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 tinkled upon and buzzing. What a great day.
And the Angel of Cleanliness had the same reaction as Lori when my wife told her she was off to Tampa for a few days. "Oooh, excellent. Shopping!" In fact so keen were they to go shopping that my wife and her colleague left town early to put in some quality time at the outlet maul near Fort Myers. Its one of those things, shopping as recreation. Everyone on the island misses it. Except me.
And they also come with a handy little clip so you can secure them to your person or your purse. I have made a habit of overloading my Chico bags and they are very tough and durable. They dry instantly as they are made of nylon and they are very useful to carry all the crap that accumulates in a busy life, school books, left overs, even trash and they can be tossed in the washing machine with the laundry.
A couple of Chico bags in the saddlebags lend great versatility to the motorcycle-as-daily-pack mule concept. Plus they may be good for the planet, if you care. 
Bob lost a two stroke Vespa P125 to Hurricane Wilma and he was pining for a replacement. He's lucky Vespas command no market down here("Huh? I could get a Harley for that!") but with that cash my Bonneville is paid for. 
And my wife has promised that she'll let me ride her Vespa ET4 from time to time to ease the bitter loss.
Riding round South Roosevelt Boulevard on my lunch break I saw a fishing boat at anchor, all lit up on the flat waters half a mile south of Key West. It's where boats go to get out of strong north winds when cold fronts arrive and a front is upon us this morning. Seeing that boat put me in mind of Safe Harbor, a boat basin off Front Street on the south side of Stock Island. 
I have an acquaintance who used to work as a commercial fisherman, and when the National Marine sanctuary was proposed for the waters of the Florida Keys he fought the Feds strenuously. And then he had an epiphany and he joined the move to protect the waters of the Florida Keys. Today he works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and he educates boaters of all stripes about the rules and regulations in place to keep the reefs alive. But its not just environmental pressures that are killing off commercial fishermen; simple economics are doing them in. Its cheaper to pay Third World wages and fly the fish to our tables than it is to pay Americans to chase fish. And so it goes, the shrinking of the Key West commercial fleet.
Thirty years ago it must have seemed inconceivable to all but the most far seeing observer that the shrimpers crowding Key West Bight would be gone, replaced by pleasure boats. 
Yet today no one would argue that the marinas lining the boardwalk look out of place. They smell a good deal better than the commercial docks, a level of authenticity the city fathers would have a hard time selling to visitors, if the commercial fleet were still docked in the middle of the gentrification that is Key West Bight.
Safe Harbor is still thriving as the hub of commercial fishing at least for the time being. Fishbusterz is the anchor business here, an ice house that offers dockage and a place for shrimpers to sell their catch. And refrigerated trucks stand by to haul away the fish; you won't often see an 18-wheeler with Key West as it's home port:
At night this place makes my heart flip, what with the flat shiny waters, the bright lights reflected and the sound of humming generators. I love waterfronts even if I really don't belong there. Boarding a ship, any ship including ferries and cruise ships feeds the romantic in me in a way that getting on an airliner never has. Taking my middle-of-the-night lunch break by prowling the deserted docks of Safe Harbor is pure pleasure.
I am not cut out to be a commercial fisherman, I don't have the stamina or the strength or the nuts to mix it up with people of their ilk, and they wouldn't know what to do with me acting like a tourist flapping my fingers at their hardscrabble way of life. On the recreational side of Safe Harbor I have no desire to return to boat living. 
But I sure do like looking at the craft lined up, listening to the ropes creak, watching the boat cats delicately prowling the dew covered decks. Across the harbor I remember the basins lined with live aboard boats, run down wrecks many of them, but homes nonetheless. 
They are all gone to make way for development of modern marinas that average pleasure boaters will never be able to afford. The commercial side of Safe Harbor is safe for now, but there's too much money to be made here to feel complacent that things on this side of the basin will stay this way for long. The National Marine Sanctuary spelled the beginning of the end for commercial fishing, for good or ill, as large areas of reef were placed out of bounds to sustain tourism to the detriment of commercial boats. The transformation of Stock Island will eventually push out the inconvenient commercial boats and I don't doubt Fishbusterz will get an offer he can't refuse. And then I will be able to say I remember the good old days, and that I appreciated the tenuous thread that held all this together, the shadows of boats barely visible in the encroaching darkness... 
And its that air of imminent destruction that perhaps gives Safe Harbor a romantic overlay, because whether I remember it or not in 20 years, it will still all be gone most likely and I will just be a bore for reminding people of what used to be.
Luckily I'm fairly immune to mosquitoes because they descended on me en masse and settled like a large buzzing halo around my head, the only part of me exposed to the air. When I arrived it was dark, around 6am, and the fence lights at the end of the military runway were blinking bright red almost outshining the moon.
Boca Chica Road has been a dead end for decades but the roadway got ravaged by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and the county, in their wisdom threw up a barrier and cut off the last mile or so of beach road. So now the chunk of roadway available for vehicle parking is a tiny portion of what it once was. However the pedestrian gap in the barricade up by the trees, is still wide enough for a motorcycle to pass through. And I was astonished by the amount of grasses and creepers that had grown over the unused paved road in less than three years.
When Emma and I used to come down here to go for a little Labrador stump the roadway was lined with bushes and trees all the way along the water front. Wilma put paid to them all when the storm pushed sand and water over the road spilling on military property inland of the road. However, by riding the Bonneville past the tree line, through the barricade I got a crisp dawn profile of the motorbike. 
As far as mossies go I'm lucky because even after they dig into me I never show a welt and the sting goes away just a few minutes later. Even so they were incredible. They landed all over my mesh and Kevlar jacket, and even with my leather gloves on they crawled over my hands desperately seeking blood. I should have dug out my repellent from my saddlebag but I wasn't planning on hanging around... and they took horrible advantage of me.
And slowly the sun came up, highlighting the dew on the windshield and the incredible, summer-like stillness of the waters. I was entranced, despite the abundant insect life.
We're supposed to get a cold front again this week, possibly by Wednesday with temperatures plunging back into the 60s they tell us, but at the moment we have the pre-frontal heat and humidity and the big puffy thunderclouds hanging over the Gulf Stream add to the summer-like ambiance. 
I took a quick stop at Geiger Creek, a saltwater "river" which is usually home to a bunch of bridge anglers, but not at that hour. The mosquito population here was minimal. An enormous relief.
And so it was that about 40 minutes later than usual, tardiness possible thanks to my wife being out of town, I started out for home. First I had to make my way back to Highway One through Tamarac Park, a subdivison of stilt homes set among numerous trailers on canal front lots. In the distance I could see low lying mist which I thought very evocative:
Highway One was busier than I am used to on my trip home in the morning, as by now it was nearly seven am and the daytime workers were massing on the Highway into Key West. Lots of people commute as I do (in cars) from as far afield as Big Pine Key around Mile Marker 30, sometimes to pay less rent or get a larger home on a more spacious lot. Others like the relative peace and quiet and many like the easy access to the water in the Lower Keys, thanks to the many homes built on canals. But they sure do clog the roadway between seven and eight in the morning. 
Tired as I was I had to stop for a moment on Cudjoe Key and attempt to capture the rising orb that had stayed coyly out of sight on Boca Chica Beach. I can only say it looked way better in real life. 
I do not associate the Florida Keys with flying, which shortcoming lies in my mind, not in the facts. People who choose to live around Boca Chica Naval Air Station are made well aware of the importance of flight with all the training jets swooping overhead. For some reason the pompously named Key West International Airport has its sole runway aligned directly over old town so city residents can take joy in the sights and sounds of commercial aircraft's underwear drifting loudly and lowly overhead several times a day. I, in my roost far from the madding crowds, hear the low lawn mower buzz of small aircraft from time to time. They remind me of summer insects but in fact they are the objects of much love and attention from their owners on nearby Summerland Key. People who devote their entire homes to the business of flying.
I am fascinated by these stilt homes that house aeroplanes in the garage instead of expensive cars. The houses themselves aren't much to write home about, architecturally speaking, but the notion that one lives breathes and flies aircraft is fascinating to this reformed sailor. 
I have mooted around the idea of getting my pilot's license, more perhaps as a thing to do for its own sake than as a means to an end. I have held at one time or another just about every kind of vehicle license, boat master, cab driver, truck driver, school bus driver even (pity the poor kids! but the job offered excellent health insurance) but pilots license? where I feel at home on the docks or in a marina I feel all at sea around airplanes.
Up and down West Shore on Summerland you will see the usual agglomeration of stilt homes, boats for sale, palm trees and..aircraft hangars? It's an odd mixture of dwellings and a block behind the airstrip, next to the canal, the homes sink into the usual historical Keys landscaping style of discarded boat parts and decomposing appliances and gently rusting cars:
And you can call me old fashioned but I'm one of those people who feels that had God intended us to fly she'd have given us wings, and I know whereof I speak. 
"I go up to San Francisco and we hang glide off the cliffs," she said and I went and looked at the hang gliders at Fort Funston and I saw them dangling underneath their wings like popsicles staring out at the foggy ocean and I realised one could do nothing with hang gliders but dangle and honestly it all seemed rather boring, so I quit before I broke a limb.
So it is that I am naively curious about the flying Keys lifestyle and I hang on the periphery wondering. Wondering who thought a golf cart might be an effective way to tow a plane for a start. I met this combo as I was turning onto the main street and the sight nearly wobbled me off my Bonneville: two men perched on the cart towing a plane backwards across the road.
They loaded up some extra victims hoping to impress the ladies no doubt (thats what we sailors do at any rate, always living in hope):
Then they parked at the end of the runway where they revved the engine up to make sure I assume that all would be well in the air, like commercial jets do, though the engine sounded like a lawnmower in distress to me:
The next thing I knew they were gone wobbling off into the wide blue yonder, until all I could hear was the summery lawnmower buzzing gently somewhere up among the clouds:
I'm not saying never and perhaps one day, after the economy gets back on an even keel and after my wife stops forcing me to go to school to improve myself I might find the time and money to try to get my pilot's license for the hell of the thing. Until then I'm going to fly like everyone else, as a way to get someplace else in a hurry:
My wife snorts when I tell her that in retirement I shall only travel by boat or by train or by sidecar, but I still think that if God hadn't meant us to have fun while traveling she'd never have given us motorcycles.
Its about that time of year when Scooter in the Sticks announces that his Vespa is suffering from lack of attention and as the Pennsylvania salt chows down on his muffler he wants everyone else that rides daily to confess that they torture their motorcycles with a lack of attention. I told him I wash my Bonneville regularly and he seemed almost taken aback. I wasn't lying, I have an entire routine laid out, and here it is.
Then I take a cloth and mop up some of the water. On the Bonneville it tends to puddle at the base of the cylinders front and back. I use a microfiber cloth not only because it absorbs a ton of water but also because it doesn't scratch. I am also in the habit of running the cloths through the laundry from time to time to keep them clean and grit free. So far this operation has cost me ten minutes approximately. I like to run the engine for a few minutes to dry off the droplets that are left, sparkling in the sunlight, so I'll take advantage of this pause to show a gratuitous picture of my motorcycle, looking good at the submarine/housing pens. 
Then I use the can of Anti Rust pictured and I spray it on the chrome, the engine covers, on the carburettors, on the cylinders, around the headlamp and instruments and on the handlebar controls. And that's another three minutes.
Then I put everything back in the crate, put the crate in the shed and go upstairs to read the paper and drink a pot of tea on the porch while enjoying that virtuous feeling that comes from having a clean ride. Naturally this operation is easy to do with an average ambient temperature hovering around 80 degrees with the sunlight dappling the palm leaves. As if that weren't enough my Parabellum 20 inch windshield needs cleaning from time to time and I like this Teflon based cleaner. Its does a nice job of cleaning the plastic and unlike Plexus, another product I've used, All Kleer does an excellent job of keeping the surface slippery enough to allow raindrops and even dust particles to blow off.
Just rub it in with one microfiber cloth.
And dry it with a fresh cloth and the shield comes up beautifully shiny. I also use this product on all painted surfaces, fork legs, side covers, fuel tank, fenders, lamp lenses and I find it excellent in all respects. I also use it to buff my helmet visor and it does a nice job there too. 
My fabric Triumph bags ($250) come with built in plastic rain covers but I like to spray fabric bags with water repellent silicone because they get rained on unexpectedly from time to time. It's worked well so far, as I sprayed them when new and they've been through some weather (rain, people, NOT snow!) and the contents remain dry. 
I'm also reading about a lot of frustrated riders Up North who can't get out the front door for snow sleet and ice. Naturally I don't have that problem but this stuff sits on the shelf in my shed for my other engines. I use it in my gasoline generator that waits for the next "weather event" to knock out electricity. I also put Stabil in my boat's outboard when its on the trailer during the colder winter months. To leave an engine sitting without this in the tank is plain nuts. The recommendation is to add Stabil to the fuel and run the engine long enough to get the stuff into the carburettors or fuel injection as well. It just takes a few ounces to stabilize fuel for months.
I use a specialised brush to wipe the links with good old fashioned kerosene. It smells like shit but the links come up clean after I give them a nice rag wipe. Plus I pull off the front sprocket cover and swoosh kerosene around there, then I check the tension (my Bonneville has the optional $250 center stand, thank you) and then I squeeze my Loobman chain oiler and off I go:
With apologies to Scooter in the Sticks because riding really is what it's all about. The rest is just dealing with crap. 
I took my lunch break late last night, long after my two colleagues took theirs, and I set off on an island tour. It was a perfect night for it, a nearly full moon, a strong east breeze clearing out the humidity and pushing lumpy white clouds fast overhead. At 43miles per gallon my Bonneville isn't as frugal with a gallon of premium as my Vespa 250 (70mpg), but its still allows me to rack up the miles without worrying about the cost of dead dinosaurs. My Shell credit card gets me a five percent rebate too and that's starting to add up these days:
I was enjoying the night so much I took a couple of back roads to my first stop. Denny's on North Roosevelt is one of the few overnight eateries on the island and at 3:30 in the morning I pretty much had the Formica dining room to myself.
I have been reading The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, a biography of a year teaching Gullah inhabitants of a 1970s barrier island in South Carolina. It's tough to read a book at work where I'm constantly interrupted by the phone or the radio, plus reading at 2 am tends to put me to sleep, so I prefer to write my blog between radio calls. Two strong cups of coffee and some peace and quiet were entirely refreshing at Denny's. 
I got back on the Bonneville at 3:55 and took off for Stock Island. Florida is a helmet-optional-for-adults-with-health-insurance State, and though I generally ride with a lid I make no apology for the times when I take to my motorcycle without. Last night was one of those occasions. It was quite glorious to hear the engine purr, to feel the reinforced breeze grabbing my hair and forcing my eyes to water slightly behind my glasses. When I'm all togged up with Kevlar and fiberglass and leather I have to force myself to feel the sensation of riding and it takes more self control to slow down and smell the passing saltwater. Glove-less, helmet-less and with my shirt snapping in the breeze I have all the inducement I need to slow down and feel the ride. It takes me back to my feckless youth when rain gear was a garbage bag and cold weather gear was waxed cotton, gross beyond measure where it rubbed the skin. Waxed cotton you say? No really, we wore canvas jackets and pants impregnated with solid kerosene wax to make it waterproof, which also rendered it smelly and and greasy to the touch. 
Nowadays even my panniers have reflective tape sewn into them. I was young and enjoyed riding in the 1970s and in my defence I knew no better. Nowadays I know better but I like to ride not just for the pleasure of the ride but also for the memories. Just being out in the warm night air, unarmored is a powerful memory aid. I grow weary of all the arguing over helmet laws because one side is shrill and the other makes me feel old, so I do my own thing and am prepared to take the consequences. Just as I revel in the pleasures of my memories.
College Road on North Stock Island, Mile Marker 5, is where I like to go when I want to practice taking some curves and pretending for a mile that I'm in the "countryside" and last night didn't disappoint. I played with my sight lines, took the curves with my toe touching ground near the apex as I practiced applying torque in the curve to increase traction and remind myself how to ride in the twisties if ever I find myself back among the mountains. 
After a few runs back and forth between the mangrove hedges I stopped to enjoy the post-eclipse moon at the edge of the lagoon and watched silver clouds scudding across the sky, driven by the winds. Across the water I could see the bright lights of the landfill, known locally as Mount Trashmore, the highest point in the Lower Keys. 
Nearer to me were a few squares of lighted windows in the dark rectangular bulk of the hospital, where I wondered might there be a few inmates staring at the ceiling counting their remaining hours and wishing they had filled their time with more adventure and less certainty. Perhaps a helmetless rider rendered immobile? Don't think I don't think about it!
Back in the city I turned left at the triangle and took off south on what Florida calls Highway A1A, which the city labels as South Roosevelt Boulevard and which I label as my favorite route into town. Since Hurricane Wilma deposited feet of sand across the road and closed it for months Florida has rebuilt the roadway, improved the bike and jogging path and created a smooth black ribbon of four lane highway. To the left as you head inbound you have the Straits of Florida, 90 miles of saltwater to Cuba, and to the right you pass the East Martello Tower:
And then a scattering of hotels, Double Tree, Hyatt, Sheraton famous chains all of them boasting modern amenities and ocean views in familiar architecture of the massive sort. Coconut palms transform the familiarity by shaking their fronds under the yellow street lights and turning the hotels into tropical resorts. I'm alone on the road and the Bonneville's headlight illuminates the sand and crab grass along the bridle path, the track where Key West's elite supposedly exercised their horses in the days before horsepower.
From Smathers Beach its a quick run up White Street, then Virginia to the back of the police station, park the motorcycle (rear wheel towards the curb, out far enough to be visible of course, Irondad) and back up to dispatch, lungs full of fresh sea air brain full of fresh appreciation for the rides possible in even a small place like Key West. All is calm in the room, an attempted suicide is recovering nicely at the hospital, no fights downtown, no burglaries, no lost tourists. Time to sit and ponder and feel the air, hear the motor in my head and plan the ride home in an hour followed by a fall into bed mind still buzzing with the ride. Do car drivers understand the stimulation they are missing?
Someone with a very large back hoe or a plentiful supply of dynamite came to the north shore of Boca Chica Key, at Mile Marker Eight and blew the bejeezus out of the limestone rock. They call these cuts in the rock the Submarine Pens. Thus one could reasonably assume that they were created to dock submarines in... However when you visit these very expensive holes in the water it becomes obvious the most you could do with them is...swim in them!
I don't know who dug them and I don't know when they were created but there are fully seven rectangular holes in the limestone, and to me as a veteran of the Canal they look wider and are definitely longer than the thousand-foot locks of Panama's Eighth Wonder of the World. They also appear to be a great deal less useful, even though they do look quite pretty in a pastoral, unmilitary sort of way: 
These holes in the water could be Key West's Stonehenge or perhaps, viewed from the air, they could be the island's crop circles or cousins to the enormous figures drawn in the deserts of South America. Submarines? I don't think so. I've poked around online and the only mention I can find of submarines and Key West are the official docks at Truman Annex, where the Navy was based for a long time. On the north side of Boca Chica Key the long arm of military militariness is still felt at the inner end of the road past the last pens:
The gate has a shiny new lock to protect the radar installation for the nearby Naval Air Station airfield where Navy jets take practice flights:
And clearly some locals have taken advantage of these unused giant swimming pools. I found a camp site complete with fire ring, tables and chairs and pool "facilities."
This place has been floating around in my consciousness forever, because I have heard people talk about the pens, but I have never previously bothered to come out here. Why? I don't know really despite my self anointed tag as an explorer. Now that I have come out here I feel like a kid discovering a huge new playground, and I'm guessing that weekdays in summer I shall find a corner or two within this "park" I can enjoy by myself on a hot sticky afternoon. 
The access road runs parallel to Highway One and then passes through some broken gates. As I rode the Bonneville through the gates I wondered, in a rather paranoiac state of mind, if armed Navy guards were going to leap out of the casuarina trees, armed to the teeth with camouflage sprouting from their helmets. No such thing came to pass, as I rumbled down the tatty old access road. In the distance, beyond Highway One, I could see the hangars at Boca Chica glowing in the evening sun:
And alongside the access road the old outlines of cement bunkers, probably ammunition magazines rose out of the mangroves like large immobile turtles: 
I first rode to the end of the road, snapping pictures as I went, still half wondering if I was in fact trespassing, but after I got to the locked gate I realised that I was alone on an empty, unmarked street open to all. The fact that we in the Keys live on small slivers of land necessarily gives these extra strips of open space value out of all proportion to what you see here. This is an excellent piece of parkland right off my commute and I can see strapping a folding chair to my saddlebag, stuffing a thermos of tea inside the same saddlebag and taking an afternoon to sit in the shade and read in peace and quiet, far from the distractions of modern life. No bums, no radios no nothing to disturb me or my motorcycle.
It isn't as though I have explored the whole place yet, so next time I will have to poke a little bit further, ride a little bit deeper into the undergrowth and check out a few more views.
Nevertheless I don't think that, picturesque though they may be, the Submarine Pens of Boca Chica Key are ever going to reveal the whys and wherefores of their existence. 
They call the chassis frame members a "tridiron" in smartspeak and those frames come in silver or black. The rest of the bodywork is plastic paneling that can be changed by simply unscrewing the various panels and attaching new colors of your choice. A nice way to eliminate dings and scratches...These 40 mile per gallon cars were conceived as urban transport and the original Smarts were 600cc, six foot long cars that could park rear to the curb in half the space of a "normal" car. In Italy they sometimes end up in motorcycle parking!
These newer models are 8foot 8inches long, hit 90 miles per hour and come complete with heated seats, air conditioning and full sound systems.
The entire vehicle is designed around the cabin which is the same size as a regular car's front seats, but the rest of the vehicle is a tad bit shorter.
I found the Smart pleasant to drive, a bit clunky in automatic and but smoother with the manual clutchless shifter so beloved of modern sporting cars. It picks up okay, but not brilliantly, and feels the bumps more than a longer car might but its a very usable vehicle incorporating a modest but adequate trunk. In some respects it is a worthy successor to the venerable Fiat 500, a simple car that offered no frills, a clunky gearbox (double declutch first gear!) and got people on the road even if they had little money.
The Cinquecento by Fiat has become an icon such that Florentine jewellers were selling them as trinkets on the Ponte Vecchio when I was visiting last year. Fiat has produced a new, more comfortable 500 as part of the new/old retro wave of automobiles led by the VW Bug and BMW's Mini, but my sister still has her original Fiat 500 in perfect condition and won't drive it anymore because she's shy and says it attracts too much attention! 
Modern Europeans are spoiled for choice when it comes to attractive small cars and my wife, while passing these paragons of economy on the pillion of my friend Giovanni's much more robust BMW 1200 two wheeler, took a fancy to Nissan's (convertible) Micra as her favorite.
For myself I still like the original urban machines, like this Vespa lurking in a Florentine alley,
or the BMW 650 I rented last June, seen here at the castle at Alviano near Orvieto: 
And modest scooters of all stripes still stir my heart more than micro cars:
Inside the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera, Tuscany, there are all sorts of vehicles that speak of Italy's need for wheels in the wake of World War Two. Piaggio's Ape (ahh-pay) is still seen everywhere on modern roads in Italy and the Third World including India where they still build them; it's a classic three wheeled workhorse. My wife cracked herself up sitting in my sister's Ape 50 "moped:"
The fruit vendor used to make his rounds in my Umbrian village driving an Ape 30 years ago, weighing the fruits and vegetables in a hand-held set of scales. And I remember the Vespa 400, real micro cars on the streets of Italy in the 60's and 70's. Now they are relegated to museums, the Smart car of their day:
And here's a gratuitous motorcycle picture, a heart throb if I ever I saw one, a Gilera single at the Piaggio museum:
Take that you urban poseurs! It would undoubtedly be hell to ride on modern city streets, but the image is lovely nonetheless, for those of us that dream unfettered dreams. 
My wife still dreams of owning a Smartfortwo convertible, she has her colors picked out, metallic blue on a silver tridiron, with the comfort package, out the door including sales tax for $20,000... but its not going to happen. And its a shame because this is the first car I've ever seen her really passionate about.
This was not a showroom in the normal sense of the word. This was a throwback to the East German style of selling Trabants, the smoky two stroke cars that passed for transportation in the former Worker's Paradise. You got what you were given which was whatever the Party thought you deserved to receive, and were happy to get anything at all, never mind the color of the body or the number of doors. The coed remarked how nice the Key West buyers had been when they received their cars, a Cabriolet instead of the Passion and how they had kindly taken what they were given (for $3,000 more- no discounts for French shipping errors!).
When my colleague took a 9-1-1 call about an accident on Highway One he had to make sure the wreck wasn't within city limits. That's because North Roosevelt Boulevard is technically US Highway One, even though it is a city street. Then he turned to us two in the room with him and asked quizzically: "Baypoint? Where's Baypoint? In the county?"
Bay Point is a peninsula that sticks out south of Highway One just about a mile or so, with a couple of dead ends and a few streets that form two surprisingly distinct communities in this small amount of space.
It's always crowded it seems like, in the winter and a motorcycle just makes sense for these expeditions into the hinterlands of the Florida Keys. Baby's Coffee marks the spot on Highway One where Bay Point sits, and there's a little grocery store next door, the kind of convenience store that people in the Keys can't seem to do without. Its known as the Halfway Store as it's mid point between Big Pine and Key West. Baby's has become the sort of frou frou grocery store that snowbirds seem to thrive in. 
They sell all those super expensive candies and cookies and sauces and pastes that you buy on vacation, fantasizing that the kitchen at home will suddenly become Aladdin's cave... but it doesn't! Unless you're my wife that is, but that's another hot sauce story. Baby's which was founded in downtown Key West still sells an honest cup of Joe for a buck including tax and their selections draw crowds.
Nowadays Baby's roasts its coffee somewhere around Homestead I believe, where labor costs and building rents are more reasonable, but moved its sole retail operation out to Mile Marker 15 after Duval Street rents started to go high enough to favor pornographic t-shirts over coffee sales. Behind the store is a county park, the sort of delicious public extravagance one associates with high property values, public income spent to benefit the local community:
I was sitting in the shade at a picnic table checking out Classic Bike while my coffee cooled a little. A local passed walking her dogs and got a greeting from a Baby's employee taking a smoke break behind the store:
Then my peaceful reading was interrupted by some cretinous customer who decided to take a leak in the bushes also behind the store next to the employee who was not blind. Emphatically not. She was a very loud female barista and she got a muted apology from the idiot. "And we don't just reserve the restroom for customers," she allowed to the dogwalker, a woman spared the sight of an elderly man attempting to pee into a tree. "What is wrong with people?" Which was way too philosophical a question for such a sunny President's Day. The most philosophy I could deal with was why did someone take on this boat project in the first place:
And I know for a fact that this country is absolutely bulging with backyard projects gone bad. When I see one here in the Keys it strikes me harder somehow. I imagine the happy boatbuilder reaching the end of the road and implementing a plan to cast off on the High Seas. Which naturally comes to naught, a bad habit, a woman, a family, obligations, los of nerve, Life; who knows what happens and the boat ends up high and dry. Catch Me indeed, I'm thinking fish are safe from this one. Back on land some people prefer to buy their projects intact and stick a manufactured home up on stilts; very popular and very neat:
Some people start their homes like boat plans and plant the framework for some stilts overlooking a dreamy scenic view:
There are the snowbirds who forget to come down for a winter or two and their plants blossom while their hurricane shutters stay tight shut:
I like to see the shutters open especially when they are these old 1950's style hurricane-bahama shutter style, popular on mobile homes of yesteryear with those old louvered windows underneath. Rotten for air conditioning great for nostalgia:
The eastern arm of Bay Point has the pricier homes on this island, with more on the way:
And I thought that was all there was to Bay Point, because I knew what this place was about.
It happened that a few years ago I was a tour boat captain and my boss bought himself a home on a canal at Bay Point. It was under $400,000 as I recall and he was over the moon at the bargain. The house was a concrete block structure, CBS, not on stilts and in terrible shape. It would have to be at that knock down bargain price... We captains went to work helping to install the wood paneled flooring which was quite a challenge as we all lived on boats and floors on a boat are something completely different. It took hours to figure out the jigsaw and get the corners to match up with the boss's anxious wife hovering and their new kid squalling and us captains scratching our collective heads at how to get the floor to go round corners and fit through doorways. It was a very late pizza and beer night for us at Bay Point.
The boss's house did look a deal better than this sorry shack for sale on the western arm of Bay Point, but cross a little bridge and you are in a world of trailers of all immaginable shapes, years and conditions:
The views remain spectacular no matter where you are when you look out on the water:
And back on the edge of Highway One there is a business for sale for an enterprising restaurateur. I never understood what was special about Knuckleheads, somebody's dream business which just translated into yet another sports bar restaurant selling television games and wings, and fried fish and beer, like any number of other, better established locales along the Highway. And there its, complete with handicapped parking and an airborne generator, ready for new owners to try their luck:
And look out at yet another spectacular view while they do:
For me it was time to roll home and meet the wife who had been off with a friend yard sale-ing and checking out a flea market. For some reason she found no junque worth bringing home so it was a splendid day all round.
Still sunny, still hot with a southwest breeze presaging another cold front to lower the 83 degree temperatures just a little bit, for a little while.
The tour guide opened it up for questions at the end of her presentation, and one member of the group asked immediately: 
The Florida East Coast Extension Railroad never made a profit, and the last leg of the journey to Key West took about 12 hours as trains were limited to 25 miles per hour on the exposed bridge portions of the 120 mile over-the-ocean trek. Passengers then had the option of bedding down at Flagler's luxury Casa Marina hotel (recently refurbished by the way and quite lovely) or riding the rails by ferry to Havana where carriages were loaded with tropical fruit for consumption in New York a few days later.
In 1935 a huge hurricane wiped out the financially ailing railroad in the Matecumbe Keys, killed hundreds of people and the connection to Key West died with that storm, in the midst of the national depression. The State of Florida bought the right-of-way and used it as the basis of an Overseas Highway which opened in 1938, allowing motorists to drive direct to Key West for the first time, without the use of any ferries along the way. When I first rode to Key West in 1981 the trip from Homestead took about five hours on a narrow winding highway. 
In 1982 the the Highway was upgraded and the journey to the mainland was reduced to about three hours along a modern broad roadway which in some places is even four lanes wide. The speed limit varies between 45mph and 55mph, and a lot less than that behind gaping tourists...
They love to look out at the water and who can blame them? 
The views are quite extraordinary if you aren't looking for mountains or valleys or rivers or forests or...all the other natural features one expects to see when taking the scenic route. However this is the only route through the Keys. Most islands are a few miles wide, the inhabited ones, but the smaller islands are generally lumps of rock or mangrove and they can be literally the size of a tennis court.
The waters are for the most part less than six feet deep, often less than three feet deep and on calm days one can look over the edge of the bridge and see the seagrasses growing on the bottom. Because the islands are basically limestone and coral there is not much sand and beaches are a rare commodity. The west coast of Florida has excellent beaches with very flat calm waters and the east coast is one long beach with Atlantic Ocean waves breaking spectacularly on them when the wind is onshore. The Keys are instead an intricate puzzle of land that is not quite dry and waters that are not always deep enough to wet one's ankles.
The tallest bridge on my commute is the highest bridge between Big Pine Key and Key West, and thanks to the deadening effect of photography the fact that it arches fully forty feet above Niles Channel is completely lost in this photograph:
From the top of Niles Channel Bridge one can see miles and miles of...mangroves, a forest of green about five feet tall, I took this picture near the sea level:
Descending into Summerland Key the Highway stretches straight as an arrow through the wide spot that offers gas stations a supermarket, a Post Office, a video rental and a hardware store, boat repair, dock repair, pizza and even a landing strip for people who like to fly their small private planes directly to their houses. The highway takes a curve or two and a bridge or two and there isn't too much variation as Cudjoe Key comes and goes and Sugarloaf Key comes and goes:
And all along the highway, unseen to the motorists, runs the aqueduct pipe, installed by the Navy to supply water to its Key West bases. the modern pipe along the modern highway keeps us supplied with water from the south Florida aquifer, and because south Florida is running out of water they mix in four percent saltwater and keep on pumping stuff that doesn't taste that great to me. I collect and filter my own rainwater at my house and store it in a cistern.
The pipe is hooked up under the bridge and it can get to be a big problem if they both get cut by weather or an accident. Also alongside the roadway are rather ugly power poles, huge concrete structures that march to the horizon and mark the line of traffic from afar. They are rated to withstand 155 mile per hour winds, and to its credit Keys Energy does a great job of keeping the power flowing along them, but boy, they are ugly.
The bridges come and the bridges go, connecting causeway after causeway, across Sugarloaf, past the school and the lodge, all at 45 sedate miles per hour (Florida allows motorists to go 5mph over the limit without getting a citation but most visitors don't know that) and every now and again there is an opportunity for a swift pass:
Then the Saddlebunch Keys come into view, a wide scattering of little mangrove islets on either side of the Highway. These specks are uninhabited, too small and scattered to support human life, and the limit rises to 55mph.
The views can be spectacular especially as the sun drops to the western horizon. What a lot of people don't know is that the Keys are strung out east to west and are only nominally north to south, so the setting sun will hit a Key West bound motorcyclist in the eyes in the evening:
And then finally at Mile Marker 10 the ambling Bonneville reaches Big Coppitt Key, served by the Key West Post Office so people who live here think they are in Key West but there's a ways to go yet!
And then, after Big Coppitt comes Rockland Key where the road opens up to its final four lanes all the way to the Police station in the middle of Key West itself. The last five miles are industrial strength freeway curving across the mangroves and at night part of the highway is illuminated by street lights, just like on they do on the mainland in the big cities.
The water tower marks the Navy base where they train fighter jets which circle endlessly overhead, practicing all those things fliers need to practice, much of it over easily accessible open waters, some of it circling overhead.
and then its round a bend or two more, a few more wide water views and its time to ease off and roll into the urban agglomeration of Stock Island, and then Key West itself starts at Mile Marker 4, and a couple of miles down North Roosevelt Boulevard lies the pink Public Safety building and my ride is over.
When I commuted in California with a choice of routes to and from the Santa Clara Valley I was always actively seeking out a new and different road to travel across the Santa Cruz Mountains. Now that I have but one choice the difference is in my head. Some days I'll leave a little early and meander a bit, take a dead end side road to explore, other days I'll make it my business to pass cars and stay ahead of the pack. Other days I pull over and let anyone who catches up to me pass. I make it my own rule not to leave late and not to be in a hurry. Its a road that demands a certain amount of patience because it is an easy commute, no snow no ice, few cross streets and long sight lines so its easy to get complacent and many no doubt would get bored. I do miss winding curvy roads but you can't have it all.
My Bonneville is ideal for this commute as it pulls strongly from 45mph in top gear, and if I drop a gear or two it will accelerate past anything drifting along in front of me. It is such a pleasure to ride I never view slow moving cars as obstacles, just as interesting challenges, variations on my monorail commute.
Yup, Key West can be a giant stop sign, the cul-de-sac to end all dead ends and the rejection rate is high. I can't for the life of me figure out who will make it and who will be rejected by the Southernmost City. As far as I know he is still crewing on a tourist boat loving Key West, she is apparently high tailing it home to Tennessee to regroup.
Key West thrives on its reputation, the weather obviously is a big part of the allure and always has been. In the 19th century Key West had the only liveable climate in the dank, humid, mosquito infested state, that boasted a capital more in Alabama than Florida, and no other cities of note. Key West flourished as a tourist town in the 20th century attracting famous people whose very presence snowballed the effect, as their presence in turn encouraged more people to visit. It looks like there's nothing better than a celebrity to help the Chamber of Commerce along.
My wife and I came to Key West as a pause in our sailing travels, we figured we could earn some more money, refresh ourselves after our two year odyssey from California and then move on. I wanted to go back to Grenada, a Caribbean island we had both enjoyed under sail. Well, it was a good plan but we got stuck as have so many others. The odd thing was that at first we positively rebelled against Key West. We wanted a cosmopolitan city inhabited by travelers and devil may care adventurers, a place where the worn out travelers of the world congregated, and instead of Rick's Cafe Americain we found the Conch Train and tour guides and visitors from Cleveland not Casablanca.
The place sucked us in, gently and over time, we got jobs, we found a pleasant marina slip for the boat, the dogs started to age, it seemed cruel to subject them to more travels by boat. Then it seemed a tad cruel to subject ourselves to more travels by boat. So here we are, not fence sitters exactly but not feeling trapped either by life ashore.
I have been asked if riding a motorcycle leads me to a more open approach to my life and views of the world around me, which is a big enough question, and its hard to separate myself from the machine. Cars are extensions of our homes to some extent, they are refuges, places of relaxation supposedly on the road between home and work. A motorcycle instead is the machine that demands concentration, one has to pay attention as one rides and despite the desire of manufacturers to sell us phones, cupholders, sound systems and GPS navigators, I resist the blandishments, with a simple speedometer and a few idiot lights. I like to watch the world around me as I ride through it. Undoubtedly my Triumph adds to appreciation of what lies along the road, making the journey the goal.
I like to take my camera and my motorcycle and wander the backroads, trips that would make no sense to me were I to roll out my Nissan Maxima, switch on Sirius and listen to 100 channels of satellite programming. The air conditioning blows cold, the huge engine revs freely and the windshield wipers combine with the ABS to make wet weather driving snug and secure. Whatever else a trip by Nissan may be, an adventure it is not. The Bonneville starts and runs reliably but as I ride I smell the smells and feel the raindrops through my waterproofs, I eye traffic as a hazard not an obstacle, I am alert and feeling my way as I go.
My early morning ride home from a night of police dispatching is 40 minutes of sheer bliss. The road is mostly open and if a car lumbers into my path I know where I can pass and were I can't. Riding home I leave the work problems, the angry callers, the demands of my colleagues far behind. The motorcycle is a flyer, the boy-racer critics of the motorcycle press notwithstanding, and Highway One is my ribbon home at six in the morning away from the chaos of the night before. The cool morning air keeps me awake long enough to roll under the house yawning but still alert. I can wander upstairs and tumble into bed, acknowledging my wife in passing, and then I'm asleep before I know it.
We live in Paradise, they say, but we still fill out income tax returns for the federal government, because the Conch Republic is a State of Mind and one must as the Good Book says, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. My wife is very persnickety when it comes to the paperwork, and lucky she is because I'm emphatically not. My diary reflects that and it is my belief it should render life as it is lived. I am not a chamber of commerce, nor am I selling anything be it a dream or a book or real estate. I am just opening a small window on my life and tjose of my friends aquainatances and strangers who pass within my orbit, like Heather and Scott taking a break at the Tropic Cinema:
Life is like a box of chocolates for Forest Gump's mother- its more like a Chinese take out for me; a ton of different colors and flavors and all rather messy. I don't think this blog would be much if it read like an advertising brochure, and it certainly wouldn't reflect my voice.
There was once a short-lived fad on BBC television called Max Headroom, a robotic newscaster named for a common bridge height limitation sign in the UK. He disappeared after some cultish adoration by the television masses only to resurface a few nights ago, lurking in a shop window on Duval Street, flanked by the usual adoring women. An appearance on television makes the worst dullard desirable. I was a reporter once, a trade I backed into by accident rather in the manner I finally backed into a settled life in Key West. But I got bored by the whole charade of trivialization that came with cable television, 24 hours news and endless talk. I quit my radio job.
We have been inundated with rain the past few days. The National Weather Service says winds peaked at 55miles per hour and my car mechanic tells me bunches of his bananas that he was anxiously watching ripen got knocked off their stalks last night. Well, I told Donnie, he should been expecting a catastrophe, these were my two days off and most of my days off lately have been meterologically impaired.
Anyway the house has remained dry which is always a good thing, nighttime lows dropped briefly to a brisk 65 degrees requiring a liner in my mesh jacket, but daytime highs have been hovering around 75 degrees. As my buddy Jan put it last week before he caught the 'flu, winter is over; no more 50 degree cold fronts this year. We're still lucky by comparison to a lot of North Americans, for instance when they get strong winds and rain in the Pacific Northwest people lose their homes and their lives; down here they lose their bananas.
I went to the dentist Wednesday, which is a chore that I perversely quite enjoy. Dr Harris is a man with an enormous sense of humor and his hygenist is very patient with my stupid jokes and my tendency to nod off as she cleans my teeth. I find lying in the chair very relaxing and she has to keep prodding me to wake me up so I can open my mouth for her. I think I have good tooth genes, and as a kid I grew up with the dreaded Socialized Medecine which meant I got lots of (free) preventive care.
I came out of the dentist's office feeling very virtuous and as a reward the gods sent a brief break in the weather. The wind had switched to the southwest, a sure sign of an impending cold front and the sun was taking a chance and peeking through the clouds so it was time to whip out the camera for some pictures. I was driving the wife's convertible with a slow leak in a tire, which Donnie the mechanic took care of before the trip to the dentist, and I stopped at Higgs Beach to admire the ocean and to try to capture the turquoise colors of the sun on the water:
I parked next to Salute, the Italian restaurant on the beach and took a short walk. The ocean looks deceptively calm in these pictures, which is not to say the surf was up or anything but wavelets were pounding the sand, pounding hard enough to make it interesting for passersby:
I spent way too long in Santa Cruz California, home of the Surf Museum, to be impressed by the waves rolling in off the Straits of Florida, but at least there was neither fog nor freezing temperatures here. There weren't many people out at Higgs Beach thanks to the rain, but not everyone at the park was entirely aware of their surroundings, as usual, and the surroundings were quite worth keeping an eye on:
Higgs Beach is owned by Monroe County and they have been, in their insolvency, trying to palm it off on the City, which politely declines to take the beach over. The Key West Police Department patrols the beach by agreement with the Sheriff's Department as they, in turn, take care of City property on North Stock Island. Higgs has been a bit of a pain since the Sheriff, in a cost cutting measure, abolished beach patrols by two deputies who used to ride around on All Terrain Vehicles. The signs requiring decent behavior are everywhere, of course:
And from time to time the Conch Train trundles past the beach, where the driver repeats the joke about how the White Street Pier is actually the rump of the old road bridge to Havana 90 miles south...
The residentially challenged tend to dominate the picnic tables under the pavilions at Higgs Beach and they prove to be an endless source of irritation to local families who not surprisingly don't like to share their pork sandwiches and boliche with the homeless subjects in thier reeking cerements sprawled all over the pavilions.
Parents like to use Astro City across the street and they sometimes feel threatened by the antics of the drunks nearby so they let the police department know, and we send officers out in a round robin moving people along all the time. 
It is hardly what you might call an ideal situation but it is emblematic of the close living that is required of islanders, including unfortunately the youngsters, seen here going for a drive while mama takes a nap on the bench.
There are lots of different places to visit around Higgs Beach itself, including the Garden Club in the brick Martello Tower, and the White Street Pier offers a splendid view of the waterfor those in a contemplative mood. For sporting enthusiasts there's the bocce court at Indigenous Park across the from the pier, and tennis players do their thing on the courts acrossd the street from the restaurant:
A bicycle path runs along the waterfront, even though some cyclists lose their way in the shrubbery and end up creating their own obstacle course across the parking lot:
Alongside the restaurant with the beachfront view there's a rest room playfully covered in muriels of a particularly fishy sort. Some locals maintain their dapper appearance by using the beach shower intended to refresh swimmers, and the sinks in the restrooms intended to wash hands. Actually using the restroom can be an adventure for those of us who like to take our ablutions in the privacy of our own bourgeois homes:
People do tend to stay away from the beach because there are just too many bums they say. Too bad I say, because Higgs is the people's park, with its dog run, picnic tables and water views. We should all, even we the bourgeoisie have a slice of the recreational pie, especially on this small cramped island.
Yessiree, that's where I parked the Nissan, right there! where it says park... Our visiting relatives like plants so we took Cousins Bob and Lyn to see the Botantical Gardens on north Stock Island.
I like to park in the shade, even in winter, its force of habit in these parts, and a survivial technique in summer.
The Gardens have been expanding for a while and more expansion is planned in the rubble-filled area where the Monroe County Public Health building used to sit, now marked with an advertising sign:
In case there be any doubt at all, signs will tell the anxious visitor exactly how to proceed and what perils await within:
Even though the "donation" has increased from four dollars when last I was here to five whole dollars these days. I guess they have to fund the burgeoning signs somehow. And then there's the free paperwork. Cousin Lyn managed to persuade the overly enthusiastic front desk volunteer that she only needed one set of guides to the Gardens and still ended up with a fistful :
And the sergeant-major like volunteer at the gate was all over us when she learned the visitors were from out of town. She pretty much had their tour planned all the way till sunset (they never did make it to Mallory Square, those Chicago slackers).
I think the volunteers at the Garden are proud of their expanded flourishing oasis off College Road. They have a right to be because it has become quite the formal garden after many years of happy neglect. They built the visitors' center, they even stuck in a massive fountain, in a sort of amphitheater, whose purpose remains to me, somewhat obscure:
All this organizational efficency is a little hard for me to take, not just because I am a rebel at heart (who obeys the signs) but because I remember the good old days. Quelle drag, I am sounding like an old fart, because I've lived here too long.
In 2000, when I was living on my boat parked at Sunset Marina, just up the street I would spend lots of time wandering the gardens. In those good old days I would go home, pick up my Labrador Emma and we would wander the garden at will.
These days happily they still allow dogs on leashes which was the ignored rule back then too. Emma had the freedom of the garden, the gate hung open on a hinge, there was no visitor's center, or elaborate fountain or even a marked parking lot. I left the car tucked in a corner behind the shuttered Health Center and off we would romp, through the bushes along the barely marked trails. There was no entrance fee, not even disguised as a "donation" and just a few of the plants were labeled. Today the plants are catalogued.
At dusk there was an excellent chance of encountering a residentially challenged local subject bedding down under the bushes and at dawn one could occasionally meet a man arching his back comfortably as he watered those same bushes after he had packed up his camp. There were benches which made this an superb place for a pizza picnic, and on windy days I loved to sit out and alternately listen to Emma panting as she lumbered around, or to the wind whistling through the trees. It was my refuge, a place barely noticed by the mainstream population, tourists or monied donors.
It is progress and I have come to realise I must bow to it. Change is good, even if you can't have a picnic in the gardens anymore. Emma has long since gone to her reward but the gardens actually are pretty nice even if they are over organized. The new boardwalks are made of recycled plastic "wood" and are wheelchair accessible. 
The plants are labeled but the garden's essential air of mystery and its forest-like depth has been maintained and enhanced. And the dudes peeing in the bushes are, like Emma, banished to memory. In this case the substantial boundary fence keeps undesirables out. 
It was a very pleasant trip, a journey of discovery as I piloted Lyn and Bob from shade to sunlight, trundling down the boardwalk, past exotic ferns that elicited squeals of delight and grunts of puzzlement. Bob fingered this very gingerly as the photographic possibilities rolled through his brain. I just pointed and shot.
And so it was, the stroll got us back to the beginning, a very good place to start:
In the end in fact I came to the conclusion, reluctantly, that change can be good, and a five dollar entry fee, even if disguised as a "donation," can make for a greatly improved garden. Next time I will delight in parking in the clearly marked spaces and I shall stride into the visitor's center with joy in my heart. For this is the way of the new improved future, we may have nowhere to live but our Botanical garden will be second to none.
When Bruce and Celia descended on us recently, an attempt to escape the "dry heat" of mid winter in New Mexico, we spent an enjoyable time with them as they revisited this area, in which they had lived previously. This past weekend my wife's cousins from Chicago stopped by as part of a Florida tour, and they were new to Key West. Bob had been down decades ago, dragged by his father on a family vacation but Lyn had never been at all, so their visit gave me an opportunity to see Key West through fresh eyes, always a pleasure.
I learned a lot about Bob and Lyn this trip, and though I knew a trip to the Botanical Garden was on the cards (report to follow!) I had no idea they would be entranced by butterflies. And it just so happens Key West has a Butterfly Conservatory on Duval Street.
I have been there before in the 1300 block of Duval, and its an easy place to visit with plenty of parking in back. The conservatory was the brainchild of a man who came to Key West obsessed by the insects and to feed his passion he built the greenhouse on Duval Street just a few years ago. Its never easy to figure which businesses are going to flourish in the Keys but this one seems to be doing well, certainly I'd never have figured that to be the case. There was a healthy line to buy the $10 tickets:
The conservatory itself is a greenhouse attached to the back of a human house and the front portion of the building offers an extensive range of all things butterfly: clothing, jewelry, knicks knacks, toys and cards and I don't know what. A man has to feed his butterfly habit I suppose, but if it isn't a bookstore or a motorcycle dealer I'm a terrible shopper and all this insect stuff left me perplexed. The best part was The Rules, as announced by a cheerleader type in the knick knack store. It turns out one of the rules is that you can't photograph the junque as some of the artwork is copyrighted but one can snap the flutterbies though as long as you don't touch them.
Getting in and out of the atmospherically delicate conservatory is no mean feat. There are double doors and I understand it is a Federal Offense to release butterflies into the outside world. And as unlikely as it might seem it turns out there is some possibility of live actual danger from visiting the greenhouse, so as you can see above we were duly warned. After all that we arrived in the enchanted forest.
I also discovered that butterflies are bloody difficult to photograph. The above picture should have illustrated a positive cloud of the things fluttering about but somehow they are invisible to the camera's lense. Not that you would have known judging by the strenuous efforts of every single visitor to record their magic moments:
Cousin Bob is a pretty intense amateur with a camera and he drags an absolute suitcase ("lead lined" he jokes, not far from the truth) of lenses and other apparatus around behind him. He got into the butterfly thing like butterflies on...honeydew melon:
Which I found rather creepy actually. They sit on the fruit probing it with their snouts and their wings pulsing like vampires sucking up blood. Bob was ecstatic and he sat and smiled like a schoolboy in an adult theater, a mixture of bliss and overwhelm alternating on his features.
I felt like a successful tour guide as I watched him follow the colors as they floated around his delighted face. I could have done without the piped music but the place had an unreal serenity to it, and I'm betting I had a goofy expression on my face too. No butterflies landed on us to bring us luck as they say, but we watched them as they ignored us:
I had to leave after a fair bit of hanging around. I had to work that night and the serenity thing was making my eyes droop. It was an excellent outing and I am going to do it again, often, with visitors or not. The conservatory also offers a bench outside the front door to allow for some people watching if you prefer humans to insects. Or if you are a tour guide bored by innumerable visits to see the butterflies. Hard to immagine but here he is:
I know nothing about lepidoptera but I sure enjoyed the conservatory. 
There are better and worse examples of housing on Stock Island but this place houses many of the lower paid people who keep Key West's economy functioning. During the recent development boom in south Florida Stock Island was bought up in large chunks by people with elaborate plans for the future and some of those plans are starting to see the light of day.
Fancy new boat slips are first up and former shrimp docks are being razed to make way for the fresh new water playgrounds. The shrimp boats have moved across the water to Safe Harbor and their future there seems assured by a local who has set up a permanent home for them. However this section of Shrimp Road has been bulldozed and cleaned up in preparation reportedly for a hotel and upscale appurtenances, while a few small workshops are still holding onto their places in the sun. This one was featured in a recent Citizen article:
And this boat building yard seems to be doing well. Their multihulls are well known in the world of sailing:
Behind Multihull Technologies lies the last haul out facility which has not yet announced plans to close and be transformed into luxury waterfront housing. I used to know it as the 3-D boatyard, and it's still moving boats around in the slings we boaters know and dread:
All skippers hate seeing their cherished vessels dragged around the yard like a bag of cement but these Travelifts are critical for the future of boating in Key West. If you can't lift boats out of the water from time to time you can't do basic maintenance. The Travelift costs better than a quarter million dollars an investment that needs a long future to pay itself off. Boating, traditionally of the commercial sort, but more recently pleasure boating, has kept Stock island in the marine business for a very long time:
Originally this was the island where Key West kept its livestock, and in servicing the needs of what was Florida's largest city Stock Island adopted its role of satellite to its more famous and more polished neighbor to the south. Now it appears to be growing into its own upscale destination, for good or ill. Peninsular Boatyard used to offer haul outs, marine services, a shop and liveaboard slips as well as a dinghy dock for people living out at anchor, in a dusty working class environment. The plan is for these monstrous new tin sheds to house the runabouts of the new class of Stock Island resident projected to take an interest in this freshly minted community:
Granted, the state of dilapidation on Stock Island makes it hard to defend the status quo:
But no one said commercial fishing has to be tidy. It's a disorganized way to make a living, sudden wealth with a good catch, back breaking labor relieved by plentiful alcohol, and its adherents aren't required to have strong formal educations. All of which combines to produce an industry that exists in a state of mostly benign chaos:
Fishermen, if they have to be lumped together, could be defined as old fashioned rugged individualists, self reliant businessmen of the old school who would rather spend time of their choosing, making traps and sorting nets in the discomfort of a boatyard rather than taking orders from a chain of command in a more organized workplace:
Then there are the stores on Stock Island that keep this tenuous lifestyle supplied. On Highway One there is a Burger King, a liquor store, a minimart, a dollar store, a gas station, a Mexican restaurant and so forth. Here's Highway One looking north from my magnificent Bonneville:
But deeper into this world of trailers, boatyards and fish traps there's a Tom Thumb convenience store right there on the main drag that offers Stock Islanders a place to get the ncessaries and to hang out:
For some a flat surface is all that's needed to pass the time of day...not unlike how things go in Key West, except that around here tourists are less numerous.
I am quite fond of Hogfish on Front Street, a bar and restaurant that serves a mean basket of fish and chips, in the open air environment that we all love and enjoy on a brisk sunny, winter day in the Keys. Good luck finding Front Street, a road which leads to the old power generating station that Keys Energy keeps on stand-by in case the main powerline from the mainland fails. The Stock Island power station could keep Key West in electricty for a couple of weeks if needed. Hogfish keeps the hungry traveler in fish and beer as the need arises:
The Rusty Anchor is another good one, nondescript from the exterior but with a long history of serving up plates of seafood on 5th and Shrimp Road. These aren't fancy eateries but suppliers of honest grub to the workers looking for their noontime break. My favorite breakfast joint is an unassuming Cuban place serving an inexpensive plate of eggs, bacon and grits with a steaming cup of con leche right here:
At my table I sop up my grits with cuban toast and soak up the ambiance. Tomorrow who knows what might be occupying this spot?
charged with protecting all these homes and businesses, scattered around south Stock Island. It seems a lot of ask of this tiny fire station and plans have been mooted to modernize the facility. Where the money will come from with the county's current state of insolvency doesn't bear wondering about. County employees have been laid off, more than two dozen so far, next year the budget crisis will undoubtedly deepen as Amendment One kicks in. A State prosecutor quit the other day because his salary didn't qualify him for a loan he needed to buy an apartment. The State Attorney's office in the Keys has the highest turnover rate in the state- 40 percent in 2007. I saw this vehicle outside this trailer and I don't put it beyond the bounds of possibility that a Deputy Sheriff lives in a trailer on Stock Island. This is affordable housing for all kinds of workers. 
We are in crisis in the lower Keys and the impending redevelopment of Stock Island trailer parks seems likely to make the crisis worse. When you see travel trailers made into permanent housing you know the need for somewhere to live is well beyond platitudes.
One curiosity that I find somewhat ironic is that a mobile home, even of the permanently immobile sort, is rated as a registered vehicle in the state of Florida and all these homes have little vehicle registration stickers on them, like this one under the mailbox:
I didn't have to look far for the signature piece of furniture I am finding in all neighborhoods I photograph in the Keys:
Away from the waterfront and all its marinas and commercial shrimping there lies a neighborhood of homes off Cross Street called "Lincoln Gardens" in the official lingo but known locally as "The Avenues." Its a wild mixture of trailers and homes, old and new:
This two year old modular home on stilts is for sale, all one thousand square feet of it, for $368,000 according to the brochure. It has 3 bedrooms, two baths and bugger all in the way of landscaping. 
Nearby there is a row of two story housing that has been built for sale as affordable and I have no idea what their selling price is. Units deeded affordable generally go for possibly $200,000 for 1 bedrooms and around $250,000 for two bedrooms to qualified county residents. The Conch style homes are next to Bernstein Park, which is an open space landmark in this part of the island.
Across from the park is the old dog track now transformed into several blocks of affordable rentals, built by Ed Swift part owner of Historic Tours of America. Swift comes in for a lot of criticsm not least thanks to his street-clogging Conch Trains, but he has put his money where his mouth is. These places look pretty good for $700 a month for a one bedroom:
Let's face it he could do more and Meridien West is supposed to be matched I believe at some future date by another 100 units labeled Meridien East, a suitable replacement for a long defunct drive in theater. 
The intersection of Chapman and Petronia is the epicenter of drug dealing in this part of town, but we're talking Key West, not a major urban agglomeration. People in Key West use drugs just like anyplace else and the police department does what it can to stem the flow. The paper today reports nearly a half million dollars confiscated and nearly 300 drug related arrests last year by undercover officers. There is a uniformed officer also assigned to the Village day and night and yet some people have a negative view of law enforcement. Its an easy drive down from Homestead and the "Miami boys" treat our little town as a branch of their very active market, and bring their big city habits and sales with them.
My wife's first job in Key West was as a juvenile probation officer and she was warned early on not to go into the Village to check on her kids without police backup. 15 years as a public defender in California had equippped my wife to cope with Bahama Village and she still laughs about how concerned her colleagues were for her safety when she rode her scooter into the Village, alone, to keep an eye on her charges.
I like the tapas bar called Santiago's on Petronia Street, and it appears a lot of people do too, so much so the owners of the block just up from the restaurant felt complelled to move geographically confused people along with a handwritten sign:
Much of Bahama Village consists of little houses on narrow streets exhibiting all the architectural grace for which Key west is reknowned. There are tours of the Village pointing all this stuff out.
Some residents like to take their living rooms outside and the inevitable couch is there on Geraldine Street to allow for some dedicated people watching.
Plywood on windows can be a form of hurricane shutter as well as the usual window repair, or even in extremis a sign of abandonment of the property. Across Geraldine Street there remains an example of the more robust construction of centuries past, now definitely abandoned and shuttered with wood and with no apparent hope of resurrection
The Truman Annex Master Property Owner's Association is fighting the city's access to Southard Street which is the only way to reach this waterfront at the moment. TAMPOA claims the city sold its right-of-way and the association claims the right to shut the city street. The Navy stepped in and told everyone to cool their jets after a confrontation between the TAMPOA security guard, the chief of police and a city commissioner who were all gathered at the Southard Street entrance to Truman Annex arguing about who had right-of-way. That issue is critical because Southard gives sole access to their base at Truman Annex and for the time being Southard Street remains open to all. 
The Navy's entrance off Whitehead Street is permanently closed these days for reasons I don't know. This whole issue of closing Southard Street got Village residents in a lather because the only other way into the waterfront would be by opening up Fort Street to the west and directing traffic through the village. The city announced that would never happen but at the end of the year created a new one way system that essentially directs traffic to and from Duval and Fort in a way that could easily be adapted to ease a heavy flow of vehicles heading to and from the waterfront, Fort Zachary Taylor State Park and the Navy base. Coincidence?
Bahama Village likes its streets quiet; this is a place where people take their lives outdoors not least because its cheaper than sitting indoors with air conditioning. This is a true village and people meet on the streets and chat the old fashioned way, face to face.
I listened to these two nattering away for quite a while as I fiddled with my camera.They were carrying on an animated conversation in Spanish. 
I didn't get quite the effect I was looking for through the camera's eye as a tart female voice told me to disappear in no uncertain terms. I buggered off though I never did see where the voice came from, I can only presume it was the occupant of the house hidden behind the greenery. There is a mixture of tourism exhaustion like anywhere else in the city combined with irritation with and mistrust of white folk. For all that Key West claims better than average tolerance within its diversity I see more tolerance among Anglos and Cubans and straights and gays than I do between whites and blacks, especially in the Village. Violence no; irritation, yes. On the other hand I get irritated by Conch Trains and visitors who don't know which way to turn at intersections...
In the above picture I find the stop sign ironic, the fence on the other hand makes a loud, clear statement. Why live in Key West, I wonder to myself as I gaze up at the Truman Wall if you want to be apart from it? Could a hedge have marked the boundary between the Annex and theVillage just as well? Less harshly perhaps? We'll never know.
Roosevelt Sands above and Robert Gabriel below, this latter unit is kitty corner from the Hemingway House:
There are homes of all styles around the Village and non African-Americans have been moving in and buying up some of them. I shot a bunch of random pictures of a few houses and streets that caught my eye. In an effort not to get yelled at again I tried to avoid framing people in my pictures which gives the Village a rather deserted, summer-like air:
And in closing a few public spaces in the Village, the A.M.E. Church on Whitehead Street: 
The Frederick Douglass Community Center:
And the Community Pool: 
Also viewed from Wille Ward Park,
This picture shows how the pool itself is raised, thus affording swimmers a magnificent view across the Navy base to the Straits of Florida. When I lived in the city I loved swimming in the (free) pool of an afternoon before reporting to work. And that pretty much was the extent of my daily penetration in the Village, and very welcome it was too.
I don't go out to bars much, unless dragged by a friend, but I couldn't help noticing how many people were thronging the sidewalk with little black boxes poked in their ears. What did people do before there were cell phones? Bad enough that people drive with them on all the time, but you can't even hang out in a bar without yakking on them too? 
I just liked the looked of the sidewalk outside, a warm night in February, what a luxury. 
For all that its slightly fuzzy I too am a tourist and my motorcycle is there to prove it! 
And just across Fleming from the county building lies the symbol of Federal munificence, the Post Office which was looking particularly toothsome that night.
I find the main post office very evocative, built of brick and looking permanent in its majesty with a huge parking lot and yet it is welcoming too with its long portico and open access to the P O Boxes. I love ducking into the walkway on rainy summer afternoons and watching the water pound the feeble lawn in front of the building.
I like the symbolism of the gate across the city street, the reflectors, the whole "Keep Out!" message reminds me of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin where I stood in 1981 on my first trip around the world. 
I struggle to differentiate the fake "Conch Houses" inside the Annex from the soulless Stalinist blocks of apartments you can see in East Berlin just beyond the Allied Check Point. West Berlin was a vibrant crazy place, much more so than Key West today, and it too was an island, though surrounded by dour do-gooders of the most oppressive sort. East Berlin was ghastly. I just feel bad for the limp retirees who mope around the Annex, and simply want to ignore Key West's middle class naughtiness; they would do better to let down the barricades, just as the East Germans eventually did.
One of their (living) neighbors on Windsor Lane made the effort to illuminate their flourishing palm:
And across the street is Poor House Lane which leads to Bill Butler Park nestled deep in this residential neighborhood It takes on a mysterious, unwarranted gloom in the middle of the night.
Sloppy Joe's is ambling along and there aren't the huge lumpen crowds on Duval's sidewalks I was hoping to photograph. It always amazes me how people imagine Hemingway ever would have been caught dead, drinking in this sloppy neon studded music bar. I think Sloppy Joe Russell would be astonished how his name has taken off! The two of them must be laughing like drains in the Great Beyond.
The San Carlos stands all but ignored, day and night, on the 500 block of Duval. This theater is generally credited with being the place where a speech by Jose Marti set fire to the Cuban revolution that ultimately saw Spain abandon its Cuban colony. And yet today the restored theater stands as a monument to the exile Cuban community's total inability to think of anything to do with this historic building. It could be a fabulous museum relating the story of generations of Cuban migrants to South Florida. Instead its pretty much ignored.
What a tremendous waste; another reason I have little time for the Miami Mafia as Fidel Castro calls them. 
That was when Kelly and Nick pedalled up and we started a long discussion about motorcycles and Triumphs and Harleys and their relative merits and Kelly had to drool over the Triumph. Silly man he has his own splendid H-D Road King to gloat over.
They launch the blimp on the end of a very long piece of string and it can be seen from miles around lollygagging in the sky. 
Aside from the dump and the blimp Blimp Road is also home to a ramp where people can launch boats or simply hang out and fish. Its pretty handy for small craft like kayaks but the ramp isn't very long and it doesn't seem to go very deep, for my taste and I imagine it might be all too easy to launch your car if you got it wrong.There was some kind of old fogey kayaking event going on when I stopped by yesterday afternoon so I kept the hellish machine (which has standard factory exhausts I might note) away from the nature loving paddlers. In summer this is a great spot to be alone with the sounds of wavelets splashing on the ramp.
Then one returns to reality and there is the Cudjoe Pocket Park at Valencia road opposite the entrance to the dump. 
It's kind of weird as parks go, kindly provided by Keys Energy our publicly owned utility company (I like it that my electric bill doesn't go to pay shareholders) and though it is equipped with a bike rack (!), a sign, and an artistic rock there is nowhere to sit. The grass is nice and lush which would make this a good spot for a picnic as lawns are in short supply in the Keys.
It was a glorious afternoon, low humidity, breezy and sunny, a continuation of the absolutley perfect weather we have been enjoying lately. The thermometer on the Bonneville recorded the fact for me, and I guess 92 degrees should feel hot but for my thin blood this was just as it should be:
Valencia Road wound its way back into a subdivision that was tucked out of sight, a criss crossing of dirt roads lined with palms and shrubs of various kinds. There are no canals back here so these homes would be considered "dry lots' in the local lingo but they are quite delightful for all that they aren't boat accessible.
I worked my way back along the lanes and found myself in another world. Aside from the purring of my Bonneville the place was silent, no dogs, no squawking kids no aircraft overhead, nothing. I found my way to the end of Valencia, where the street was closed by a fenced area and beyond was an old geezer walking his dog. He turned to look at me and I waved but he just stared icily back. It was perfect, a place less friendly than my own neighborhood!
I found my way to Spain Road and somewhere near there I came across a couple of horse paddocks. Now, I've never viewed the Keys as the place to come if you fancy riding horses but there they are, happy as clams.
My sisters loved to ride in their youth, and though they still keep horses, because they live in the country, they don't ride any more. Beats me, but thats how it is. I've always preferred horsepower to horses and here I am still riding. I may have imagined it but the nag seemed to be a little envious of my steed, loose on the backroads outside their stockade.
There was more than one barricaded animal in the subdivision, practically every home warned of fearsome canines within, beware of this dog and that on every fence until I came across a dog of a different breed:
Bad snakes? Thats what it says and no I didn't stop to investigate. And no, I have no idea why the first line is in English and the snake warning is in Spanish. As I am frequently moved to explain, asking "why" isn't cool in these islands. Things just are. Like iguanas:
Iguanas drive gardeners crazy down here. They aren't indigenous as for the most part they are pets that have been released and survive pretty well in the climate. They tend to seize up during cold fronts but mostly they plod around looking solemn and eating everyone's flower beds. Some people apparently don't mind the iguanas, I count myself among them, but I haven't put up a sign to that effect.
This house is at most half a mile from the dump; a $5 trip lasting perhaps 15 minutes and this excresence would be gone. But no, there it sits decomposing gently in the lush greenery of the neighborhood, a blight for all to enjoy. If I lived here I'd be hitching up my trailer and counting my pennies for the dump fee!
This magnificent manufactured home structure, complete with gingerbread fretwork is another example of the snowbird style of living. Apparently unoccupied like so many homes in the Lower Keys sitting there waiting for heaven knows what. An occupant perhaps? A happy grateful-to-be-here occupant? And one who perhaps would like to get rid of the gruesome hurricane fencing, but I'm pretty sure I'm overthinking this.
Or at least it would if the County's Public Works department could spell. I think its meant to be Asturias Road, but whats a vowel between neighbors?
There's a decomposing truck next to the crane, as though one was loading the other next to what appears to be a water filled quarry of some sort. It's all terribly bucolic now the engines are reduced to rust.
And then I hear a madly revving engine across the pond, a red truck appears in a cloud of dust and ducks behind a pile of gravel. Harder and louder the engine revs and the red truck appears closer than ever. I put my camera up and the truck spins out in a spectacular cloud of dust that my feeble picture only manages to hint at: 
The driver pulls alongside, a young kid looking worried. "I'm not doing any harm," he says defensively. I start laughing which breaks the ice. Ron is 23 years old and he grew up in the Keys. "I've seen everything there is to see and I've done everything there is to do, " he says gloomily lamenting the lack of variety in his corner of this huge and variegated country. I sympathize, telling him when I was his age I visited key West and left in a hurry bound for the exciting opportunities awaiting me in California. "Its just a way to let off steam," he says of his rough riding around the quarry. He complains that the deputies come out at night and try to put a stop to it. "We're not doing drugs," he adds, making what I think is a reasonable case for some off street fun. This encounter is typical of young people in the Keys; I find them generally to be polite thoughtful and well mannered in total defiance of the preferred model of sullen bad mannered youth reported elsewhere in the country. I wish Ron well and he takes off after letting me know of another secret spot nearby worth exploring. 
When my wife and I lived in Santa Cruz, California we expected our friends would be NPR listeners, which letters in the Reaganite 1980's were often taken to mean Nicaragua Public Radio. Public funding has shrunk since then, and corporate sponsorship has kept a more middle-of-the-road NPR flourishing, which has in turn rendered it less appealing to a listener like me who wantsNPR to be a different voice in a media broadcasting world of blandness and sameness and ownership by the powerful. Oh well!
I used to work at an NPR affiliate and I submitted a number of reports to the network during the 1980's and once the thrill of hearing my name go national wore off I was left feeling bored by the formula, by the editing, by the sense that what was of value was only understood by the newsroom in Washington, not where I lived in Fruitcake, California. I stopped trying to please my masters in the network and retreated to making a nuisance of myself in local news and then, tired of the trivialization of news, I quit what my buddy, NPR newscaster Frank Stasio used to call "show biz." I am a happier man for it. Frank Deford has been heard on NPR every week since 1980 and he's still going strong. He has the longevity that confers greatness. As Woody Allen says 80 percent of success is showing up. 
Deford's talk was centered around his new sports novel called "The Entitled," exploring the role and meaning of the "sports superstar" in our world. Jay Alcazar is a young Cuban-American baseball player overseen by a tired second rate player called Howie who now manages the Chicago White Sox. The book apparently opens with a possible date rape by Alcazar, possibly witnessed by Howie and the plot thickens from there, which was as much as Deford told us, inbetween reading excerpts from the book. He did say much of the action takes place in Cuba a country he has visited twice and is apparently where his plot ends up.
Deford also told of a day when sports players and writers were invited to the Clinton White House for a reception. Deford told his wife he was sure Clinton would recognize him, as the President was a sports fan and Deford had just written a glowing piece about an Arkansas player. As luck would have it the president remained blank when the Marine Officer announced Mr and Mrs Frank Deford, much to his chagrin, but he added with a twinkle, Mrs Clinton interrupted his introduction to gush how his voice woke her every Wednesday morning. "So how are you voting?" asked a voice in the bowels of the Tropic auditorium. "Oh," said Deford, "I always vote for my listeners," to howls of laughter. "But," he allowed,"the other guy is okay too."
Deford had some comments about free agency and how football television royalties are evenly split between teams, stuff I could barely grasp. He allowed as the Paris Open in June was among his favorite events, but he doesn't like soccer except the World Cup when seen live in a European city. he answered my question about NPR with his famous line that his most devoted fans aren't into sports at all, which brought another round of applause from the packed theater. he made a point about baseball that struck home with me. He said baseball is a great sport because unlike all other games baseball allows time for reflection, for commentary, for discussion between pitches. And I have surprised my wife a few times by seeking out the night time AM frequencies on a car trip to listen to some distant baseball game as I drive. 
In closing Deford suggested sports are important to use because they bind the country together in a way that other activities fail signally to do, he also said to loud laughter that sports allow men to argue which is important for them to do. And he made another of those interesting points that keep me listening to him on Wednesday mornings; he said sports unlike any other art form are thje place where the popular and the quality are allowed to rise to the top. He compared good teams to great movies, so rarely recognized at say, the Oscars, or where the best music isn't necessarily heard on radio playlists. In sports he said you have an art form where the best is always the most popular. Deford is a sports commentator alone in a crowded profession. How many writers do you hear use the term sui generis when speaking of a player? Deford is sui generis among sports comentators.
He was of course mobbed by the old biddy snowbirds on his way out but he kindly stopped for my flash and I caught his bemusement at his popularity in this little resort town. Key West I think cherishes its brushes with interesting people because, for such a distant little town it gets the attention of people worth listening to, but they don't stay so you have to catch them while you can. And we do.
Angela Street showing off its picket fences, that all-American symbol of domesticity. Then there's the eyebrow house peering across Truman Avenue at Bayview Park and its rather less domestically inclined public Art.
It's a tough place to keep your cool on an afternoon when the temperature is hovering between 80 and 85 degrees which makes it a good moment to pop into Flamingo Crossing and check out the flavors.
I like soursop, but the view out the window is a reminder of how hot it can be outside while the air conditioning cranks inside. This is the time of year when sunshine means more than usual down here, a a time of year when others lament the shortage of bright daylight in winter. 
Scooter riders, including lots of barely-able-to-ride renters, enjoy the great outdoors, in this case Little Hamaca, the city's last surviving hardwood clump wedged between the airport and the Riviera Canal.
It's hot work but some people can't resist walking their dogs from a chair in the dog run at Higgs Beach. Others take a gentle ride on a bicycle, a favored form of transport, preferred for their relative silence compared to scooters: 
My wife likes to wander Duval Street from time to time with her friends and do a little shopping. Duval gets a lot of stick because of the t-shirt stores and headshops and funky underwear on display and it is pretty gross. But there are also art galleries and interesting stores to browse along the main drag. And from time to time I get dragged in as well:
I'm figuring it must be more Art, functional Art perhaps to light up a home, day or night. 
And when it all gets too much some among us lay down to take a rest:
The cemetery makes a good spot for the still breathing to take a break and unwind in its leafy spaces. They're fixing up the tombs these days which gives some corners of the place a bit of a construction site feel. Nevertheless the cemetery is one of the city's largest open spaces and I know if I were buried there I shouldn't mind a visit from current residents from time to time.
Even today there are boats wandering around their anchors in the ebb and flow of the tides in Cow Key Channel and these aren't boats that actually move. They become, over time, elaborate Ali Baba palaces on the water. I look out from the solidity of land, astride my Bonneville and I don't envy them.
As commutes go this bearded water rat doubtless prefers his cormorant neighbors to busy land dwellers among whom he navigates his bicycle locked to a palm tree on South Roosevelt awaiting his return shoreside. I've spent too many nights bouncing around at anchor, too many nights standing at the dinghy dock in the rain listening to the dismal pop-pop-pop of my idling outboard ready to take me to my watery home, to want to do it again.
My home is only 770 square feet in size, larger by far than my 20-foot boat, my 30-foot boat and twice as large as my final floating home which I sold a few years ago. 
Out here on my darkened street I see the stars overhead as crisp and as clear as I did anchored out. I pause my Bonneville on a bridge to take in the watery views, as beautiful as ever they were from the thwart of my dinghy. Beyond the simple convenience of life ashore, which I pay for in the form of a mortgage I like being anchored for a change, in one place with one view, unchanging whichever way the wind blows. Its a sensation new enough it creeps up on me still every single day. I don't regret letting my commercial Coastguard Master's License lapse. I live and work ashore now, a new phase in my evolving life.
I spared a thought for the tourists flying past Fort Zachary under their silk canopy as I got in gear and I headed south to Rest Beach to finish up my lunch break at my favorite bench. And even there I found another active water player buzzing back and forth, like a bluebottle stuck behind a pane of glass.
The winds were stronger and the waters were frothy piling into the corner formed by White Street Pier. Key West gets so active in winter I am surprised frequently by how many people take to the water at the coldest time of year. I miss my skiff but I'm not going swimming for a few months more. Less than 80 degree water temperature and I leave the salt water to the hardy types from Up North. On the other hand Raul outpolled Fidel last week in the Cuban elections. I wonder how much longer the embargo will last? 
I ought to go back and see if they are still there, waiting, in a state of suspended animation.
I left the store wondering what is it exactly that parents are teaching their children? And who is going to be trained to be my cardiologist when I am approaching my death bed? Apparently of gynecologists there will at least be no shortage, and I suppose it would be better were I to be less startled and more accepting of this state of affairs.
I put this picture on the ADVRider forum thread titled "Old Structures" and somehow it generated an enthusiastic response from some dude who had actually stayed at this place in his youth during a crazy mid winter trip from Up North on a farting Bonneville that dragged him, somehow, to Key West and back in 1984. Quite delightful to hear from another geezer gumming his grits under a snowdrift somewhere, recalling his impetuous youth. I quite recommend ADVRider if you like pictures of faraway places (the occasional burst of juvenile "humor" can be an added "bonus") especially if you spend hours sitting in a room waiting for disaster to strike, as I do.
Anyway this entry is obviously a product of last week's rip snorting ride through south Florida and I was moved to stop on my way home because Dade County has been making noises about abolishing the community at Card Sound and I wanted to take a few pictures before change catches me by surprise.
Most people who climb in their cages and decide to drive to Key West arrive in Homestead from the mad rush that is Florida's Turnpike and find themselves funnelled onto Highway One and just keep going, which works fine, but there is a Better Way. Card Sound road starts just past the Last Chance Saloon, a dubious establishment offering the last chance for a drink in 20 miles, and aside from that attempt at humor the place looks like a pit without the allure of actually being in the Keys.
Card Sound road is 25 miles long and is thus a few miles further than the direct 18 Mile Stretch, as Highway One is known between Homestead and Key Largo, a place where impatient drivers are constantly hitting each other head on. Granted this is the bucolic route, but thats not to say you can't get up a nice head of steam on the long straightaways of Card Sound Road but the speed limit as you approach the fishing shacks drops to 40 miles per, which you would do well to observe as life is lived rather literally close to the edge on this road.
As the Internet, Satellites and Nextflix penetrate every corner of our modern world people keep nattering on about the good old days, and to hear them you'd think it really was Paradise Lost. If you want a taste of life lived close to the edge stop in Card Sound and take a careful walk along the roadway.
Or not, as the case may be:
While their neighbors tout for business:
If you speak Spanish around here you will do better. Card Sound might once have been a place where English was the premdominant language but not anymore, except perhaps across the county line which marks the end of Dade County and the beginning of Monroe County. 
Alabama Jack's touts in English and offers what it hopes is your first al fresco Keys dining experience. Its not real waterfront dining, because the eating area is on the roadside and the waterfront is a bit...derelict? which you'd think would qualify it as being Keys-funky. Some people claim the food's okay and it offers people a place to stop so I guess they do pretty well by calling their decrepitude "funk."
I hope Card Sound survives a bit longer. It may not be to my taste, being as how I don't care to fish, or to sit in a boat and drink, but it isn't to my taste either for people to get steamrollered out of their lives just because they are too funky, or too poor or simply too bloody minded. I like to take Card Sound Road to avoid the maniacs on the Stretch but also to give a tip of the hat to a bunch of survivors who happened to erect their fish camp on the wrong side of the County line of toleration.
Had they built decades ago just 200 yards to the south they would have been in the Keys, where anything still goes, if you have the fortitude to resist the blandishments of the Almighty Dollar. These guys seem to have what it takes to resist anything, for now. 
Its a new year which means it's time to go back to school, so from time to time my Bonneville will be parked on campus near the Marine Engineering building while I am busy inside burning my brain cells on Ohm's Law and measuring the nobility of anodes and cathodes and contemplating electrolytes.
Last year I was shocked to come back to school and find Instructor A gone from the program. He had had led me through my diesel engine classes and he was disappeared from campus while Instructor B, my outboard trainer who shared an office with A, would only mutter something about how A had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, hinting darkly how he had been using lab facilities for his own private ends. Shock, horror! How am I supposed to cope with change? By keeping my head down, that's how. So that is what I did and kept on studying.
He used to work in nuclear subs so this level of electricity is well within his grasp, and we sit and gawp and fiddle with our circuit testers as we try to follow the path of the electrons through our brains. I find it stressful being back in school because I'm compulsive, and relaxing because there is something satisfying about sitting in the back of the classroom watching the instructor spread formulas on the whiteboard. 
These are technical classes so we do lab work as well to gain our degrees, tearing apart actual live marine engines and then putting them back together and hopefully making them work. I well remember my shock in a previous course when I tore down a two stroke outboard to its naked crankshaft and put it back together and it actually started on the third pull. And ran properly too when i twisted the trottle tentatively. I was quite full of myself for about 30 minutes. There's always more, much more to learn.
Then I opened the newspaper and there the report was, glaring back at my innocence, berating my childishness. This was more than an unhappy divorce in the halls of Marine Enginering, this was Birnam Wood marching off to meet its fate at Dunsinane. I had been a witness to Civil War. Her Presidentness has fired B for claiming a degree from the College and falsifying his transcripts. The charge, sustained by the Board, is that B got A to fake a two year degree for him so he could continue lecturing with the minimum State standards for teaching at a Junior College. B denies the charge absolutely. A, from his new home Up North swears a public oath he fiddled B's transcripts in order to award him a fake degree so B wouldn't fire him. B says the charge is absurd coming from a disgruntled former employee. Indeed A resigned; B is now fired; they are both gone. Dust swirls across the department as classes continue in their absence. 
My Bonneville at the campus Torii, a place of quiet meditation and contemplation, a spot to sit, in the sun, and marvel at life in all its duality, its complexity, its mean spiritedness. And then go for a chest thumping motorcycle ride! 
Back then, the fort was actually much more like its bigger counterpart called Fort Jefferson, some 70 miles west of Key West, because Fort Zachary was also built out on the water yet connected to the main island by a very long wooden causeway. Nowadays we are used to the fact that Fort Zachary is surrounded by dirt, even if it is only fill, lumpy rocky dredged materials from the harbor bottom mostly, that have been built up and around the fort itself. That expanse of weedy lawn is all rubble, added long after the Fort sprouted here.
Fort Zachary became home to a company of Union artillery at the outbreak of the Civil War and when Tallahassee seceded, the officer in charge, a Captain James Brannan surreptitiously marched his 44 artillerymen across from the town barracks to the Fort and they locked themselves inside the building and kept the flag flying for the Union. That was it for Key West and the city, despite some Bubba grumblings (notably the still extant Bethel family), they stayed with the Union for the rest of the conflict, helping support the blockade of the Confederacy. 
However its Rodman smooth bore canon never were fired in anger and today they lie around looking good and adding to the ambiance. As do their balls, as it were:
Fort Zachary forms part of the State Parks system and there is a fee charged at the entrance, which is why I have an annual pass, I like coming down that much. Sunsets are beautiful here illuminating all the components of the Fort no matter how obscure their purpose, like this fixed pulley with no ropes attached:
And the buildings themselves glow, as with pride while the dying sun slips them into darkness:
Visitors get the run of the place, nominally till 5pm but if its just a matter of climbing the steep stairs to view the sun plunge into the straits of Florida that's what these walls are ideal for:
Visitors can wander the parade ground and imagine themselves in here in the Spring enjoying a concert under the stars, perhaps. Most likely not as freezing cold as it was for the wife and I, last time we tried that about a year ago. It was great fun despite the bone numbing cold of the north wind whistling across the infernal parade ground! We huddled under inadequate blankets and listened to Arturo Sandoval blow his heart, and his cheeks, out right here:
In the distance one can spot the sterility of Sunset Key isolated across the harbor, another new arrival, much newer than Fort Zach, in the town of Key West. These days the Fort provides a breath of fresh air for city dwellers who can wander the grounds at will in perfect safety and enjoy the paths that loop mysteriously giving the place the air of being larger than it is, a necessary attribute for a park on a small island-within-an-island:
And in between the trees and the shrubbery the park service with an impish sense of humor allowed some pirates to take root, rejoicing over their booty, just outside the walls and the moat of the old Fort. Clearly someone got the Black Spot!
The Fort's walls are impressively thick and no doubt in the era before rifled cannon would have done a fine job. The moat too, but as it is the defenses now make the place look gorgeous in the dying light of the sub-tropical day:
Outside the fort's domain the 21st century intrudes with sunset cruises, ferries and private pleasure boats rushing back and forth across the entrance to the harbor, under the watchful eye of an iron statue on the ramparts, as well as a couple of tourists.
And eventually a ranger comes by in his golf cart as the sun starts to truly disappear, to remind us that in "ten minutes" the park will be closing, and reluctantly we pile into the car (we have friends visiting and the motorcycle is on hiatus for the weekend: dreary but necessary), and we leave behind a place silent and dark and cold enough to house the Prisoner of Zenda, or a man or two in an Iron Mask:
This is your friendly neighborhood Fort, a place to meander and meditate, to bring a picnic, or a bottle of wine as Key Westers would in defiance of all and any rules, to sit and to think, or not to think at all and just to enjoy. What a great place to be a kid again, Fort Zachary Taylor, far and away the best, most imaginative place to spend an evening's sunset in Key West.
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