Ramrod Key

My street, in response to queries:

We had a homeless dude on Ramrod Key last week. He approached me while I was launching my boat at the community boat ramp, a time when I carried no money. He looked lost and mistrustful like a stray dog, and I wondered what his story was but he had only one thought: alcohol. I think he may have arrived on a jalopy with Illinois tags that is still parked in the dirt across from the gas station (and source of beer) but he has gone, and I never did get a picture of him, wandering the gas station forecourt like the ghost of Hamlet's father.

Ramrod Key is a lump of land, a blip on the highway really at Mile marker 27, and I doubt most people with the wild light of Key West in their eyes even notice the place on their headlong flight south. Don't think that bothers me because I like living here and the fewer the better as far as I am concerned. I'm not actually the official curmudgeon of Ramrod Key but I do like to point out that I live on the least friendly street in the Lower Keys. My neighbors glower when I roll by and I don't even have loud exhausts on my Bonneville! Suburbia has its drawbacks.

Boondocks is Ramrod's greatest claim to fame probably, it's a tiki bar with a fried food restaurant and periodic events to draw in the punters. On a night with a north wind blowing I can hear the thumping band noises from my home a mile away. That's when I've got the windows open and the air conditioning off. The cool part of Boondocks is the miniature golf course, the only one of its kind in the Middle or Lower Keys, and like anyone who lives close to an attraction I rarely go to play over there:

Yesterday Boondoocks was holding a MG car show, which was pretty enough:I'm thinking it was a secret plot to decimate the population of elderly MGs in the southeastern United States. How else do you explain the offer of free beer for their owners:The negative about living in the 'burbs is that one's friends who live in the Big City 25 miles away tend to be reluctant to get in their cars and drive out to visit and tipple and find themselves subsequently unable to drive home. I enjoy the commute, not least because it gives me a reason to ride the Bonneville. When I lived in Key West I got rock fever, with nary an excuse to get out and see the bridges and the waters alongside Highway One. Besides Ramrod Has most of what one needs day to day. Plants:...quiet back streets, with my bicycle substituting ably for my Triumph:Not forgetting the best deli north of Key West for a good long ways. It's part of the Five Brothers empire, an "empire" of two stores, the other being the deli on Southard Street in Key West. This one is named rather unimaginatively, Five Brothers Two:

Open seven days and serving strong dark Cuban coffee which any self respecting visitor should tank up on for the half hour drive to Key West. Of course for those with "wet lots" ( houses on canals, with which the island is criss-crossed) there is boating too:For those without docks of their own the Looe Key Resort will provide a bed waterside overlooking the motel's own docks. Or better yet for those seeking a snorkeling experience Looe Key has a boat, what captain's call a head boat:

I don't pay a lot of attention to all this stuff, seeing as how I live here (not at the dive shop) but there;s plenty going on, on Ramrod Key: And if Boondocks isn't enough bikers (and cage drivers) can stop in here for live music from time to time:And booze in the other World Famous Tiki Bar:And, in between pouring the beer they advocate paying attention to motorcyclists, because we are everywhere, sometimes on pedal bikes too:When I decided to settle in the Keys it seemed obvious that one would want to live in Key West, in Old Town of course, caught up in the romance and beauty of the narrow streets, greenery and cute houses and all that. The reality is that Key west is noisy and cramped and crowded and romantic but I like riding my motorcycle, I like the peace and quiet of my neighborhood and I like having lots of shaded parking for my Bonneville, even if underneath my stilt house isn't a proper garage:Gas is around $3:75 for a gallon of regular, pretty much the same as elsewhere and living in Old Town within cycling distance makes sense if your only alternative is a cage. For a lot of people that convenience, and the excitement of urban life is enough. For everyone else God knows, there's lots of real estate for sale, on every street:
Prices aren't dropping though which is a little weird. Sellers still expect to get more than half a million for a two bedroom twelve hundred square foot house. I don't see many of them getting sold. Any of them, anywhere.

This is my neighborhood, well away from my employers at the Key West Police Department, far from Mallory Square and Sloppy Joe's, no jets circling overhead, and for whatever reason no barking dogs, squawking chickens or squalling children on my island. Its an oasis for me, with pizza delivery, a decent hardware store on Summerland Key, next to a video rental alongside a post office. What more could a suburbanite want? A fishmongers on Cudjoe Key four miles away and a couple of decent (and several indecently cruddy) restaurants.There's a bench on my street where the drunk hung out for a while but the neighbor across the way was raking it up recently, reordering the plants so we can ride by and admire the symmetry, not that I've ever see anyone else actually use it. It looks nice.Which should be enough for all of us.

When I'm feeling more than usually introspective I think about our neighbors a hundred miles to the south living their embargoed lives on the hidden island. It occurs to me that I live with more stuff within a long stone's throw of my stilt house than thousands of Cubans see in a year. For me ordering videos on Netflix (I have no television reception at home, by choice, neither satellite nor cable) or picking up a Mexican dinner at Coco's for half a Cuban doctor's monthly salary involves no more indecision than "what do I feel like?" Yes, gas is expensive, and a motorcycle helps but my wife and I with no children and no debt other than our (fixed rate) mortgage are worried but not strapped, like many other North Americans who have started to wonder what petroleum at $120 a barrel really means. Here in the keys it means tourism, sunshine and showing up for work on time. As always. I hope the equation remains as simple Up North where our tourism income comes from.