The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Most folks think art is a relatively safe pastime, sit at an easel with an iced tea on a side table and capture that sunset over Saratoga Passage in gentle watercolors. Unless the bluff gives way or the easel collapses or the paint brush has a dangerously sharp end, nobody’s going to get hurt. Art — just a quiet stroll in the park. Yah shure, you betcha.

Larry Bach and I just got back from the wilds of Alaska. Larry’s the minister up at Merrill Gardens most Sundays who’s been with me before on high wire installations. Sky Pilot Larry – one hand on the lift truck and the other on the Bible he always carries. We installed the Christian Motorcycle Headquarters and Chapel down in Arkansas two years ago and now we were headed north to Anchorage some 2500 miles away in his big diesel Ford towing his covered trailer with too many of my eggs in one basket up the dreaded Al/Can. Larry’s unbridled optimism is a perfect antidote to my fretful cynicism.

We got the Chugiak Fire Station Headquarters installed no problem, confirming Larry’s predictions of smooth sailing, but at the Univ. of Alaska’s Science Building, my worries were confirmed when the quarter million dollar lift truck, the only machine in all of the 49th state capable of reaching over a protruding canopy to go up 50 feet and extend 70 feet arrived, but without a specially trained operator we were promised.

No problem, the Facilities Director said, we’ll show you the dashboard and the joystick, then it’s all yours. Five minutes later, Sky Pilot Larry and I were soloing into the dizzying atmosphere high above Terra Firma, building new mullion systems for a 35 foot by 15 foot stained glass mural. For 5 days we swooped and dove and flew without harnesses or hardhats, experience or common sense, just two artistic acrobats high up in the Big Top without safety nets below.

You think art is a walk in the park, let Larry take you for a ride. He just built a secular cathedral guaranteed to take more than your breath away and he did it mostly on faith. Art — not for the timid, let me tell you.

You can tell you’ve left Kansas, Dorothy, when the road signs mark caribou crossings, moose crash zones or Watch for Bison markers.  We’ve seen bear and moose and buffalo and mountain goats up here in the Yukon and Alaska interiors.  Mountains taller than Mt. Rainier aren’t even given mention on the roadside markers — instead we get prose on the heroic efforts of road builders with no identification of Mt. Logan dominating the background just shy of 20,000 feet and only 700 feet short of being the tallest mountain in North America.  I guess there’s so many, another Big One just doesn’t pique their interest, probably the way Minnesotans yawn over that 9767^th lake.

One in 60 Alaskans owns a bush plane.  Not surprising when you see the mountain ranges on every side and glaciers carving huge valleys toward vast river basins.  There are three — count em — highways basically that traverse the state.  To reach the capital, Juneau, you have to come in by boat or by plane.  Now add a little snow, arctic fronts, temperatures far below zero, 40 or 50 degrees below, plunge the state into seasonal darkness, what I might call eternal night, and you have a world almost lunar if we ever build the Sea of Tranquillity Highway.  Think frontier.  Vast spaces of wilderness so remote no one goes there, not even the Inuits, not even the bush pilots, not even the gas and oil conglomerates.  Superimpose Alaska on a map of the continental United States and it covers all of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and half of North and South Dakota plus Oklahoma.  It would stretch from South Carolina at the Panhandle to the Pacific at the end of the Aleutians.  The bugger is big!!

Me and Larry are going to drive all the highways before we leave.  Thousands of miles from the southern Kenai Peninsula to the Arctic Ocean up at Prudeau Bay.  Like the South End, history’s pretty much gone to rot and ruin.  Nature’s a little too harsh to afford saving old cabins and frontier stores for future tourists.  Alaska’s a wilderness.  Maybe in a hundred years the historic motels and gift shops on the Al/Can, preserved and restored, will serve as vicarious treks for stalwart sightseers on their virtual internet travelogues.  If nothing else, they’ll burn a lot less fuel than we’re burning.

Well, here we go again!  The good news/bad news dichotomy.  The good news is we made it back in one piece from the wilds of Alaska.  The bad news is it’s blog time again.  I assume you’ve learned the Aeolian harp and are now fluent in 2 or 3 languages.  Probably got the Chinese poetry translations down pat too.  Maybe even — no, probably — you got more erudite interests than reading South End Scripture or Skeeter soliloquys.  That’s what withdrawal is all about.  Learning that when the monkey is off your back, life is fine.  You didn’t need that fix after all.

Take me, for instance.  I hauled up to Alaska with my buddy and chauffeur, Sky Pilot Larry, through B.C., the Yukon, the interior of the North Star state and, just to synchronize with all of you in sympathetic Cold Turkey, I decided to deprive myself of one of my fav-o-rite indulgences.  Drinking.  I didn’t even drink Lite Beer.  Sure, the spiders and bugs came off the walls of my tent.  Course I had the shakes and tremors.  All that delirium stuff….!

And that was only the first hour before we hit the border at the Blaine truck crossing for customs inspection of the glass crates at the impound yard.  I think they sensed my anguish and took pity so they never did anything but lock Larry’s trailer and send us north where I could howl to my heart’s content with the grizzlies and the coyotes, the moose and the mosquitoes.  The buffalo may have been hairy figments but … they blocked the road in the Yukon.  And the muskox up by Prudeau Bay, hell if I know if they were real or not, but they sure seemed like it coming up off the Sag River delta.

Long days indeed up there in the Midnight Sun!  Try it dead ass sober and see how long they are.

“Moderation,” I heard espoused recently, ” is for cowards.”  Well, perhaps.  But abstinence, I submit, is for the birds.  The real trick of living is to maintain your balance.  It’s different for each of us.  Maybe a small dose of Skeeter here and there, you can manage it without undue personal harm.  Sure, there’s going to be a reader or two who take it too seriously, too far, who lose their way, who actually believe half this stuff.  Junkie mentality.  Comic addicts.  I don’t know.  Sure, we should help them if we can, same as the gamblers, the alcoholics, the crack users, the dope fiends.  But the rest of us?  Just proceed with caution.  Most of us will be okay.  In the end all I can say is: Read Responsibly.

I got some good news and I got some bad news. The bad news is I gotta go back to work. I’m taking a trailer full of glass up the notoriously pot-holed Al/Can Highway to install two murals in Anchorage, one at a fire station, the other at the U of A’s Science Building. I will be pretty much incommunicado except for some limited conversations with moose and long haul truckers. Meaning, this blogsite’s going to sit stagnant as a muskeg mosquito hole until I get back.

The good news is you get to take some time to pursue more spiritual goals than reading on the internet some yahoo’s scribblings on the cave walls of his inner psyche. Chances are when I get back stateside, you’ll have taken up the Aeolian harp or tackled War and Peace in the original Russian or are translating 5th century Chinese poetry into Spanish. You’ll find you have the time to practice calligraphy or hot yoga or yodeling. Maybe volunteer down at the South End Historical Society or take lessons in Tai-Chi. Or worst case, you’ll do like the rest of us ne-er-do-wells down here and synchronize to the tides and the moon, the long days of summer.

I envy you, I really do. I’m the Maynard G, Krebs of this island. Work is a 4 letter word hurled in shock and disbelief. Some folks subscribe to the notion of work as what gives meaning to life. Trust me, I’m not one of them. Still, a ‘living’ has to be made, they tell me, as if ‘living’ is equivalent to a paycheck. We know better down here, but … a paycheck is still important. Just not as important as ‘living’.

Be glad you won’t receive epistles from the tundra where I whine and cry, bitch and moan, throw myself on the permafrost with a whimper and a strangled curse. I’ll spare you that, at least. Meanwhile, good luck on the harp. Keep tabs on the tide. Grow your gardens and listen to good music. Think of me up there in Mosquitoville but don’t pity me too much. Chances are pretty good I’ll have a helluva good time too.