My neighbors at the end of my street hitched their Jeep up to their RV the other day and took off north on the Overseas Highway. I've never spoken to them, but their comings and goings mark the season as sure as the swallows at Capistrano, and now that their canal front home is padlocked and shuttered I know the winter season is coming to an end and summer approaches.
Summer time in the Keys is the "other" season, not exactly a time of mellow fruitfulness to quote the poet, but a time of higher humidity, longer daylight, and calmer ocean waters, laid flat by an absence of wind, and overpowered by those magnificent Florida mountains known to outsiders as thunderheads. Florida this far south has only two seasons, broadly speaking, dry winters and wet summers. Summers are the time people go North to sweat in sweltering Mid Western brick homes in places where, I'm told temperatures easily top a hundred degrees on airless wet afternoons. Down here by contrast it rarely gets over 95, and the sun though hot and white is reflected by the waters which also produce a lot of the time, the tiniest of breezes. be they ever so small the summer winds are always welcome.
This is also the time of year I get home before the sun comes up, bathing my house in golden light, but those days I do stay awake past seven, after a long night at work, I am rewarded by the transformation of gray skies that hold the promise of nothing good, into crisp blues and whites and the deep golden yellow of the dawn.
I took this photo a while back at Geiger Key Bridge when I took a dawn deviation on my way home. It put me in mind of summer, with the flat waters, the fresh pre-sunshine air and the hum of swarms of mosquitoes. People will often, in the midst of a litany of things they dislike about Florida (Bless their hearts! Stay away!) include the fanciful notion that this is a climate without seasons. Like I need a snow season, a mud season, a green season and a stinking hot season. Some people do and the subtleties of the sub tropics are too slow and too indistinct for their eyes. Summer is obvious: less traffic on Highway One of course! Pretty soon the Bonneville and I will be rumbling back and forth almost unimpeded. Its not that cars are too fast in winter, its that oncoming traffic is too thick and frequently one has to pass a wedge of half a dozen cars lumped together on the highway, like a gaggle of slow moving geese, so one gives up and waits for summer to ease the congestion. Summer is the time for smooth moving traffic, another plus...This is a picture of Southard Street, home of the future gate, uncharacteristically untraffic'ed in mid winter:
But summer is also the time for hurricanes, those phenomena that stick in the memory of those that have experienced them, and shrugged off by those that have yet to taste the joy of widespread destruction and disruption of our warm, still summer months. Its an axiom of hurricanes that the fewer you have experienced, the less regard you have for them. Many many people gave up on the Keys after eight storms in two consecutive seasons. Another weekend, another hurricane read the wry bumper stickers of the period. Wilma culminated that run with a mass drowning that sank seventy percent of the city and killed no one. It was a time of triumph and total post traumatic stress disorder. We were shattered, collectively, but we kept soldiering on, no riots no looting no fighting. It wasn't all bad though it was pretty awful. Even though residents had to be rescued from their roofs there weren't the dramatic headlines seen in New Orleans. The Keys plugged along. There were casualties though and even today you will see empty houses, shells of their former selves with the telltale dirty bathtub rings around the walls:
It looks just a bit down at heel from across the street in New Town. Closer up:
And closer yet shows the abandonment and its cause, rising waters, followed by mold and exhaustion, flooding really does suck:
I never really appreciated stilt homes till Wilma left my home untouched. There was a move to build stilt homes in New Orleans' Lower Ninth District, but city planners objected saying they look ugly like "olives on sticks." Maybe but they stay dry, like this precariously balanced olive on Flagler Avenue, one of the few stilt homes in the City:
Not architecturally striking, but fear of flooding has been a powerful motivator for those that still remember Wilma's waters in the city.
I have come to like living in my little tree house, my windows are on a level with the mature tree branches that surround it, and my decks give me splendid views. And waters will have to rise a long way to reach my bamboo floors...The sun reaches inside easily enough in the early morning and every day I am grateful my little home is still there, the sun shining through my wife's flower arrangement on the dining table:
Stoicism is a fine quality in hurricane season , but there are a few months yet before things heat up and I've got some riding to do, on those roads that at last should be emptying out as the weeks go by.
