The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Folks down by me live by a different Code.  Mostly their own.  You live hell and gone from the Reach of Rome, you tend to make up your own rules that meet your local needs.  Laws from places half of us never visited …. well….  Our boys down here are notorious for exaggeration.   What you might call, for want of a better word, Liars. B.S.ers, braggarts, purveyors of Tall Tales.  They still think this the Wild West and they’re the last of the cowboys.   They mostly do what they want and call it freedom.  Laws were made for suckers and sheep.  They’re, by god, not bound by any rules or regulations, they’ll have you know.

I got a little of that in me too, so when I say these outlaws are slightly left of scofflaw, trust me, they’re slightly on the dangerous side.  Sure, some are mild as Two Toke Tom who grows weed the way Grampa Daddle made moonshine.  Just trying to make a living in times out of synch with societal demands.  Prohibition comes and goes.  Today’s criminal is tomorrow’s CEO.  Some of us are just a little ahead of the curve, or so says Two Toke. We all got a small inclination toward the miscreant, I guess.  Well, maybe not the missus.  She toes the straight and narrow.  And tries her best to help me do the same.  Probably why I’m a pillar of the community.  I’d hate to think what might happen if I was left with my own de-vices.

My pals poach crab, overharvest free range clams, shoot deer out of season with a rifle, not a shotgun, and generally proceed as if game wardens and police officers were mythical creatures.  They eschew niceties like auto insurance, ignore speed limits, drive under the influence and cheat the government on taxes every chance they get.  Which, since mostly they’re unemployed, isn’t all that often.

They build without permits, hunt without licenses, drive without insurance, work ‘under the table’ and generally navigate life as if government was a volunteer program.  All these folks who constantly carp and complain about government, they look at with total bemusement.  Government certainly doesn’t apply to them, why should it bother anybody?  I suppose there will come a time when Rome rolls in, wanting its tribute.  By then we’ll probably all be a docile crowd down here, ready for government health care, meals on wheels and a good nursing home.  Sure hope they don’t have rules at the Mabana Assisted Living Villa.  The boys will want to stay up past Lights Out — even if they’re just asleep on the couch in front of the big screen communal TV.

We’ve been hearing rumors lately that folks are worried these new pot laws and similar sex marriages are going to be the ruination of society as we know it.  Stanwood and Gomorrah.  Coming to a sex and drug emporium near you!  Probably too late to save em from themselves….

Pastor Paul at the Hallelujah Good News Church of the Rock down at the Odd Fellows Hall they rent every Sunday morning was enjoining the congregation after the voters passed the Initiatives of Iniquity to fight the forces of evil unleashed upon us poor South Enders.  Cast the first stoned, you ask me, but Pastor Paul didn’t.  He read passages from a battered King James to prove his point and God’s, made reference to Babylon and Beelzebub, and practically blistered the varnish off the pulpit.

I know it’s hard to watch if you think sin is spreading around you faster than floodwater in New Jersey, but before we get our earmuffs in a bunch, it’s worth remembering us South Enders haven’t turned to pillars of salt yet and this end of the island hasn’t been consumed by an eternal fire of damnation.  We’ve been similar sexing and smoking herbs other than nettles since I came here back on the 5th day of Creation.  I wouldn’t say we’re Paragons of Virtue  — well, most of my pals aren’t — but if we’re on the Road to Perdition, Hell looks more like Elger Bay Mega Mall than it does Dante’s bad dreams.

Folks are a little too lathered up and Pastor Paul isn’t helping much.  Truth is, he was all FOR that Holy War we been running for a decade and I’m not talking about the Crusade to put a tollgate between Stanwoodopolis and the island to keep the infidels back where they belong on the Mainland.  Pastor Paul would benefit mightily from a bowlful of Two Toke’s Heavenly Blitz, I suspect.  Maybe quit worrying about who loves who.  Love might not be THE answer, but it’s a start….

Two Toke doesn’t talk much about his past. Hell, he never talks about his past. Some people are like that, the mizzus is, they just want to leave what came before back where it lies. Me, I’m the opposite, sort of the king of reminiscence. Not sure why but probably I just hate the thought of forgetting all those memories, the bad and the good. They’re what formed us so why not learn some lessons from them. Tom, though, you won’t get much of anything from him, not where he was born, not where he used to live before he came to the South End, not if he was ever married or had kids, none of that will you discover from him. And if you google him, Thomas Richardson, assuming that’s his real name, you’ll be wasting your time on dead ends, wrong ages, different addresses. The man is a cipher, at least the man before I knew him.

One fairly stoned night many years back when we first were getting to know each other, and trust me, Two Toke doesn’t let people know him, he slipped up and mentioned a night long ago on the Delta. “What Delta?” I asked and judging by the look on his face, realized I was definitely prying into something I had no business prying into. The Delta, it turned out, was Viet Nam. “Nam,” he said after a long pause. “You were in the War?” I asked and he made it clear it was nothing he cared to talk about. What I realized later, over the many years we’ve known each other, is there’s nothing he cares to talk about beyond maybe a few weeks earlier.

‘Be Here Now’ is pretty much a running punch line for us. Not that Tom is a child of the 60’s exactly. He lacks that burned out hippie ethos a few of us others down here have, cynical refugees from the culture wars of those days. Could be he was drafted and missed the cauldron of campus radicalism back then, marched off to war, witnessed horrors others were fortunate never to see, came back and left all that back in the jungle. When he exiled himself to the South End, he bought an old dilapidated cabin and a couple of acres of nettle fields down the road from me, worked part-time as a janitor in the elementary school in Stanwoodopolis, drank occasionally in the Hotel after work and that’s where we first met. I would see him at the bar, his ponytail poked out from under a battered Yankees ballcap, while I would be at a corner table, notebook and pen in hand with a pint at the ready for literary inspiration so that eventually he parked himself next to me and asked what in hell I was always scribbling at.

“You writing the great American Novel or what?”

I said, “Or what. Nothing much, just taking notes on the current state of affairs here in town. Mostly an excuse to drink.” If I was worried he might want to read what I was scribbling, I was happily mistaken. Instead we ended up talking about the current state of affairs. Not only in town, but the island, the state, the nation. Alcohol, the great uninhibiter.

We’ve known each other as friends and neighbors for 30 years come next year. That’s a long time to know someone and not know anything about their previous life. But I know Tom as well as anyone else does. And even I think it’s probably best to leave some mysteries.

It wasn’t more than a month ago we were quaffing a few at the Pilot House, me, Two Toke and a few others trying to find an excuse to stay another round without jeopardizing marriages. T.T. was mid-sip when he suddenly put his glass down and went, how does the expression go?, white as a sheet. A new arrival was at the bar talking to Jerry, the bartender, and they were both looking at our table. Or more precisely, looking at Tom before the newcomer nodded and started our way.

I hate to talk in cliches but when she said, “Hi, Dad,” you could have knocked me over with a sneeze. Tom half rose out of his chair and said, “Hey, Donna. Kind of a surprise….”

I know I should have gotten up, gotten scarce, left them to … whatever reunion was on tap, but I guess I was in shock. Tom certainly was. “Been a long time,” he mumbled before finally offering her a seat. “Donna, this is Skeeter, an old friend. Skeeter … well, this is my daughter, Donna.”

Neither of us managed much more than a muttered hi. Donna sat down. Tom sat back down himself. I stayed right where I was, stupid as a frog in water coming to a slow boil until T.T. asked her how she’d been and she answered “What the fuck do you care?”

“Hey listen,” I practically yelled, scrambling up, kicking back my chair, “I’m gonna leave you two to yourselves.” No nice to meet ya, no have a nice night, no adios, just left my half finished pint on the table, paid my tab with Jerry and hit the road.

A few days later I ran into Tom, guess where, the usual watering hole. “You doing all right?” I asked sheepishly when we’d hauled our glasses to a corner table. T.T. said sure, sorry for the …. He didn’t know quite how to characterize that father/daughter reunion. And, of course, I said, no problem.

“The past,” he said, shaking his head, “it has a way of sneaking up on you.”

If you think I got any more from him than that piece of profundity, well, you don’t know Tom.

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.