The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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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