Smoke and Mirrors

The good part about living in the Keys is the bit where you wake up each day remembering you live in small town America. This is the place where you enjoy the benefits of life as rhapsodised in places like North Dakota, places where front doors are never locked, here that attitude is allied with the best possible weather and warm ocean water and a certain savoir faire that is hard to describe but easy to enjoy. For instance I have no idea what my neighborhood crime watch is or does, but there are signs in my suburb proving that it exists:It occurs to me to think about the possibility of worrying about the reasons for the existence of the sign, but then I relax, I live in the keys after all! What you might call a place that offers savoir faire combined with lassitude, that translates into a quality that outsiders call laid-back, a concept that belongers make fun of as they trudge daily through three jobs that between them barely pay for rent and beer. In Kansas one lives in a small town and doesn't lock one's front door, true, but one frowns and suffers anxiety if a person of strange demeanor enters the city limits. In Key West one possibly locks the door to keep chickens and drunks at arms length, but one hardly notices men dressed as women, people speaking foreign languages on the street or coming to the office in shorts and floral shirts. We,as far as I know, have no children on our street, despite the signs of awful warning. Just another of life's little paradoxes in paradise.

Undoubtedly it helps not to have children in paradise, unless you are a millionaire, in which case you have all the help you need. It also helps to be connected. There is, it has to be said, an unusually healthy portion of the inexplicable in Paradise; inexplicable that is, were it not for the fact that there is always a money trail. Take sewers for example. The State government has oversight over Monroe County and has been asking the Keys for the past twenty years to please put a sewer system into the islands and replace all those leaky sewage pits. Well, the good leaders of Monroe County have been temporising for twenty years and the State has now decided that if all the islands aren't sewered by 2010 heads will roll and people will be fined. So now we face the prospect of getting sewers, and I might add saving the coral reef. A recent study showed conclusively that human sewage leaking into the nearshore waters is poisoning the coral. 'Nuff sed.

The city of Key West got done with their tertiary (three stage) sewage system a while ago, and very painful it was too tearing up city streets apparently at random. But now all that waste gets made clean enough to drink before it is ejected back to the ocean. I live with a septic tank, underneath a lid like the one shown above, and the county is mulling over how to put me on a central sewer system, at a cost to me of somewhere around $7,000.

Residents of Stock Island have been through the process and the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) voted to give the job to a private company called Key West Resort Utilities. This despite the fact that the publicly owned and run Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority (FKAA) did an excellent job of sewering the city with no cost overruns. Key West Resort Utilities is run by a man who is close friends with a long time member of the BOCC, and that's why they got the contract, despite building a system that did not meet specifications, that cost more than bid and that repeatedly backed up raw sewerage into people's homes. I'm not kidding- you'd come home from work to find a brown lake in your bathroom.


So, if you were the BOCC you would rather crucify yourself than risk giving another contract to Key West Resort Utilities, right? Especially with people on Rockland and Big Coppitt and Geiger Keys screaming "No!" Right? You or I would ask FKAA to do the central sewer system. Not the BOCC, they are thinking about awarding the contract to their buddies at Key West Resort Utilities.


And thats the flip side of living in Paradise, daily, public corruption masked as incompetence! You'd think the voters would be over it by now! Instead we open the paper and read another disturbing headline. The county is preparing next year's budget at a difficult time, especially as the state has mandated budget cuts in all 68 Florida counties. So this is the time the County Administrator, a public clown, decides to fire the Budget Director. On the face of it the Budget Director has been rude and unprofessional to co-workers, including the County Engineer (think sewers) but the BOCC, the Administrator's bosses have split down predictable lines. The majority of three, known as the Gang of Three for their Maoist devotion to cronyism, support the County Clown and the minority of Two, the sensible Republicans (another paradox in paradise!) wonder why the Budget Director is under threat by the Administrator, the jester of the Gang of Three. Which leads me to wonder what is really going on. Is the Budget Director an abrasive yet competent public official, duly worried by the Administrator's ability to run up a huge public deficit- currently $8 million and counting. Or is the Budget Director just another incompetent bubba wallowing in his job, and now facing getting fired because he has fallen out of favor with the rest of the gang?

So much for living in Paradise, this place sometimes is just ankle deep in shit- literally.

Failing to Yield

The Vespa is in Victor's tender care in Miami, after I made a third trip up to the city towing my still broken Vespa. We tore out the anti pollution canister, and replaced it with a simple piece of tubing. That's a fix that is supposed to solve stuttering and hesitation problems- but I got nothing good out of the surgery. An appendectomy that solved a misdiagnosis of appendicitis! Bummer. Victor called for help and apparently my Vespa, still under warranty will go under the diagnostic computer at the main, Fort Lauderdale store. That's my sad story of woe, and I am bummed as I lose confidence in the Vespa's daily rider reliability. I am scooter cursed I think.

So, my thoughts turn to a return to a full-blown motorcycle, a machine of traditional proportions, scant weather protection and a hodgepodge solution to carry luggage. I am fed to the teeth with all these fruitless trips to Miami, this long distance problem solving sucks, so I took a trip by the new Scoot Boots motorcycle shop in Key West. The idea was to see if this seemed like it might be the kind of place that I could rely on to look after a new and different motorcycle, without having to run up to the mainland every time something breaks...It was good idea, I think.

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I am no great fan of motorcycle shops, they are filled with broken, sad motorcycles, and the people who repair them who all too often prefer the machines by far, to their poky, annoying, incompetent riders. Relations between expert and supplicant are generally not of the best.

My introduction to the new store was through a 27-year-old lanky native of Wisconsin, lamenting the heat (In Florida! In summer! What did he expect?) so I knew he wasn't too bright. As though to confirm my initial impression of him he proudly pointed out his Hardly Davidson, a machine with 1960's ape hanger handlebars and scissor suspension front forks, a 1930's technology designed to guarantee a rough ride; I made appreciative noises and retired behind a motorcycle magazine to wait for Kenny, the "oddball brand" specialist to come back from lunch. Mr Wisconsin, in his all knowing Harley Davidson-ness, classified any other motorcycle brand as "oddball," a marketing technique not popular in most stores, but in the world of motorcycling elitism its a surefire way to run a business into the ground. Scoots Boots future is not assured.

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While I waited for the mythical, "oddball brand" Kenny to show up I listened to Wisconsin and a customer discuss life. The customer was on a long distance ride from Seattle, on a Harley, and he and Wisconsin fell into an arcane discussion about their idiosyncratic machines.

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It appeared that Mr Tourer had broken down in Paradise and Peterson's Harley Davidson of Miami were falling down on the job of sending parts. Mr Tourer was red faced, sweaty and not in a good mood. He and Wisconsin were discussing traveling as the young man had, to his credit, ridden his uncomfortable machine down from his home town up north. Mr Tourer in his middle aged myopia was insisting Wisconsin would do better with a windshield and the young man was adamantly (to a customer!) insisting he didn't want a windshield, nor a helmet for that matter. I turned to Mr Tourer and said something to the effect that he's young, and Mr Tourer looked at me like I was stupid and said "The wind's still just as strong when you're young!" I bowed out of his incomprehension.

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Then they turned to discussing the missing parts.Mr Tourer had been waiting two days and he was pissed. Wisconsin assured him Peterson had the parts and it was just the parts clerks screwing everything up, which was little consolation to Mr Tourer. I, silly me, intervened and suggested renting a car- Peterson's is just three hours away and highly visible from the Turnpike. Mr Tourer, red and sweaty turned his blazing piggy eyes on me and hissed coldly: "I am not driving up to Miami in a rental to save their asses!" he nodded at Wisconsin as he muttered the words. I shrugged.

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Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but one has to have a mind to broaden to start with. Lots of people, thousands, perhaps millions, would give an arm for an unexpected vacation in Key West, but all Mr Tourer knew what to do, was sit in the stuffy, weakly air conditioned room, and fume. The traveling thing was not, I think, going so well for him. The notion that not all problems are of the same severity was not a lesson he was prepared to learn or understand. I keep having to remind myself of the same thing as I wonder why my Vespa continues to be broken and I am driving not riding. And I'm not even on vacation.