The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

I’m not a meticulous guy. Not a bone in me is OCD. My engineer pals call me an 80/20 guy, only put in 80% of the work and accept the results. This week I rented a drum floor sander, weighed about what a car does and okay, you haul it up our stairs, see if you think you’re still young and strong. But okay, I did and now I feel old and plenty weak. What did I expect at 74? Although this isn’t about my geriatric condition, it’s about my inattention to details, the old ‘good enuff’ attitude I’ve had my entire life, sort of a hippie ethos. Not trying to be an expert, just, gee, get the job done and let’s move on. Plenty of other stuff needs taking care of, not really working toward a PhD in floor finishing.

But … if I’d hoped optimism and the Can-Do attitude would carry the day … I was sorely mistaken. It’s been a full day sanding down the old finish that looked like hell the last five years or more but I just kept procrastinating, putting it off year after year until finally, this week, I rented the sander and hauled it home, huffed and puffed the monstrously heavy beast up the stairs and plugged it in, figuring the last time I sanded these floors 30 years ago it was fairly easy.

Course it didn’t have epoxy finish on it when I laid it back then, tougher than nails now, tougher than my 60 grit sandpaper in a lot of hard to get at place, tougher than my own grit. By the time I threw in the towel I had plenty of deep gouges, rough corners, finish that sanded uneven — in other words, not the gleaming fresh hardwood maple floor I’d envisioned. Quite the contrary. Story of my life, really, attempting projects like housebuilding or guitar luthiery or furniture making without the proper tools, without the patience necessary, without the requisite skills and just hoping in the end that things would work out fine. The fallacy of this fantasy is obvious in the final details, a failure of craftsmanship, simple as that.

Today I’m questioning a lot of that hippie ethos of mine, licking wounds, kicking myself. Tomorrow … hopefully I won’t see all the mistakes. It is, after all, just a floor. We just put the scratches in ahead of time.