I am fond of what Italians call the Campo Santo, the Holy Field. More prosaically in death-averse Anglo-Saxon idiom we call it a cemetery, and Key West's is in my opinion a particularly fine example of the type. I like to visit cemeteries when I travel and years ago I was smart enough to get a tour of this one by the Historical Society's Director George Born, who was well informed and armed with a dry wit. Thus it is he left earlier this year for Rhode Island, our loss their gain. Let's face it, a town like Key West, much of which is a 19th century architectural museum for the living would be hard pressed to create in its midst a holy field that didn't inspire flights of fancy in anyone taking a stroll through its avenues:
I first got a taste for the cemetery when I worked one summer in the shipping department at Fast Buck Freddie's on Duval Street. It was a matter of a few moments to leap on my scooter and take myself off to a shady spot in the city's best park. I always figured the dead, had they any feelings at all, would appreciate a member of the community of the living hanging out in their midst eating a sandwich and drinking a con leche while perusing the day's news or a toothsome novel: Some of my colleagues wrinkled their noses when I told them where I spent my lunch breaks but I shouldn't have been surprised, most people prefer the company of the living to the peace and gossip free environment of the dead. The cemetery enjoys a central location on the island, where it was put after the original cemetery on Higgs Beach got badly messed up in a mid-19th century hurricane. This was originally on the edge of town but development naturally overtook it and now its in the middle. Indeed they are running out of space and the city recently demolished a condemned house on Olivia Street and is using the space to add a few more vaults.
There are quite a few empty vaults scattered around the holy field but they are already sold under what undertakers delicately refer to as the "pre-need" program. And from time to time old vaults can get reused as the ancestors return to the format whence we all came. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," as my Catholic priest used to intone on Ash Wednesday:
Key West isn't known as The Rock for nothing and digging isn't easy around here. Furthermore the water table is pretty high so people get buried above ground. It's common enough in many countries but the other well known US example is New Orleans where the same rising damp problem requires the same solution:
The city comes in for some grief from time to time from Conch families upset that the place isn't in apple pie order. The city did surround the cemetery with a tall strong fence but that was a move designed to prevent people from sneaking into the cemetery to have sex or perform weird rituals, or simply to get stuck after hours. 
If you call 9-1-1 because you are locked in after hours, be prepared to wait, it usually takes a good long time to locate the sexton and the key and at the best of times the sexton can be a grumpy man. You'd be amazed how hysterical some people can become when they are trapped in the cemetery after dark. Personally I always liked the idea of a house on Frances Street with the dead for neighbors. Even now a two bed two bath cottage with pool and pool house is for sale for one point six million dollars. Peaceful neighbors at a price.
And Kemp's Riddley turtle had to be named after somebody didn't it? Rare as the turtle is the Kemp family has quite a few headstones around here:
The Spottswood family is a solid and imposing a presence in the Keys developing anything not nailed down so it would be proper for them to have a large granitic mausoleum to get planted in:
The family who first made their fortune pouring concrete for Mr Flagler's railway are still in town and the Toppino vault was I thought a little over the top in rococo style:
There are the well known parts of the cemetery, the Martyrs of Cuba, commemorating revolutionaries who died in one or other of the revolutions they kept coming up with, throughout the latter years of the 19th century.
Then we should never forget the Maine, blown up in mysterious circumstances in Havana, creating a Tonkin-like excuse for the invasion of Cuba and the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898. WMD's are nothing new, when it comes to invasions. This is simply a monument to the American and British sailors who died that day:
I like the private sentiments better and the cemetery is positively littered with those of course:
From the sublimely heartfelt to the wildly intimate:
The simplest epitaph tugs hardest at the heartstrings:
I know the sentiments aren't totally personal on this one but I like the cri de coeur nonetheless. I like to imagine my wife, bereft, echoing these sentiments:
Or this one, I'm guessing written to express serenity but it has overtones of hoping for the best:
And of course there is the kid's favorite toy, which always pops up in illustrations of the Key West cemetery, strapped down to deter forcible removal by hurricane or vandals:
I came across one vault in the Catholic section set up for a kaffee klatsch, supporting my theory that at least some family members like to hang with their deceased:
I was just an interloper in the cemetery, related to no one, vicariously wandering, but I was not entirely alone in my musings:
The Key West cemetery is wide open to anyone who feels like checking it out but it does have some rules, as confusing as any I have read. Does one park a moped inside the cemetery and is running at more than five miles per hour outlawed?
They banned mopeds and motorcycles after mourners got fed up with people racing through the cemetery using it as a short cut between Frances and Margaret Streets. The picture at the top of my blog I snapped the day before the city commission enacted the ban. Cyclists though still get to ride through:
Motorcycles bad, cars good, go figure. Cars can't use the cemetery as a short cut because the Frances Street gate is too narrow, even for a Smart Car I'm pretty sure. That would be cool,"No Mopeds, Motorcycles or Smart Cars." Mitsubishi convertibles are OK, Bonnevilles aren't? Humph.
In any event this isn't always a quiet spot for contemplation of one's mortality. It is, as I have pointed out, in the middle of town and that means the sounds of the living carry across it all. Key West is a noisy place to live; it has to be as there is no room at all to swing a sander or a drill without impacting a neighbor. And some bright spark lined up the runway at the airport so aircraft fly directly over Old Town when they come back to Earth:
Cultural segregation is alive and well in the land of the Dead where people are planted according to their typecasting :
It reminds me a bit of Bosnia Herzegovina where one could identify the sympathies of the villagers by the shape of their tombstones. As they had recently had a great deal of unpleasantness there, they had an abundance of tombstones to identify. My plan is cremation and scattering at sea, entirely ecumenical and anonymous. Though I enjoy cemeteries I do find their occupants' pursuit of graven immortality a little too hopeful. There was one headstone which carried the comment to know him was to love him, if that could have been said of me I might cheerfully submit to interment with a tombstone. However I think I am a little too astringent for such cloying sentiments, nevertheless I do enjoy the simple beauty of the cemetery with its inevitable decay and its flowered statements of loss and grief and remembrance:
And as we celebrate Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness this Independence Day Weekend, I shall spare a thought for those who are today what we will be tomorrow.
I have never lived in a place where the term local carried so much weight. When I lived in Santa Cruz, California no one ever made much of being a local, in part I am sure because locals and visitors never mixed. They drove down Ocean Street to the Boardwalk, we crossed on River and Water Streets and avoided them like the plague. In Key West such a separation of tourist from local is much harder to manage, the city is tiny, the attractions are everywhere and even residents of New Town are forced from time to time to cross paths with visitors. 
I wonder who he is because his talent is prodigious, and all I have of his are the beautiful drawings throughout this wonderful book.
The next block up is marked by Bogart's the Irish pub on Duval. This was slated for destruction a few years ago to be replaced by a gigantic entertainment complex. A neighborhood revolt ensued and miraculously Bogart's reopened the same as before, I'm told. You see Bogart's distinctive green awning and you know you are at Olivia.
Very clean, very modern, but who would have guessed the city needed one more place to buy water and chips. Another block east one comes to Simonton Street, a shady section with overhanging trees and a distinctive Dade pine house:
If one is rolling south on Simonton one also spots the muriel glued to the wall of Bobby's Monkey Bar a gay hangout eccentrically located not on the 700 block of Duval. Wilhelmina Harvey was an outspoken representative of the county at all levels of government here portrayed in Revolutionary pose in front of the old seven mile bridge accompanied by a few select locals of the era:
Harvey was a tireless self promoter, known as a "character" but a canny politician for all that, claiming many firsts- female member of the county commission, female county Mayor and she died in 2005 with the title of Mayor Emeritus attached to her name. There is a better likeness of her hanging in the Historical Museum in the Customs House.
And speaking of residential there is the old fashioned Conch style of living with everything chaotically hanging out:
Or there is the modern middle class as exemplified by these Conch homes, both renovated with nice landscaping and trees and stuff but one is clearly superior to the other:
And the winner is number two. Indeed, the second home has off street parking, and that is something it is easy to be blase about until you can't find anywhere to put the thing. I know the snowbirds are back in town when people flood the police department switchboard with complaints all night long about "their" parking space on the street in front of their house (!) being occupied, or worse some bozo is blocking their driveway (instant tow! Don't do it! $200+!!). Next to off street parking I am a fan of mature trees:
Goofy mail boxes are not exactly my cup of tea, though I confess our box has modest decorative artwork on it. Not quite as outre as this:
Speaking of fish there are seven of them at the corner of Elizabeth Street and I like to eat there from time to time:
Why they named it Seven Fish I have no idea, but a restaurant by any other name might not be so appealing. Or do I have that quotation backwards? And if the struggle to get to Windsor Lane has quite worn out the urban traveler, do not despair there is another inconvenience store and grocery on the corner filled to the brim with food and drink:
And so one comes to the final stretch of Olivia Street which soon crosses Frances and then White Street before disappearing into the bowels of The Meadows, a neighborhood that got an essay all its own a couple of months ago. Between Windsor and Frances Streets Olivia becomes a 20mph lane with a tiny sidewalk on the cemetery side and a cramped parking lot on the side with the little houses:
Undistinguished but oh-so-useful Olivia Street. A street by any other name would not smell as sweet. Or something like that.
The speed limit is a sedate thirty not observed from what I could see by local residents, and a quick squirt of the gas showed the road is smooth and wide enough to take these series of s-bends at twice the legal 
The right fork of the main road runs out soon enough, and ends with the inevitable view of the water, wedged tightly between mangroves:
Little Torch Key, like Middle Torch and Big Torch, is named for an undistinguished looking tree that apparently burns like a ...torch when it is ignited. I have no idea what 
Posted indeed. This next one appears to be appealing to Neptune for coverage in uncertain times:
It would have been nice had I noticed the 
And similarly here I also came across a coral rock wall, this time protecting a waterfront 
Away from the salt water is where one finds the bigger homes on bigger lots and they end up looking like discreet hunting lodges in the forest. I hit up a couple of dirt roads, made friends with a nervous dog:
and found a whole new subdivision I want to come back to for some in depth exploration:
Back on the paved road, civilization and a straight ride home to tea and a properly behaving lap top, at last:
Not much gas burned for an afternoon out in the sun.
The mass of humanity jogging by on the sidewalk didn't even notice me standing there peering into the black box and grumbling. I have a lot of patience to learn as we go in to the Peak Oil period and high energy tasks start to take longer and longer. Waiting for a camera to get ready to take a picture will require the same patience as waiting for a bus. Good things come to them as wait:
Above is Smathers Beach looking west towards the harbor and not a soul in sight, while below the view is east towards the Airport. These pictures make Key West look like a beachy resort town. It's amazing how easy the illusion is to foster with just a couple of pictures. 
The ride out of town was easy this morning, not much traffic, not much headwinds and an open dry highway. The Bonneville has hit 13,000 miles since I bought it last October and I have slipped into the groove of familiarity with it. The handlebars fall right to hand, my feet fit comfortably tucked up on the foot pegs, the engine response is smooth and full of torque, the clutch light, the gearbox smooth. The engine with stock exhaust purrs quietly at sixty miles per hour across the Saddlebunch Keys. I manage to offend a dawdling Debonaire Air Conditioning van by passing him easily and quickly where the speed limit increases to 55mph, and he eventually puts down his cellphone or his sandwich or his newspaper, whatever the distraction was, and floors his boss's accelerator, damn all expense in a mad effort to catch me up so when he does manage to grow big in my mirror, I use him as an excuse to pull over and take a picture of this castle in the air:
I miss riding in Italy, where most drivers pull to the shoulder to let motorcycles go by, and pause at stop signs to give right of way to let the bikers disappear ahead of them. Here instead passing is a comment on manhood and even women drivers get upset because they want to dawdle and you don't, so as you pull past they speed up as though to deny my 865cc twin the open road? Days when I want to dawdle I pull over when vehicles catch up to me, days when I want to go faster people hunker down and block my way. People are weird. The clouds are fascinating by contrast, all bunched and black and full of empty threats of rain.
As dawns go today's was a bit of a bust, some mornings the sun rises all angry and red illuminating the horizon from end to end with white rays of light bursting from the edges of the clouds like a renaissance painting of the Transfiguration. Though I'm not religious there are mornings when I am surprised God in a white beard doesn't appear from behind these stunning arrays of light and cloud to descend onto the Overseas Highways and present me the Ten Commandments, or in a fit of absentmindedness to demand the life of my eldest (and non existent) son. The burning bush by comparison to these light shows was but a feeble ember. I ride with awe on my face and wonder why everybody doesn't pause in their commute to drink in the beauty of it all. But they don't, they're too busy, and on a pale colorless morning like this I hardly blame them, but I stop anyway to enjoy the gray and steely views and force myself to take a picture:
It costs me a few pennies more to fill my three point two gallons of fuel at my neighborhood Chevron, since they don't give me the five percent rebate I get with my Shell credit card . Nevertheless I like to patronize my local business. 
Three point two gallons of 89 octane with 141 miles on the trip odometer equals...um...forty three miles per gallon? All this open amazing road all 27 milesof it from my workplace, enjoyed for less than the cost of a con leche. Why do they commute by car?
