Once I had figured out I had to return to Florida to renew my drivers license the rest of the journey just fell into place. Being retired and getting a monthly pension reduces stress enormously because even though this would be an expense it wasn’t going to take money away from our ability to continue our journey. Were we traveling with a lump sum as we used to when younger it would have been a blow. I got to walk the White Street Pier in Key West a few days ago. Now I’m in Arequipa, Peru. Next month I get my retirement check from the city of Key West.
I dislike the helplessness of commercial flight, the lack of decision making and the shuffling around like a package in a conveyor. I dislike the sudden change produced by six hours in the aircraft flying at 600 miles an hour. From the desert of coastal Peru to the sudden immersion in hot humid South Florida, no gradual adaptation as when traveling by car or sailboat. What took a year to drive took a day to fly.
When we first got GANNET2, our future home built inside a Promaster van we used to come out here and places like this in Central Florida to park overnight, learning how to manage the van systems and how to cope with the reduced living spaces offered by a 21 foot van.
After I got my new license in Indiantown last Wednesday I drove to Lake Okeechobee to enjoy Central Florida once again. It was as I remembered it.
Long straight flat boring. Sugar cane country. Big sky country. The Florida free of beaches and tourists that shows up in Carl Hiassen novels and not in tourist brochures. I like it and I discovered I was reassured that it is still here and it will be when we get back.
I bought a supermarket sandwich for lunch and I sat among the sugar cane enjoying heat and humidity and lots of oxygen in the air. There is a whole agricultural industry here you never see on the beaches of Florida.
I had my duty to fulfill too, with stops in Miami to check on our storage locker and drop off the trip souvenirs accumulated thus far. And Trader Joe’s had its own shopping list too of course. And then the familiar drive down Card Sound Road, driven hundreds of times and still as it ever was.
Wayne and Chuck gave me a place to stay and welcomed me to Key West with dinner at Oasis on White Street, Uzbek food as I remembered it.
Conversation about Key West and how the actors change but the fundamentals stay the same.
Nick my former colleague shared lunch at Hogfish on Stock Island. We spent a decade working nights together. He’s found a boyfriend in Key West and is for now settled and enjoying life in the place where he grew up. He kept me sane during many long years of office politics at the police department and during the horrors of surviving Hurricane Irma together living through night dispatch answering 911 during those difficult times.
Poor people scraping by on Stock Island are coming face to face with the new reality of long promised hyper development. Change is always in the air in a wealthy dynamic community like Key West where ambition out strips the small plot of land on which it is nurtured.
I’ve never heard of Haitians eating dogs in the tenements of Stock Island but these few will be gone soon.
It’s not attractive but it is affordable.
Eccentricity and scraping by and flitting about in torn shorts and sandals is being replaced by conformity it’s and high prices.
I’m not at all sure what the draw is to live like this but you do get to say you lived for a while in the Keys. Scruffy layabouts used to be called characters hanging around the Tom Thumb convenience stores. Nowadays they are recognized as eyesores.
The funk is gone from Murray Marine.
There are stories of survival in the midst of change. Jiri still repairs motorcycles on Stock Island. He has figured out how to make it work. Some day he says everything may change but so far…His journey from Czechia to Key West has been a long one but he has no desire to return to Europe. His daughter is 16 and almost an adult.
There are survivors on the waters around Key West and Stock Island, staying afloat just about even as the state that bans books seeks to ban free spirits. Mooring fields are spreading slowly for all sorts of practical reasons but I would miss my opportunity to take my hat off to people who can live far closer to the edge than I ever could.
I get the feeling of limitations and restrictions closing in all the time. There was a time before my time when artists lived in Key West and wrote stories that they lived. Before the internet and the new highway this place really was a fringe community.
It is inevitable that progress changes all things and we humans always look back with nostalgia to remember how much better things were. I dare say the new batch of hopeful settlers see what we all did when we first settled. A new place of acceptance.
Key West felt more like home than any other place I lived and yet ironically the city and the police department gave me the freedom to go away and live on the edge on my own terms in a van, amm no lifestyle much derided but which suits me perfectly.
We planned our retirement and lived a fairly plain existence among bohemians. But it worked out.
The generations pass and as each of us moves through the Keys we feel lucky to have done it, to have lived as close as we could to the edge of the continent. But we aren’t Conchs, we aren’t bound to the Keys by family ties and obligations and traditions. We came, we live, we leave. No regrets.
