Part Time Big Pine And The Lonely Alligator

My dog does like to lie around and there are those occasions when she lies around and I say to myself, "She looks just like an alligator."

Check it out. Above we have a Yellow Labrador (not a Golden Retriever) and below we have a genuine North American alligator (not a saltwater crocodile). I can't see any difference.

We had run out of eggs and my wife had settled on breakfast for dinner last night and she needed eggs to mix in with the (soy?!) chorizo. I was going to sneak a ride on her Vespa to the Winn Dixie but as soon as I started to assemble the shopping list - phone, wallet, cloth bag - Cheyenne leapt to her feet and started wagging her tail in a big round circle. It was obviously walk time for her which meant I had to submit and drive the car. Where to go? That was the question buzzing through my head as we drove down Indies Road toward Highway One. Ah yes, of course, the Blue Hole.

We hadn't been to the Blue Hole, a former quarry filled with fresh water, in a while. This is one of those places that lives high on the tourist check-off list and is thus rarely unoccupied. Indeed there was a Jeep in the parking lot when we arrived but by the time I had Cheyenne's collar round her neck and a plastic bag in my pocket they were pulling out and leaving us alone to deal with the setting sun and the lonely alligator.

Cheyenne trotted back and forth smelling every single blade of grass and sticking her nose in leaf piles as usual. For every two paces I took she took a dozen. My wife sent me a message telling me to buy grapes and I was lucky the message got through as there was barely a phone signal in this sylvan place. The modern clever phone is becoming indispensable with all it's functions and I think of my Android as an electronic Swiss Army knife, as I rely on it for pictures and as a flashlight, a navigator and a message machine in the old fashioned way, not to mention as a fax machine.

In between all that I can put it in my pocket and stand around and watch the sun set. As long as my dog didn't try to go down to the water's edge to say hi! to the silent alligator we were okay. She tried that one time before and the alligator did stir slightly before I got my furry friend back to a safe spot. Eventually the sun went down and we had to get to the store for those eggs and grapes and tomatoes. We were expected at home.

Key Deer Boulevard looked unusually lovely under the deep blue skies.

I like finding solitude in these cluttered islands. It's as much about the time of day as much as the location when you can find yourself alone.

Winn Dixie was an island of light in the darkness. It was a good time to shop for food, the aisles were relatively uncluttered and I zipped through the shopping list. On my way out I saw this sign of the times. PT means part time, and this store has a reputation for shitting on its workers, importing cut price foreigners to do work formerly done by unionized full time Americans. Here's the evidence. No benefits for you! What a great way to treat the community you rely on for customers!

I feel helpless in the face of corporate America's indifference to the people who live and want to work here. I wonder what the point is of putting profits over people. It's an age old question, but it's too bad we aren't asking it anymore.

 

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The Aggravation Of Small Boats

My wife and I, though not anglers, a subject I do not wish to revisit today, do enjoy swimming in the ocean.

Our 14 foot Dusky has suffered from some engine problems but we believe we found a guy on Stock Island who manged to lick them so we have made a determined effort to send the summer monts swimming.

We define summer as that period when seawater sustains a minimum temperature of eighty degrees. Usually around April or May and ending around October or November depending on the number of cold fronts and rain.

Owning a small boat is a fine thing. My wife wmated a steering wheel so we went as small as we felt we could which worked out to fourteen feet and a 25 horsepower outboard which gives a planing speed around twenty (land) miles per hour.

it's easy to tow and to launch at our neighborhood lanch ramp. Residents pay ten bucks a year to use the ramp while I think the charge for visitors is fifteen bucks a pop.

The motel complex on Ramord was recently sold according to the newspaper. The previous owner was some Canadian dude who was murdered a few years ago in Costa Rica. The future of the motel, Tiki bar and dive shop was in some doubt but new owners stepped forward promising to continue to offer commercial snorkeling trips at Looe Key while allowing locals access to the pool.

It's about a mile from highway one to the end of the canal and my dock behind my house is three quarters of the way down. The drive seems endless at no wake speed.

Launching means I get to see the side of the houses I don't see when I am riding down the road.

Formal sea walls are popular though I like the mangroves next to my house for privacy and lack of maintenance.

There are a bunch of side canals too, blasted out of the rock fifty years ago when such things were permitted.

The main canal is getting a bit narrow in places as the mangroves tend to flourish.

Chugging down the canal is a bit boring actually and I'm glad we live much closer to the mouth. Also that puts us further from the street noise of Highway One. The prevailing south east winds mean we hardly hear any traffic at all at home.

Home at last.

Cheyenne is neither a swimmer nor a boater. She'll come out with us if we take her but she's quite happy to hang out at home and wait. Tough life.

Our first test run produced poor performance. I think the carburettors need to be cleaned. Sigh. Another haul out. Oh well.

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Latitudes Restaurant

Look at that water and those skies, a perfect day for a ride across Key West harbor. So we did just that.

Our destination was Latitudes on Sunset Key. My wife had the day off for a business meeting that went well so she wanted lunch in town.

"Lupita's," I said. Too far she said, unwilling to drive all the way to Bertha Street ten minutes away. Such is the effect Key West has on you after a short while. Anything beyond walking distance is far.

"Finnegan's Wake," I riposted thinking of their rather nice strawberry tart and custard for pudding. I figured a sweet end to the meal was on the cards as it had been a good morning for the wife.

"Sunset Key," she decided. "Today we have lots of time and we can spend some of it riding the ferry." The concierge at the Westin put our names on the 12:15 boat and we got in line to ride.

Like I said it was a lovely day to ride and we looked around on the five minute crossing. At the island dock we met an old friend of mine I used to captain with. Betsy likes driving boats for the Westin as she gets paid vacation and has regular year round work, which is hard to find for boat captains; I became a police dispatcher after captaining for a few years. Her kid plays baseball at school, in a town mad for youth baseball. Her life is made in the shade. We compared notes, my wife with her fabulous new job in Adult Education, me plugging away on night shift and Betsy successfully raising a kid in Key West, the hardest of cities.

Yards ago Sunset Key was called Tank Island where the Navy built tanks for fuel on a deserted speck of land in the harbor, never used the tanks and ended up giving the island to the city. The city then sold the waterfront for the Westin (the Hilton as was) and the island as well for eleven million dollars... the deal of the century in a town where modest homes sell for millions. So Tank Island became upscale Sunset Key where millionaires and public figures get to enjoy Key West away from us hoi polloi.

They say Oprah Winfrey and Kevin Costner among others, come here to relax as has the Secretary of State of various administrations along with ordinary one percenters who like tennis and golf carts and privacy. Look but don't enter:

Latitudes is open to the public as is a short stretch of beach which is accessible for a fee. The restaurant is pleasant, the bar is plagued by a television and the staff is attentive to the point of being obsequious. Want to know how wretched rich people are? Hang out in their hang outs for a while and watch the staff act like beaten puppies.

The surroundings are lovely of course and coconut palms sway in the breeze, deprived of nuts, emasculated to ensure the comfort of patrons.

Dinner at this place is ruinously expensive but lunch is relatively reasonable. We had one beer, a soup and two sandwiches for $48 plus tip. The ferry ride is free as is the view and the margarita list is extensive...

The lobster bisque was the best my wife ever had, she said. Sweet, creamy and smooth it was quite the indulgence with a crouton floating in the middle topped with pieces of actual lobster. We shared the bowl and it didn't last long.

The lunch menu offers a several starters and some salads plus grilled meat chicken and fish with rice but the sandwiches are in my opinion the tour de force. They come on suave holders swung along by po faced staff.

My Cubano had lots of meat and a slice of melted Swiss wedged into a roll that was sweet enough to make this a Media Noche, traditionally a smaller sweet, middle of the night snack. It was delicious of course as was the famous Laitudes sweet potato salad.

My wife had trouble eating all of her huge grouper sandwich and limited herself to just the fish on the second half of this monster.

I had a Stella served in the traditional long glass. They have four draft beers and a variety of bottles available.

We skipped dessert but I know from experience their crême brûlée is remarkable, as it comes in a dish with three troughs each filled with a flavored burnt custard.

The day was perfect with intermittent sunshine poking through puffy clouds and the remains of an unseasonably late cold front long awa humidity. Just right for sitting out.

The restaurant wasn't crowded, a reminder if one were needed that winter is over.

The loo is as remarkable as the rest of the place, all cool stone and sanitary woodwork with piped music to ease your bowels as you sit and think. Even the paper towels are embroidered which seems a monumental waste to me for a one use object. One day our one percenters will learn to join with the rest of us in the mantra that less is more.

Hemingway has his place on the wall of the gentleman's convenience of course. Everyone wants a piece of Papa:

What a lovely day.

Lupita's or Finnegan's would have been fine of course, but the views make this place special and they know it.

I find it intrusive when perfect strangers, after I have spoken but two sentences home in on me and ask coyly where I'm from with my Mid Atlantic speech patterns. In Key West every one asks where you are from as a way of making a connection, however I don't frequent bars and no one can relate to where I'm from anyway, so I find the question tedious and intrusive. I cut this nice couple from Louisiana a bit short when she poked her snout into my Anglo-Italian background, "You're not from here," she simpered. I wanted to tell her she was so sharp she might cut herself but I was rather sharp myself. I repented immediately and had to spend te rest of the ride not admiring the view but finding out instead about life in rural Louisiana. I said I liked New Orleans which was the wrong thing to tell these devout small town people so I generally made a dog's dinner of the whole bloody encounter. I wish I could be more like Doug Bennett and just be cheerful with strangers, like this: This Week on the Island . The problem is people just make me nervous and then I bugger everything up trying too hard to relax.

Then the ride was over and we immediately went our mercifully separate ways.

Back to the real world where ordinary people, shop for trinkets and ice cream. Thank you Lord for ordinariness. Latitudes is lovely as a once In a while thing, but renting a cottage there and hanging out in that rarified atmosphere would be too... rich for me.

 

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