The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I first arrived here in the primordial South End, I had a small garden and a smaller yard. The yard I mowed with one of those old push mowers with the spiral blades that worked fine on level land with no rocks. Rocks jammed that set of blades and I mean right now. So eventually we did like all sodbusters and homesteaders, we cleared land and moved stumps and expanded our gardens and lawn. A postage stamp parcel of grass grew into acreage and I put away that little push mower and bought a used gas powered one. Progress? Maybe, maybe not.

My neighbors all got big John Deere riders for their puny weed’nfeed lots. That, or they just call in the landscaping outfits and the Hispanics roll in for an hour and manicure the lawn, edge the walks, trim the hedge. Me, I’m still pushing a mower. Good exercise, if nothing else, plus I get to survey the hidden corners of all those gardens, watch all the bulbs come up, the flowers bloom, the shrubs grow and the trees turn color. It’s my job and I try my damndest to find something positive about it. Although I will admit I cheer the day when the summer drought browns the lawn and mowing ends until the monsoons start.

What I don’t like is working on those mowers. I’m what you call a shade tree mechanic. And that’s putting a positive spin on it. Shade shrub mechanic more like it. Take today. The spare mower has been giving me trouble since it got left in the shed of the house we bought next door. Last year I could make it start, barely, but it wouldn’t run long. This year I decided to let it know who’s boss. So I disassembled the air filter, took off the cowling to the carburetor and unscrewed the bowl that hides the float valve. I had no idea what I was looking for, but you never know, something might be loose or a hose is disconnected or there’s a snake dead in the electrical. Okay, I’m hoping for a miracle. It is, after all, Easter. My lawnmower might roll back the stone and rise from the dead. Why not?

When I loosened the bolt raw gas came out the bottom so naturally I began to hurry. I’m not all that handy going slow, but speeding it up, I dropped the bolt and the bolt fell into the engine area. I could just see it hiding through the gasoline waterfall so I grabbed a screwdriver and managed to wedge it tightly in its hidey hole. Gas spewed everywhere, obscenities flew and I beat that mower like an obstinate mule with my socket wrench. Then I beat it with a large crescent wrench and stabbed it with my screwdriver. All I needed was to spark the fumes and send the whole she-bang to hell and gone. Probably me too. I didn’t much care.

Why God, Why me?? I won’t go into detail, but an hour later I had the bolt back in my hand, back on the bowl, back on the mower. What a colossal waste of my precious time!! I could’ve been watching daytime TV or checking my e-mail for spam. Not that bathing in spilled gas isn’t my idea of a spring day.

I reassembled the little mower, dragged it off the potting table and let it hit the ground from four feet up, I mean, who cares? I have burned recalcitrant chainsaws and destroyed VCR’s and tossed CD players out second story windows. They may think they have won, but they are wrong. There will be no winners. And one will die. Mark one up for humankind.

But … when it comes to machinery, I am superstitious. Science seems preposterous to me in regard to my mechanical ability. I trust in luck. And in a certain sadism toward my metal compadres. So I poured gas in the tank, not because I was confident, but because you have to pull the starting cord one last time . You have to give the obstinate brute one last chance. It’s a code, even if unwritten. You must let the universe work things out and no, it doesn’t make sense and of course it does not a religion make. And because this is what must be done I pulled the starting cord and you can believe it or not, but that mower jumped right to life and kept on running.

Do I think I fixed it? Do I think next time I go to start it, it will? No, my friends, I might be superstitious, but I’m not a gullible idiot. I know my enemy and now it knows me. Today is Easter and my mower has Risen. Let’s leave it at that.

The political season is in its final innings here on the South End. Down at the Diner the debates continue unabated, but practically everywhere else, we’re wore down, depleted, dejected and pretty much exhausted with the whole damn thing. Even the Pilot House, once Hotbed Central for lively late night alcohol fueled discussions, even the Pilot House has turned its short span of attention to the college basketball tournaments and the pre-season baseball scores.

The tulips are coming in early up north in the fields of La Conner. I was thinking maybe going there instead of the caucus this Saturday. Last time I went to a caucus it was Carter running against Reagan. All the local politicos were in attendance. And me and the mizzus. We never really understood the process and we never went back. I like voting in private, to tell you the truth, not in small groups of people I don’t really know. The tulips, I get tulips. They come in early some years and some years late and rarely, but it happens, they bloom on time. This year they’re way early and the Festival, that two week traffic jam miles and miles long, well, it’s going to be pretty much after the harvest.

I spoze the folks stuck in the colorful backup out in the flats can while away the hours arguing whether global warming is to blame or if the low price of gas is a blessing or not. The big tour buses can haul up the city folks for a slow creep through the countryside and hope for a few fields of blazing candy color seen vaguely through the rain. Us locals pretty much avoid the whole show now. You’ve seen one tulip field, you’ve kind of got the idea.

I wish I could say the same about elections. I’ve seen a few, but … this one is very very strange. Maybe even troubling. Says a little too much about my neighbors, for sure, but hey, that’s the price of democracy. Nobody says you have to be sane to vote.

I got a friend who was kicked out of Catholic Seminary many years back for admitting he was gay. I guess if he had been a pedophile too, he could’ve been a priest. Even a gay pederast known to his parishioners would’ve been okay, although the bishop or cardinal or the Pope might want to move him along to other parishes that didn’t know his history. Like they say, it takes a lot of faith to be religious.

My buddy lost his faith. He couldn’t quite square up a church that professed love for his fellow man in the abstract but not in the particular. All I can say — as an outsider and even an infidel — they lost a good man, a thoughtful man and a man with a very big heart.

Religion is a topic best left alone, I’ve learned the hard way. For awhile the South End Diner had the Bible study group descend on two of their too few tables. They only ordered coffee, no breakfast, and drank refill after refill without leaving much of a tip or a thank you either. Anita, the owner back then, watched her business going downhill, mostly when her other regulars got sick of the debates over Leviticus. She finally asked them to go somewhere else, they were curdling the eggs.

“And besides,” she told them, “morality shouldn’t be as hardboiled as you gentlemen make it.”

Live and let live, but nevertheless she wanted them to live somewhere else half the damn mornings of the week. Jezebel, they called her. But not to her face, of course. Anita was much loved down here and known by all as tough but fair. “Take it back to the church,” she told them, “and if I want to join, I will.”

We actually got a little church on the South End, the Little White Chapel in the Ravine, a non-denominational congregation that ministers to quite a few of us sinners. Comfort and fellowship come in many forms and myriad faiths. Debating which one is the correct one, well, I leave that to the righteous. Me, I just try to do as little harm as I can and stay out of their way. Figuring out the universe, trust me, that’s not in my pay grade.

When I built our palace over two decades ago, I installed a brass bathroom faucet for the marble sink surround we’d hauled by homemade sailboat across the treacherous straits of Saratoga from Whidbey Island. The spout of that faucet was a little shy of reaching completely over the sink so I was forced to do my first renovation. The faucet I replaced the first one with finally gave out, don’t get me started, but with a sigh I tore out the entire marble sink so that I could access the water inlets and the drain stuff, all that plumbing we hide in the cabinet and put out of mind until the leak starts.

I decided to win some gold stars from the mizzus with the next evolution of fixtures, so I bought a pricey little Kohler number. Kohler is a Wisconsin company and since we lived in their fair state long ago, we have even toured their factory and admired their half acre wall of toilets mounted horizontally like some art installation gone monumentally absurd with bathroom humor. It took me a day to disassemble and reassemble the sink, but it looked worth the effort once I stood back to admire my plumbing skills. At least until I turned on the water. A trickle like an 80 year old with advanced prostate problems dribbled out the spout. I turned both faucets full volume, but the flow stayed miserably small.

If you’re a modern handyman like myself, you go straight to Google and start asking questions where, hopefully, you will find real plumbers, not fellow idiots, responding with cogent and useful answers. I discovered, thanks to BillyBob Hosebib, professional roto-rooter from Boston, that my aerator was to blame for the low flow. He even told me the gizmo was difficult to remove and had a few helpful suggestions. God love Google!! Two hours later I had mangled my plastic aerator which refused to unscrew the way Billy B had told me it would. Undaunted, I managed to get a needlenose on the little blighter and got it far enough out to be able to snip it from its tube which was all one unit. Needless to say, I crushed the tube. A few hours later I opened the thing up, but …. apparently I had pulled the tube from some important connection and now no water whatsoever came out.
In disgust I threw the faucet out the back door in a small but cathartic rage, then drove 40 miles back to the big hardware store up north and purchased another faucet, but definitely not a Kohler with its cheesey plastic tube guts. No, I bought a nice little brushed nickel number. A day later and a couple of marble sink surround removals and installations later, I had that baby in and operational. I liked it, the mizzus liked it, guests liked it and so, we had another successful home plumbing project completed.

Until the power went out and the well sat idle. When the power returned, so did the grit and sand and loosened rust from the water lines. The new faucet now had very little flow too. I grabbed a shop vacuum and blew out the lines from the spout, reconnected the supply lines and now had worse water flow. I tried sucking from the other side, then blowing from the spout, etc. etc. When I finished, hardly any water came out. What in the name of Price Pfister !!??

So again I went to Google. Where I learned ALL new faucets now are mandated by FEDERAL LAW to have Low Flow. Which is fine if you are a city dweller on municipal water. But it’s a killer if you are on a well that pulls sediment and kicks grit when the power is off and comes back on. The Google experts recommended buying new valve cartridges if blockage occurs. Probably only 20 or 30 bucks apiece each power outage. Pretty easy to put in, they said. Not too expensive, they said. Easy for them, charging $100 an hour for their labor.

I could bore you some more. Hell, I could bore you for days telling you how I went and found an older faucet, pre-EPA, actually illegal now so that most recycle stores won’t sell you one unless you tell them you have a utility sink, something to do with lead content in the solder pre-2009. My first vintage faucet — and it’s too long and sad a story — was destroyed in the refurbishing. When I went looking for its replacement, I found virtually none so when I laid hands on two up north about 75 miles from home, I bought both. Call it insurance. Or just pessimism.

An hour ago I managed to put one of those in the sink, dropped the marble surround with it installed back down into his frame and turned on the taps. Not only didn’t it leak, but water roared out its spout, just another success story in my quest to be my own repairman. Sure it cost me two new faucets, three used ones and maybe 6 or 7 days of labor. Course I paid a psychological price too high to calculate. Probably it nearly cost me a marriage. But now I too can post advice on Google for fellow idiots to read and follow in my drippy footsteps. Home Repair: Not necessarily easy, but oh so very satisfying.