The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a friend whose granddad came over from Norway to America in 1901.  Bought some land on Camano Island between the Stilly River and Utsalady Bay, built a 12 foot by 12 foot cabin that still stands and lived in it until he built his house, about 2 or 3 times bigger, and it still stands with an addition that made it a 750 square foot palace.  This, for all us newcomers, makes him a bona fide North End homesteader.

To get to his farm he had to be ferried across from Stanwoodopolis, then hike the 2 or 3 miles up Land’s Hill and across the hogback we all use now, although we got a road these days.  Shopping was a bit more strenuous than it is for us Late Arrivals.  You can bet he was like a lot of us South Enders are today  —  he only went in to town when he had to.

My buddy still lives there in the ‘modern’ house his father built.  He’s added lots of acreage over the years, kept the farm going, the chickens, the gardens, the cattle herd.  It would be easy to imagine him being pretty proud and possibly smug about carrying on the American tradition of hard work, a veritable Captain of His Own Destiny.  We all like to think our lives were the result of our sweat, our smarts and our individual Can-Do attitude.  But my friend would disagree.  He says none of this would have been possible without the bridge being built finally and the roads laid down, the electric lines strung, the whole infrastructure that supports us all.

We aren’t Laplanders, you know.  And we don’t exist in a wilderness.  Even if, as we pioneers down here like to believe, we’re far from the oversight of Rome over there on the ‘other’ island with its seat of power centered in Coupeville, about a 2 day drive far far from home through multiple counties and over various bridges.  It’s fine to take pride in our Emersonian self-reliance, to build a house or a business or a life.  Just give some credit to the many unseen hands that paved the way.  Believe me, nobody’s going to think any less of you.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-self-reliance-googled.mp3[/podcast]audio — self reliance googled

Wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote admiringly about self-reliance?  About two hundred years ago?  Well, I got some news for Ralph.  The world changed.  It got real small, Ralph, about the size of an I-phone, and nowadays you rely on IT, not on yourself.  I got friends who go to the grocery store to buy a couple of last minute items and they no more than get to Aisle #1 than they need to call the missus and see if she’d prefer the large size or the organic kind or a plastic jar not the glass one or exactly what kind of mustard?

I really don’t know what to make of this.  Do my buddies call across the house every morning to see what color socks they ought to wear today?  I mean, damn!  Make the decision!!  All by yourself.  Be brave.  Be bold.  Get the mustard YOU want.  Then live with the consequences!!!

We got GPS to help us NOT get lost.  We got Google to find us a quick answer to about anything.  We got Facebook to keep us abreast of our pals’ last 6 hours of late breaking activity.  We got internet shopping and Netflix movies and satellite TV.  We got e-mail and cellphone and twitter and text messaging.  We haven’t got one iota of time to make even a simple decision, you get right down to it.

Poor sorry Ralph Waldo.  He might’ve been stuck sorting it out solo, but we’re linked up, digitally connected, nano seconds from somebody else’s answer to any question we got.  And we got plenty of questions.  Just none we’re willing to answer by ourselves.  We need confirmation, we need a social network, we want to know if our friends will approve, if they bought that product, if they liked that movie, if they’re going to that restaurant.

Ralph probably ate his hot dogs without mustard, is my guess.  Too much trouble deciding.  Besides, if you google it up, the supermarket hadn’t been invented…..  Don’t believe me, cellphone a buddy and ask them.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-plumbing-procrastination1.mp3[/podcast]audio — plumbing procrastination

So I had a leak in my shack’s only working faucet, a drip I couldn’t stop by twisting as hard as I possibly could without breaking off the rusty handle.  Big Deal, I decided, I could live with a dribble or three, the motto of a seasoned procrastinator, a truly lazy man, a complete South Ender.  Never fix today what you can repair tomorrow.  And, if you can follow the inescapable logic of this maxim, tomorrow is ALWAYS later on.  NOT today.  Calculus, for you math majors, is built on this notion.  In other words, the South End is beyond most of our comprehensions.

Drip drip drip, day after day, and tomorrow never quite arriving…..   Of course, though, the Piper finally does arrive.  Sure as sunset follows sunrise.  Yesterday — and oh yeah, yesterdays pile up — I came down to find the sink full.  Slopping water on to the floor.  Great.  Just great.

I grabbed my trusty plunger, gave it a few robust shoves and voila, down she gurgled.  Next day, I repeated the process.  And the next.  And … well, all those tomorrows were showing up with teeth and claws and I suppose I could’ve continued until the shack itself rotted under its own sheer entropic weight and collapsed into the waiting nettles, sparing me my Sisyphean ordeal.  But then the toilet finally wouldn’t flush.  This, fair reader, is what Plumbing Hell looks like: dominoes all leading to further breakage, more repairs, endless hardware trips, gnashing of teeth, busted knuckles, demented curses, fear and finally loathing…. The Gods of Plumbing are cruel and implacable.  They do not care one spigot about your puny plight.

I am now three days into this.  My back porch deck has been deconstructed.  A hole has been dug large enough to bury King Kong in.  Cedar roots the size of Kong’s leg have been chopped and mangled and removed.  A mountain of dirt is rising like Babel in the backyard.   A cast iron pipe has been located.  It oozes black stinking slime a drip at a time through a tangled mat of roots and dirt and … let me spare you the rest.  My back is aching and  my wrists feel nearly broken as the pipe 5 feet down in the trench.

We take our indoor plumbing for granted, I guess.  But I’m seriously considering a return to simpler, more agrarian times.  I’m talking, of course, Outhouse.  No pipes, no plumbing, no plugged drains.  Course, there is that problem of what to do when it fills up.  But, as you know, that is a problem for tomorrow….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-vacation-planning.mp3[/podcast]audio —vacation planning

When we go off on our occasional vacations, we pack up most everything we own and then, either in Stanwoodopolis or out by the freeway, we go right or left, north or south, then head where our noses point us.  I guess some folks would say we’re Planning Averse.  And really, I admit it, we are.  This trip, however, we threw a dart beforehand and hit British Columbia’s east side.  So we looked at the map and picked a place called Winlaw high above the Washington/Idaho border.  Folks asked what was there we were interested in and we said we’ll have to tell you when we get back.

I got friends where half the fun is planning the trip, getting reservations, collecting guidebooks, studying the geography and geology of the place they’re going, building up the excitement to fever pitch months before they go.  If they have time, they learn a bit of the native language; you know, Eastern Montanan or Boston brogue, Canadian backwoods, eh?  Obviously, that is not our style.  And okay, for the record, we’ve gone down some bad roads, although I won’t go so far as to say they made for a bad vacation.  A vacation to us is a get-away.  To anywhere, any way, any time.  It isn’t home.  It isn’t routine.  It isn’t scheduled.  It’s a surprise every day.  It’s somewhere ELSE, not just physically, but mentally.  Why on earth would we want to plan it, review it, fact check it, practice it, create expectations and then go repeat it all.  Probably be disappointed if it wasn’t all that we thought it would be.  Or bored if it was.  Let’s just go home.  Practically seen it and done it thirteen times already.

Our traveling, I think, is the detour to all that.  Turn off the highway and try the dirt road.  Sure the tires might go flat, but we got a spare.  Usually.  If nothing else, we get more interesting stories to tell.  And the places we go aren’t half as crowded as Disneyland or some disease plagued cruise boat.  At least not yet ….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/audio-immigration.mp3[/podcast]audio — immigration

I know most of you are worried about this immigration issue as much as I am.  The state built a new bridge onto the island and we might as well have put a digital signboard overhead scrolling day and night:  BRING US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES.  Now they’re raising the roadbed and building another bridge just westward, probably a drawbridge for the newcomer’s boats to pass underneath.

There’s no guard station, no visa checks, no customs for regulating the flow of goods and contraband.  The border is wide open and all those yearning to breathe free are rolling in like radioactive tsunami debris.  Homeland Security is nowhere to be seen.  Already it may be too late.  The barn door’s been open a bit too long.  They come here with their odd customs and cuisines.  They live in enclaves with their own kind.  And little by little they grow in population until eventually they’ll outnumber us.  Up north it’s already happening.  They got gates and they got walls.  They got private streets and private security services.   Now it’s US who are kept on the outside.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking:  we’re ALL immigrants really.  Or maybe you’re one of those who figure we NEED folks to do the chores we won’t stoop to doing any more.  But these newcomers aren’t working.  They’re retired.  They check their stocks and bonds half the livelong day.  They sail in their yachts or vacation in their 40 foot travel trailers.  They have no interest in our way of life other than to hire US for yardwork or appliance repair or vehicle maintenance.  Oh, sure, they’re superficially friendly.  But use the service entrance, will ya?  And take yer shoes off, we just had the new hardwood floor laid.

I’m not saying we should close the bridge.  I’m just saying let’s get a quota on these immigrants.  One dot.com millionaire a year maybe and nobody who has more money than the rest of the South End combined.  We got a culture worth preserving here.  Let’s don’t dilute it with cold hard cash.  That’s not the South End Way.