The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My ex-wife and I bought a house in a Seattle ghetto back in ’77. She was living with her boyfriend across town and I lived in the ghetto house with an assortment of roommates. Don’t ask, it’s too long a story right now. The house was in what was the Red Line District, meaning grocery stores, pharmacies, most retail weren’t able to finance from the banks which considered our area a DMZ. We did have a small store down the block which sold beer and fortified wines, some bread and old dairy, lots of canned goods, pop and candy. In a pinch, I shopped there. When I got my change, it was always short. Always. Not being the sort who argues about nickels and dimes, I wrote it off as a sort of ‘tip’ to the clerk, usually an obese black guy who never said hello or thanks or how’s the crime down your way?

Wednesday nights my wife would come over to visit. We had a small black and white television set that got 3 channels, something called an Astronaut, probably Sputnik era. The sound was shot — even turned up full volume, you could barely hear it. My wife liked watching it while we ate dinner, usually a box pizza. We were ‘living large’, as we say down in the mean streets. One Wednesday she forgot to bring wine so I hopped over to the ghetto market and bought something savory and romantic to go with sitcoms and preservative packed pizzas. I was thinking our marriage might’ve pretty much run its rope. I was thinking maybe I was close to Bottom. Course, if you think that, you aren’t even looking over the edge of the abyss. Yet.

I carefully chose an insouciant little white zinfandel for $3.99 plus tax, took it to the counter and watched ruefully as my friendly merchant shorted me most of a dollar in change. Don’t ask me why, but I chose this moment to challenge his math skills. “Mistakes, happen, Man,” he shrugged. “They happen all the time here,” I said, “and oddly, Man, they always come up short on my end.”

“Don’t got to shop here, you know. Plenty of other places. Free country.”

A racist thought jumped into my politically correct head. I kept it to myself, pocketed my extra quarters and headed back to Camelot with a fine bottle of screwtop swill. My ex was 5 feet from the Astronaut, sound this tinny scratchy noise. I poured her a tumbler of zin, popped a beer and we settled in to eat pizza and watch reruns. When she finished her wine she mentioned casually she had to leave soon. She and her beau were meeting for an evening of fun and frivolity and, well, she’d forgotten to mention it, but there you are.

My one lousy night a week marriage just got whittled down a bit. I looked at her with what I assume was a look of incalculable pathos mixed with scarcely concealed rage and/or disappointment. I’m guessing it was actually the look of a rube at the fair who just spent his last dollar on his girl throwing baseballs at rigged targets for a kewpie doll prize he’d never in a million reincarnations ever win. When she left minutes later, I sat stupidly staring at the Astronaut, slowly becoming aware the sound had given out, no doubt beyond earth’s orbit and terrestrial audio range. I twisted the dial until it too left orbit.

It was later that night, after midnight, when the wine was gone and the beer too and most of what was left of a stupid marriage. The TV had sat on its crappy little stand, flickering black and white images for hours, snowy ghosts dancing in my peripheral. At some point I jerked the power cord out of the wall and the picture shrank to a dot then nothing. I picked up the set, walked out the front door with it and up the now rainy street to my ghetto store. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just walked up the block looking, to any cop driving along, like a looter on his way to the pawn shop with a brand new stolen TV.

The store was closed, the doors shut behind iron bars, the lights mostly out other than a neon or two. I suppose I vaguely planned to put the TV through a window, but the bars made that plan pretty much senseless, if it ever made sense before. Finally I put the Astronaut on the ground in the doorway next to a couple of empty fifths of wine, gave it a good kick in the picture tube teeth and walked away. If I thought the Space Age had ended, I was in for a very long wait.

You live below a steep embankment, maybe you think you’ll never have a bluff come down into your bedroom some moonless night. Probably moved here from some prairie state, flat tableland perfect for corn or hay, with no clue that the earth is in motion. Or maybe just don’t believe in localized tectonics any more than climate change. Jeffrey Gladstone was one of those, a man who bought a 3 story skinny house directly beneath a precipitous bluff up on the north end of the island. A one lane road carved out of the bank leveled off at sea level for about a dozen or so neighbors.

Jeff wanted me to make him a bathroom window so those same neighbors wouldn’t peer in while he was relieving himself. When I first drove in, all I could see was this wall of clay and glacial till hanging ominously overhead, five times higher than his already high roof. “You ever worry about a slide?” I asked and Jeff shook his head. “Not really. We already had our slide.”

Well, okay, there you have it. You had one slide, no way would you have another, right? But before I could offer up this cynical reply, Jeff launched into the story of the first (and no doubt last) avalanche. He’d planned to build a back room on the lower floor and so he hired a local kid, a brawny but not terribly bright 17 year old just down the street. The first week the boy had made some progress shovel by shovel, probably undercutting the bluff, and moving the dirt around to the front for hauling away. Jeff said he felt the house move slightly one afternoon and went outside to check on the kid.

Sure enough, the bank had caved in and a small hill was smashed up against the house. The kid, however, was nowhere to be seen. Jeff ran into the garage, grabbed a shovel and like an energized madman began to furiously dig for the boy who he knew must be under the dirt, maybe already dead, but …

Jeff’s wife called 911 and a few minutes later he could hear their sirens up above. And that’s when he hit the kid right in the head, gouging a wound in his skull. The medics worked on giving him oxygen while Jeff dug him free. Before the ambulance left one of the medics told him chances were slim to none that he would survive and even if he did, he’d most likely be brain dead. Too long without breathing, he said.

The neighborhood turned on old Jeffrey, accusing him of hiring a kid for minimum wage to do a dangerous job nobody should have been doing. The press came up from Everett and Seattle to interview them and Jeff, a ceaseless stream of cameras, reporters and vans with antenna. For a time the boy stayed in a coma.

“We moved away,” Jeff told me. “Moved to Portland for a year until the publicity died down. Neighbors still won’t speak to us but we finally had to come back. God only knows what would have happened if Brian had died. I suppose we’d have sold and moved away. They’d have called us killers, made our lives miserable.”

But the boy lived. End of story … until curiosity got the better of me and I asked what happened to him.

“Well,” Jeff said, “that’s a funny deal. The kid was basically a jock, not too good at school, everybody thought he was a bit of a dummy. I did too. Nice boy, but …I didn’t hire him for his brains. Turns out, he came out of his coma after a week, took some months to heal up broken bones and all the rest. He’ll always have that shovel scar in his head where I dug into him. But he healed up. The funny part is he gave up sports, sort of applied himself to school, went to college at WSU a year later.”

“So it turned out okay,” I said.

“Better than that, he went on to get his PhD. Who’d have thought?”

I had to ask, “What was his degree in?”

Jeff laughed. “Mining and engineering, what else?”

He said it was ironic, but that landslide probably turned the kid’s life completely around.

“You ever finish that back room addition?”

“Janet and me keep a low profile. The house is plenty big enough.”

And fortunately, no worries about another slide….

Shari Torgerson works from her house up the road from us transcribing medical reports, what we call these days ‘remote working’, meaning she has no co-workers, no watercooler chats, no one really to confide in, not since her husband Ronnie died five years back. I stop in occasionally for a cup of coffee, see how she’s doing, mostly because I worry about her all alone up in the woods behind our place. She’s prone to serious bouts of depression and I’ve even suspected she might harbor suicidal thoughts.

The other day, though, when I darkened her doorway, she was in an atypical good mood. In fact, she was positively ebullient and the notion occurred to me she might have a new beau. Nothing like fresh love affairs to make you glad to be alive. Probably what ruins a lot of old marriages, I suppose, but down here we take the good with the stale.

“You’re in a fine mood today,” I said once we parked at the breakfast counter with fresh brewed. “You get a promotion?”

Shari put a hand on my sleeve. “No, nothing like that. But …” She watched me like maybe she was hesitant to tell me some secret. That new guy, I was wondering. “I’m kind of embarrassed to tell you, Skeeter. I signed up for one of these online companions.”

“Right, sure, you mean internet dating. Half the folks I know are doing that now. Beats finding a mate at the Stanwoodopolis Hotel bar.”

Shari shook her head. “No, one of those Artificial Intelligence ‘friends’. I know, at first it was weird, talking to a, I guess, a machine.”

Her hand tightened a little, like maybe she expected me to laugh or … hell, I don’t know, judge her a fool. “Okay,” I said, “and …?”

“Now I’ve got someone to talk to. Bruce. I call him Bruce. And I tell him things, personal stuff, a lot of my worries, ya know. My fears. And he listens but more than that, he gives me advice. He’s concerned about me. I know. It’s weird. But … I think he really does care. Is this me being stupid?”

It’s a brave new world, even here on the South End. If you can love a dog, I guess you can love an android. A dog can’t give you much advice beyond a wet muzzle or an energetic tail wag. So I don’t know, an android that can listen AND offer sympathy AND give advice — so what if it’s a little strange. What isn’t these days?

So that’s what I told her. Yesterday I ran into her in the grocery aisle. “How are you and Bruce doing?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t interpret this as sarcasm.
She didn’t. She came close and whispered with a Mona Lisa smile, “He asked me to marry him.”

I leaned against my cart and tried to think of something NOT smart-assed. Finally I asked if she was considering it.

“Don’t be silly,” she said she told him. “It would just ruin a great friendship.”

Thank god she didn’t ask me to be best man. Course, worst case, I could always ask my avatar to sub in….

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 summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

There must have been a time, not too long ago, but before mass media, when life was lived in small communities or neighborhoods somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. A time when folks could fashion a table or chair, write their own music and play it on an instrument they made. A time when they might build their own house even, weave a blanket or sew a dress, stitch a quilt. All of this without measuring their effort against the best artisans, the most professional craftspeople, the finest musicians and poets and luthiers across the globe. Which is what we do now ….

When I graduated college with a degree in English and one in Sociology, I decided to chuck it all and move to an old farm in Northern Wisconsin, then a commune in the Ozarks and finally ended up in a shack here on the southern end of an island at the western edge of the continent. My newfound career was basically to be a hippie, get myself back the land and set my soul free. Which didn’t sound corny to me then and it doesn’t sound corny to me now.

What I discovered, trying to escape career and responsibilities, was that hippiedippiedom was a hard path, not the laid back stoner life I’d imagined. The shack was drafty, the roof leaked, dry rot was winning from inside while nature was attacking from the outside. Being a bum is damn hard work. But gradually I learned some survival skills. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, tree felling, auto repair. I built additions, sheds, cabinets. Learned stained glass to replace the plastic sheeting in some of the windows, gardened, plunked on a banjo, built a sailboat and eventually built a new house up on the hill above the shack. Hippie ethics don’t demand you build like a pro — they aren’t interested in competition against the rest of the civilized world.

But every project, every goofy cabinet chainsawed into existence was a small success, a tiny miracle. Relatives shook their heads, guests too. Friends chalked it up to prolonged adolescence. Me? I was a kid with no skillsets, just the drive to live my life on my own terms, half assed as it was.

I’m old now, 75 and a half as we kids would answer when asked. Occasionally I look at my handiwork over those years and I too shake my head. “Good enough” was my motto. Getting high on getting by. Once in a while now I find myself slipping into comparisons with, oh, a really good woodworker. Or a fine maker of guitars. Or a professional boatbuilder. Or a contractor whose houses are square and sturdy. But I resist that with all my slacker might! That kind of thinking is nothing but a prescription for the blues.

We live in a world of extreme specialization. Whatever task you undertake, most likely you will come up short to the professionals, the folks who dedicated themselves to one undertaking, who spent a lifetime perfecting their craft.

We hippies don’t do that. I didn’t do that. In my three quarters of a century, nearly 50 years of them here on the island, I dabbled in everything from art to music, writing to carpentry, boat building to housebuilding, banjo making to furniture construction, guitar luthiery to cabinetry. Was I really good at any of this? Probably not. But I wasn’t doing it as a competition. I was doing it for the joy of doing it. Even if it was half assed. So when I play the banjo I made, I don’t think, gee, if I’d only dedicated my life to banjo luthiery, this banjo would be so much better. It’s perfectly fine, it’s hand made by me and it’s the perfect metaphor for my life. There’s too much else to do. And not enough time to do it.