The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

‘Whatcha been up to this week?’ my old pard Guitar Bob used to ask about every weekly musical session and beer binge. ‘Logging,’ I told him most every spring, at which he would let out a mocking laugh. ‘Oh right, logging. Paul Bunyan, right?’

Guitar Bob burns wood just like me, but he buys his wood already split and delivered after one long year of manhandling a maul that mostly manhandled him. We have cut up logs together, one time sliding down a ten foot high pile of stacked and snotty logs, but Bob is no logger. And despite his sneering cynicism, I am. Year after year I cut alders, maples, firs and deadfall back in the woods, buck it up, stack the slash, split the sections with an 8 pound maul I’ve prized for decades, haul it by wheelbarrow or garden cart up to the woodsheds and let it age for two years before burning it. We’re talking 10 or 12 cord a year, a cord being, for you not familiar with dendritic measurements, a stack 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet.

In other words 10 cord is a helluva lot of wood. And a helluva lot of work. So when Guitar Bob mocks me, I don’t find it amusing coming from a man who buys his wood cut and split. Paul Bunyan? Trust me, there are years when I feel like that, just wish I had a Blue Ox Babe to drag the trees out of the back 40. I’m turning 70 in a couple months. Those 10 cord get bigger every year and sometimes I think I could learn to envy Guitar Bob, just order up some aged maple, stack it in the shed and use my time for something more useful and way less strenuous.

So just when I get to thinking this way, a storm comes along and topples trees back on my trails and yeah, I could just let them rot, home to pileated woodpeckers and raccoons, but a couple years in and the woods would be a debris field of branches and impassable trails. This year we lost two huge maples in the last storms, the biggest with a trunk easily 3 feet in diameter. I own 3 chainsaws but none big enough to cut through the barrel of that base. Some of it is going to sit and rot, it looks like to this old timer. The rest is enough to fill one year of woodsheds, what I’m working on now and will be working on for the next few weeks.

The truth is I didn’t move out to the island to live an easy life. Maybe I thought I was the son of pioneers or just liked the fantasy. Maybe I just didn’t want a suburban or urban lifestyle, turn up the thermostat and watch TV. Maybe I really didn’t give it much thought, which is probably closer to the truth. It’s been 50 years now, cutting trees, planting more, burning firewood to keep warm, both the house and the studio and the woodshop. It’s so much a part of my life I usually take it for granted. Well, at least until every spring….

When this primary season started, I prayed to my gods for one miserable thing: give us someone young. Mayor Pete, well, I liked Mayor Pete but when I said young, I meant someone out of diapers. Experience does count, although judging from the current regime, not always…. One by one the kids fell by the wayside, victims not so much of gaffes and wrong-headed convictions, but a general anxiety pervading the land that this wasn’t the year for experimenting. Gays, women, candidates of color — sorry, no need to apply. We wanted something safe, a known entity, no surprises, nothing but white bread men would do. Old white bread evidently.
I tell you what. I’m about to turn 70, but if I was 50 years younger, I’d be sick and tired of the line of bullshit I get from these old shits. I’d be sucking tear gas again like we did in the 60’s. I’d be out in the streets screaming bloody murder about this Trump turd and his shit-eating little family of privileged hangers-on. I’d be outraged over income inequity, racism, welfare for the rich and I’d be hollering to get rid of these old farts who have no clue what the future is bringing.

But the truth is, I’m an old white guy myself. The world has accelerated past my wheelchair and hurtled out of my bi-focal line of vision. When the Grammy’s announced their winners, I hardly recognized a name, much less the music they sang. When the Super Bowl half time comes on, I think I’m watching soft core porn shows, not listening to great musicians. C’mon, I’m part of the problem now, not any sort of solution.

White guys, old ones, voted in Trump. Not gonna vote some woman, definitely not some woman named Hillary. Nope, rather have a dope. Drain the swamp, shake the tree, tell it like it is. Like it is is stupid. Ignorant. Anti-science. Conspiracy theories. Mumbo jumbo jingoism. Racist and ugly. That’s what the old white guyz voted for. Bring back coal, bring back the textile factories, bring back the 1950’s. Close the borders, exile the immigrants, build a Wall. Dumb and dumber, that’s what us old white guyz were selling. That and fear.

Well, now we got the Pandemic. We got fear, all right, plenty to go around. And we got the Doc-in-Chief, a know nothing idiot who worries more about his poll ratings than a death toll, more about the Dow Jones than the coronavirus. This is what you get with old white guy morons. Talk is cheap, but the toll will be heavy.

So yeah, we’ll run Uncle Joe. Nice old Uncle Joe, steady, calm, predictable. I’ll vote for him, sure. But this is the 21st Century and maybe, just maybe, we could use someone who looks to the future, not a grandpa from the last century.

The good reverend of the Little Church of the Ravine is standing up for his belief that his flock should be allowed to congregate for Easter services under Freedom of Religion. Pastor Paul told the assembled fellowship this past Sunday that he felt Rome should keep its nose out of God’s business and God will keep his nose out of theirs. “If prayer in this time of Pandemic isn’t essential,” the minister declared, slapping his well-worn leather-bound King James, “then I surely do not know what is. If the Bud Hut can remain open to sell Satan’s marijuana merchandise, how is it that this church of God is considered dangerous?” A hundred amens rang out in the old steepled church.

Well, I don’t have a great answer to the Bud Hut burning question of the day, but … most of us South Enders are quarantined up, avoiding friends and family, shopping once a week with masks and gloves. It’s not like the virus is epidemic down here. Yet. But why take chances? Even the South End String Band quit practicing together, not because we were worried about achieving early perfection, but after that choir up in Mt. Vernon gathered together to sing joyful noises and ended up with 3 dead, 4 in intensive care and two dozen infected, we thought practicing at home by ourselves might make more sense. Thankfully none of us have suggested Zoom for cyber practicing. A little hiatus will be just fine.

Easter is this weekend and even though the President once told the True Believers the pandemic would be over by then and businesses would open, it doesn’t look at this point that this will come to pass. Except for the Little Church of the Ravine, looks like. I guess these folks and Pastor Paul aren’t watching secular news from the temporal world. That, or they assume the Good Lord will be watching out for them. I kinda worry She may not be watching out for the rest of us, maybe bring plague to our neighborhood through the Typhoid Marys of their little church. Plus it sets a bad example for the sports zealots who want nothing more than to get back to basketball tournaments and baseball openers. You want True Believers, check out the Pilot Lounge down at the South End Marina on any given weekend before the Pandemic shut it down. They’d be willing to risk a virus or two and maybe the bubonic plague to congregate once again in front of that 52 inch big screen TV over the bar. Half of the boyz think the alcohol in their glass is better preventative than hand sanitizers. They figure Pastor Paul is passing out sacramental wine he buys from the liquor store. Another essential business, they notice. Churches and bars, open up them pearly gates!

We are Americans, rugged individuals, don’t tread on us!! We built the Empire State Building and the trans-continental railroad. We drive Range Rovers to our office job. Nobody can tell us what to do, we’re too rugged, too individual. Sometimes we wear socks that don’t match, usually by accident, but we won’t apologize for the fashion gaffe! No, we’re tough, we’re independent, we’re Americans.

We ride Harleys and we wear black leather jackets. Even the motorcycle gangs all wear black leather jackets, not to look the same, but to look different than You, because they’re the Wild Ones, the Different, the Dangerous, not anything like You. We wear sports jerseys, sports ballcaps, sports sweatshirts and jackets, not the same ones but ones with the number of our favorite player on our team, not your team, not your favorite player.

We live life on the Edge. We let the Costco toilet paper run down to only a few rolls before we buy another 40 roll replacement, that’s the kind of rugged individuals we are. We all buy sports utility vehicles because you never know when we’ll swerve off the highway and take the road into the wilderness. Or we might not, you just never know. We drink Bud Lite. I think that speaks for itself, don’t you?

We bought a house with a different color door than the other houses in the neighborhood. We had an affair with the neighbor too, just so you understand we’re not tied to conventions. We’re our own person, not some cookie cutter version of a TV sitcom. We don’t care how many Likes we get on Facebook even though we check the count. Some days we don’t even color coordinate our wardrobe! We use underarm deodorant to spare you our rugged odor. We have a stylist cut our hair once a month and sometimes we even change the style. That, my friend, is our wild hair! Feeling our oats. Not playing it safe. Because, yah, you guessed it, because we’re rugged individuals!!

Some nights we even watch foreign movies with subtitles on Netflix! Not kidding, we do! Crazy stuff like that, like going to Burger King instead of McDonalds or ordering something other than the burgers. Chance Takers, that’s who we are, the progeny of the pioneers who tamed this country. Any given day we might quit our stupid job and hit the road, never look back. Tell the boss to shove it. Take the risk. Because we’re Risk Takers, we’re tough as a Chevy truck. We vape tobacco and maybe we even still smoke cigarettes, because nobody is going to tell us what to do. We’re the Marlboro Man, Stetson on straight, burning our way across the landscape, solitary riders on the American plains, we’re independent, we’re free, we’re the new cowboys, same as the old cowboys.

Giddy up and Go, that’s our motto. Not that we have to giddy up and go anywhere, you understand. If we want to stay home, by god, we will. If we want to babysit the grandkids, that’s what we’ll do. If we want to read crap on the internet half the livelong day, you got it, we will. Nobody tells us what’s what. We’re Americans, dammit, we’re rugged individuals so don’t tread on us.