The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Our old shack was built about 1910. Probably didn’t have any electricity back then, pre-World War One before rural electrification came to the end of this island. Probably didn’t have a well either with no way to pump it up from over one hundred feet deep. If you dig into the walls of this old house, you will find rough cut 2×4’s, full size 2×4’s, not the modern size that’s smaller today, and you will find old knob and tube electrical wiring, rags stuffed into crevices for insulation, theater posters and cardboard, paper and tarpaper to keep the wind from penetrating, you can find disconnected galvanized plumbing, you will find dryrot and powder post beetle damage and carpenter ant burrows. This old house has been added to, partially torn down, rebuilt, shingled over, reroofed and re-sided, painted and stained and weathered. It’s a miracle it still stands, testament to the virtues of wood and an owner who loves the damn shack because it saved his life in more ways than I care to recount.

The guy before me, about 1975, bought it cheap and dug it out of the blackberries that had grown over the second story roof. He rewired the electrical and must have found a circuit panel box at a second hand shop, one meant for a barn or a shed where the main power came off another building where it could be cut off. The box I have can’t be disconnected from the power pole out on the road. Meaning if you have to work on it, you’re playing with fire. Potentially literally. I have worked on it in the past, terrified each and every time, so much so I haul out a rubber truck tire and stand on that while fiddling with live feeds that could kill me, hoping, I guess, I’m not real grounded. Most of the people who know me could tell you I’m not real grounded most of the time. But I’m a cautious man.

For those of you who lack my superior understanding of electron rodeos, the power from the street comes down a masthead, through a meter and into the circuit breaker box where two metal strips carry juice to one side and another side next door, all grounded to the box and hopefully a metal rod deep in the earth where, god forbid, a short can be carried to the center of the planet. Breaker fuses slot into the two metal strips. One side of mine stopped working. My superior understanding of electron roundups didn’t help me figure anything out, so, like I always do, I started dismantling stuff, muttered mightily the curses that would curl the hair of Odin and proceeded to play with fire.

It didn’t take long. A recalcitrant 60 amp breaker wouldn’t budge and it wouldn’t respond to my obscenities, the bastard, so I grabbed a little metal prybar and tested the above description of the box being grounded when I touched both it and the hot bar carrying enough voltage to knock a lesser man clear across the driveway with burning hair and screams of desperation. Me, it just scared the bejabbers out of me when the sparks kept shooting at me standing idiotically in near shock on that old truck tire. The video would have gone viral in an hour, an instructive how-to primer for would-be arsonists. Or suicide by more creative means than knives, guns or pills ….

It’s ten days later. It feels like ten months. Tomorrow, hopefully, we slap on a new panel (one with a shutoff at the top), rewire the new breakers, call the state electrical inspector and if we pass, call the power company who will, for an exorbitant fee, charge to channel electrons generated who knows how many miles away. Once again the old shack will light up, run outlets, play music, power tools and live to lean deeper into its second century. Me, I’m glad to be working on the first.

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You do-it-yerselfers pay attention. This is a cautionary tale, like most of what I put out here for the edification of fellow imbeciles. I believe I just wrote a sermon on Knowing Yer Limitations, so maybe this is just insult to injury or maybe a double dose of Be Careful, What You Don’t Know Might Just Kill You!!

I’ve been having electrical problems down at the old house, now my glass shack. Lights flicker, then the line goes dead. The breaker doesn’t break, but I turn it off anyway, then in a few hours it’s okay again. For a few minutes, a few days, no telling. I’ve rewired outlets and switches but nothing works. A couple days ago the well pump quit. I tried changing gizmos in the control box, then finally called in the well driller crew who installed this submersible a decade and a half ago. They discovered only half the power was reaching the well house so back to the panel box we went and sure enough the 60 watt breaker was only working on one side, not enough to power the pump.

They tried removing the breaker but it wouldn’t budge. Add to this that this old circuit panel has no way to cut off power from the street so we’re dealing here with enough voltage to fry myself and a 20 pound turkey. That makes two turkeys. Okay, I get a replacement 60 amp breaker, then stand on an old truck tire to (hopefully) keep from grounding myself if I touch the wrong places. I’m nervous as a cat in a roomful of Dobermans but here I go. The breaker just won’t release. Parts of it shatter, the panel box wants to pull off the exterior wall, I try a bigger pliers and a screwdriver, no go, so finally I grab a small pry tool and try not to touch the live buss bar but I know I’m dangerously close to the live feed … and of course I touch it.

Sparks fly out at me like the ending to a sci-fi movie where the monster is climbing the power line towers and gets his alien ass electrocuted. The panel box is now shooting sparks up and down the line, first up top, then a shower of sparks down at the bottom, then up to the middle. The pry bar is shorting the whole thing so I grab a hammer and knock it back out. The sparks mercifully stop.

Then the smoke starts roiling slowly out from behind the box. I check inside the shack and yeah, smoke is coming out from inside the walls. I grab a fire extinguisher and hit the panel box with a blast of yellow powdery chemicals. I wonder if this is what it’s supposed to look like or it’s so old they’ve turned into this weird stuff. I hit it again. And again. Smoke keeps coming so I run over to the neighbors and ask them to call 9-1-1. Back I go and grab two more extinguishers from the shop back in the woods. I know what’s in those walls where it’s smoldering is 100 year old wood, tinder dry siding, crumbling tarpaper and once it gets going, nothing will stop the inferno that will jump up into the upstairs so fast I’ll just have to stand out of the way and let it roar.

Fire engines finally show up, only about six or seven, gleaming red beauties. I think maybe they can at least keep the fire from spreading, lose a wall, save the shack. They ask if I have any buckets of water at the ready. I tell em no, the pump doesn’t run, why I’m in that panel box in the first place. Traffic on the highway can barely get through, neighbors show up to watch the excitement, I’m inside with one of the firemen tearing barn boards off the wall and smashing out drywall to make it possible to get to where the smoke is coming from. They’re doing the same thing from the outside. Huge hoses from the pump truck are ready to spray down the wall.

It’s a day later. The shack is standing. The power has been turned off at the road. The electrical box is fried. The old house is dark. The pumphouse too. I’m trying to find an electrician who will return a call. My days of do it yourself electrical have come to an end. In some ways I feel extremely lucky to be here to tell the tale. If I’ve learned any lessons, it’s that I don’t learn lessons easily. This one was learned the hard way. My advice: don’t try this at home! At least not a home you love….

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I seem to be always warning you good folks out there in your thermostatically controlled world about the perils of plumbing, the horrors of auto repair, the nightmares of everything from carpentry to toaster fixes, fully knowing you probably think I’m a complete anachronistic moron to throw myself at these endeavors when all I have to do is pick up my cellphone and call for help and a repairman would be at our doorstep in half an hour. Of course you don’t live on the South End. Number one, I don’t have a cellphone and #2, no repairman is going to come out that day, not that week and probably not even within the remainder of the year. At least not while the economy is humming and the tradesfolks are back to work after that long recession. Thanks to Trump. Thank him too for getting us out of the Great Depression, all his doing, making us great again. Good job, Brownie.

But I digress. I’m afraid I have to speak to you about something we all, well, most of us, take for granted, something that really hasn’t been around too much longer than our lifetimes, mine anyway, and that rarely gives us much trouble. I’m talking about electricity. Rural electrification in my case. Alternating current, thanks to Tommy Edison, and brought to me by my quasi-socialized utility, the PUD. Unlike most of you, I do not take electricity for granted. Winter storms knock out our power for days on end and while the neighbors power back up with generators that sound like a lawnmower marching squad, we just go without, a small reminder of how the folks a couple generations ago lived. Yeah, like cavemen.

I have a shack —what was my old abode for 17 years, now my glass studio — that started exhibiting strange behavior nearly a year ago. Lights would flicker erratically, grow constant again, then kick out the breaker. I would walk out to the breaker box outdoors, throw the switch, then … nothing. Next day, the power would return. I replaced breakers, I tried troubleshooting, I googled, I prayed, I started replacing every switch, outlet and light in the place. Sometimes, actually many times, I thought I had found the glitch. But inevitably the following day, or the next few hours, same damn thing.

Sure I worried about fires from electrical shorts. I even broke down and called some electricans. One actually called back. He didn’t have a clue any more than I did. He said work my way down the circuit and change everything. Which I’ve been doing. Now … understand … my wiring in that shack is not what you would call exactly code. Not by the book. It is, if I can be honest with you, kind of seat of the pants. Probably dangerous, definitely illegal. And maybe you’re thinking I’m getting what I deserve. But before you judge me harshly, if fairly, let me say in my defense that I was desperately poor when I did most of this. And okay, ignorant too. And yeah, I know, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

But what I’m getting at is the Law of Electrons, at least the little buggers down in my shack, aren’t playing by the rules. So we’re equal, I guess. All my life people have explained to me, patiently, that electricity is like water, it flows where you allow it and stops where you block it. It is, in other words, like plumbing. And if you have been paying attention the past few years, you know I think plumbing is faux science. I think it is more akin to voodoo than it is rational. Now I see that electricity belongs to a creepy underworld unbeholden to logic as well. At least the electricity in my haunted house of a shack. Don’t think, though, that I have admitted defeat. I intend to fight on, outlet by outlet, switch by switch, light by light. And if I have to work by lantern, by god, I’ll work by lantern. No tiny little electrons are going to break my spirit. No sir, tomorrow I’m going back down to that dark place and may the best man win. Or particles….

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