The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-walden-lost.mp3[/podcast]audio — walden lost

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Here’s a newsflash:  most of us are addicts now.  To our TV’s, to our cellphones, to our computer, to social networks, to everything Digital.  If the medium is the message, here’s the message — we got a syringe in our heads with a permanent IV drip.

My mom used to catch us kids laying around, doing pretty much nothing, complaining how we were bored.  Nothing to do, we’d whine.  She wasn’t buying it, no way, no sir.  She’d shoo our sorry butts off the couch and out the door, where, presumably, the world was waiting for us to get busy, make something of a new day, summon up the neighborhood cronies, go bike riding or play whiffleball.

Watch a friend who’s visiting and notice how frequently they check their phone for a text message.  These are people OUR age.  The kids never stop checking.  It’s like having video games and Netflix and the high school prom and phone gossip and Google all wrapped up in a candy wrapper.  The heroin isn’t listed as an ingredient but believe me, it’s there.  We’ve hooked the kids, we’ve hooked ourselves.  Our attention spans are shorter than a commercial now.  And everything in America is a commercial.  Don’t ask me what the answer is.  There’s no methadone for this, no 12 step program, no Going Back.  Every 30 seconds we need a Google fix, a text message, a Facebook update, a digital affirmation that we’re still on-line, still worthy, still connected.

Walden Pond now isn’t some remote back-to-the-land escape from the oppression of the Industrial Age, it’s a wilderness where cellphone towers are spotty and cable doesn’t reach and high-speed internet isn’t available.  It’s a place where Hi-Fi exists, but Wi-Fi doesn’t.  It’s a primitive world where the pace of life is measured, not in Twitters, but in the entire day, in the seasons, in lives moving slowly with time to pause and contemplate.  It’s a world that, sadly, no longer exists.  Not even down here on the halcyon South End.  You don’t believe me, Google it…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-the-house-that-jack-built.mp3[/podcast]audio — the house that jack built

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Our chalet was one of the last houses built under the county’s ‘owner-builder’ permit, just before they outlawed notions like a citizen building his own home without meeting every Uniform Building Code that applies equally to a house in Maine winters or hurricane-prone Miami.  The county folks said I’d be stupid to build a house that way.  When I sold it, I’d have to admit, or confess, or ask forgiveness, to any and all potential buyers.  Probably couldn’t sell it to anybody that hadn’t just fallen off a turnip truck and hit their head.  Which, undoubtedly, the county thought I’d done.

The truth was, I still had to meet all the codes, the square footage for window openings, the R-factors for insulation, beam calculations, perc tests and septic requirements, plus meet the state electrical codes.  About all I ‘got away with’ was reduced permit fee and the right to take as long as I wanted to finish the house.

I took two years.  The pioneers didn’t take two years using ax and ox.  I was 42 years old, prime of my life, cocky as Bantam rooster, figured I could learn as I went.  Study up on concrete, then pour a foundation.  Read up on framing, then build a wall.  Study plumbing, then install an indoor toilet.  Bone up on electric, then wire up the main panel box without running 220 volts through my eyeballs.  This is what we South Enders call Trial and Error in the School of Hard Knocks.  It isn’t rocket science, but …. mistakes can be costly.  I nearly lost the house removing studs in the main bearing wall in order to frame up for a Russian fireplace we hadn’t planned originally.  Studs bent like a row of archers’ bows and the second story and the roof obviously were coming down around me.  Could’ve planned this better if I’d been experienced…

I could bore you with all the details of all my mistakes —- there were plenty.  But in the end, we moved in two years to the week after pouring the foundation.  Doors are all homemade.  Cabinets are hand fashioned.  Most of the furniture we designed and built.  Even the toilet seats are custom fit curly maple.  It’s a shame, I think, we don’t allow, much less encourage, folks to build their own home, the way they want it, as simple or as fancy as they choose.  I know for a fact it’s the most ambitious, the hardest, the most satisfying thing I ever did.  Although I’m real glad it didn’t kill me that day when it almost collapsed on top of me.  And I admit, during winter storms, I sometimes wonder if I got enough nails and screws in the old place to hold things together.  So far, so good…..

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-fish-requiem.mp3[/podcast]audio — fish requiem

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Maybe it’s advancing old age … or maybe I need more good books to read to fulfill my literary addiction … but I’m starting to notice the obituaries in the paper these days.  Obits used to fall into the same category as high school sports scores, recipes in the food section and all the devotional stuff under the heading of feel-good clap-trap.  Usually I won’t find friends or acquaintances there, but that will change, no doubt.

At this point I’m mostly pausing to look at the photographs of the recently departed, the one their spouse or children submitted.  You can tell a lot from these, maybe more than we ought to know, way more than the verbiage about passing away peacefully or going to be with the Lord or being called Home, followed by a list of surviving family members that should be indispensable to genealogists many years hence.  The saddest to me are the ones fished out of some old shoebox in the basement, obviously the only one they could locate, faded, out of focus, of a dearly departed no one thought enough of in life to bother photographing.  There’s the shot of poor dead Mom with her daughter — obviously submitted by the now motherless child — which shows a better photo of the kid.  Some have the family dog.  Or the cat.  I assume the pet may still be alive to carry on the memory.

But I’m mostly struck by how many of the men are shown with their fish.  Big salmon, huge halibut, trophy trout.  Bad shots mostly of the happy angler, probably shot at the pier by a half inebriated charter boat buddy.  Dead fish, now both of em…  Sometimes you still see an obit with a bloody elk or a fresh shot buck.  Hunter fishermen:  the last of an era, I suspect.

Maybe the only surviving mugshots are these photos.  Maybe this was their one crowning achievement before departing to the heavenly Fish Pond.  All I know is, I’m gathering up all my old fish fotos and burning them Now.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/audio-south-end-recycling.mp3[/podcast]audio — south end recycling

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I live in a third world sort of place, kind of the Tijuana of Camano Island.  Given that Camano is the Tijuana of Whidbey, it probably tells you all you need to know.  My neighbors have discovered that when they want to rid themselves of a ratty sofa or an obsolete tube TV the size of a Volkswagen, they just drag the item out to the road, stick a FREE sign on it and next day, as if leprechauns had organized into teams, the goods disappear.

In other words we’re just passing our commodities hand to hand, neighbor to neighbor.  Saves that trip to the dump if you don’t own a pickup and, let’s face it, saves the humiliation of trying to sell obvious crap on E-Bay or Craigslist that now self-respecting, fully functional adult would bid on.  I’m all for this, by the way.  South End Recycling: just plain old fashioned good stewardship, you ask me.

So when my next door neighbor hauled his 1970’s butt-ugly hide-a-bed and his busted microwave oven onto the shoulder, I figured the hazard to early morning, pre-caffeinated commuter traffic was offset by this Carbon Credit Swapping tactic.  Sure enough, before any accidents ensued, the aforementioned items disappeared.  All well and good….  The dead refrigerator on the porch, though, sat a week, the result of my neighbor’s laziness and poor signage.  Nevertheless, one day it too vanished.

I was amazed and astounded.  Until my bike ride around the Head the same day …. where the reefer was discovered unceremoniously dumped on a backroad in the nettles, not so noticeable to vehicular traffic, but a white billboard to me on a bicycle.  To say I was pissed would be a gross understatement.  I wanted to pound on my trashy neighbor’s door and UNLOAD not just my anger but the refrigerator too.  But … I thought, unlikely as it might be, maybe this was someone else’s midnight discard.  Plenty of folks who would rather haul stuff into the woods than pay a dump charge ….

It nagged me, though, it really did, that my boy next door would trash up my paradise.  So finally I took some paint and wrote his address on the fridge door after hoisting the appliance upright where it loomed white and apparitional out of the gloom of the nettle forest.  No great harm if I was wrong.  Bullseye if I was right.  The Skeeter Gambit.

The sheriff’s deputies noticed it the very next day, trained professionals that they are, and they stopped by my pal’s house and inquired if perhaps he’d reported a Missing Frigidaire.  He had a cockamamie story, but next day when I checked at the dump, oh yeah, a refrigerator with an address on it was standing over in the appliance section.

If there’s a moral here, damned if I know what it is.  But I’ll say this:  before you toss your old stoves and iceboxes into some woods you think is remote, just leave it on the shoulder of the South End with a FREE sign on it.  Apparently we can always use another appliance out on the front porch.  Save you a lot of embarrassment with the Island County Sheriff.

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