The people at the Fort Lauderdale Triumph dealership sucked air through their teeth when I said I didn't want to "upgrade" the exhausts on my brand new motorcycle. To make them more noisy is what they meant by upgrading. In order to make modern motorcycles meet high European air pollution reduction standards manufacturers employ useful little tricks to clean the exhaust fumes. They add fresh air to the combustion chamber and put a catalytic converter in the exhaust system. They quieten the air intake with elaborate air filters so new owners tear it all out, add loud exhausts and gain a few horsepower. When I told the lads at the dealership I liked my Bonneville as is because I like to ride fast, they scratched their heads and wrote me off as eccentric. It's much easier to ride fast on the open road when the Old Bill can't hear you coming for a mile. Loud exhausts would be a real pain wandering the streets of Key West as narrow as they are, and at three am it would be hard to go roaring around town snapping pictures of the pretty, illuminated houses when the good burghers of the city are tucked up asleep. Bike Week generates tons of negative, anti- motorcycle comments in the paper. Some argue loud pipes might save lives, but I know they make residents crazy with irritation.
I never thought of myself as a night owl but I love taking off on my lunch breaks and wandering the city when no one else is around. My colleagues like to take their breaks earlier, Noel goes home to play video games with Matt and Diggy roars off on his Honda and rarely tells what he does. I leave for lunch hours later and the streets of the city are mine, all tourists have either already staggered home or are still wobbling on Duval Street sucking down one last cold one before vomiting in a nearby flower bed to give their vacations the proper flavor. Deserted is how I like William Street:
I don't like to use a flash for night shots, partly because the flash isn't much goodon my little pocket camera and partly because I like the warmth of the sepia tint that shades the natural night tones. Plus I can't be bothered to carry a tripod which laziness forces me to get imaginative on how to prop my camera. At three in the morning I can park the Bonneville in the middle of the street and use that to act as a support for the camera:
This next picture I got by balancing the camera on the branch of a convenient tree. One can poke around in the lower braches of a tree at three in the morning without attracting critical comment. I love the look of these porches, even if sometimes they appear too formal to actually sit in:
The streets of Key West aren't overly endowed with street lights fortunately, and there are lots of trees overhanging, all of which adds to the ambiance of the middle of the night. That and the fact that everyone feels the need to illuminate their homes like Christmas trees.
Then there is the matter of noise, or the lack of it. No planes, no engines and when the Bonneville is turned off total silence descends over the whole street. There isn't even the sound of air conditioning humming on a cool winter night.
In the part of town west of White Street known as Old Town, the city's Historical Architecture Review Committee lays down rules for what can and cannot be done to these homes. It's actually trickier than at first might appear and as one can surmise, HARC is the source of lots of controversy. For instance one source of irritation has been HARC's requirements that windows be made of suitable materials that are in keeping with the historical theme. However home owners anxious to use modern hurricane resistant materials have to stick to the historically authentic renovations. I get the best of both worlds: the opportunity to enjoy these preserved homes and also to go home and bolt on my hurricane shutters as the next storm heads our way...
And to close, the historic Fleming House, all balconies and strings of lights just sitting there all night long, waiting for someone to come by and appreciate the historical serenity of these quiet streets. And when I get back to the Bonneville I can fire it up and take off with only a slight chance of disturbing the lightest of sleepers. I get to go where my less acoustically sensitive brethren make a great deal of rumbling and piss off the slumbering residents with their altered exhausts. Noisy motorcycles, another source of communal irritation in the sensitive, narrow streets of Key West. America's hardest town to live quietly in.
