Going, Going…Gone

Galley Grill on Summerland Key is an unassuming breakfast and lunch joint wedged between a dentist’s office and a liquor store. What else do you need at Mile Marker 25? Friends to share breakfast of course. Then Wayne and Chuck led us to the Ramrod Key Saturday Market next to Boondocks bar. Laynes favorite weekend haunt. 

They bought their seafood from Mundy the Pirate…

“He’s taking your picture!” 

“Yes he does that,” they said continuing the discussion of life and business without a pause. 

Saying hood bud is the hard part of traveling. Paula hated parting with Rusty and who can blame her? 

She’s promised to meet us in Peru to dog sit him while we visit Machu Picchu next year. I’ve checked already and dogs unaccountably aren’t allowed. You can’t just drive up to the gates either so we can’t park him in the van as we usually do at museums so we will need volunteers to help.  Paula and Ivan, Kathy and Wayne and Chuck have all expressed interest. Sign up early to join the party in Peru. 

Bruce and Celia are collecting packages for us in Arizona where we shall swing by to buy lunch prior to going to Mexico do when Bruce expressed a desire for a commemorative t-shirt I could hardly say no. However Five Brothers on Southard was all out. 

The years have passed but Eddie still holds court making small talk and handing out coffees. How he does it day after day with equanimity baffles me. No t-shirts for now he confirmed. We compared notes on the passing of time and the electronic complexities of the younger generation. 

All was not lost. Layne and I got large con leches and cheese bread to go. I took the loot home to Paula’s garden where GANNET2 was plugged in and spread Marmite on mine. English boarding schools warp your palette and I make no apology. I plan to cross to Mexico with 480 Yorkshire Gold teabags secreted into nooks and crannies aboard. Layne drew the line at more than six boxes. 

We left Key West relieved to be on the road in good order, looking forward to the open road but aware that lives on that road have diverged our path from the daily lives of those staying on.  

It’s the reality of routine that when you live close by you get too involved in work to spend proper time together and then when you are gone but drop in everyone makes a break to celebrate. But then the routine returns and we the voluntary outsiders must leave and make way for other visitors.  It’s good to know when to make our exit. We did take some smelly blue cheese with us. That was good. 

We are driving to Ocracoke now. Slowly meandering across Florida towards Webb at Hilton Head, another  goodbye. We stopped at a recreation area on Alligator Alley for the night. It’s just past the Miccosukee gas station heading toward Naples, and it’s set back from I-75 and it’s vast. 

I had no idea where to park so I stuck us in a corner away from empty rows and rows of extended trailer parking spots.  Rusty and I explored. There is a trail head for hunters. Rusty poked his nose out and smelled something and red treated rapidly. Maybe he remembered being abandoned in similar terrain. 

Layne made a salad as the sun went down and a few mosquitoes braved the cool 60 degree evening. It was good not to need the air conditioning after the heat in the Keys. 

Morning brought fog. True thick gray wet swirling invisibility fog. Rusty and I took a walk down to the boat ramp and the canal toward the I-75 bridge. 

Rusty walks on his own schedule and he sat for a while at the boat ramp. I did the same sitting on the concrete wall at the waters edge.

I am trying to finish The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a languid novel about the final journey of the Liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar. I was deep into it when I noticed what I had previously thought was a lily pad floating in the canal, photographed below…

…was upon close inspection two eyeballs and the snout of an alligator. Naturally I reacted badly imagining myself stalked so I stood up abruptly and called my dog as I stepped away from the water. The alligator periscope disappeared as it submerged silently and my dog, the Everglades old hand, ignored the panic in my voice. 

TJ and Willow showed up when he arrived to open the hunter’s checkpoint at the back of the parking lot. We chatted at length as the dogs played. He’s been living in an RV in the Wverglafes for the past decade working half the year for the state Fish and Wildlife Commission parking his home on a lot in the park  

We talked of retirement and travel and RVs and so on and so forth. It was extremely relaxed and pleasant and I didn’t want to leave. 

Rusty sat and watched me throw the ball for a while. We drank coffee and watched the sun come up. TJ waved to Karen as she drove by in her pick up. She lives in her lot in the middle of the park and works at the Miccosukee store on the interstate. There is a whole world of life unknown to me in these canals swamps and woods. It was a privilege to learn.  

We’d never have seen any of it without GANNET2 and the curiosity to stop and watch the sunset from an unlikely spot. 

Goodbye South Florida. Look after yourself while I’m gone.