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.

Nancy came out of Jolene’s Boutique and Salon’s breakroom in a foul mood, snapping the plastic apron on her chair back with a loud retort that sent Ronald’s client upright underneath her dryer. “Whoa,” Ronald said, “someone’s in a crispy mood.”

“Don’t get me started, Ronald,” she growled and grabbed her broom to resweep her area. Ronald shook his tinged hair, clucked his tongue and said, “Girl, you’re gonna wear out that linoleum, couldn’t be any cleaner.”

Finally she put away the broom and dropped into her chair with a defeated sigh. Her next customer wasn’t due for 10 minutes and Mrs. Anderson never came on time anyway. Never one to let angry dogs lie, Ronald said, “You been listening to Jolene’s hot talk radio station, I’m betting. You don’t have enough stress with those kids of yours and the cost of daycare?”

“I know, I know, I …” She trailed off. For a moment she just clicked her scissors in the air, slow cuts, slicing nothing at all. She stared at herself in the half length mirror running the length of the salon, touched a finger to one cheek and frowned at herself. “Doesn’t it feel like us women are supposed to back to the kitchen?” she muttered.

“Oh, honey,” Ronald replied, walking over to lightly drape an arm over her shoulder in sympathy. “I’m supposed to go back to the closet, not the kitchen,” he whispered out of range of Rita Jorgenson who had stopped reading her Woman’s Day magazine to watch the two stylists with considerable interest.

“It’s hard, Ronnie, really frickin hard, rising two kids, paying most of my earnings for daycare. Maybe I should go back home, quit knocking myself out. Dan wants me to. But … I don’t know, maybe if he didn’t keep getting laid off.”

Dan, as Ronald well knew, didn’t get laid off, he got his ass fired. Usually for drinking on the job. So much for bread winning, Ronald told her when the café that hired him as morning cook sent him home after he screwed up multiple orders.

The front door jingled and Patricia Anderson walked in early. Ronald pulled away abruptly and Nancy welcomed her client. Rita Jorgenson tossed her magazine on the side table, shook her curlered head and said over the dryer, “You just hang in there, Nancy. It wasn’t us women who screwed up this world but it’s gonna be us who fix it. So hang in and don’t ever give up.”
Ronald gave a whoop and a small holler. “Damn right, Ms. J, damn right!” Patricia Anderson took off her coat and parked in Nancy’s chair. “Did I miss something?” she asked.

“No,” Nancy told her, “the revolution’s just getting started.”

When we bought our 7 acres and its accompanying shack back in 1977, we first saw the place at night. The smell of cookies baking in a 1920’s Majestic wood stove, the soft glow of oil lamps, a fire crackling in the parlor stove — sure, I thought I’d died and gone to Hippie Heaven. A thought that evaporated by daylight the day we signed the paperwork, at least for the mizzus who sat herself in a corner of the vacated shack and cried her eyes out.

What we didn’t discover until spring was a clearcut woods that by May was an impenetrable jungle of stinging nettles 7 feet high. These days they’d qualify for required disclosure on real estate forms, same as contaminated wells, leaking roofs, buckling foundations and black mold behind the walls. Trails had to be cleared constantly just to enter the dreaded stinging domain and we were constantly struck by toppled nettles that penetrated even the thickest dungarees.

In some parts of the country, pioneers dealt with predators, arctic winters, poisonous snakes and insects, dust storms, hurricanes and hostile natives. So if my curse was only hostile neighbors and stinging nettles, I counted myself semi-lucky. You can eat nettles and I’ve made nettle beer with the itching bastards. The hostile neighbors, well, we had our differences. And still do. But there’s never been any violence. So far.

For 30 years I made my peace. With both. But awhile back I decided enough was really enough! One spring I took a sickle and cleared acre after acre of these monsters. And when they sprang right back up, I hit em again. And again. Each spring I attack the fresh recruits with extreme prejudice … and each spring less and less of them come back. The cedar and fir seedlings I plant now have sunlight reaching them where earlier they withered and died beneath a dark canopy of nettles.

The old growths are gone now, just a few stumps, a memory of early times here on the South End of the island, a myth maybe to the neighbors with their weed’n’feed manicured lawns. But when I’m gone and my sickle hung up for good, little doubt in my mind the roots of these stingers, patient all these many years, will return with a vengeance. I wish em luck…. The neighbors, I mean.

During the enforced hibernation of the Covid Plague, Techno Tom and his wife took in their son and his wife plus their two kids. No big deal considering Tom and Rachel’s house here across the road from us was a two story, 4 bedroom, 3 bath Cape Cod with a 3 car garage and another for the 40 foot travel trailer that rarely left its shelter. Tom and Rachel didn’t mind the return of their prodigal son, but Jason and his wife Marie viewed this as a personal catastrophe, lost job, their own house underwater, the kids forced to uproot and attend school here in the boondocks, just paupers accepting the charity of parents who they figured might have other plans for their Golden Years than an empty nest filled back up.

Jason, once the quarantines lifted, enrolled in a Coding Boot Camp, something Tom explained to us techie imbeciles that had something to do with creating software programs. Good paying jobs, he said, and sure enough, Jason was hired at a start-up in Seattle and after a couple of years in South End purgatory, made his family’s escape. Tom and Rachel fronted the kids partial down payment on a modest house in the city, the children enrolled in new schools — again — and the future looked rosy. Again.

Until this week when Techno joined our table at the Pilot House, not with his usual beer but a double shot of scotch on the rocks. ‘Wuzzup?’, one of us finally got up the courage to ask after 5 minutes of silent and serious drinking until the tension proved too much to wait on Tom to break the dismal mood.

“My kid,’ he moaned. ‘They laid him off yesterday. Said they didn’t need a coder now that AI can do the same thing ten times faster and twice as well. Plus, nobody’s hiring coders now, same damn reason. He’s screwed. What’s he gonna do now?’

Now, you have to understand, Tom’s audience were maybe not the best choice for eliciting sympathy, most of us having spent our ‘earning years’ in frivolous pursuits, odd jobs, artistic detours … and, well, just basic indolence to be honest.

But we bought the next couple of rounds, declared that the Tech Billionaires were scum, cursed AI and mumbled pathetic aphorisms like ‘when one door closes another one opens’, not altogether helpful in raising Techno’s despair. He declared the American Dream dead and finally Two Toke drove him home. I imagine pretty soon Jason will be joining us at the Pilot House where we can all give him the benefit of our collective sage counseling.

Rhonda was nursing her glass of red merlot when I rolled into the American Legion with a buddy who’d ‘guested’ me into the inner sanctum of the Stanwoodopolis military speakeasy, a windowless, no frills lounge catering to those in search of cheap booze, generous pours and dollar off beers. We’d just come from the No King protests up north with our fellow left wing terrorists who hate America and want to burn our cities down. La Conner was still intact, not a town that looked like Gaze, buildings just rubble and the river townspeople sheltered in tent encampments along the dikes.

Rhonda was the lead blocker for the South End Slammers, our roller derby squad, not a far cry from her detachment in Iraq 2, but a hamstring pull tangling with the Burlington Bruisers the week before had put her on injured reserve. She was recuperating at the bar where we joined her, taking the last two stools available.

“How you doin?” my pal asked her and she just grunted. “Not great, thanks for asking.” Then told us her play by play that led to her injury. “I’ll be back on the rink in a couple,” she said. And being the joker chucklehead, I asked, “Couple more drinks?”

“Weeks, you asshole.” Which prompted a hasty apology and the offer to buy the next round. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m just grouchy today … but I’ll take another glass, thanks,” and waved to our bartender with her now empty glass.

In the adjoining room a cornhole tournament was underway with beanbags flying, scores tallied, drinks close at hand. Spectators sat at tables in the bar watching half interested. No King protests meant nothing to these folks. Rhonda either when conversation got around to it, Larry mentioning our antifa escapades at some point.

“So what’s the idea?” she asked. “The guy’s a jerk but he’s no king. Maybe we need a jerk instead of the usual mealy-mouths.”

Since I’d already proven myself a jerk, I decided to sip my beer and shut up. Larry, a regular here, maybe he’d take a shot at explaining what we were doing at the protests, what the point was. Instead he said, “Maybe you’re right. I sure hope so. Next round’s on me.”

They say the country is polarized. And probably it is. Okay, definitely it is. But for a couple of hours we watched cornhole and talked roller derby and the Iraq War and crazy politics. Nobody got mad and none of us got hurt. No bean bags were thrown in our direction. The last round was on Rhonda.