The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I first learned how to make stained glass at a night class up at the high school in Stanwoodopolis, my sole goal was to learn enough to make replacement windows for a couple of nailed on plastic sheets in my drafty shack on the South End. At the time I didn’t know how to reframe a window for maybe a salvage yard replacement … and judging by the plastic ones, neither did my predecessor who I’d bought the place from. Ignorance, of course, isn’t always bliss.

But a funny thing happened on my way to an Architectural Digest feature. I got hooked on stained glass. Those couple of windows fueled some sort of heretofore unknown passion and in the course of a few fevered months that curiosity into the backwaters of art design sunk its hooks completely. For a time I built panels on the floor of my bedroom in the attic but after stepping on half-built glass designs going to the bathroom for midnight pisses, it became apparent I needed a more formal studio. Or at least an addition to the shack. Which necessitated learning basic construction and carpentry. A small detour that led to a career in glass and a love of building, additions, outbuildings, furniture and eventually a two story house up on the hill above the shack. Life is full of surprises….

The glass addiction created a conundrum for me back then. It was expensive, this stained glass stuff. My panels got smaller and smaller trying to keep going without going broke. And so, ultimately I had to decide whether to try to sell some of these little windows or just quit outright, call it a day and be glad those plastic windows were closed in against the wind and the weather. Reluctantly, I became a salesman. Of sorts. And a capitalist. Of sorts.

The last few years I got entangled in a similar passion. It started when I remodeled a favorite banjo, upgrading parts, then decided to build one from scratch. Everybody, of course, needs more than one banjo. Maybe not five, which is what I ended up with after building a few more. And if that weren’t bad enough, I tried my hand at building acoustic guitars. I just finished the fifth one of those, a nice little maple body job with an unusual sycamore top, what I swear is my last one.

The thing is, I don’t really want to be a guitar/banjo salesman. For one thing, they’re not really that professionally made. Maybe half a dozen more and they might be. But I doubt it. Maybe if I was back in my starving artist mode I’d take the leap. But I doubt it. Poverty might just be the true mother of invention. And I’m no longer starving. Anyone out there needs a few banjos to make their neighbors miserable, you know where to find me.

We’re encamped on the beachfront community of 3 Crabs Road, a strip of land hosting million plus dollar homes, mostly vacant between Dungeness Spit in front and a half mile of marsh behind. A few owners are in residence but not many, no doubt safely ensconced in their homes for the holiday in Seattle or Tacoma. These are their summer vacation villas, one of which we’re staying at between Christmas and New Year to watch the storms coming up the Straits or over the Olympics and avoid the Christmas besotted masses of our consumer citizenry. Fa la la, y’all.

Beyond the marshes are the landed poor, primarily rusting single and doublewides braving the mud and tidal seep, a few festooned with fading Santas and trees draped in colored lights, but nary a creature was stirring other than the ducks, geese, gulls and eagles who seem to be the primary residents here. Wealth and poverty lean comfortably into one another … or so it would seem to this itinerant guest. Although … no place I’ve ever seen outside military bases are there as many NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT signs as this mile long area.

My old man nearly every visit to our island shack would ask why it was people would choose to live in the interior rather than on the shoreline. Gee, Dad, I don’t know. You spoze it had anything to do with the high cost of beachfront property?? But he invariably would shake his head and declare he himself would choose the beach.

Ah yes, and we would all choose palaces over dilapidated trailer homes. Maybe in the widening chasm between the wealthy and the poor, the poor are just glad to have a roof when more and more are living on the street or in their car. Maybe their dream isn’t to be Mark Zukerberg who’s building a Versailles in his tony neighborhood and passing out noise-canceling headphones to shut up the chronic complainers this Christmas.

In the current America, Scrooge is very much unrepentant. The rich not only get richer, they get harder hearts. Hopefully they get a visit from Marley’s ghost.

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

Bob the Baptist lives up the hollow where the dirt road south of me dead ends in a swampy cul-de-sac. You look hard you can see past the abandoned cars, rotted boats, rusty appliances, kids’ toys, broken furniture and busted machinery to where Bob’s shack leans into the last century. Just to be sure nobody will steal this stockpile of valuable rusty corroded parts from his junkyard covered with leaf mulch and blackberry vines, Bob has nailed handwritten signs every few hundred feet: NO TRESSPASING POSTED KEEP OUT!! PRIVIT PROPPERTY, like anyone would venture into his place. By the driveway or entrance or whatever it is that isn’t maintained and is overgrown to the point any vehicle trying to drive in would be scratched to bare metal by berry thorns and cedar limbs and lost equipment, he’s nailed a plywood plank painted black with white words: JESUS IS COMMING SOON!!

These are the End Times, Bob tells us neighbors. South End Times, anyway, if Bob’s place comes under scrutiny. It looks like Armageddon hit yesterday. Windows are broken out and covered with plastic that’s now tattered. Doors hang off their hinges, usually open winter or spring. The first time I went back there looking for my dog who’d wandered off, I walked through an open door with books and magazines strewn everywhere, thinking it was an anteway or a porch … until I realized to my horror I was deep into his house. Believe me, I backed out of there fast as anything, expecting a shotgun blast from Bob the Baptist. He walked up a minute after I’d exited his home sweet hovel and demanded to know who I was, what I wanted, why I was there. “Lost dog,” I mumbled.

“We’re ALL lost,” he fairly howled. “We’re all lost and we don’t even know it!!” Tobacco stains ran down his matted beard and his eyes bulged like King Lear in a room full of psychiatrists.

Bob’s okay, actually, reasonably harmless and even sociable occasionally. The neighbors hear him once in awhile, exhorting whatever demons drive him day in and day out. Apparently the demons aren’t listening. Awhile back we heard he used to be a minister over the other side of the mountains. Heard it from one of his flock. Bob had had an affair with the local TV station’s weathergirl and his wife had run off with the church’s deacon. The weather lady moved up to a megawatt Atlanta station and Bob was banished to the wilderness. I guess it makes some sense he ended up down here. Although … Bob still hasn’t figured out most of us don’t think of this as punishment or penance. Hell, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder too.

This year’s pre-Christmas windstorm, fresh on the heels of the Skagit River’s historic floods, knocked down two of our large hemlocks, tore the top off one of our first live Christmas trees planted in the early ‘80’s and left us with no power or water, phone or internet for four days. After two weeks we still don’t have internet. Zipley says they sent someone and it was fixed but when we got home from New Years, still no connection to the outside world. The Zipsters say they’ll drop by sometime this week, no rush. After all, who requires more Epstein stories, Trump outrages, eco-disasters, news from the war zones or any and all social media??

In other words … Christmas this year may not be white but it most certainly will have no White Noise. Just a return to the way things were when we first arrived on the isolated end of an island not yet discovered by the beachfront-hungry hordes desperate to escape the teeming cities of Seattle or Stanwoodopolis. An era before the internet wrapped its addictive tentacle around our frontal cortex, when time moved more by the ebb and flow of tides than the spaces between Tik Tok videos.

Was it a better era? No need to ask the young folks — it’s like asking an opioid addict if sobriety is preferable, it’s an impossible question at this point. But me? Oh baby, you bet it was! It wasn’t just the economy that globalized. Everything did. We live now in a personal space invaded by constant information from the world outside, news in fragments, images from the electron screen that have absolutely nothing, nada, to do with our real lives, our friends, neighbors or family.

Over the years we’ve let reality slip out of our consciousness, replaced by virtual experience, kitty videos, doomscrolls, snippets from an outside world we imagine is more our world now than the one outside our front door. And we like it. It keeps us constantly engaged, amused and safe from boredom.

I’m two weeks or more into withdrawal. We spent Christmas with traveling friends over on the Olympic Peninsula for our annual bah- humbug getaway for four days, then another week just the mizzus and me driving down into Oregon then over to the Idaho border to visit old friends and celebrate New Years. Were we bored? Don’t kid yourself. This was the real deal….