The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Used to be Midlife Crises came when we were shocked to realize youth had lost its bloom and wouldn’t be coming back. Although … guys bought red sportscars and their wives dyed their grey hairs and considered plastic surgery. A new set of wheels or breasts usually didn’t work — truth was, what they mourned was the end of dreams. The corporate man was never going to backpack Europe or write the Great American Novel. And his trophy wife was not going back to college for a degree in sociology. Even if the kids were….

But I’m seeing friends who are going through a different crisis, the one where mortality is closing in and so is the realization that their life was mostly mortgaged, maybe even subprimed and now the equity seems puny and someone else may actually foreclose on it. They’re retired, time is not on their side and may never have been, and now the prospect of another hard winter is really bearing down. They think maybe a move might help. Go south, go back to their hometowns, look for a second childhood or adolescence, start over and see if the dice come up Lucky Sevens. They ask me: do you think I’m nuts to do this? And I say sure, (as if I got anything against being nuts)  but … if you’re not happy here, with what you got, with the life you made, I’d take a roll of the dice too.  Plus, it’s America.  We’re supposedly the adventurous, the brave, the pioneers.  We leave the known for the unknown.  We let optimism be our guide.  Complacency is the enemy.  Reinvent yourself!  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Go west, young man!  At least …. that’s what we tell ourselves.  Even if most of us have settled for a secure banality.

So maybe  it’s the winter of our discontent. Friends are dying, not a lot, but a start and our turn is in there somewhere. The community volunteerism isn’t working, the house has a leaky roof and the deck is rotted, retirement is surprisingly BORING, the walls are closing in and the trips to town are maddeningly uneventful. It’s as if the life we thought we’d built on sturdy foundations is sliding toward the bluff in incremental but steady tectonic lurches. We aren’t going to be rich and famous, money didn’t buy us love, religion was dumbed down to an embarrassingly blind faith devoid of anything resembling much more than a hope for another life in the after-world or prayers for winning the Lotto. We’re adrift, unmoored and untethered, and definitely uneasy.

I know. This is how I felt when I came here. For you pilgrims, be of cheerful heart! Sometimes the grass IS greener. Occasionally you CAN start over. Dreams DO come true in the once upon a times…. And happiness may actually be just over the next hill, the one you won’t find if you don’t go looking. Good luck!

I got a friend who just bought property a quarter mile down the road, up a dead end gravel road past some recent clearcuts, cars parked along the road, mobile homes hauled in, a small community of fellow South Enders perched on their plots in Paradise.  She has a small cabin with an extension cord for power off the neighbor’s grid, an outhouse,  a hose for water from the shared well and 5 acres with a few nice cedars and firs encroached upon by nettles and blackberries.  For now, summer time, the place is more than livable, it’s sunny and private, a refuge from the island’s gridlock and gated communities.

It puts me in mind of my arrival at my own shack some 45 years ago, all agog and wearing thick rose colored glasses, ready for a new start, anxious to leave behind all the baggage of my previous life.  Helping my friend move a shed back toward the woods the other day, all I could think about was the excitement I felt when I came here, my own woods, my own house, my new garden, the joy of going back to the land, planting fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables, learning to build sheds, remodel that shack, fix the well pump, all that pioneer stuff.  No doubt some would scoff and shake their heads, the dumb kid bought a pig’s ear, a logged off acreage mostly nettled and primitive and no damn wonder it cost next to nothing.

Beauty, so they say, is in the eye of the myopic.  Or something like that.  I remember the look my old man gave the place first time he set foot on the property.  Shack leaning into the mud, blackberries taking over, salmonberry jungles and nettle barriers, a son who should have known better than to move to the end of an island at the end of civilization, no job prospects, no homesteader skills, no damn sense.  What was the boy thinking?  He saw a shabby life ahead of me where I saw a new start.  I guess we were both right.

My friend is starting over.  She’s a bit older than I was and no doubt a helluva lot wiser.  She’s gonna do fine up there.  She’s already remodeling the cabin, got PUD coming today to hook up the power, water lines next and indoor plumbing.  She can see the future from her front porch steps.  And it’s wide open, an unlimited horizon.  I envy her, I really do, but for now I’m enjoying the nostalgia.  You go, girl!