.

“It’s hard, Ronnie, really frickin hard, rising two kids, paying most of my earnings for daycare. Maybe I should go back home, quit knocking myself out. Dan wants me to. But … I don’t know, maybe if he didn’t keep getting laid off.”

Dan, as Ronald well knew, didn’t get laid off, he got his ass fired. Usually for drinking on the job. So much for bread winning, Ronald told her when the café that hired him as morning cook sent him home after he screwed up multiple orders.

The front door jingled and Patricia Anderson walked in early. Ronald pulled away abruptly and Nancy welcomed her client. Rita Jorgenson tossed her magazine on the side table, shook her curlered head and said over the dryer, “You just hang in there, Nancy. It wasn’t us women who screwed up this world but it’s gonna be us who fix it. So hang in and don’t ever give up.”
Ronald gave a whoop and a small holler. “Damn right, Ms. J, damn right!” Patricia Anderson took off her coat and parked in Nancy’s chair. “Did I miss something?” she asked.

“No,” Nancy told her, “the revolution’s just getting started.”

When we bought our 7 acres and its accompanying shack back in 1977, we first saw the place at night. The smell of cookies baking in a 1920’s Majestic wood stove, the soft glow of oil lamps, a fire crackling in the parlor stove — sure, I thought I’d died and gone to Hippie Heaven. A thought that evaporated by daylight the day we signed the paperwork, at least for the mizzus who sat herself in a corner of the vacated shack and cried her eyes out.

What we didn’t discover until spring was a clearcut woods that by May was an impenetrable jungle of stinging nettles 7 feet high. These days they’d qualify for required disclosure on real estate forms, same as contaminated wells, leaking roofs, buckling foundations and black mold behind the walls. Trails had to be cleared constantly just to enter the dreaded stinging domain and we were constantly struck by toppled nettles that penetrated even the thickest dungarees.

In some parts of the country, pioneers dealt with predators, arctic winters, poisonous snakes and insects, dust storms, hurricanes and hostile natives. So if my curse was only hostile neighbors and stinging nettles, I counted myself semi-lucky. You can eat nettles and I’ve made nettle beer with the itching bastards. The hostile neighbors, well, we had our differences. And still do. But there’s never been any violence. So far.

For 30 years I made my peace. With both. But awhile back I decided enough was really enough! One spring I took a sickle and cleared acre after acre of these monsters. And when they sprang right back up, I hit em again. And again. Each spring I attack the fresh recruits with extreme prejudice … and each spring less and less of them come back. The cedar and fir seedlings I plant now have sunlight reaching them where earlier they withered and died beneath a dark canopy of nettles.

The old growths are gone now, just a few stumps, a memory of early times here on the South End of the island, a myth maybe to the neighbors with their weed’n’feed manicured lawns. But when I’m gone and my sickle hung up for good, little doubt in my mind the roots of these stingers, patient all these many years, will return with a vengeance. I wish em luck…. The neighbors, I mean.