The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been out here in the wilds of the Arkansas backcountry, tromping hills and woods, creekbeds and pastures, scaring up turkeys and deer, even the occasional armadillo and roadrunner. Vultures patrol everywhere, gleaning the dead. The woods are littered with washed carcasses, bleached skulls, scattered bones.

You might think this is a slice of Americana glimpsed through a lens from 1850. Hard men and tough women. And they are. Plenty of bad dentistry hereabouts. Lots of suspicious, distrustful looks. Life is lived closer to the dirt here and the dirt isn’t so much soil as it is chipped rock without much nutrient. Not many gardens to be seen. Not many orchards either. Homes here are small, patched and made to serve the purpose. Rusty sheet metal siding, rotted clapboard, plywood never painted. Some are nice enough, but you won’t find a large home or one on the Architectural Digest reject list. There’s no money here. Towns have 350, 402, 569 people, man, woman and child. The grocery store calls itself a ‘trading post’, more aptly, I guess. Churches outnumber bars a thousand to one. Actually, a thousand to none. You want a drink here, you drive to Oklahoma for 3.2 beer. That, or you make it yourself. I’m not here long enough to get Set-Up.

Religion and poverty usually go hand in hand. You got to believe in something and these folks aren’t playing Lotto. A sign on the highway read: I’M NOT RICH ENOUGH TO BE A REPUBLICAN. I doubt it meant he was a Democrat either.

Today I walked past a half dozen deer stands, structures up on stilts or in trees, near a field or a pond ten to twenty feet up, a small room with a view to kill. Salt blocks have been laid out all year so the deer come there. Opening day of season, free salt will carry a high price. These boys aren’t hunting for sport, I assume. I sure hope not. There’s nothing sporting about it. One I climbed had an office chair, swiveled and padded. I don’t have to wait a couple weeks to know they’ll have a scope on their rifle. Jesus provides.

Some of us forget that America isn’t mostly a suburb, that folks are living hand to mouth, that poverty exists and the living is hard. Some of us scream bloody murder that the middle class is under assault, that union jobs are suspect, that government jobs should all be eliminated, that our 401-K’s have been raided and lost.

But … it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of us who don’t get pensions, who don’t get to ‘retire’, who don’t have health care, who don’t live in fine houses with huge mortgages, who don’t drive new cars, who don’t use credit cards or cellphones or own computers. They live in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in Detroit, in upper Michigan or Maine or the South End or backwash anywhere. They don’t ask for much, but they don’t give a good goddamn about folks who overspent or didn’t save or never appreciated the Good Life when they had it. They’re fellow citizens and life is a lot harder for them in this Land of Plenty. It’s worth remembering next time we’re whining is all I’m saying.

I got a wild hair this spring, no doubt from lack of legitimate work, and decided I’d build myself a banjo. I play one so I’m familiar with the basic form. Bunch of strings, thingamabobs to hold em to the end and more up at the top so you can tighten or loosen em. I mean, even a banjo, it helps to be in some kind of tune. It’s got a round pot made of wood and some have a round brass metal piece on top of that to give it a ‘ring’. Banjos have a skin head or a store bought plastic job pulled down over the pot and you need some kind of gizmos to hold it down tight and better yet, to be able to tighten it up like a drum. Then there’s a neck that has the fretboard and the peghead and this has to fit up against the pot and something has to hold it at the right angle so you aren’t playing strings about half a foot off the fretboard which makes playing a lot harder than it already is.

I don’t mean to make it sound complicated. I mean, early banjos were made out of gourds with some catgut for strings and a stick neck and you just wailed on that thing like beating a drum. Banjo! Not exactly as complex as a harpsichord or a saxophone. Seems doable. Seems like a person with the right attitude and a little nerve could just go at it and a few days later might come out the other end with all his digits intact and an instrument that would sound at least okay, if not totally tolerable to most listeners.

I think life is a little like that. Meaning, sometimes you have to wade out into the water. It isn’t as deep as you think and worse case, you can dogpaddle. Too many of us think we’re going to drown, just flounder out there when the bottom drops out and then flail until we’re worn out and finally just sink down into a watery grave. Why risk it? Why take a chance when there’s all this dry ground to stand on and just look at the beach and the water from a safe distance? Well, lots of us do just that. I mean, I don’t mountain climb and I don’t race Formula Ones. Some things do seem risky.

But … nothing ventured, nothing gained, my old man used to tell me. Course, he never figured I’d apply that to a career in art and he probably felt bad for steering me down a rutted road. I remember when I told him I was building my own house. The silence on the other end of the phone was all I needed to comprehend his horror. Poor Karen, he was thinking, or so he told me later when he and Mom came to visit and view this construction debacle firsthand and he fully expected some plywood lean-to drafty as a chicken shed and leaking the first rain. Instead he drove up the drive to find a two story house, sturdy and durable and handbuilt with slate floors, mosaic tiles, curly maple staircases, stained glass transoms and sidelights, custom made doors, brick fireplace, handcrafted furniture, birdseye maple cabinetry, hardwood floors, cedar paneling on the interior walls, cedar on the exterior. A nice house, perfectly comfortable. Took two years to build. Best years of my life.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. Sometimes a purpose and a little faith in yourself will carry the day. Most things in life aren’t rocket science. Although that seems to be changing. Too often we’re just afraid of failure. I guess I’m not. It seems like it’s one way to learn what you need to learn to be successful. And anyway, sometimes they’re not totally different. That’s what art taught me. You have to be your own judge, finally, even if other people will be too.

So … I’m making banjos. Some play well, some not. Some sound sweet, some not. Some are beautiful, some are a little like your kids, beautiful maybe only to you. Could I sell them? my friends ask, wondering I guess, who needs this many banjos. Well, that wasn’t my original intention. But then again, when I started making stained glass, it wasn’t going to be my career either. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to build houses for a living. I’m probably not going to be a banjo luthier. What I’m doing is what any kid does, just following my nose, trying stuff out, seeing what’s fun and what isn’t. In the meantime I get to live in my house. I get to play my banjos. And hopefully my life will be my art. It’s about all I can ask.

One of the reasons there’s only a handful of folks on the South End is you used to have to hand dig your wells. My well’s l05 feet deep, dug by some poor pioneer with a shovel, a bucket, a rope, a light and somebody up top he trusted more than I trust ANYBODY. You look down my well hole – it’s 3 feet in diameter and swerves a bit – and shine a light down to the bottom, you see a teeny, itsy bitsy reflection the size of a silver dollar. That’s what daylight looked like to my well digger.

Personally, I’d drink gutter water collected in a dirty wood barrel before you got ME down a damp hole that could cave in any second. There are wells on the South End hand dug over 200 feet deep.. Light in those looks like a star at the end of the galaxy only Hubble can see….

Water’s always been a problem on the South End. We’re surrounded by it and we’re rained on by it most of the time and it always seems to leak its way into our shacks, but finding enough to drink, that’s another matter. My neighbors have Water Associations. Big wells. Giant holding tanks. Huge headaches. Saltwater intrusions. Government regulations. Plenty of opportunities to have contentious meetings and increasing dues and nasty lawsuits.

They wanted me and the mizzus to join up a few years back. Give em 10,000 dollars and I could enjoy the privilege of being ruled and regulated and taxed. I thanked em, but said no thanks, our pitiful well would just have to do. After all, it’s been working okay for 80 years, we might make it last a few more. A month later they sold a different neighbor that water share for 3000 dollars. That definitely puts a chill on the neighborhood picnic… I suspect they’ve got some kind of prejudice against loud thirsty banjo players……

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but other than self-employment, there’s not much work down here on the South End. The neighbors think retirement is Hard Work, but other than paying well, it really doesn’t qualify. Even under our bohemian standards. Hell, everyone practically’s retired down these parts. We just don’t get a pension or Social Security yet.

The best way to make a so-called Living here is to find something the retirees need. Pet grooming. House sitting. Lawn care. Koi pond maintenance. Security system installation. Probably not preschool or daycare. Although …. Down the road we’ll need adult daycare. Half of us do now. We just won’t admit it and if we got cable TV, we can bluff our way a little longer.

Freddie the Handyman is a good example of ‘filling a niche for the rich’, his unspoken motto toward his clientele. He can repair a garage door or add a deck out over the bluff, he can replace a garbage disposal someone tried grinding a spoon in or change out the original sink. I worked a few years with Freddie, mostly the dumb end of a shovel or the crawling part of a crawlspace work. When Freddie needed a second pair of hands or just someone willing and desperate enough to tackle the gruntwork, I was his boy. We replaced rotted beams under old homes, we installed electric water heaters, we built additions and we tackled leaky roofs, although Freddie would take a look, shoot some caulk or smear some tar, but roofs, he said, were a money pit, probably lose on the callbacks. So we stayed near the ground mostly. Too near, in my case. I was always face in the dirt, burrowing my way through decades of spider webs beneath floor joists, doing god knows what Freddie had contracted for.

“When I retire …” was Fred’s favorite topic at lunch breaks. “This will all be yours …” was his second favorite as we munched sandwiches on the tailgate of his beat up Ford pickup. Ladders, extension cords, toolboxes, chopsaws and all the detritus of the current remodel awaited me like a City of God, if you believed Freddie.

Well, Fred retired and moved to California to be near his daughter. Said the cost of living was cheaper, which might be true. Sold his house in the Country Club and rented a space in a mobile home park for more than some mortgage payments. The living might’ve been cheaper, but probably not easier.

He would ask, when I’d call every month or two, if I’d carried on the business or was even considering it. “You were the brains, Fred,” I’d say, “and I was the grunt. Too many water heaters hooked up backwards, I guess.” “Learn on the job,” he’d advise. “Good money!”

Folks ask me all the time for the name of a good handyman. I tell em Freddie’s gone and there isn’t anyone I know. Although, since the recession, most of the house builders are available. Until the economy heats back up, there’s probably a glut. Just costs twice as much as Freddie…