The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Promise of Technology

The Avant-Gardeners bought a tractor from a neighbor, obviously before they’d learned horse trading was a bloodsport down in this neck of the woods. What they’d learned from constant repair on their bespangled VW bus was mostly unhelpful on the Massey-Ferguson antique they’d acquired in a trade for some standing timber soon to be prostrate.

In the spring of their second year they bogged the Massey in a swampish corner of their property, buried it deep as a skunk cabbage root and burned up the clutch trying to free it. Another neighbor had a medium size Caterpillar and Zeke, the most outgoing of the group, propositioned him into a loan so that they could extricate their own tractor from the mud.

Many a good plan ‘aft gang awry’ as the bard once said, and the Avant-Gardeners ALWAYS did. Zeke powered up the borrowed diesel and off the crew went back into the tarpit where their prized tractor was slowly fossilizing. Jeremiah hopped aboard the Massey, the better to steer it across the muddy abyss, and Zeke pushed the Cat up against its rear tires. Later, no one could say why they pushed rather than, oh, say, pulled it out, but the Avant-Gardeners were never much for logic. Predictably, they drove the Cat into the same quagmire, and being, apparently, slow learners, promptly burned up the neighbor’s Cat engine trying to cross the wetland.

Much breast beating and self-deprecating curses ensued. Too embarrassed to admit to their neighbor they’d ruined his loaner, they decided to overhaul the engine, restore it to almost new condition and return it without comment. So they tore that diesel down. Without the Idiot Repair Guide for D-5’s. Needless to say, the spring became the summer, summer fall, fall to winter. They finally located the parts, the tools, the expertise to rebuild that baby and when spring rolled around once more they torqued down the last of the head bolts, put the key in the ignition and turned it ON.

Oh the joy! when that diesel caught, jumped to life and ran like a spring mule. For about 4 minutes…. Until the engine seized. The boys recovered finally from stunned and deflated silence. Ralph, coming down from the house at the celebratory sounds of moments earlier, asked if anyone had filled the crankcase with oil.

It wouldn’t take a year to rebuild the engine the second time. Only a month. And they remembered to add the oil too! They parked the Cat in the neighbor’s barn and neither ever said a word at its one year absence. The Massey-Ferguson never left its muddy grave and if you know where to look, even today you can find, down past the brook that only runs in spring and winter, the shadow of the thing beneath a salmonberry thicket, its rusty muffler pipe poking skyward, a not so subtle reminder that technology isn’t everyone’s friend. Certainly not the Avant-Gardeners’.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/audio-avant-gardeners.mp3[/podcast]audio — avant-gardeners

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I’m not going to admit, at this late date, to being a card carrying cannabis communist — and I’m not going to tell you I wasn’t an Avant-Gardener either. In a way, all of us were. It was a small place back then, the South End, and it was a large circle of friends. Still is, really, so sometimes it’s best not to judge, just enjoy the comedy, the hortichuckles, and write it off to youthful idealism. Or indiscretion.

The Avant-Gardeners outgrew the old shack that came with their ten acres. Tipis and tents sufficed in the first summer, but not when the rains came. All dreary winter the intrepid band of itinerant pharmers made their plans for a geodesic dome large enough to house everyone and plenty more to boot. Ralph, their dropout MIT math-magician, did the necessary calculations, established the pentagonal dimensions, the number of 2×4’s to make the dome, the area of the footprint. All winter and spring the VW van ferried lumber from the Woodinville Lumber yard at the north end, and teams of co-ed Gardeners cut it to size and nailed it together. By late spring pentagonal units were stacked everywhere, waiting for the day Ralph pronounced they’d reached the required number. That day was the first day of summer, the Vernal Equinox for these happy Druid carpenters and everyone, man, woman and flower child rolled out for Construction Day.

By the first night the Dome was curving up and over their heads. By the second night it was arching into the tree branches almost beyond the reach of their tallest ladders. Day 3 they had to stop and build scaffolding to reach so high. And still it went Up and ever Up, a Babel towering overhead, frighteningly high.

It was the 4th night before someone realized the sides were never going to meet. At least not in the lower atmosphere. Ralph was summoned to a hastildy arranged Pow-Wow. He retreated for 10 minutes to his office in the main shack headquarters, then re-emerged, sheepish, if not completely apologetic. “Um,” he said, “I may have miscalculated this a little.”

The Gardeners, children of the Universe all, grumbled and wailed, bummed majorly, but eventually forgave Ralph. “We all make mistakes,” they said, nearly in unison, what would be more prophetic than they could possibly know at the time. After all, these were the 60’s and we all built domed cathedrals on mostly borrowed faith.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/audio-Bye-Bye-American-Pie.mp3[/podcast]audio — Bye Bye American Pie

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Like a lot of places, the South End is far more discerning of the oddities of others than themselves. The Avant-Gardeners’ hippie commune was the most prevalent gossip for years down here. Were they communists? Were they polygamists? Were they drug addicts? Were they pagans? There was no end to the rumors, no matter how fantastic — and, of course, the Gardeners themselves fed the flames with their fantastic behavior. Not just their colorful gypsy attire or their unorthodox social behavior, but Grand Experiments involving ship building and dome construction, all gone horribly awry, yet never diminishing their unbounded optimism or their total lack of fear of failure. They were pioneers, not just in breaking ground for their greenhouses and their livestock sheds, but in how they viewed the world. And the rest of us South Enders.

So we shunned them, most of us. Made them Outsiders in a place already Outside. Oh, a few of us bought their eggs and raw goat milk. I traded bread for those and vegetables, even got to know a few of the menfolk. The women mostly held back, kids peeking from behind their long granny dresses. Although I did teach Betsy, the most gregarious of the whole troupe, how to make stained glass. She would walk to my shack and glean scraps from the throwaway pile, then make the most beautiful suncatchers and small windows, far surpassing her teacher in no time flat.

After a few seasons I showed them where the wily Dungeness could be caught by hand and where to dig for free range clams. I took a few of the boys out in the S.S. Pterodactyl, my little sailboat, and we fished for true cod and bottomfish before they were gone, both the fish and the boys. Because one day the FOR SALE signs went up and the farm was abandoned as fast as it had arrived.

I bought a couple of their goats and some laying hens, took some greenhouse glass panels, accepted some macramé and pottery gifts, then waved adios as their gypsy caravan exited the South End one misty, fog filled autumn day. I guess they were as mysterious to me as they were to my neighbors, the only difference being I never minded. But I still remember that day when the Flower Children headed off island, north into the cruel ‘70’s, waving goodbye as I stood by my blue mailbox in a slow drizzle, wishing they would never leave. For me at least, that was the day, looking back, the 60’s really ended.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/audio-vaigra-falls.mp3[/podcast]audio — vaigra falls

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Every blue moon a good idea comes rolling down to the South End. Or at least a crazy idea so goofus, it catches the air on fire around it. Viagra Falls exploded on the scene right before oil prices shot through the roof in Jimmy Carter’s reign. Ernie Crandall bought up the old Camp Camano cabins, all 12 of the dilapidated clapboard units, tore the worst two down, then restored the remaining 10 to like-new condition. Each had its own bathroom, unlike the shared bathhouse of the 1920’s, and each got a fully equipped kitchenette, a TV set with adult VCR movies, and a queen sized bed.

Ernie gave each cabin its uniquely distinct ‘theme’. Suite #7, for instance, was advertised as the “The Caveman: for the Primitive in all of us.” The Rancho Deluxe was touted as “a cross between rawhide and satin.” It sported cowhoof lamps and a table supported by three sets of longhorns. The Casanova had a “heart shaped bed, red boudoir and a shower curtain to make a sheik blush.” Ever the P.R. specialist, Ernie provided local reporters and their editor with free introductory accomodations. Needless to say, Viagra Falls received lavish praise and exceptional press coverage. The South End, to most Seattleites soon became the Sodom and Gomorrah of the island archipelago, a playground for bacchanalian delights and salacious get-aways. Ernie was booked for six months in advance and the Falls, despite a cascade of water of any sort, was brimming to overflow.

All this notoriety brought not only customers, but the wrath of the Little Church of the Ravine, one of whose members was a County Health inspector. Septic violations became frequent and building code violations were uncovered. Not coincidentally #4 was renamed the Pastor’s Hostage Wife cabin, a romper room for Sado-Masochists. Ernie held the hounds at bay for a time, but finally decided he might prosper financially better in a less morally upright area closer to the urban areas of Sin City. And so the South End narrowly escaped becoming Las Vegas North and a magnet for lovers. Some of us, of course, mourn the loss.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/audio-outhouse-etiquette.mp3[/podcast]audio — outhouse etiquette

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