The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest.mp3[/podcast]

My little brother was just down touring the redwood groves near Eureka.  Like almost any six foot human he was mightily awed by a living thing 300 feet high, wide as a 747 fuselage and older than almost anything living on the planet.  These are magnificent beings and amazingly, we didn’t cut every damn one down for Malibu decks and the furniture to adorn them.

I guess the photos of these arboreal giants he sent via his smartphone camera made me dig out an old burl a sculptor friend had given me, a remnant from her countertop she’d slabbed onto an ugly one and pretty much turned her kitchen into a work of art with one fell swoop.  That’s kind of what artists do, take something the rest of us never notice, then make the ordinary into the extraordinary.  And more — they make us take a second look at the ordinary, the banal, the day to day until we see it differently too.  This is what we call inspirational, meaning, it inspires us to reimagine the world around us.

So I dragged out this big slab of redwood burl, almost 40 pounds, a tiny sliver of some behemoth California old growth three plus inches thick, and I thought, I wonder what it would sound like?  I had to cut an edge off with a chainsaw, then I smoothed two sides flat and then I carved out a banjo neck, sanded it, oiled it and thought, holy cow, what a beautiful dark red wood, all kinds of figuring, birdseyes, tiger striping, gnarls, knots and grain.  So I continued on, cut out the foot round pot from one piece, sanded and oiled it, then stood back in awe the way my brother did from the living tree.

I’m a week into this now, making parts, working the wood, watching it come back to life.  In a few days I’ll assemble the parts, all re-imagined, and then I’ll string it up.  There will be, I have no doubt, a sublime moment, one only heard by me, when a tree that fell in the forest after growing a thousand years, makes the sound it’s held until now.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/audio-commuting-on-the-south-end.mp3[/podcast]audio — commuting on the south end

I’ve known some folks on the South End who didn’t own a car, incredible as that seems. And this was back before the Island Transit free buses plied the highways. They’d hitchhike or walk, they’d ask for rides at Elger Bay Store. Some rode bicycles. They weren’t making some ecological, enviro ‘green’ statement — they were just poor. And without transportation, they kept getting poorer since there weren’t many local jobs.

A lot of us South Enders commute. Seriously commute. After my one night at the Twin City Food assembly lines and a mangled arm, I quit and found myself in a familiar predicament: unemployed with no prospects for work. Just about when I hit rock bottom and figured I’d need to move to Seattle just to keep my homestead, I got a graveyard job at Everett General Hospital as an orderly two nights every weekend. 40 miles one way. I thought it was a trip to Oregon every week, an adventure in my old ’60 Chevy Apache pickup that needed constant mechanical attention, often on the side of the road.

Maybe it’s an indication of just how paradisical the South End is that we’ll drive to Hell and Back just to live here. The missuz drove 75 miles to the University of Washington Library in Seattle for her job. I knew folks who drove to Tacoma, over 100 miles away, to find work that paid enough to keep their piece of Shangri-La-La. Course, they probably never saw it in the light of day —- mostly just imaginary real estate, sort of exactly like Heaven. Maybe without the streets of gold.

My own commuting days are about over. Walk down the hill to the workshop, fire up the woodstove on cold days, go back up for the third cup of coffee and wait for the place to warm up. Sure I miss those drives through the farmlands, the tulip fields, over the rivers and past all those Puget Sound views and the volcanoes and the mountain ranges. But my truck’s gonna last a decade or two longer and if I get real nostalgic about the good old days of commuting, I just take a road trip, you know, without the 8 hour shifts at the end.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/audio-The-South-End-Discovers-the-Old-World.mp3[/podcast]audio — The South End Discovers the Old World

Don’t ask me why, but the Avant-Gardeners got it in their heads to build a boat. Not a dinghy, not a rowboat, not a cute little sailboat. Naw, they decided to build a 50 foot ferro-cement ship down at the beach. Ralph, their chief engineer, studied from books he gleaned at the big Stanwoodopolis Biblioteca in town after the head librarian twice made him prove residency when she didn’t care for his unkempt look, then during the first winter when the garden work was pretty much on hold, they commenced to constructing their Ark. Which was what they called this hulk of a boat that slowly began to blight the beach. A late winter storm set the plywood and wood strongback framework out to sea prematurely … but the Gardeners, accustomed to setbacks, rebuilt the skeleton a little higher from the beach.

Years passed, children were born, members left and new ones arrived. But there came a day when us South Enders looked off toward Whidbey to see the S.S. Avant-Gardboat circling the Straits like an inebriated whale, a sight repeated for a week until the lumbering Ark sobered sufficiently, headed south and disappeared around Whidbey’s own South End, its diesel chugging mightily to move the leviathan through the tides and waves of the shipping straits of San Juan de Fuca, an obvious menace to merchant ships and Navy warmachines.

Somewhere west of Pt. Townsend the steering failed and the brave crew managed to limp into Pt. Angeles Marina where they berthed at the visitor dock and promptly abandoned ship, leaving the boat moored. The dockmaster, two days later, realized his ‘guest’ had no registration and its owners were unavailable for contact. He was mightily pissed.

Our itinerant Ahabs, of course, had returned to work their land, tending their gardens and their livestock. Ralph set to work studying the steering fix. And so, following the harvest season, the Gardeners returned to the Peninsula to fetch their vessel, where, of course, they found it impounded and upon indignant inquiry they were promptly arrested.

All due to misunderstanding, you understand. Nothing a hefty fine and some salty cursing couldn’t cure. Nothing unusual, really, when South Enders leave the rarefied bubble of their small ecosystem and encounter the cultural values they left so long ago, long enough, apparently, to have completely forgotten. In a word, they had gone native. And in the Old World, they were now strangers. Like the rest of us.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/prevention-worse-than-the-disease-with-new-banjo-on-intro-and-ending.mp3[/podcast]prevention worse than the disease with new banjo on intro and ending

I decided, in the dreary months of the monsoons, to while away the sunless days by learning a new trade. If you read what passes as medical news, you’ll no doubt know that exercising the brain is supposed to thwart dementia, Alzheimers and probably premature hair loss, something to do with synaptic heat generation upstairs. Course, like with physical exertion, it’s best to go slow, work into it, don’t strain, know your limits — all that cautionary advice — before you tackle, oh, quantum mechanics or the future subjective clauses of Swahili.

So I detoured away from Kantian philosophy or a complete study of Middle Easter history from the ancient Assyrians to Modern Isreal. I’d keep it simple, South End, just baby steps toward a rich and complex intellectual pursuit of, well, who cares? Crossword puzzles, they say, work as well as anything. Why not learn words that no one ever uses? Me, I decided to build a banjo. I can guess what you’re thinking. I can guess because the missuz thought the same thing.

A banjo is a simple device, got a drum attached to a skinny neck with strings you whack and the thing makes a rhythmic caterwaul that you either tap a foot to or you want to stomp on with that foot. You could attach a cigar box or a cookie tin to a 2×4 and tie some wire and when you got done, it would sound pretty much like a banjo. Hell, it would BE a banjo. And sure, I could’ve done that, I could’ve taken the Easy Road, but … the point is to avoid Dementia, not embrace it. So I set out to build not just a banjo, but a work of art. And hopefully … one I could play.

I thought I’d apply my limited luthier skills to this, then probably move on to maybe cellos, make the missuz a grand piano, then when my intellectual stamina was up to it, move on to a new theory of music based on atonalities, discordant triads and a rap musician-on-meth’s rhyming Simon phraseology. Roll over Alzheimer, give Beethoven the news…

I write this after a month of whittling necks, carving pegheads, cutting saddles and nuts and armrests and dowel sticks, all those ephemera you’ll never use outside the NY Times Crossword Puzzle. But I had to design them, laminate and saw them, fit them, adjust them …. more than once, more sometimes than twice. For a novice, this is like flying to the space station — but you need to build the vehicle. And somewhere, oh, maybe when you ignite the propane canister boosters you think will propel you through the first layer of the atmosphere, you realize, far too belatedly, it’s not Alzheimers you should fear, not dementia, not even South End Senility.

No, it’s insanity. And if you could only forget … if the memory of this was forever lost … you might feel blessed. But you’ve closed that avenue now. You’ve got the synaptic strength of a hormonal teenager. And so, sadly, I plow on. I’m building the next banjo. Certain, I want you to know, that I’ll learn from all my mistakes.