The Socialists are coming! The Socialists are coming...on a Triumph Bonneville? Its a terrible thing but places like Duck Key make me crazy, so naturally on a beautiful Fall day like today with 85 degrees of sunshine and a cooling southeasterly breeze it was a perfect day to drive myself crazy.
Duck Key sits south of Highway One at Mile marker 61, across a short causeway decorated with columns and signs that don't actually say Keep Out but that's the theme. You can't keep a good Bonneville out.
Duck Key was the creation of Pritam Singh, the hobo turned Sikh developer born in Boston and settled in Key West who famously drove himself broke buying the Navy Base that became Truman Annex. He made a fortune ultimately and turned his hand to making Duck Key just north of Marathon, Paradise in the Middle Keys, as it were.
This wide spot in the Highway is a shared paradise, half occupied by a mixture of elderly cement homes, in the raised style of the sixties. 
These are being taken over by Money and turned into Palm Beach by the Keys. 
I love these massively expensive homes tiled with Mediterranean roof tiles that'll blow halfway to Tampa in a hurricane. Actually these objects of conspicuous consumption irk me to death. I see no value in making expensive exurbia of a Florida Key, a place traditionally reserved for scrounging a living, not lounging a living. I suppose a traditionally inclined Conch sponge fisherman might sneer equally at my level of indulgent living, a weatherproof home equipped to excess with air conditioning, running water and a low flush water closet. The height of bourgeois excess no doubt. My little island has no Mickey Mouse bridges across the canals.
On the other hand Duck Key, the half that isn't Singh's exclusive Hawk Cay Resort, could never be described as plebeian. 
I mean, one has to wonder a little bit about this opulence doesn't one? Especially considering that most of these homes are unoccupied. These are the homes of people who show up a week or four every year, and the rest of the time they are the domain of electricians and plumbers, gardeners 
and Mexican weed whackers. Some idle people fish off the canals, for fun:
but that's too close to life in the rest of the Keys, I think. So the anglers are a lone breed far from the majority of elderly housebound millionaires, yet hardly close to the world of commercial fishing.Duck Key is not a serene place, the few empty lots are lined with Realtors' signs looking almost disdainful that someone might want, or worse need, to profit from these small squares of open spaces wedged between the homes and pools and canals. The air is redolent with the sounds of small motors buzzing as the industrious Mexicans clear away leaves, whack impudent weeds and apply coats of paint to slightly worn exteriors. I ride through this world and wonder why people feel the need to own more than they can use. Its a terribly European sentiment, I admit and I try to shake it. But I cannot be like my American neighbors who feel only a warm glow of satisfaction when they see people who have managed to make vast fortunes and can think of nothing better to do than to add to them. I think its a very American sense that its possible for anyone to accomplish given industry and luck in the proper proportions. Europeans have a nasty sense that to be successful demands a hook between the shoulder blades and a sharp tug back into the mire of ordinary living.
And then I ride home and revel in my quiet neighborhood of small houses, unadorned canals and empty snowbird nests. Just like Duck Key, only less so.
We have met the enemy and he is us. My kind of Socialism I suppose.
