Conch Republic Air

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.

Many years ago a new "sport" came into the public consciousness and they called it "hang gliding," and had you ever tried dangling from beneath a plastic bat wing you would know that the name is closer to the truth than one might find comfortable. I was looking for something to fill the void of a recent divorce and I threw myself into activities that, in retrospect one realises were plain foolhardy. I went at it with a will, launching myself from the top of a sand dune near Fort Ord, California, kicking like a newborn while lurching 20 feet above the sand underneath the stork that would bear me crashing back to earth all too soon. My instructor would appear alongside galloping and screaming "Run! Run!" but my brain had emptied itself of all instructions thanks to the magic of flight and I would hit the sand and tip forward with the force of a projectile banging my chest on the cross bar and the bat wing collapsing about my head like a parachute. I kept trying until one day I asked my leader what one did when one qualified to hang glide alone, like a bird."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.

And that was that. When I decided to move out of my apartment I realised one cannot live on a plane, at least not comfortably, so by default as it were I ended up on a sailboat, on the theory that a SAIL boat would be cheaper and more effective than a motor boat. I was delightfully naive in those days.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.