The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Every year my family would make the pilgrimage to the place they called Home, a desolate stretch of potato country in upstate Maine near the Canadian border, the place my brother and I took their ashes a few years ago. Their parents, my grandparents, lived there all their lives and so, without question, no matter what part of the country we lived in at the time, we loaded up the station wagon and hauled our nuclear family back there for a few weeks’ vacation. Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin … didn’t matter, we hit the road, stayed at auto courts on the way, ate out of Mom’s packed cooler for days at a stretch.

My dad’s old man, Grampy to us boys, was a hard drinking, foul mouth, adulterous roughneck who adored his grandkids, built them rafts for the cabin by the river, taught them how to play poker, showed them how to drive offroad in his jeep mowing down saplings while he laughed and howled. Short as he was, he was bigger than life to us kids. My old man didn’t much like him, not the man who cheated on his mom, but year after year we came back. When Dad went off to war at 18, the advice he got standing at the train station, possibly the last time the two would talk, was one sentence: Keep it in your pocket. Okay, pa…. thanks for the wisdom.

When we packed up to go and said our goodbyes another year, Gramp would hand me his old fedora to keep. Folks ask me too often why I wear a hat all the time, usually a beat up old one, and I guess, without playing psychologist without a license, this is probably why. Or maybe I just like my head being warm….

The last year we visited, I was about 16. My grandfather was looking older than I remembered, plenty slower, a few drinks shy of being the hellion of yesteryear. At the door as we were leaving to go back to Wisconsin he handed me his hat from the hook by the door. I said thanks and see you next year. He surprised me when he shook his head and said, “Probably not.”

I think I took his meaning but only when we were motoring away. My dad muttered something about how he should have kept quiet about this when I mentioned what he’d said. I never, of course, saw Grampy again. He died of cancer shortly after. Later, after college, I started wearing hats, still do. My old man, every visit, would make disparaging comments. Family traditions die hard, I guess. Or he just worried I was turning into his father, the reprobate.

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.

The Beer Hunters are getting long in the tooth. This Hunt is our 40th and when we took our first, we were young bucks, mostly in our 30’s, men who could thin the herds of ales and IPA’s at night in local watering holes up in the mountains, then hike the hills for miles and miles the next day without complaint or hangover. Not so much in these later years, not after a couple of us have had heart attacks, broken backs in skiing accidents, multiple injuries after passing out and driving off the road, knee replacements, eye cancer, sepsis and other assorted ailments and health issues.

One of us is in his 80’s, most are in their mid to late 70’s. Two are morbidly obese, one is blind in one eye. Another lost his spouse this year and came down with a clot in his leg today. The Hunters have definitely seen better days. Nevertheless, the Hunt is ON again this year and my brother and I are on route to meet up with the boyz at a cabin on Hood Canal in the shadow of the Olympics where we’ll do our hiking and hunting. The tradition endures.

The Hunters met in law school back in the mid ‘80’s. Some went into private practice, one became a judge, another a prosecuting attorney and myself, none of the above. Only one of the lawyers still practices law, the rest have retired. And me, I’m not sure what I am these days. Other than older….

Some years others have joined our core group. Usually only for one Hunt. Many are called but few, as they say, are chosen. A drunk driving charge on a Hunt in Arizona finished Curly. Roy, an army buddy of Mike’s, went into rehab and AA after his first and only weekend with us. Dave’s son and a friend came once — they held up to the drinking but withered on the hikes. Jim lasted one Hunt and never returned. Doug, Tom’s fishing buddy, a right winger, hated all us card carrying commies, left the Hunt and moved to Tennessee where like-minded Trump loyalists run the state, good riddance.

Today we rendezvous once again, our rag tag geezer gang, compare ailments, reminisce about Hunts of yesteryear, hike the Olympics, drink less and continue the tradition. Wish us good hunting ….

I’ve heard it said there’s nothing new under the sun. If that’s true, us artists might as well drop the charade, lose the paint brushes and get a job selling door-to-door encyclopedias, the jig is up. Creativity was a sham at worst, a self-delusion at best.

I had clients who commissioned me to do a stained glass entryway for their high end house up at the gated North End, transom, double doors, sidelights, one unified design. I showed them past work, various styles, choices in glass and color. When they landed on a door I’d recently done propped against a back wall of the studio, I said great, I’ll work off that. A month later we installed the panels, they were pleased, I took pictures, we shook hands and hugged, all was well in my little corner of the universe.

Until … sometime around a year after they saw the door they’d originally liked, the one I’d used as inspiration for theirs, for sale in a gallery on the island. This, they told me, was outrageous. Theirs was no longer an original, it was an imitation and I had plagiarized myself. I tried to explain that their design was derived in part from the one they liked, that art was an evolution of sorts, each design a continuation of style, but this fell on deaf ears. They were, they declared, gravely disappointed.

Apparently I had been exposed as the fraud I most certainly was, an art thief who stole from himself, a Picasso whose every painting was a phony baloney copy of what came before, a con man who needed to be turned into the Culture Cops.

Since my art tutorial had failed to convince them, what was I supposed to do? No point in removing the fake artwork — the next would be a fake too. I offered them their money back and removal of the glass panels, but no, they loved their entryway. In the end I agreed to their demand to remove the original door for sale in the local gallery and had to promise never to show it again or sell it in the future. No contract was required and no attorneys were hired.

That door still sits in my shack, unsold as promised, a constant reminder that art is definitely in the eye of the beholder and a finger in my eye, to which I say: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Although … someone else said it first. At least I stole it from someone else.