The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Ginny, our mail lady a few years back, had the longest postal route on the island, serving half the South End and all the residents near the Head. She drove a car with right side steering. She always said when she retired she wanted to go to England and rent a car where she’d feel right at home behind a passenger-sided steering wheel. With luggage in the back, not a ton of junk mail and magazines. I never heard if she did or not.

Like all our U.S. Postal carriers, Ginny would drive packages up to the shack if they didn’t fit our mailbox, the one with 10 pounds of goofy add-ons, red star on the ‘flag’, big glass nose on the door like a Christmas present for the insane. That, or a mailbox adulterated by an artist on drugs. Or worse. When parts of this evolving sculpture fell off, Ginny would pick them up and put them in the box with our bills and unsolicited credit card applications, just another small aggravation on a route filled with those. Boxes too high or too low, too far back, too grown over with blackberries or nettles, on wobbly posts with doors that no longer closed. At any given time ours would fit the description.

I hear folks who say the Post Office is a lousy organization, a letter costs too much to send and probably gets lost anyway, that UPS or Fed Ex would do a better job faster and cheaper. I think these people would find fault with Heaven itself and ask for a refund from St. Peter at the gate. I can send a letter across the country for half what it costs for a bottle of pop and it gets there in 2 days, 3 at most. Now, of course, most of us can e-mail it Instantaneously. Still can’t e-mail a package yet. Or a magazine. And anachronistic yahoos like me still send letters. Handwritten even. Even if we never get a letter back.

All my life I’ve appreciated going out to the mailbox, sort of a daily mini-Christmas, a surprise in every Cracker Jack box and yeah, mostly junk, I know. I like that it’s efficient, that it’s been around since Ben Franklin, that it delivered letters sent to soldiers in Europe or cowboys in Amarillo or me at the end of America. To all the Ginny’s driving wrong sided down America’s backroads, through wind and hail, sleet and snow, curmudgeons and naysayers, thanks!!

And Ginny, if you’re touring England, mind the hedges.

We got the last officially sanctioned woodburning sole-heat residence on the island. Back when the county still let us pioneers build our own shacks, we put in a Russian fireplace, 16 tons of brick with two flues and multiple horizontal paths that capture 90% of the heat from the wood we burn once a day. Very efficient burning, but not efficient enough when the burn bans roll in … unless you have a house whose only heat source is wood. Then you can burn wood.

The county stopped issuing owner-builder permits back in the 20th century, probably to protect us hobby carpenters from hurting ourselves with kickbacking hammers. They claimed it was to keep the building codes up to snuff, but I can tell you, they made us shack-whackers meet every one anyway. And then they made us sign affadavits in the event we ever sold our palace that we would disclose to the poor unsuspecting buyer that the house they were thinking of buying was built, not by a professional, but by us, slam-happy amateurs who didn’t care if our handiwork fell on us the first winter storm when the walls collapsed or the roof caved in. Not that my buyers would be very much fooled by the homemade doors or the stained glass transoms or the odd tile designs or the handmade furniture or the beach timbers holding up the beams or the cabinets and bookshelves made with exotic woods or the custom toilet seats that fit one particular butt particularly well.

Nah, I suspect they wanted the permit fees. I know, it sounds cynical on my part. Just a few extra hundred dollars to eliminate a right everyone who ever came to America or the South End has had since we first arrived on the continent. Even King George let the Pilgrims build their igloos without inspections or permit fees and George certainly wasn’t noted for his generosity. Admittedly, the island residents didn’t run out to dump tea in the Saratoga Harbor when the county banned owner-builder permits, but that isn’t really the point, you ask me. I know folks these days would rather just get a fat mortgage, hire a contractor, get the permits and pay the fees, then move in to their drywalled, energy-efficient, tsunami-proofed abode and watch the big screen high def TV in the throne room. Okay for them. But there might just be one more yahoo like myself who thinks it would be a Total Hoot to pick up a hammer and a saw and commence to erecting a house he would take pride in for the rest of his days, who doesn’t give a damn what the next buyer might think and if he doesn’t like it, tear it down and hire another built. We used to be people who prided themselves on their Can-Do attitude, who innovated and created and built from the ground up their ideas and their dreams. That was the America we all grew up in. I’m not sure that’s the America we live in now.

But … down on the South End, like other backwashes across the country, there are still a few of us. Maybe someday our shacks will be the museums of the future. Naw, they’ll get torn down. You know, if they don’t just fall down on their own.

I was following a Cadillac SUV with a bumper sticker that read: YOU’RE THE REASON YOU’RE SUFFERING. This is bad news indeed for most of us down here on the South End, but at least now we know who to blame for our misfortunes. Although … I don’t think I care for the Winners in the Game of Life telling us Losers we deserve what we got. Some of us sure do. And I’m one. But I don’t ask for favors … or sympathy … or welfare either. I’m not going to make it to the 1% and I’m not gonna work myself to death trying.

But there are folks like Janet down the road, two kids in preschool and daycare, a husband John back from the Oil Wars with one leg and a head bounced too many times in IED explosions who’s pretty much a permanent casualty. She’s trying to hold a job and hold things together too. She’s 24 going on 60 and I seriously doubt she thinks her suffering is on account of her.

Joe the Plumber — and no, not that Joe the Plumber — has meliosomethingorother, the cancer from breathing asbestos when he unknowingly worked with the stuff in his youth. I doubt he’s going to take kindly to a Cadillac bumper sticker that thinks his Attitude must be to blame for his disease.

The rich think the rest of us are lazy, I guess. The 1% think the losers are takers. The corporate boyz think they made it on their own, no help from the education system, no assistance from the government that built the infrastructure, no subsidies or tax credits or loopholes in the law. They got theirs and if it happens to suck up most of yours, well, tough. You coulda done it too. Course, you might have been born black or Hispanic, you might be autistic or handicapped, you might be a single mom or a laid-off worker, you might get sick, you might be discriminated against, you might have been born on the South End.

We all want to believe we’re the captains of our destiny. But the waters we sail are more treacherous for some. It doesn’t take much compassion to pick up survivors in the water from the lifeboat off your yacht. Course, when the time comes we take the yacht away from you, I hope you’ll understand, it’s going to be your fault.

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddled at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By the end of summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

We were down at the Columbia Gorge trailhead last year, emptying bladders and filling water bottles. A woman emerged from the restroom and whispered to her companion in a conspiratorial voice, “There’s no flush.” Her friend shook her head in incomprehension. “Not working?” she asked. “No, there’s nothing but a hole.” “A hole?” her friend asked incredulously. “Just a hole in the ground and no flush.”

I felt like a Cro Magnon listening in on aliens from some advanced galaxy. How could they possibly understand my dependence on a polluting gas engine? Or something as totally primitive as a cellphone? These two debutantes had missed their exit, apparently, on the way to the Ritz. A pit toilet was incomprehensible and if it weren’t such a sordid subject matter, it would have made for the nucleus of many a future discussion over bridge and tea at the Country Club. “But where, Charlotte? where does it Go???”

Indeed. Not that our two ladies could answer that question in regard to the plumbing matrix from their Beverly Hills manse to the sewer system it connects to. What matters is that it be whisked away, out of sight, out of smell. We don’t know how things work anymore — but so long as they do, we don’t need to care. The world is less and less natural to us; it’s electrons and silicon, computerized and digitized, all packaged in Black Boxes that create the new universe.

The trouble is, Charlotte, we’re still of the natural world. Body functions, pheromones, appetites, all that genetic coding of mammalian evolution in a world that’s more and more alien to us. We’ll fix that eventually. We’ll adapt to the virtual world, the one we make not so much in our own image as a clever cyber image. The natural stuff will be obsolete soon and we’ll replace the old ‘parts’ with new and improved engineered ones. The robots aren’t going to take over us humans. Us humans are going to become cyborgs.

And Charlotte, the best part is you won’t need a flush. Or a toilet either.