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.

The era of door-to-door sales was, or so I assumed, relegated to the distant past. Tinkers from the 1800’s, Avon and Fuller Brush in the 20th Century, thieves in my ghetto neighborhood selling stolen TV’s and stereos in my urban nightmare days, encyclopedias and magazines, cutlery, gyppo loggers, the list is long but not long now. Until last night when I heard a rapping on the front door and found a uniformed young man introducing himself as a Pest Exterminator. As he explained more than a few times, he was in the vicinity, had clients across the road who needed his services and wondered if we might be looking for similar remediation of our mice, wasp, spider, ants, bats or any other varmint problem.

“I have traps and poison in the van already,” my Willy Loman explained, “so I could offer you a considerable discount since I’m here already.” I said that’s mighty generous but we’re doing okay so far. “Don’t you get mice?” he asked. I said we get all those things, it’s the country, kind of comes with the territory.

“You take care of those by yourself?” he wanted to know. Gee, maybe he’s guessing my age, calculating the geriatric decay and figuring this old geezer probably is past setting mice traps, just let the buggers run rampant in the house, maybe keep one room sealed and locked, live like refugees. But I told him yeah, I’ve kept them at bay so far. He told me again how the neighbors were signing up for pest eradication and since he was here, he could make me a helluva deal, then pulled out a price list of services. Curious, I took the laminated sheet and perused it for a bit, prices based on square footage starting at 400 bucks, then a monthly service of just under half that. I’m guessing the buggers adapt to the poison or mutate like bacteria no antibiotic will kill.

The kid wanted to know, since I obviously underestimated the threat to person and property if these rabid rodents and disease carrying creepy-crawlies managed to penetrate past my insufficient barriers, how long I’d lived here, no doubt thinking I’d just fell off the turnip truck and had no clear notion whatsoever of the danger we were putting ourselves in by thinking we could handle the scourge plaguing our neighbors single-handedly, probably city refugees.

I said 50 years come this fall. My salesman immediately concluded his next line of argument was probably doomed, unlike ourselves. He took back the laminated price list and asked if I wanted his bizness card, the price list he couldn’t leave with us. “Not really,” I said, but to hasten the removal of his shoe in the doorway, I said I’d take it. “You never know,” I said and he agreed whole-heartedly.

After he handed me his company card and wrote his name on the back, he turned to go back down the driveway to his van full of toxins, traps, poisons and god only knows what killing strategies. I said, “Wait.” Of course he figured, maybe, just maybe ….

“Listen,” I said seriously. “Do a good job with my neighbors’ rats and mice and all the rest. I sure don’t want them escaping across the highway. We got our own varmints, don’t need a mass migration.”

The kid nodded. “I’ll do my best.” I was pretty sure he would.

My neighbor not very far up the road lives at the end of an unpaved road, really a long driveway with two other houses before his and his partner’s. Two women own the house on the right as you come in and a couple planning to move are selling the hacienda on the left. So what we got here for sale is a short dirt road way down the island, no view, a remote backwash, an old double-wide trailer, asking just shy of a half million dollars, maybe you guessed, hard to sell.

My buddy tells me the seller, the would-be seller, wants him to ask the two ladies across from his Windy Rear real estate sign if they would take down their fairly large weathered gay pride rainbow flag they’ve displayed for long enough that the rainbow looks bleached. “What’s our thinking here,” I asked Clyde, “ he doesn’t like gays?”

I probably ought to mention Clyde and his partner, Will, are gay too, they just don’t fly flags to advertise that fact to us hetero locals. “No,” Clyde told me, “he’s just worried having lesbian neighbors will scare off potential buyers.” Probably a fact not required by state law to disclose to prospective buyers along with termite damage, leaky roofs, cracked foundations and non-white neighbors, just another example of woke politics at work in our blue Washington State.

Clyde says he’s just trying to sell and move on, no homophobia, strictly straight forward, small pun intended. “Why doesn’t he just ask the women himself? Why bring you into it?”

Clyde just shrugs, hell if he knows, but now he’s wondering what to do and god only knows why he’s asking me, the Sage of the South End, for advice. Desperation, at the least, demanded a second beer. Finally, fully acquainted with the facts and only slightly inebriated, I offered counsel.

“Put a rainbow flag at your place too,” I said. “And rename your street. Plum Tree Lane, uh-uh. Queer Avenue, maybe. Better yet, Gay Way. Ecstasy Estates or LGBTQ+ Heights. Lesbian Lane. It’s a new day on the South End, Clyde. Tell your neighbor he needs a new realtor, one who’ll advertise to the gays.”

So far it looks like Clyde isn’t taking my advice. Still Plum Tree Lane. And the place is still unsold. I know, I should have been a realtor.

I got a pal who wrote a really good book on the Barefoot Bandit, well researched, tautly written, humanely told. He’d hoped to parlay that into a movie with the Academy Award winning screenplay writer of Milk and J. Edgar, but something went sour beside the kidney pools of Hollywood and the movie lapsed beyond the internet interest expiration date. He’s holed up at his cabin on Orcas, doing what most of us artists do, waiting for the phone to ring.

Ten years ago I had breakfast with a local artist here on the South End. He’d just finished a huge mural at the new theater and their outside lobby of the restaurants that ringed the place. He was depressed, he said, now that the project was over. He couldn’t understand it, big artwork installed to great acclaim, good money, all good. And now he was depressed. He poked forlornly at his chicken fried steak. That project was a yearlong undertaking and he figured it would open the floodgates to more of the same. Fame and fortune would surely follow.

I gulped at my 3rd refill of coffee, set it down empty and said, “Post partum depression.” He looked at me with a mouthful of heart attack and said, “What?”

“You got the afterbirth blues,” I said with some authority. “You’ll look at the other stuff, the usual paintings, as piddly-ass. The big stuff as an adrenaline rush. When it stops, the rest seems blasé’ It’ll pass … or else you’ll get another big one.”

I just went two years in withdrawal. They don’t make methadone for this. There’s no cure. And there’s no prescription. You wait for the Next Project, cold turkey and sweating in the wee hours of the night in a blood fever.

Like I told Orcas Bob, you’d think it would get easier for us Old Hands. But it doesn’t. I like to think — when I’m partially rational — the hunger lets us keep an Edge. Too much success, we’d get fat and lazy. Probably go to socialite parties, get accustomed to the applause and the alcohol, then squiggle out the next artwork by rote and routine. Maybe we’re actually the lucky ones. You know … if that phone ever rings again.

Clyde stopped by our place yesterday, wanted to know if I wanted some wood flooring. Clyde’s notorious for scrounging lumber — beams, 2×4’s, plywood, chopped off rafters and joists full of nails — he takes it all, he and his partner Fred. They’re true South Enders, no building parts are too unworthy for future projects. No oddly shaped root or burled tree trunk couldn’t be imagined as a trellis or a doorway or a garden gate. Their greenhouse/apartment is a testament to homesteader ingenuity, from the recycled plumbing for a radiant heat floor to the gnarly limbs of a cedar tree that frame a window made from sliding glass door panels. The roof is raftered with bridge beams and salvaged lumber, all covered with earth and plantings, a green ecosystem.

So when Clyde asks if I want some wood flooring, red lights go off and a siren shrieks deep down in my hippocampus. “You don’t want it yourself?” I ask, meaning, what’s wrong with this flooring if you boyz are turning it down? Clyde avows how they don’t need flooring and anyway, it’s all mismatched remnants. Like they don’t have mismatched remnants from one end of their property to the next??? “Use em for furniture,” I advise. “I took my leftovers and made cabinets and bookcases, banjos, hell, it’s hardwood.”

“We’re jammed up,” Clyde says sadly. “Stuff we got now is getting powder post beetles. We couldn’t use it all in the rest of our lifetimes.” Which is true! They’re beyond Scroungers now, heading toward Hoarders. It’s a fine line, I know, and only a packrat like myself who’s scrounged most of his life is qualified to define the slip from Collector to Psychopathology. Clyde, I diagnosed, had stepped back from the Abyss. Enough was finally enough. Clutter was one thing, tunnels to the kitchen and bathroom quite another.

No mas! There comes a time when a sane man knows implicitly to STOP. Before it’s too late. Before madness descends like a dark curtain blotting light and reason.

Today I picked up 10 boxes of hardwood flooring, enough to lift the front end of my truck. No, I don’t really need flooring. But, you never know, right? Now if I can just figure out where to store all this wood until I need it….