The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The toilet won’t quit running, she says, so I say I’ll take a look. I pop the tank lid and the gizmo that regulates the inflow, hell if I know what it’s called, is spurting water out the top and I wonder if that’s normal or not. The ball float on its brass lever has been bent down multiple times but now it keeps the tank so low the crap won’t flush completely when you pull the handle. The mysteries of plumbing, I sigh to myself and head to the hardware store for a replacement gizmo, full knowing this is only the beginning of what will probably be a series of cascading plumbing issues.

I decided back in 1974 to be a homesteader. I had no interest in a career or a traditional marriage or a bourgeois lifestyle, not me, not that kid who wanted to blaze a new trail, make the world his own, leave the suburbs of his folks’ last few moves behind. I wanted to be a writer maybe, a school bus driver probably, an itinerant worker of dozens of jobs but none too long, plenty very short. So we hauled our hippie asses up to a farm in Northern Wisconsin and planted a garden, pumped our water, built our outhouse and left mainstream America in our wake. But it doesn’t take long to realize how ill-equipped for that alternative lifestyle you are, about the first truck repair when it won’t start and you have no idea whatsoever how things work. How an engine combusts, how to frame an outhouse, how to fix a pump, how to repair most anything and everything. When you’re poor because you don’t have jobs that make money, you best believe you will need to learn all those skills you didn’t learn in the suburbs and I don’t mean calling the repairman.

I got hold of a mail order correspondence automotive course’s books, studied them and began to learn auto repair. The army pickup truck I bought from some sweet lady who turned out to be a used car salesman’s daughter gave me ample opportunity for hands-on experience. School of Hard Knocks and Knuckle Busting, the very definition of a continuous education. When I bought the shack here on the South End, my graduate courses came fast and furious. Well pump repair, chainsaw use and maintenance, small engine diagnoses, house framing, electrical installations, furniture building, plumbing, concrete work, tree felling, woodworking, remodeling, you name it, I took the exams, sometimes failing, but after a few attempts, passing even if barely.

Over the years I added additions to the shack, rooms out the back, a kitchen off the front, a dormer upstairs. When I learned stained glass I built a shop back in the woods far from the prying eyes of the building inspectors. I built a sailboat in 1990 or so, built some kayaks, built plenty of outbuildings on the 7 acres, then built our house up on the hill. I guess I’d learned enough to feel confident to tackle a two story building, although I will tell you, most of it I learned along the way, reading the week or night before how to California-frame a corner or wire a 3-way switch or plumb a vent for the toilet or tile a bathroom floor or caulk in windows or hang an overhead fan. Took me two years working most every day. Learned how to build a door, lay hardwood floors, build cabinets and bookcases, all this from library books before Google came along. It was hard. It was also the most fun I ever had, this building our own house. It was, like all the hardscrabble stuff that homesteading requires, the building blocks of my life, the life I wanted to build from scratch, the one I would call my own.

So I’m down under the toilet hacksawing apart the threaded pipe that holds the gizmo that’s leaking for no apparent reason, catching the water left in the reservoir, most of it, the rest running down my sleeve. Yah, it’s a funny life all right. Things fall apart, entropic as always, and who ya gonna call? Me, I’m not calling anybody.

My mama told me, way more than a few times: Go to College. The first time she told me that was after a buddy and myself made a deal with our neighbor to pull two of his stumps, I think for $10 a stump. Not being professional stump pullers – actually these were our first stump jobs – we had no idea how long it might take to dig around an old maple tree, whack off its roots with axes and hatchets, put a come-a-long on the thing and haul it out. Like pulling a giant tooth, how hard could it be?

Two days later, blisters on both our hands, we finally disgorged the monster stump. Nothing to it! Course, we had the other one to do and now we knew – and dreaded – the work ahead of us. But a contract was a contract, a handshake a handshake, even for us 15 year olds. So much for our summer vacation. Our neighbor gave us each 10 bucks and no tip, no bonus, no thank you. Four days of hard labor. My mother, on the other hand, had a tip waiting for me at home.

“What do you think you made an hour?” she wanted to know. “Not much,” I said, pretty bummed and very tired. I figured a quarter an hour. And yeah, don’t say it, I know a quarter was worth more in 1965.

My mom asked if I had any idea how much my father made an hour. Actually, I didn’t, not a clue, but I hazarded ‘fifty cents?” Mom, well, let’s just say she didn’t have the greatest sense of humor, especially not wise-ass son humor, so she cut right to her Lesson of the Day, told me he made 50 times what I just made, all because – and here was the crux – He Went to College.

Now, I didn’t tell her I’d eventually have my own stump removal company, hire a hundred kids to pull them, franchise the whole she-bang and become a millionaire when the stock went public. I just put my head down and said. “I got it Mom.” I did go to college but ended up working stump pulling wages at various dead end jobs before becoming a starving artist.

Today I was at an oral surgeon seeing about yanking a tooth too far gone for a root canal and crown. My doc came in, said hello, snapped on some blue exam gloves, looked in my pie hole and said make an appointment at the desk for an extraction while you’re paying for this exam. At most, 5 minutes. The bill came to $100. If you’re as expert at math as me, a college graduate, that comes to $1200 an hour.

So okay, Mom, happy now??