Key West Diary

That's All Folks

2011-12-31T12:01:00.003-05:00

This was the very first entry in my blog, a joke told to me by my buddy Robert, when I rode a Vespa 250 GTS and this blog was called Key West Vespa.

Day One June 13 2007
This dude dies. There's a promising start for a blog. Well, anyway he dies and goes to heaven. St Peter meets him at the Pearly Gates and says:
"We have choices nowadays in Heaven. You get a free trial period in a choice of places. In your case you get to try out the celestial sphere up here, or you get to spend the rest of eternity in Key West.
Day one, among the clouds sipping ambrosia, tinkling the odd harp, lounging around chatting of this and that with the hosts of heavenly angels.
Day Two, our hero gets sent down to Key West to check out the scene. He starts the day with a proper breakfast at Turtle Kraals, fresh eggs, strong coffee, crisp bacon and a view across the Key West Bight Harbor. Then he heads to the beach at Fort Zachary for a swim, a read in a hammock under the pines and a leisurely bike ride back to civilisation for a refreshing smoothie on Duval Street while checking out the passing scene.
After a lunch on the beach at Salute restaurant he takes off from Smathers Beach dangling from a parachute, whips round the harbor and back on land takes in a ride across town to Half Shell raw bar for oysters and a frosty.
In the evening its back to Duval and a night of drinking and carousing.
St Peter barely has to ask.
"Dude," our Hero says, panting from his exertions in Paradise, "its gotta be Key West for me." Nodding gravely St Peter puts him down for eternity in Key West.
Our hero drops off to sleep under a freshly laundered sheet, a fan swirling slowly round above his head.
He awakes in a lather of sweat, the sound of hungry female mosquitoes fills his ears. His lip is swollen from a nighttime mosquito feast and his ears are filled with gritty sand.
"Hey!" A voice roars and the sound of cracking whip fills the air." Get up you lazy bugger! Work! Get to work!"
"Hey, I'm spending Eternity in Paradise!" comes the indignant protest.
"Yeah, yesterday you were a tourist. Today you're a local."

So there we have it. I'm not completely sure how to say goodbye because after all there I will be tomorrow to greet the new year at http://thekeywestlocal.com/ but in the meantime let me say thank you for following this blog and I hope to hear from you on the other side tomorrow. It has been fun and I can't say better than that.

Keep well. do good work and enjoy New Year's Eve with the hope of good things to come next year.

Solares Hill 2008

2011-12-31T00:01:00.002-05:00

So here we are, the last day of Key West Diary and I couldn't let my beloved blog fade away without some pictures of the iconic hill in the middle of the city that I am pleased to call home, even though I live in the suburbs.
There are people that delight in thinking Florida is flat which in point of fact is not true at all. Solares Hill, a couple of blocks east of Duval Street is variously reported to be between 14 and 18 feet above sea level. I take the middle ground and call it sixteen feet (about five meters in new money) which is, I think, a good height for a hill to be. For instance if you were planning a fishing trip on your bicycle and came this way, west on Angela Street, you could free wheel a block:There is another hill in Key West, on Elizabeth Street near Eaton, and it, though unnamed is labeled by the presence of the Hilltop Laundry. But Solares Hill takes pride of place, by virtue of the fact that this is Key West's own Mount Everest, the top, the highest peak of all. You may even see people climbing the hill without the aid of supplemental oxygen. These hardy souls looked like visitors staying at Courtney's Place located on the South Col, just off the Hill itself:Solares Hill isn't a straight climb. The road dips on its way up from City Hall at the corner of Simonton Street:What makes this place odd is that in a town notorious for labelling every little non event in its tumultuous history, the highest point gets no marker. Here there is no souvenir stand, seashell vendor or tout with postcards. For the ardent labeller it is a do-it-yourself spot, and in that spirit I label this Key West's tallest house, the home with the front porch highest above the lapping waters of the Straits of Florida, one short mile to the south:It could as easily be this imposing home across the street:But I prefer the more modest Conch proportions of the little white house with it's sky blue trim and every time I pass I salute it as Key West's highest foundation.

The other thing about Solares Hill is that it comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It is just another street, another way to get out of town, and once you pass the crown of the hill the street levels off:It becomes, momentarily, a modest little plaza that is actually an intersection where four roads join. At night the pink house with the drooping cantilevered extension looks quite a bit different, more imposing perhaps and a lurid shade of yellow in my viewfinder:The lights in the distance mark Angela and Simonton Streets, the bright lights of downtown, but up here on the hill where every breath costs a climber effort, the lay of the land is much more peaceful, by day......and by night:In that last picture I caught the trifecta of Key West wheels; the convertible, the scooter, and the shopping cart, something for everyone. From the intersection one can turn left onto Elizabeth and head towards the Fleming/Southard corridor, or keep going straight, down the hill towards the cemetery:Or, if turning right one gets to freewheel a little bit back towards Truman Avenue and the main street out of Key West:Or you could be like me and wander the hill at 4:30 in the morning and find a bunch of little alleyways, evocative and secret that I shall have to come back to check out in the cold light of day. I keep thinking I know this town and then there is a fifty yard strip of cement lined with laundry, sleeping cats and tile decorations that make a liar out of me. How provoking.

Key West Culture

2011-12-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that over the past few years I have written about an endless array of aspects of Key West and as I close in on the end of this blog as an active daily record of my life in the Lower Keys I am at a bit of a loss as to which essays to pick to highlight on the way out. In this case I figure the Literary Seminar is coming up again pretty soon next month so here I offer a few thoughts from 2008 about life music and poetry in the Southernmost City. I am sad this blog has to end tomorrow but I am looking forward to our new endeavor at http://TheKeyWestLocal.com as I hope you are too.

"Carol invited me to a reading," my wife said as she curled up on the couch, leafing through the Sunday Citizen. "I wonder if I should go...?" A girl's afternoon out, thought I, which means I get to do my thing. "Friendships need to be nourished," said I sententiously so we drove into town and my wife went off with her friends to some sort of post-feminist reading circle as I thought, and I took the wife's scooter from her workplace and rode into town. Her Vespa ET4 has been languishing while her arm is in the surgical cast and the plan was for me to ride the 150 home and tart it up a bit. But first I had some culture and color to absorb.My wife's teaching assistant and office manager were salivating at the prospect of spending the afternoon at Jack Flats on Duval with their men while watching The Game, however for me an afternoon off means a meander through Old Town on my (wife's) Vespa taking pictures for future blogs ending up at the Old Pile seen above, St Paul's at the corner of Duval and Eaton, where the Philadelphia Brass Quintet was giving the first in this season's series of "Impromptu Concerts." On the steps of the church I met a couple of friends who invited me to sit with them and I did. The quintet did their bit in a concert I rated okay,interesting selection of pieces but the execution seemed uneven to me. As a former tuba player I love the instrument to death but it can too easily kill off the melody in a small, relatively small space.The sun was setting as we streamed out of the church and key West always looks lovely in the light of the dying day, with a purplish tinge on the sky and warm gray tones down below as street lights come on and open doors throw squares of orange light onto the sidewalks. I took the long way out of town along the south coast startling an ambling convertible on my 50mph "moped." The ride home was delightful on the little Vespa.Not least because it buzzes along merrily at 65mph and even allowed me to pass a dawdling kid in a souped up hatchback and I get silly pleasure from surprising people with my wife's little scooter.

That was the last pleasure of the day. Half my enjoyment of the music came from actually bothering to show up, a sense of being rewarded for the effort. The ride home was fun no doubt, always a pleasure but my wife's "post feminist reading" turned out to have been a poetry gathering at the Key West Literary Seminar. Well, bummer, she met Billy Collins. And I didn't. Grrr.

It was sometime last year I was wandering the stacks at Voltaire Books on Simonton Street when I opened a slim volume of poetry called Sailing Alone Around the Room, if only because I used to be a single handed sailor. And if you think the book is about sailing, think again. I burst out laughing at the very first poem titled Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House, and if you think it has anything to do with the Second Amendment: think again. Think of an innovative Beethoven composing for a dog abandoned at home.My always thoughtful wife brought me home a copy of another book of Billy Collins' poems, and if you look at the title you'll know why this is a book you have to own. I've enjoyed only a very few 20th century poets, mostly writers out of the trenches of World War One, and I have mostly been drawn to romantic, rhyming, poetry-like poetry from the classical 19th century. Billy Collins has been a breakout for me, and my wife knows this.So there it is, in black and white, an autographed copy of the book no less, which can join the other one in our loo. I have an autographed copy of a book by Billy Collins and I wasn't even there to get it!

Post feminist readings have a lot to answer for. And so do assumptions.

The Road To Pale 2007

2011-12-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

This essay I assembled from pictures taken on the Balkan road trip my wife and I took in summer 2007. We took a ferry from Italy to Croatia and turned south to visit Montenegro, Albania and Bosnia Herzegovina. This essay tells the story of our fevered imaginations leading us well off the beaten path in a part of the world where even we felt we may have gone too far. All such adventures were grist for my blogging mill on Key West Diary and starting January 1st i hope we will find some space for out of town journeys of the future on http://TheKeyWestLocal.com. In fact I'm sure we shall!

This was not what I expected when we turned off the main road, and started driving confidently into the narrow valley off the main road from Gorazde. We were on our way to Sarajevo, but my mind was full of the civil war that had ended 12 years ago and I could clearly see a narrow winding strip of white on the map, a road that led to Pale, the former capital of the breakaway Republica Srpska,the homeland desired by the formerly genocidal Serbs.

Gorazde, seen above, was a Bosnian-Muslim outpost surrounded by Serbs in the civil war, but nowadays bolstered by European Union money it is a prosperous little town on a sunny July afternoon.

The road we were on was not following the dictates of the map and it was deteriorating rapidly into little more than a goat track. We climbed up the valley on a narrow twisting road. The sun made itself visible shining on the greenery high up the granite walls of the valley but down on the road we were deep in shadow.

We came to a steel bridge crossing the river, a fast flowing, boulder-strewn cut through the mountains. The bridge had seen some rough use and the metal plates were buckled in an abstract, interesting way. I plunged onto it lest we start thinking too hard and the heavily laden station wagon bounced as the wheels dropped into a cleft between the plates.

"Er, " Layne gurgled as the car lurched. I kept driving, it was too late now. We scrambled off the end of the bridge onto the roadway and I focused on the fact that other vehicles must use this structure too...

We passed a logging mill, wood piled up outside a classic stone and brick Balkan house with a pointy red tile roof and the road that wound close past the front door. A boy sat on a stack of fresh planks, a dog licked its paws and ignored us as we droned past. The trees closed in and the road waggled its way along the edge of the river. Until we reached the gate.

Somehow we had found some sort of power station, possibly a hydro-electric plant or something, nestled in the woods, guarded by a lonely man in a sentry booth. He let us turn around and when I asked : "Pale?" (In the local lingo pronounced "Pah- lay?") he replied in rapid fire Bosniak and I understood nothing except his hand pointing backwards.

It all came clear as we turned in the parking lot of the power station and headed back to the mill. There we noticed a little cardboard sign, hand written: "Pale Something" which I took to mean "Pale this Way" in cardboard English. We looked at each other and, saying nothing, I turned the wheel and our eager Ford Fusion scrambled up the bank onto the narrow dirt road.

At least, it looked like a road, at first; then we met this...

And then the penny dropped. This was a railroad line and apparently long disused by the trains but still in use as a road. Weird! Cool! We're on the road to Pale. Not waiting for my wife's radiating disapproval to slow us down I kept my foot on the gas and we rumbled into the tunnel.

The first one was a short one and that made it easier to get into the second one which also was short and we could see daylight seconds after starting into the gloom. The third tunnel was much longer, and darker and damper. It gave me shivers as we penetrated the darkness with tendrils of damp sliding down the walls, potholes large enough to reduce our speed to a slow walk and barely enough width to allow us to open a door and get out. that I figured would be a killer if we got a flat...

"What if we meet someone coming the other way?" my wife asked with a half giggle.

"Buggered if I know," I muttered, swinging wide to avoid a hole of particular dimensions. "Lets hope they know how to back." We kept on rumbling, the diesel engine growling in low gear.
"What's that?" she said, cocking her head.

"That, " I said with a sinking feeling , " is our opportunity to figure out who knows how best to back up."

Suddenly their headlights were upon us. A moped lurched out of the darkness and without waiting for me to engage reverse streamed past my door and buzzed out of sight towards the light. Like we weren't even there. Which would have been okay if there wasn't a compact car following close behind him.

I sighed and twisted in my seat and started backing.

I must have gone 50 yards and I'm proud to note without faltering. We pulled to one side and the graceless hulks inside the car flashed us a glare that said if looks could kill we would have been incinerated, and in a flash they were gone, my friendly wave frozen in mid air as though petrified.

And so we gave it a second shot, this time with complete success we popped out at the other end of a tunnel that curved in the middle and must have been 200 yards long, at least. maybe more. it felt longer, I will say that.

The road to Pale came out of the tunnel and coasted alongside the river for a distance, dappled sunlight playing on the trees overhead, the mountain looming over us and still cutting off the lowering sun, for it was close to 6 pm as we drove along the railbed.

"Does this seem like a good idea?" My wife asked after a couple of minutes of silence.
"Umm," I replied. The thought had been occurring to me that we might not be headed towards anything good. Pale had been home to the gruesome killers of Ratko Mladic, the "hero" of the Bosnian-Serb militias. These were the people famous for the slaughter of Srebrenica and the torture by sniper fire over Sarajevo. Pale was their headquarters where they planned the reduction of the Bosnian Muslim capital city. As we bounced along the railroad track with no end in sight ( another quick tunnel) I was mulling over the wisdom of following this trail to nowhere.

I imagined us arriving in some Carmen-like bandit camp high in the mountains and stepping out of our Austrian registered car with weak smiles on our faces and then being lost forever to the rest of humanity. Just two more mounds of dirt in a country littered still with mass graves. It was not a pleasant picture.

"Do you think we should turn back?" I asked.
"Only if you do," she temporized.
"Um, " I temporized.
This trail had probably been pressed into service during the war to connect Pale to the rest of the Serb-held Western Bosnia. Now it was probably just a short-cut across the mountains for a few hardcore people who really want the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina split into two, or three parts.

In any event we stopped, we took pictures, we turned around. I was ready to not keep going, we knew the rail bed went somewhere, and we didn't want to arrive in the dark, or get stuck in the dark and Pale was there somewhere ahead, on a proper paved road, I was pretty sure. This track led to Pale but through God knows who's back yard.

The relief in the Ford was palpable as we back'ed and forth'ed and got facing the way we'd come.
"I expect those guys who passed us called ahead and now the bandits are waiting for us."
"Long wait," I said. We passed the long tunnel, and two more and finally found the sawmill, dropped onto the pavement, crossed the funky bridge , went back down the valley, turned left on the main road away from Gorazde and took the long way round the mountain.

Pale was easily accessible by main road and a drab, down-at-heel town it was too, about as threatening as a page from a history book. 'The banality of evil' was all I could think as I checked the Soviet style apartment blocks and the hurrying hunched pedestrians on their way to nowhere. We drove through, not stopping, and went on our way to Sarajevo and a night in America at the Holiday Inn. We wanted service with a smile and a pretense that outside the door lay midwestern suburbia in all its unthreatening glory. We got a Lego building inhabited by surly Slavs instead. The good ole USA was still a long way away.

We were a little tired and stressed by the Balkans at this point.

Biscayne Bay National Park

2011-12-28T00:01:00.002-05:00

As much as I like living in the Lower Keys I do enjoy trips to the mainland, particularly the Everglades of course and this lesser known park off Homestead. I expect I will include such trips in future as I view South Florida as part of many people's Keys experience. Next week http://TheKeyWestLocal.com will fire up with Chuck and I publishing one essay each, daily. Until January 1st I am publishing old essays from this blog, like this one from September 2009. I hope you enjoy this view of this "locals" National Park an essasy I titled originaly 'Serendipitous Serendipity.'

When I pass cars on the Overseas Highway I sometimes notice a box sitting on the dashboard, carefully obstructing the driver's view of the actual road with a picture of the road on the GPS screen. I wonder why drivers on the only road available even need a Global Positioning System receiver in their cars. Except of course to block their view.And when on a mainland road trip I am an advocate of leaving at least some of the route to chance, a concept that GPS cannot compute. Which is a rather long way round explaining how I found myself here and not at Matheson Hammock State Park as originally intended..."Here" in this photograph is the picturesquely named "North Canal Road" heading towards Biscayne National Park east of Homestead.It was the day I left home with no fixed plan and no fixed route, other than the inevitable ride North on Highway One. After I took my pictures at Anne's Beach I figured it was early, not yet ten o'clock and I wasn't working that night so I pressed on. The (paper) map of Florida i carry in my saddlebag has only the faintest representation of South Florida on it and I really didn't look too closely. I followed Highway One north out of Homestead following my nose, ready to turn right or left as the mood and the signposts urged me. I paused under the cover of a gas station to fill up with premium and allow a rain cloud to move away while I drank with fizzy high fructose corn syrup with caramel and zero calories at 99 cents a can. I also chilled off with a frosty glance from a bandanna'd Hardly Ableson driver next door keeping his hot leather chaps out of the rain.I followed a brown sign into the void of South Florida agriculture. "Biscayne National Park" it said, an organization that had yet to penetrate my consciousness. It sounded rather watery and I was game so off I went, leaving behind the four lane madness of pawn shops, car dealers and Latin hairdressers lining the highway. And indeed there is a marina next to the National Park, and for some unaccountable reason this large sub tropic spider got caught up in the web of my lens: I am quite fond of spiders and bats and any creature that eats insects, though I like to leave them to their habitat as long as they leave me to mine. It is generally an easily digested agreement.It was a hot overcast humid morning but there were a few cars in the parking lot, transportation as we shall see for some hunter-gatherers with fishing poles and a couple of other gawkers, tourists like me with nothing better to do of a weekday morning. I at least had a camera with me to record the immortal moment in this unheralded place:There was a massive imposing visitor center, but I wasn't in the mood for statistics (Biscayne National Park comprises x number of tennis courts if you stuck the bay end to end, that kind of thing) so I went for a walk instead,
and took a look around at a National Park out of season, and thus peaceful:

It's when you visit places like this that you know that people who hate the gummint are full of crap. I loved the combination of wilderness area spilling over into the crisp organized park ambiance on shore, the mowed lawns, the wandering boardwalk, with rocks growing... ...out of the post-consumer recycled plastic planking: A playful conjunction of natural and not. All overseen by the heavy summer clouds promising more rain later:
Where we would be, I wonder, without the tradition of open spaces and parks instituted a hundred years ago by the Federal Government?
I envy the anglers their patient ability to sit and stare out at the waters of Biscayne Bay while waiting for good things to snaggle themselves on their hooks. Just above this woman's head the black spots highlighted against the bay waters are dragonflies. There were hundreds of them eating mosquitoes, the mossies repelled by my chemical layer: This fisherman was dangling a delightfully old fashioned cigarette holder:

A little to the south of the Biscayne Park Headquarters lies Florida Power and Light's Turkey Point Nuclear generating station. FPL claims lots of good things from this plant, including warm water habitat for manatees in the winter from the plant's cooling system and a park around the plant has helped endangered American crocodiles breed and flourish in peace. However plans to expand the plant's generating capacity are being opposed at the moment because the cooling waters apparently produce salts that drastically change sea water salinity. Which I am told is a problem even as Miami gets hundreds of megawatts from these light water Westinghouse nukes, and gets the electricity without spewing carbon by-products into the atmosphere.

However should this thing decide to go mutant the neighbors have a warning system set up, just in case:

Turkey Point has been operating for decades with no history of major problems and it survived a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. So I guess it's okay to paddle in the waters of the bay. I've done it and come away unharmed...
Camera-less tourists. I think they were foreigners which may explain that eccentricity.

I watched the dive boat coming into the marina down a long, well marked channel. The coastal waters around here are shallow enough it would be difficult to drown a grasshopper.
Then I got inspired to walk all the way down the causeway that sticks out into the bay. I crossed the path of the camera-free tourists here and he gave me a decidedly Francophone "Bonjour" about here, where they gave up and turned around. I pressed on.And what a magnificent edge this is. I love the look of the flat waters of summer:

There was somebody out enjoying the waters of the bay. I had some memorable sails on Biscayne Bay when I lived on my boat anchored at Jack's Bight on the Coral Gables waterfront.

Even modest breezes give good performance on protected shallow waters like these.I was getting near the outer end of the little causeway and wasn't I surprised to see Spencer Tracy organizing his lure. I had been under the misapprehension the actor died years ago:
Up close he was actually fishing with a younger Latino, quite possibly his son. They nodded amicably and kept their eyes on their lines. I stared out at the empty waters for a minute and pondered the meaning of this sign:
Far to the landward side lay the magnificence of the visitors center and the footbridge out to this causeway:
I have been hunting for manatee desultorily for some time and I have no doubt I will try again this winter. This was the best I could do here in summer: It was too hot to lounge and enjoy the day so I stood in the shade and ate a granola bar and drank some of my home-collected rain water from a carbon neutral flask and got back on the road back to civilization. Here represented by the Homestead Speedway track, a castle lurking in the middle of the fields, suspended between the bay and the noise of the city of Homestead. I dodged rain clouds and got back on the Highway home, arriving two hours later, only slightly rained on, enough to be cooled down, but not enough to stop and put on my waterproofs. Just think, had been following my GPS to my real destination I'd never have found this place. Matheson Hammock will still be there, when I get it together to go, but now I need to plan to come back here and wander the lush visitor center. And I won't need GPS to show me how to back track there.

Art And History Museum 2008

2011-12-27T00:01:00.000-05:00

I confess I feel I should have visited more museums more often for my blog. One of my favorites is the Art And History Museum on Front Street which carries the small town collections that illustrate this little town's particular history. Next year plans are afoot for extravagant celebrations of Flagler's railroad centenary and I expect we will see more of this place in http://TheKeyWestLocal.com when Chuck and I fire it up on January 1st. Bear in mind the exhibits have changed but the magnificent Customs House brick building is right there, down town, waiting for you and me to visit.

Small town America is loaded with repositories of local arcana and culture, and Key West has it's own Museum of Art and History too, and of course I think its the best small town museum around. Certainly its in a splendid building, an all-brick genuine US Custom House, designed with snowfall in mind and built to a standard specification.The Art and History Museum has several permanent exhibits on offer and rotates several of its rooms for visiting shows. Seward Johnson a sculptor backed by the Johnson and Johnson family fortune has been a favorite for some time. He likes to make mind bending sculptures rendering three dimensional that which we consider familiar in the world of Art. American Gothic, the grumpy farmer, his pitchfork and his daughter is an icon. So naturally the sculptor needs to mess with people's heads:They are enormous, the statues:But Johnson also has some more life sized statues for people to play with, possibly familiar from art class:The Art and History Museum has its own display chronicling its long era of neglect but the place has been brought back from near destruction and has become a lovely Victorian to wander around in, unusual in Key West, brick and wood and everything:
It's ten bucks to get in, with a whole ten percent discount for local ID, better than nothing I suppose, and there he is, at it again, Seward Johnson:It looks like nothing more than a copy of the Mona Lisa, the enigmatic smile and all, but walking along side the picture it becomes apparent this sculpture has its own story to tell. Playing on the obscure origin of this painting Johnson made a sculpture following the theory that La Gioconda (as she is known in Italy) was actually a version of the artist's male lover and "her" legs have been sculpted to reflect that notion:Elsewhere in the room we have women with pearl earrings and skirts flying, all familiar images rendered in three dimensions. Last year Johnson had an exhibit of impressionist art in similar style and it had quite an unexpected effect on me walking among the life sized diners I'd seen for years and taken for granted in two dimensions.The History part of the museum is preoccupied with one incident in particular, the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. The battleship blew up in spectacular fashion and the US took this as a sign of Spanish hostile intentions and promptly went to the assistance of Cuban rebels, ending up in possession of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.Speculation is that possibly the coal in the Maine's bunkers got wet and produced explosive gases, as coal will, and the less gullible take it upon themselves to suggest the US may have been responsible for the explosion that took the lives of US sailors. Rather in the manner of people nowadays who suggest the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Be that as it may the killed and injured were transported to Key West, the dead buried in a plot of land famous in photographs of the city cemetery, the injured cared for at the Navy hospital. The museum got a bunch of artifacts after it was all over:The other big deal in Key West history was the arrival of Ernest Hemingway and there is a fair bit of him in here:Killing fish, slaying babes......drinking, traveling and killing more animals. Fighting in World War One, as well:He wrote a few books in Key West and one about Key West, he drank with Sloppy Joe Russell, at Captain Tony's, and was fairly miserable at home by all accounts. In the above photograph there are souvenirs of his time in Italy and a picture of his first and (they say) only love. All terribly romantic but from what I can figure he fled Key West when the highway arrived and spent many years at his favorite home which was in Cuba, Finca Vigia ("Lookout Farm") which from what I have heard has been perfectly preserved by the general fossilization that has taken place in Cuba over the past 50 years.

Nearer to our own times the museum honors the Cuban American artist Mario Sanchez who died a couple of years ago. Sanchez had time on his hands (he lived into his 90's) and he taught himself to whittle planks of wood. It is astonishing stuff, street scenes of Key West in his childhood:And he got his own portrait painted too, by Paul Collins:His intaglios are much prized these days and he made quite a name for himself. I happen to know reproductions are on sale on Duval and I think its about time my wife got me one for my birthday.The originals that are on show at the Museum tend to leap out at you:The Museum celebrates the history of wrecking and Porter's anti-piracy squadron, which cleared out all pirates in less than a decade after the city was founded (much to the discomfort I'm sure of all the irritating pirate lovers who want to make out the keys were all about pirates). Porter didn't think much of Key West and left as soon as the job was done. But wrecking was quite the business for decades:And it was legitimate too. It made fortunes for it's practitioners, and brought a level of sophistication to Key West which was decorated by ship's cargoes from all over the world. Then came the lighthouses and that put paid to much of that. The museum has a couple of large maps of 19th century Key West on display. This one show Fort Zachary Taylor as a separate island, before the harbor was filled in around it:

Alongside that is a rather corny but cool diorama for Key West's waterfront at the same period.Key West really was isolated back then, and its population of 12,000 stayed pretty steady over the years. Nowadays we have double the numbers but we also have double the area as the city has spread over the whole island. What was scrub lands is now New Town. History appeals to me because it gives depth and meaning to the present. It gives me perspective when people moan about modern day changes. And there are news paper reports about the arrival of the railroad that express the fears and reluctance of many about how the island would be irrevocably changed. I ask people now about the notion that perhaps we should cut the bridge link and they look horrified. Change isn't always good but sometimes it has its good points!

A case in point: the police department recently lost its chief to an unpleasant scandal. In the bad old days they apparently voted for chief, according to a reproduction of the old San Carlos Theater at the museum:

And it gets better. We have a row of photographs documenting past police chiefs on the wall outside the chief's office in the police station. And there he is, Cleveland Niles in 1926:"Your most honest..." ? No worse than today at least.

And to close the obligatory alligator photo:

There was a man who lived on Key Largo who collected junk and turned it into Art. Stanley Papio got into trouble with his neighbors for bringing down thequality of the neighborhood. Where they saw junkin front of his house, he saw Art. He has a few pieces now on display at this museum and also the East Martello Tower the other venue for art and history in Key West. Or he used to. I'll have to go to the Martello Tower and check. Luckily I like small town museums.

Shavers Lane 2009

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

This blog started as a geographic photo record of what ever I saw and I wanted to see all the fascinating streets and alleys that make up Key West. This view of Shavers Lane from 2009 is typical of the essays I have been doing since 2007, a mixture of Key West streets and Lower Keys landscapes. All of which will continue next month when http://TheKeyWestLocal.com picks up where Key West Diary and Old Town Key West leave off.Shavers Lane lies west of Duval, and it has two notable bookends. Above one can see the north side of the Hemingway House on Olivia Street and below on the Petronia street end is the rather oddly named restaurant which sells desserts only called Better Than Sex:
In light of the fact that Key West is currently in a ferment over plans announced by the City Commission to hold a nude beach referendum, you'd think that a restaurant by such an unappetizing name might merit a referendum of it's own. No such luck. That and the ghastly Big 'Uns bar on Duval are here to stay apparently. Looking toward Olivia Street Shavers carries old time Key West charm, breeze block walls and bright lime paint:
Despite it's location in the heart of the city Shavers boasts vast open lots of land with tiny, elderly cottages perched on a corner of them: And it's own share of peculiar residents, or residents with peculiar senses of humor:I don't have any such sign at my house but I belong to the big stick and less braggadocio school of thought. On the subject of trespassing I really wanted to invade this secret driveway but contented myself with a picture from a legal spot in the lane:And this next cottage revealed itself a palace when viewed from two sides. Small and intimate from here:Stretching all the way back into the next lot with a side apartment and deck when viewed from here:Perhaps I haven't had my head in the air so much lately but when I spotted these sneakers I was once again reminded that people do the most inexplicable things. Urban legend has it the shoes may mark a drug delaing location. I am dubious because who needs to mark such things:There are large lumpen buildings on Shavers too, this one artfully masked by greenery in bloom:And these identical homes in the famous Conch Cottage style, though rather more spacious than Cuban cigar workers might have enjoyed:The originals might have looked more like this:

Or this, which is high on the scale of cute:And this a parting thought on the wall at the Petronia Street end:

To which demand I can only ask: why?

Christmas Lights

2011-12-25T00:01:00.002-05:00

I am feeling rather bummed that this year my blog is making way for the rather nice new site that will be operational, I hope, in a few days and that will take over from this space entirely on January First. As a result I am missing out on photographing Christmas lights around town. here is a replay of last year's selection (and my wife's foot is fully healed by now). Next year I expect Chuck and I will feature lots of Christmas lights on TheKeyWestLocal.com

My wife gave herself a stress fracture in her foot in time for Christmas, but luckily she's a Jew who has only the faintest understanding of the Christmas story, but she understands pain quite well so we drove off to Marathon to meet a human skeleton celebrating the season. I have previously photographed Ted, Dr Collin's human bone model but this time it was a matter of whimsy.When I asked the orthopedist who decorated his skeleton he looked at it in amazement and said "Oh, really? I never noticed" to howls of abuse from his office staff who took the time to make his offices look nice. Ted Collins is actually quite a decent guy and gave my wife a couple of prescriptions and an admonishment to take it easy for three weeks. No chance.My wife's health insurance through the school district kept the charge down to an entirely bearable $20 and we exchanged a few thoughts about motorcycling with his very keen office person (and rider). We left the office with our hearts still beating though in one sense we did check out properly.And so to the proper seasonal pictures for this time of year. Staples Avenue off 12th Street came well equipped with fantastic arrays of light and color and whimsy. I don't suppose one can ever have enough of this though what the banner referred to directly I couldn't say. And it did seem a little indelicate to ask. I'm off talking to people too much these days when I have my camera in hand.Christmas is wreaths and holly and red ribbons, it matters not your latitude. Chuck and Wayne and Cheyenne came along, my wife with her foot stayed in the car. This photograph illustrates exactly why Labradors should come in yellow not black (or chocolate). Nice eyes though and he was cheery enough that Cheyenne got jealous.It would be wrong of me to suggest that were a Triumph Speed Triple to turn up under the Christmas Tree I would be annoyed, but I really don't think 125 horsepower would improve my quality of life too much. And my wife would get seriously annoyed at the tickets I would get. Nevertheless it did look quite festive all in green, unlike the rather nice Yamaha Fazer in the background.These people are serious about their decorations.This one was across from 12th Street on Flagler Avenue.Reindeer and snowmen, I prefer the illuminated palm trunks.I hope this is as close to a snowflake as I ever get to see for a very long time.After all the New Town festivity we repaired to Southard Street on our way to the Tropic Theater for a night of French cinema and the adulterous exploits of Mademoiselle Chambon. On the way we took in some more lights.Under the fullish moon, of which more anon.This extravagance, a snowman rowing was part of a larger extravagance that illuminated a whole corner of Southard Street.The house was quite a show and attracted walkers just like us, dogs and all.There was a very aggravating sign in front of the house announcing it had won second prize for it's magnificent decorations. "So who won first?" Wayne asked the night sky plaintively. No answer was forthcoming. Personally I'm not sure competitive decorating is a sport in the proper spirit of Christmas, but not much is in the end.On the front of the guest house another Santa was fishing next to a sign wishing us a happy keysmas.A car came down the street and I pulled over to let them by. Instead they blocked me and took their sweet bloody time admiring the decorations. I should have gone ballistic but the movie wasn't starting for twenty minutes and well...Christmas...spirit...and all that. Bah humbug.But beyond all matters mythical the moon was full this past week and very splendid it was too.Wayne and Chuck had talked about being up between two am and three am to watch the full lunar eclipse, the first such on the winter solstice since the seventeenth century. Something like that. Anyway I was, to my shame, pretty much not that interested in the whole two ante-meridien project, a time when I like to be sound asleep when I'm not working. Then the Fates took a hand and wouldn't you know it I woke up needing to pee at 2:17 am. Not one to fight destiny I wandered out into the freezing cold night and there it was, a gradually fading moon. My gorillapod to balance the camera was not to hand but of course I had to give it my best shot, by hand, as though to prove I was there if nothing else. And so I was.My wife watched for a while but it was cold out there on the deck, less than 60 degrees (15 C) which for us is cold. I left the red moon to do it's thing as the white crescent grew slowly back. Three o'clock in the morning is a very antisocial hour for an eclipse in my opinion.

Good Bye Bargain Books

2011-12-24T00:01:00.002-05:00

It was not surprising I suppose to hear that this funky old Key West business is closing, leaving Island Books as the only bookstore in town. I love the Internet but I love books too. I wrote this essay in Spring 2010 and I present here as part of my ten day retrospective before Chuck and I fire up http://thekeywestlocal.com/ on January 1st. This essay illustrates exactly why I enjoy going around town photographing things, because things change. Farewell you funky piece of older Key West:

If you need good old fashioned hard copy pornography you might consider coming by this place on Truman Avenue.

I stop by here for the stories (not the pictures...).

It's a weird shaped book store as befits Key West's peculiar architecture. There is a long alleyway and little booths off to the side, each booth labeled with general subject matter contained therein.Any used bookstore that has a decent proportion of the famous orange spines of Penguin editions can't be all bad in my prejudiced opinion.Er, I took this picture to illustrate the broadness of my photography, not my mind (on top of all my other mental issues I am not hoping for better in any unlikely next life). I know I'm a philistine but I can't help it. Just be reassured if you come to Key West and want to get up to speed on the afterlife there is a section devoted to it in the booth behind the nudie magazines.

I am a boring old fart because I spend time in the classics section and perusing sailing books. Horror you can keep along with the bodice rippers as well. Blame the dog for the crappy quality of the next picture. Perhaps I should have checked out the pet section.Silly me, I did!

When I arrived the guy at the front saw me tying Cheyenne's leash to a lamp post and suggested I take her in with me if I "wasn't going to be too long." Which sort of instruction induces anxiety in me as I don't want to presume on my welcome. I am a pedant, a philistine and a bourgeois mouse afraid of breaking the rules. Oh well. I've also got a dog that tugs at the leash at the wrong moment. Books bore Cheyenne apparently. Witness the fuzzy picture of more stacks:For those of strong will who can pass by pictures of women with large naked breasts and men with six packs to beat the band, they can come in here and work off their frustrations. A used book store and gym. Who would've thunk? Love among the book stacks. Dream on romance readers; Mr Right looks like me and fluffs the blankets. Life can be a series of disappointments which makes it lucky we have books.
"Dead End" That's my kind of romance novel title. Have I mentioned before that my acute sense of irony is viewed by some narrow minded people as sarcasm? They even have a foreign language section. Russian and German is huge, Spanish is large and Italian is tiny. "Whoever doesn't read this book is an imbecille." Bite me.They were having a sale on comic books. Need I point out this is not my cup of tea? I told you I was a bore.If it ain't Tintin I don't care. They sell normal magazines by the rack load too. I'm sorry to say my illiterate dog likes books with pictures. Her former owners have much to answer for.It's just endless isn't it?

I came in to buy a copy of To Have And To Have Not by some dude who used to live in town, I'm told. The clerk said they were sold out. Bummer. It seems the book is a community reading project and everyone in town is supposed to read it for discussion later. What a coincidence. Strain your eyeballs riepe, those are the titty magazines in the background. You can give me a tour when you visit.
If you want the real thing you set across the street and pay a wage slave from Lithuania to tell you you are hung like a donkey and you make her every bleached root twangle. Someone with my acute sense of the ridiculous finds these places absurd. Like I said, I'm a bourgeois nerd.

I got out of Bargain Books for the loss of $7 plus tax (the nerve to tax me!). Kidnapped is a classic of course, and I haven't read it in ages. Cry Viva is a story of a gringo lost in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a book I've never heard of. If I'm lucky it will be Graham Greeneland, if I'm unlucky it will be a waste of $4 plus tax (the nerve!). My wife found me a copy of the Hemingway book at the College library. Weirdly enough I am enjoying it, the first of his books I remember liking.

Seven Mile Bridge

2011-12-23T00:01:00.002-05:00

We are closing in on the end of my daily publication of this blog after four and a half years and while Chuck and I work to put the finishing touches on our new shared website http://TheKeyWestLocal.com I am reprinting old essays as a way of reminding us where we have been and what perhaps i will enjoy photographing again in the once a day format of the new site. This blog has been great fun, and with the five essays a day format I have boosted the readership enough to allow me to think of better ways to present Key West online. Content will always be foremost because I want to see fresh material every day twice a day and sharing that task with Chuck will be a delight i am sure. I look back in some amazement at my output over the years. All by myself...

When the original seven mile bridge was under construction at the beginning of the 20th century it was viewed by many as an engineering feat on the same order of amazement as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" which at that time was the construction of the Panama Canal, less beautiful perhaps than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but decidedly more useful in the Industrial Age. The original bridge seen here from the new bridge, shows off the cement columns built around 1910 and still as solid as ever.

The original was built for the railway of course and posed a head scratcher to the engineers standing on Knight's Key in Marathon wondering how they were going to get the rails over the gap. They did it the Panama Canal way, building waterproof holes in the water with wooden casements and filling them with cement, giving them that characteristic rounded look: The new bridge was built in 1982 and opened to traffic much to the relief of the claustrophobic drivers of the Lower Keys. The new bridge is little more than a normal two lane highway when you drive on it: Of course its a bit wet on either side and the scenery is quite spectacular:The old bridge was quite narrow as can be seen today as it is still open at each end for pedestrians for use as a fishing bridge. This is the section of old bridge at the southern/western end, towards Big Pine Key and it's has been gussied up with cement barriers and trash cans:The northern/eastern end of the old bridge, the Marathon end, is still in use as a roadway for the trolley to Pigeon Key. That's an excursion I wrote about elsewhere and i snagged a couple of pictures for this essay.

Imagine driving this road and meeting a truck three miles out. I was told (though I don't remember when I rode the bridge in 1981) that when two trucks met they occasionally had to stop and squirm past each other, folding their mirrors and backing and forthing to get by. Some people really did get freaked out driving this narrow bridge for seven long miles (nowadays it has barriers in the roadway to separate the trolley from pedestrians and cyclists coming from the Marathon end):When the railroad was converted to a highway by the state of Florida in 1938 (thanks Works Progress Administration!) the state laid metal sheets across the rail bed, asphalted it and welded the rails as barriers, which are still there. Pigeon Key was a half way spot where rail workers were originally housed and is now a private park open to the public:The new bridge has a 70-foot hump three miles out from Marathon, which allows tall boats to go from the Gulf of Mexico to the Straits of Florida through Moser Channel.And the hump gives a nice view towards Marathon to the east/north (the road actually goes east but its labelled as "northbound"):Or west and south towards Big Pine Key, more or less:The top of the bridge is marked on the south side by the blue apparatus of the Florida Keys Acqueduct Authority ( the main water pipe to Key West runs alongside Highway One):In the distance you can see the incredible shades of colors created by the shallows surrounding Moser Channel as it spills out into the Straits of Florida.

On the other side of the bridge, the north parapet, is a marker I doubt one in a hundred motorists notices (and why would they?):On March 2nd 1981 an aqueduct truck carrying a backhoe accidentally hit and detonated the propane bottle that supplied the bridge tender's quarters on the old lift bridge on the old span: The 39 year old bridge tender died in the explosion and the Lower keys reverted to their island status for a period of several weeks. An old timer I talked to about the incident said it was a difficult time in Key West when everything had to be emergency airlifted or barged into the city. They fixed the bridge to take cars once again but the lifting portion never returned, as the new bridge was opened the next year to much fanfare.The speed limit is clearly marked though many people, visitors obviously, slow down to take in the views. Its perfectly legal to pass as long as you don't pass where the double yellow lines are solid. I have seen Highway Patrol cars pull a U-turn on the bridge to chase down and stop particularly egregious speeders. And speaking of views, they are quite spectacular, and I try not to get jaded or judgemental when out of state tags are crawling along at 40 miles per hour (The legal minimum for the bridge):That last picture shows two small islands off the southern end of the bridge, lying on the south side. They are called spoil islands because they were created by Flagler's engineers who heaped up the "spoil" as the dredgings were called. In fact all along the highway you will find deep water up close to the roadway where channels were cut so the dirt could be used to buttress the causeway.

I've gone out to the Money Keys and they aren't much:Perhaps it was a lack of mosquito repellent, or the hazy nature of the day, but I found the island to be rather gloomy and unappealing. Though the view of the bridges was rather nice:It's actually much easier and faster to get to the Seven Mile Bridge from my house by Triumph Bonneville than by bouncing 14-foot center console. The islands were the spoil material dug out of the ground by Flagler's workers when they built the foundations for the cement pillars of the original bridge.In fact I had been considering an essay on the bridge for some time, but to do it the way I wanted to wasn't possible during the winter (I tried a couple of times), but traffic was always just too heavy. This time of year there are fewer cars on the Highway so what I did was I waited at the southern end of the bridge for cars to go by and when I saw no vehicles approaching I chased the back of the line onto the bridge (the black SUV in the pictures above), so that by the time I got to the hump I could stop and take the pictures while stationary. I don't recommend stopping as vehicles barrel down on you surprisingly fast and you have NOWHERE to go. Caveat photographer.

Fat Albert 2009

2011-12-22T00:01:00.005-05:00

This essay is from December 2009, and as the last ten days of this year unspool I have included it because Fat Albert is a presence over the Lower Keys and because the Lower Keys have figured hugely in the life of this blog and the 2500 essays stored here. Next month I will be returning to a once a day format, with Chuck of Old Town Key West and we will publish two essays a day, one each on http://TheKeyWestLocal.com. I know Chuck is only interested in Old Town, which is his choice but for me all the Keys from the Seven Mile Bridge south are my playground and will continue to be on our new shared format. I hope you enjoy these retrospective essays and rest assured that while I take a break from daily posting my energy is going into creating the best new all around Key West website with lots of continuous fresh content. Please note that Mad Dawgz BBQ has closed since I first published this story, and that is too bad because I liked them.

It happens sometimes when giving directions and you mention "Blimp Road" in passing, that they think you are joking. "Uh, Blimp Road?" and you just nod your head sagely.It really does exist as you can see. It's a handy street not least because Mad Dawgz BBQ stand is right there, and this is the best barbecue in the Keys. Across the Overseas Highway my wife's "temple"crouches like a monument to physical fitness. it's called Pirate Wellness and is actually a very decent gym if you like those sorts of places (I don't). More obviously there is the Kickin' Back convenience store on the south side of the Highway, and that big white sign tells me I'm five minutes from home on my commute in the morning:
Blimp Road itself is home to the dump, now known as a transfer station, home to recycling and waste removal and all that good stuff (bring your used motorcycle oil for clean disposal) and also to it's namesake, Fat Albert:Blimp Road is couple of miles long and runs dead straight north from the Overseas Highway at about Mile Marker 21:
And the closer you get to the end of the road the bigger Fat Albert gets: And bigger (a telephoto lense helps):

I found a bunch of excellent info about Fat Albert on the Internet, and learned to my surprise that it is in fact part of NORAD, the US Air Force radar defense alert system beloved of movie makers. They say Fat Albert uses radar to detect smugglers but I had an experience when I wondered about that. I saw a smugglers' boat in a Stock Island marina after they had dropped off a dozen Cubans and had been located by the Coastguard and chased into Oceanside Marina. Cuban smuggling is big business these days as Miami Cubans will pay ten grand each to have their friends imported. Smuggled Cubans aren't allowed to stay so when they land they have to say their boat sank because if they come over on their own and land on US soil they get to stay, but if they are smuggled they don't (call your US representative if any of this doesn't make sense). So this smuggler's boat was docked and it was a 25 foot black inflatable with three blacked out outboards and I got to wondering if rumors that they use a heat seeking device on Fat Albert may not be true. That boat seemed like it would be really hard to 'see' on radar...

Be that as it may the blimp flies without any humans on board though it is piloted from the ground. I learned that when I actually met a former pilot, and though I was bursting with questions I refrained as it seems rather silly to ask a person about their involvement with something as secretive as NORAD...Anyway I learned on line that the helium filled blimp flies at 10,000 feet (3,000 meters give or take) and is 175 feet long (55 meters more or less) and 58 feet around (18 meters) and carries 1200 pounds (400 kg) of something mysterious called "payload." It is launched from a ground station visible across the mangroves:

And this is the ground station seen from the water:If you have any doubts about which direction the wind is blowing Fat Albert will point the way:At night you can see Fat Albert blinking red in the night sky. Not everyone sees it though and I seem to recall last year a small private plane took off from around here someplace and flew straight into the wire holding up the blimp. They say the wire has a 26,000 pound (13 ton) breaking strain and it didn't do the plane any good which spun out and crashed killing the people on board. The blimp kept flying until they retrieved it to check for damage. If you fly a plane, like a sailor you should check your charts. And look for blinking lights aloft:
Cheyenne was indifferent to the delights and mysteries of flying blimps. She is also not interested in the water and sticks firmly to dry land. Next summer I am planning on teaching her to enjoy the water.This is the view looking south down Kemp Channel toward Summerland Key on the left.

We have fun together. Awww!

This is the end of Blimp Road at the boat ramp:Just before you reach the end of the road there is a side street to the left but it's not open to the public:The turn off is exactly this far from the end of the road!
The exact cost of flying Fat Albert isn't made public as far as I can tell. But we do know that before Hurricane Wilma in 2005 a similar balloon flying alongside the NORAD blimp carried TV Marti anti-Castro propaganda at a cost to taxpayers of a cool $16,000,000 a year. And naturally the signal never got through as the Cuban authorities jammed it, but it kept the anti-Castro fanatics in Miami happy (and voting Republican in a keystone state). Now we are back down to one:Fat Albert is barely visible in this photograph but it is amazingly visible all round the Lower Keys in real life. It got separated from the ground once in the mid 90s and they had to shoot it down before it reached Cuba and nowadays it seems they have a remote control that can deflate the blimp and bring it to earth if it breaks loose again. One sign of impending strong winds is when Fat Albert is brought back to ground :Fat Albert may be costly but it is amazingly unobtrusive and life in the mangroves goes on as usual. If you stand right under the blimp you can hear it's steering propeller buzzing like a distant lawn mower on a summer afternoon. But out here it is silent and unnoticed:

TV Marti has thankfully faded away but Castro's in-laws, the Diaz-Balarts of Miami, who have pledged eternal hatred still push for Radio Marti to send propaganda to Cuba and here it is at Mile Marker 15, an unobtrusive gated little road opposite Baby's Coffee, according to Google Maps: More taxpayer dollars being happily wasted to keep the Miami Mafia (as Castro calls them) happy. I listen to Radio Nacional on 950am (classical music) and Radio Reloj at 570 and590am (news headlines) and Radio Rebelde 620am which means I suppose I am getting a freebie from the Cuban government. Pity it's so boring, all Communist propaganda of a rather old fashioned sort! On the other hand I can't imagine how boring it is to be on the ground piloting the stationary blimp. The Cold War lives and demands its sacrifices I suppose.

Sunset Cruise 2008

2011-12-21T00:01:00.001-05:00

When I first published this essay on the 29th of February 2008 I titled it "Waterskiing with Lookouts," because it includes a story of old time Key West. Which is why I am inlcuding it as part of my daily retrospective of some of my favorite essays over the past four and a half years. Don't forget please to bookmark http://TheKeyWestLocal.com to follow my blog to its new daily home on January 1st 2012.

When Jan sent the invitation to take a sunset sail to celebrate Lucy's birthday I remembered what I had previously forgotten: that I hadn't been sailing in a long time. We sold our catamaran two years ago and that was after it hadn't left the dock in a year and that was when we got back from our Bahamas trip in 2004 I think. So it was past time to get under sail and even though my wife was away shopping I wanted to go and celebrate in style. Carol and Chuck had fun also, on the schooner Hindu celebrating Lucy's unspecified birthday:

And so I did, and it was perfect, and it's one of those things one should do more often and instead we leave them for visitors to enjoy and they do. The eager tourists were sweet and spiffy in their name brand clothes and excellent good manners as they listened to Captain Kevin expound on the joys of Key West. They were entranced and I liked counting myself among them as we lurched out into the flow of the harbor life. I remember when I used to run a sailboat for cruise ship visitors, they liked getting out on the water as much, if not more, than resident Key Westers. Of course residents get all squirrely about playing tourist in a home town where being local is a badge of honor like being made is an achievement in the Cosa Nostra. So, to avoid the dreaded tourist label we skip the sunset cruise, and what a shame that is.

In actual fact the actual sunset sucked, not least because the cold front that was getting ready to climb into bed with us was loading the skies with thick gray clouds, but the sail was just fine without a wild display of purples and yellows and orange across the evening horizon.

Before driving us out of Key West Bight Kevin the captain gave the safety speech in a thick New England drawl and he pointed out that Key West is home to the second largest (winter) fleet of sailing schooners. Who knew. It was also his pleasure to point out that five of us on the boat were also licensed Captains, but I for one was busy ordering room service, too busy to be an actual licensed captain.

Room service came courtesy of the fresh young things living their adventures in Key West before old age and respectability descend on them. They raised Kevin's sails and then turned their hands to hauling out the wine and the beer, complementary they called it; free I called the ice cold can of Yuengling. I dislike euphemisms. Then the youthful adventurers brought out trays of bruschetta sandwiches, fried bread with meat and cheese and peppers and it was all too delicious. " Who told them my wife is out of town?" I asked, glad to have dinner served to me. Everyone was too busy eating and drinking to reply.

And so it went, this most civilized means of travel, a warm teak deck to sit on surrounded by true friends who know how to live and let live, people with lots of stories to tell and ready to laugh. We were I think, a little rowdy, though it was cheerful middle aged rowdiness, glad-to-have-woken-up-this-morning good cheer. I was thoroughly happy watching Kevin start the engine to get us through the tack, and then listen to the silence of sail as he entertained those lucky people sitting in the front row as we sliced past the Key West waterfront including this crowd of people perched on the pier at Simonton Beach peering at some unseen thing, the missing sunset perhaps:

By the time we had tacked out to the end of Fort Zachary Taylor it was getting quite dark and we had been crossing tacks with all the other schooners out hauling people around the harbor, including trading cannon shots which was corny and funny and very loud.

It so happened that Gretchen was one of our slightly rowdy party of locals and Gretchen was one of those five spare captains on board, and she started the cruise seeking approval for her decision to abandon buffing her 20-foot center console, and take the evening off instead. We all heartily agreed this was the right thing to do. And so it went. The thing was, that as the good ship Hindu turned around and rode the tide back towards Mallory Square and the lights came up over a darkened Key West, one of our number brought up the time honored lament about the old Key West, a phantom of a place before hotels lined the waterfront and the locals sold their heritage for a large pot of gold. Well Gretchen got to telling her stories of boating in the good old days (the only aspect of those days that I think I really miss) and we got to talking about water skiing, a hobby I never took up during my life on the surf riddled coast of Central California.

Gretchen (dressed in blue, stone cold sober, sitting next to a startled birthday girl who couldn't figure out what the flash was about) told of water skiing the flats even on windy days in places unmentionable, where calm waters lie between exposed flats that keep the waves out of the skier's path even on the very windiest of days. Ah yes those were the days, not least she said because skiing was allowed. Nowadays she said, the Coast Guard has made it an idle zone. That is to say a zone where the engine can be run at idle speed, not a place where only idlers may dawdle. She looked dreamily at the bright lights of the city's waterfront and remarked how odd the world had become. Nowadays you can only water ski with a lookout, she mused. And I wondered what it would be like, not just to water ski, but to do it like an outlaw, a gang member riding a wave while the Coast Guard's back is turned. It sounded very exciting, and I felt perhaps we should score one for modern day Key West, a place where lookouts, the epitome of lawlessness, find employment.

Oh well, I'll probably never know as teak and canvas and six miles per hour is more my waterborne speed.

It started to rain on the way home and I was so energized by my gentlemanly sail I failed to stop to put on my waterproofs and got home riding the Bonneville tinkled upon and buzzing. What a great day.

Goodbye To All That

2011-12-20T00:01:00.005-05:00

Four and a half years ago I started this blog and through many permutations have reached a place today where it is time to start again. Chuck of Old Town Key West and I have been talking for a while about combining our blogs into one place and offering additional pages to people interested in Key West and the Lower Keys. We believe we have found a formula that will suit you the reader and will perhaps find it to be a better way of seeing the islands that you enjoy viewing and visiting. I started riding and taking pictures trying to create a record of these islands in June 2007 as I went about on my Vespa 250 GTS. My blog page was called Key West Vespa. But I soon discovered writing about a scooter was limiting and boring. I branched out and took pictures of my life in Key west. I used the blogspot format because it was easy and efficient and accessible. These are qualities that Chuck and I both hold dear and will continue with our new combined project. Too often we are offered "new and improved" as though change is automatically a good thing. Frequently change sucks big time and the changes offered are actually for the benefit of someone other than the reader. Believe me when I say I have struggled with this conundrum so I am pretty sure of myself when I say that the new website will not be too jarring at all and I think you will actually, truly, find it improved.

My idea is to use a font, background color and title colors that closely resemble this format that I found on blogspot and that much to my surprise is a font that has not been used by anyone else. The front page of our new magazine format will be composed of two daily essays in long format, morning and evening by Chuck and myself on whatever takes our fancy. You will come to the new page on January First and you will open it to find a fresh essay of a dozen or two pictures just as you find now on either blog. Alongside we will have recent post and recent comment windows. Chuck and I will keep the comment section lively but my promise is you will never have to do more than open the page to get the latest picture essay on Key West and the Lower Keys. And Cheyenne will continue to figure in my life as much as ever.
That however is not the end of the story because if it were, what would be the point of the change, right? What Chuck and I envision is that beyond the daily blog entries there will be pages of stuff about the keys that will be of interest to you and that you will want to read. We are open to suggestions as the new website is expandable over time and we have designed it to be flexible so we can adapt what we offer to you the readers. At this stage we plan to start out with pages devoted to our favorite pictures of the Keys. we will be adding pictures to the gallery as the mood strikes us of places and people and scenery we find appealing. We will encourage you to help us select memorable pictures for our Gallery page. You will be able to download these pictures for free and use them yourselves, just as you can now as long as you mention our website.I first came to Key West by Vespa in 1981 but despite many return trips over the decades, by boat and by land the urge to settle down didn't overcome my wife and I until 2000. Chuck on Fleming had no such qualms and came saw and settled three years ago from the frigid Upper Midwest. We both enjoy living here, he in town and me in the suburbs on Ramrod Key. I enjoy commuting by motorcycle and while Chuck enjoys tinkering with his bikes between rides he likes to commute on foot. We both like taking pictures, and we hope those of you who come to Key West and the Keys and who take your own pictures will be moved to add them to a page we will be calling Reader Contributions. This will be your page for picture and word submissions, any way you like. Your views of Key West scenery, your memories of life here, or of vacations here or you add a vacation photo that moves you.

On January 1st Key West Diary will be no more as a daily record. It will become a static page on the Internet, apparently one more of those "I lost interest in my blog" public deaths by indifference. In fact it will be a static monument to my perseverance though innocence, stupidity, self doubt, and lack of confidence. With about 2500 photo essays since June 2007 I do not look back as my blog as a failure, far from it. I am actually feeling rather sad about abandoning this page that has been such a part of my daily life for so long. Nevertheless I have not lost interest in doing what I do in my free time. Giovanni, my childhood buddy in Italy has no free time because he's a busy cardiologist so he smokes compulsively instead. He envies me my free time and my life in the sun. If he lived in Key West Chuck might include him in his list of People of Texture features that we plan to include. We will talk with people who live in these islands and include their stories and their pictures on our front page. Then we will store the essays on a separate page which will be available for you to check out any time you want. We plan to build an online treasure trove of pictures and stories and people.

I am glad lots of people have enjoyed looking at pictures of this highly enjoyable place to live. Lots of people love Key West, and some want to live here while others keep coming back year after year to enjoy an escape on vacation. I have included pictures of my own escapes back to Italy because this was my diary......but from here on out the focus of the daily essays will be the Lower Keys. To that end Key West Diary ends on the 31st but the pictures and essays will continue on the web at http://www.thekeywestlocal.com/ Chuck and I and our wives and friends have been butting heads figuring out this new web magazine that will continue to provide actual online content that is worth looking at several times a day with all the pictures and wry ironies that Key West and environs offer us daily. We will be better equipped to do the social media nonsense that is so important these days and links to the ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter will be included and mobile machinery will have easier access in the future as well. Our new website is the fresh manifestation of our continuing commitment to these islands and to recording the passing of the days and the people who inhabit them. Now it is up to you to bookmark http://www.thekeywestlocal.com/ (don't ask how complicated the search was for a suitable domain name!) and keep us on our toes. We do not plan to let our combined website become stale not only because we are committed to it but because we want you to become committed to it too.Meanwhile I will post one essay a day here for the rest of this month as we work on setting up the new site where I have no doubt we will see you on January 1st.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

Good night, good luck and thanks for reading this blog.

Wheels Across Key West

2011-12-19T22:53:00.000-05:00

This short essay reverts to one of my favorite subjects of whimsy in this blog, which is how people get around the Southernmost City. The subject came to mind when I spotted this gaggle of moped riding tourists stopped by the light at North Roosevelt and Fifth. They were off to a flying start and brilliantly they all got their feet tucked up without injury and flew off down the boulevard in a group without knocking each other over. That was impressive, I am not fond of group riding.

This guy was riding a weird Chinese scooter-built-to-look-like-a-motorcycle. The line between the two types of powered two wheelers is getting less well defined as time goes by.

This man was skateboarding but it wasn't strictly for sport. He was taking his shopping home which I thought rather deft of him. The Kymco scooter in the foreground is equipped like a typical delivery vehicle in Key West with the cooler for a top case.

On the open road home I did a poor job of snapping. These brisk snowbird cyclists all dressed up and highly visible.

This dude was enjoying the fresh pavement at Mile Marker 17 where they did not seem to have the room to create a. Proper new bicycle path.

A proper cycle path the length of the Keys is the aim. It seems too long and too hot and too exposed to be much fun cycling the highway. I've done short bits with my pedal bike and that was how it seemed to me. Riding it on my Bonneville is always fun.

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Gerald Adams School

2011-12-19T19:17:00.000-05:00

College Road winds round north Stock Island in a semi-circle from US Highway One back to the highway over the course of a meandering mile and a bit. The city annexed this portion of Stock Island to facilitate a gold course development by the indefatigable Pritam Singh, he of Truman Annex fame. In addition the city got a little extra room to build out.

One city addition was Gerald Adams Elementary school, one of the newer projects in the school district. It sits between the Community College and the former trash transfer station N every day the slow children signs come out to keep traffic tame on the meandering College Road.

Not everyone knows this side of Stock Island is actually in the city but it is which accounts for the sidewalks that reach almost all the way round the semi-circle and more are being built all the time.

Crawling along at 15 miles per hour, not a human in sight I had time to enjoy the bright tropical colors of Key West's most far flung school.

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Duncan Street By Night

2011-12-19T15:37:00.001-05:00

The heavy hedge at the corner of White Street marks the narrow entrance to Duncan Street, which despite all appearances is actually a two way street.

Duncan Street is quite an unassuming but is best known as the home of Tennessee Williams who first came to Key West in 1941 and bought a home at 1431 Duncan in 1947. it was the only home he ever owned and he kept it until he died in 1983.

He was born in March 1911 so we ca expect a blitz of centenary celebrations next year which means all of us need to know all about the man. The Art and History Museum on Front Street is doing it's bit. Tennessee Williams In Key West

It was a breezy night and I wished I had my gorilla pod which was safely at home in the Bonneville saddlebag.

This part of Key West was on the edge of town when the writer moved here though nowadays it's just another street in the city.

I make it a point to ride Duncan Street from time to time just because it's there and it's leafy and pretty. Next year doubtless it will be clogged with Tennessee Williams tourists.

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North Cudjoe Walk

2011-12-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

There is a trail that leads off Cutthroat Drive on the north side of Cudjoe Key.

It is I suspect a road built for a development that never materialized and has become a trail for walkers or cyclists who like to see mangroves and palmettos close up.

The surface is crushed rock so it's easy to walk though in summer it tends to flood and the heat and humidity persuade my dog it's not worth being here.

So this is a winter walk, cool dry air, mid seventies, no mosquitoes and a light breeze mostly masked by the bushes,

Trash piles up from the bad old days but nowadays I find the dump, just up the road takes everything and is easy to use and reasonably priced.

Environmentalists tell us coke cans rot in about 500 years when left to lie around in the wild. This car was built just a few decades ago and it's almost gone!

Some kind soul brought a can of spray paint to the woods to leave this cultural mark on an old gate. I came to the conclusion it was either a representation of a face or a Dali-esque reproduction of the female anatomy.

Fat Albert's base is just around the corner close to the dump.

I wish flying for humans were as easy as it is for the turkey vultures.

They ride the thermals like they were born to it with no security checks or lines to wait in, no cancellations and no airline food.

I expect we will soon start seeing comments in the anonymous Citizen's Voice about all those birds hanging around in the sky.

It was no big thing being out in the woods.

But it was another great walk under the sun.

The highway gets clogged in winter and cold fronts are a pain but days like this make up for the bad stuff.

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Trumbo Waters

2011-12-19T03:34:00.001-05:00

A cruise ship was in town and even though it was a mile away it dominated the skyline of our fair city.

With all the people off the boat crowding Lower Duval I decided to take Cheyenne for a waterfront stroll on Trumbo Road.

We stood there outside the Coastguard gate looking at the water.

I watched the center console closing in on the Key West Bight with Sunset Key in the background while Cheyenne refreshed herself in the water.

This corner used to be known as the Toxic Triangle a place where the effluent from the generator in the "Steam Plant" used to be dumped directly into the sea.
L

I knew people who tied their boats up here and lived on them despite the stench, simply because the price was right (free, obviously).

Nowadays the ex-military landing craft that service Sunset Key tie up here in-between hauling garbage trucks and delivery vehicles to the island across the harbor.

Key West is a tourist town that doesn't pause and every day professional boaters can be seen earning money on the waters surrounding the island.

Looking at the water can make you oblivious to the beauty overhead.

And even the sparse greenery at the Coastguard base has an austere beauty.

Where toxic waters flowed and rat boats tied up today there is the very clean and functional and proper ferry terminal.

Three hours ride in the evening gets you to Fort Myers beach while the morning ride comes south and lands here.

For details: Key West Express

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Cheyenne

2011-12-18T23:15:00.000-05:00

Robert and Dolly had to go out of town so I have been over to their home to water the plants of which they have a number and all flourishing.

They live in a subdivision with grass so while I was at work Cheyenne took the opportunity to lay in it and really enjoy a rare treat.

I am not hugely fond of lawns as they take quite a lot of work to keep up and the small patch of lawn I built in a box for Cheyenne to lie on suffers from my lack of attention so it is not as cool and abundant as this when Cheyenne stretches out on it at home.

So she sat there and enjoyed the afternoon and after I finished watering we sat together for a while and watched absolutely nothing happen in this sleepy suburb.

It was quote pastoral what with the trees and the canal that could have passed for a lake.

Just another summer afternoon in the Lower Keys in December.

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Branches

2011-12-18T20:06:00.000-05:00

There is a tortured quality to the trees in these back country open spaces.

There isn't much soil, there is a lot of salt in the air and the winds blow most of the time.

There is no build-able wood in these trees, and no fresh water except caught rainwater so in the bad old days life in these islands was rather spare. In fact until the railroad breezed through most of the Keys were uninhabited.

For those reasons I have always doubted pirates hung out here quite aside from the fact there is no history recorded that any of the ever did live here.

But these pathetic stumps of trees make f good pictures if one is of a mind to take the picture.

I went all Clyde Butcher and Ansel Adams at one point even though all I did was switch to black and white mode to change the mood.

With a little splash of color to highlight the deer ate struggle of the bromeliad to stay alive.

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The Birds Of Searstown

2011-12-18T16:55:00.000-05:00

I was slumped behind the wheel of the car waiting for my wife to finish buying a pair of wooly shoes for her upcoming trip to California. I am not going to Santa Cruz to freeze next week so I had nothing I needed to buy.

Cheyenne was snoozing on the back seat and I was just about ready to regret waiting in the car when a flock of seagulls swooped down and settled on a pile of something disgusting in the parking lot. It was of course a moment that put me in mind of the more famous birds from the movie. Perhaps it was popcorn they had found on the ground...

The came, they went, a new group re-grouped and there was more flapping of wings. I watched as I waited and still my wife didn't show up. Searstown was bird heaven or hell I couldn't tell which.

"Sorry it took so long," my wife said when she brandished her wooly prize under my nose. "It was a Conch moment. I got stuck behind an employee returning an item and she gave all of us a long loud overview of working conditions at Sears." It's the sort of thing we incomers are supposed to take pleasure in, trying to prove we aren't in a mainland rush. "Not to worry," I replied. "I was bird watching," and got a quizzical look from my skeptical wife who knows our feathered friends hold little interest for me. Had I said 'motorcycle watching' she'd have believed me.

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Virginia Street

2011-12-18T10:20:00.001-05:00

The perpetual plea in Key West, in one form or another: "No Parking."

The fiction is growing on me that the chicken population is expanding like particles from a big bang theory. Park your car and return to find a chicken coop.

A nice house that survived hurricane season and will soon lose the shutters no doubt.

Sidewalk parking is illegal. Sort of. Or frowned upon at the very least. I just walked around the parked cars, no problem mon. Perhaps I should have dialed 9-1-1.

Sidewalk scrounging is a sport for my dog. This treasure trove merited two dives by my hungry Labrador.

A living fence.

I have not yet got a response when I ask a shrimp on my plate where it's from. They call them Key West pinks so one assumes...

From Canada we get the Zenn, zero emissions no noise car.

And not from Cuba we get cigars.

Caribbean tobacco is anything but Cuban and there's no sign the embargo is folding, so Cuban cigars will have to remain as illegal as heroin. Weird.

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Things That Grow

2011-12-18T03:27:00.000-05:00

It's bloom time in Key West.

I liked how this bicycle got absorbed into the vegetation.

I have no idea who or why these coconuts, sold for their water, were dumped here on Julia Street. It makes me laugh how people pay five bucks to drink a coconut it with a straw. I have more nuts than I can handle, from my afire trees and ay readers who want a taste can ask e for free when they are in town. Find your own straws.

I think this formerly living tree was sculpted into a dock post or some such considering it's rounded end. And here it lies half submerged and forgotten.

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Christmas Almost Everywhere

2011-12-17T23:19:00.001-05:00

This important sign marks the edge of the Navy base at Louisa Street. I rather fancy a tall fence and a quiet Navy base for a neighbor. That would be a Christmas gift I could live with.

I wondered about these red star fish until I remembered the season.

I found more of them. Some people dedicate a great deal of time thinking about what they will do for Christmas in the way of decorations.

Cheyenne found her own eye level decorations with a cat lurking among the mistletoe, which is in fact a plant that won't grow this far south, so the cat was actually hiding behind some conch shells. I didn't let Cheyenne steal any of his food either.

Christmas bunting did less to cheer these walkers up than did texting on their phones.

They sat on the step side by side in companionable silence each staring fixedly at a little screen their thumbs hooking wildly as they communicated not with each other but people far, far away. Perhaps in Bethlehem.

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Whitehead Street

2011-12-17T16:15:00.000-05:00

I passed the Southernmost Point packed with people in a crescent like a stadium overlooking the water and moved up a block to find a quiet spot to park the car and loose theHound from Hell. She loves walking the city.

The pineapple is supposed to be a symbol of welcome though for each pineapple you will find on the streets of Key West you will find two screaming signs advising all comers to Keep Off.

A Christmas wreath thought I, but no a sports wreath appears upon closer inspection.

I can summon no allegiance to sports, much easier to live with allegiance to a place.

A squash left over from Thanksgiving creatively turned to good use for Christmas.

Another pineapple inscribed in an impenetrable fence.

A good porch needs to be used often, and i'll bet this one gets lots of use. Not fancy, not large but with two decent rocking chairs that's all it needs.

An angel in the garden. Or is it a fairy?

Like sports the concept of a fraternal organization is rather alien to me. But Key West has plenty of them in all manner of animal forms.

Cheyenne was not ready to stop and shop, she kept going.

Had we needed refreshment there was a convenient bottle of beer wrapped in paper just around the corner from the convenience store.

We just kept walking as a dog walker does.

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