Blimp Road

I am very ready for new horizons even though these old familiar ones do not decrease in beauty even as the time passes. Blimp Road for an easy morning walk with Rusty yields spectacular beauty.

As you drive past the Kickin' Back convenience store on Cudjoe Key a road off to the north drives two miles as straight as the proverbial arrow through the mangroves to a boat ramp. To turn off Highway One to come here at sunrise or sunset especially in summer with all the clouds and humidity is to see stuff like this:

Every side road in the Keys dead ends, often into water. The story is told of a young tourist who drive off the end of Blimp Road a couple of years ago and spent the night in her car filled with water as she was scared to step out into the darkness lest she drown. The car was sitting on the bottom in knee deep water. They have added red reflectors at the end of the road to point out the reality of the longstanding signage:

The boat ramp, like all roadside public ramps in the Keys is free for anyone to use (at their own risk doofus!) but if you prefer to have services and help to hand use a marina which will charge a fee and hopefully help prevent you from launching your truck. 

The large airborne object is operated by the US Air Force to monitor boat and  air traffic in the Straits of Florida. Smuggling has always been a business in the Keys since before prohibition. Nowadays they pay big money to get their relatives out of Cuba and fast boats are less than three hours from a  Cuban Beach. 

The driver of the blimp sits on the ground and monitors windspeed and direction. Standing at the end of Blimp Road you can hear the directional motor running on the blimp. It sounds like a distant monotone blender.

A still summer morning will take your mind off the vagaries of the Blimp. There was a second one for a while sending TV signals to Cuba but the Cuban government blocked the propaganda easily and TV Marti was dropped. 

The blimp points into the wind if you need to know whence blows the breeze and they bring it down in the event of windy weather forecasts. If the Blimp is down either they are maintaining it or  the weather is predicted to get blustrous. Otherwise it flies day and night.

There have been occasions of the blimp getting off the tether and flying away. Once the blimp landed in the water next to a rather startled fishermen who called it from his boat.

It's well lit at night with red blinking lights and I am told it is clearly marked on aviation charts, yet it has happened that a small private plane flew into it. That happened one night years ago and I look up and wonder how it was possible. Perhaps in the flatlands the pilot didn't think to check for obstacles. No one survived.

That's the trouble with living here along time, in a place where not everyone does. I find myself remembering stuff at work no one else remembers or cares about. I feel like a fossil surrounded by late arrivals and newcomers and all with a  forward view down the road. I can't imagine how it feels to be a Conch with generations at your back. I fled Europe to escape that uncomfortable pressure.

They also talked years ago about handing Fat Albert (the blimp) over to the weather service and their budget but that didn't seem to happen. You can't get close to the blimp because there's a fence and guard house and trespassers are decidedly not welcome. Partiers on Duval don't seem to remember this is actually a frontier town with real responsibilities. No matter how short your stay.

Accidental Zen Master

Friday I worked overtime and after work I took Rusty to Blimp Road where it was too hot and he cut the walk short and sat by the car in it's shade.

Three storm formations are building the Eastern Atlantic, none of them are rated as likely to build into anything more than rainy tropical rainy waves. When one of them does, there will be much worry about the safety of stuff in peoples' lives.

Hurricane season starts June 1st so the unwary and inexperienced need to be reminded that peak hurricane season is shared by September and October when the ocean waters have been nicely warmed by longer summer daylight hours. Recently the National Hurricane Center in Miami advised the hurricane season will produce some doozies in their estimation: NOAA August 4th.

A lunch break Friday saw me converting our piggybank into a $36  deposit at the machine that sorts coins at First State Bank. The piggybank itself will soon go on Facebook by my indefatigable wife who is selling anything we don't want to store or carry in the van, which amounts to a lot of surplus stuff.

As she is already retired she is in charge of packing, so I have to nail down anything I want to keep, not much, as every day the house attains that state of Zen emptiness that I secretly happen to prefer.

My father threw out my childhood belongings the day after he sent me to Italy to sort out my mother's inheritance which she left to us youngsters and superstitiously refused to write a will. By the time my sisters had finished fighting over the inheritance, a spectacle that revolted me and turned me off to money for the rest of my life, my childhood was gone into the dumpster and was too late to retrieve from my childhood home in England.

That set the pattern for my life, a collection of progressively fewer and fewer things: when I emigrated to the US, when I moved onto a  boat, and so forth with each of many changes I shed more vestiges of my history in each move. The result is I have hardly anything to my name, a few books and with the blessings of digital recordings I have an iCloud of photographs. It's easy then to move into the van for me.

And as I came into the world so shall I leave it one day, with no regrets for the things I have scattered along the way and discarded as I went. There is much to see and the weight of stuff slows you down.

 

Balloon Sunrise

I treat Fat Albert as my weather gauge. Not only does the blimp show which way the wind is blowing, but the balloon also shows when the weather is predicted to be gnarly. Those are the days the blimp isn't flying and is pulled down to the safety of sea level.

It is tethered to the ground and uses devices to monitor boat and aircraft traffic across the Straits of Florida. It is a small outpost of civilization set back in the mangroves of Cudjoe Key, an area filled with salt water and stunted bushes and any chance a nearby boat ramp.

I find Fat Albert's presence in the sky, visible from far away on the Overseas Highway, to be a reassurance that everything is as it should be and that is good. The blimp is its own reminder that we are on the edge of the country, an outpost pushed far out to sea, a corner in the traffic lanes of ships at sea. The blimp is a reminder of the reach of the US as much as little league on North Roosevelt Boulevard is a reminder that the flag and apple pie are the symbols stereotyped for all to see that this is America, a small piece, no matter how far out to sea we find ourselves.

You have time to think these thoughts as you wander aimlessly one more dead end side street, socially distanced, alone with your dog and your camera wishing the humidity would go down just a little bit and let some air into the atmosphere.

This is the first year of all the decades I have spent enjoying the tropics that I find summer to be just a bit too much. I'd like to imagine it is my resistance that has been beaten down but everyone seems to be saying the same thing. Even Rusty has been less energetic than usual and he doesn't mind the heat.

There was a Serious Photographer at the end of blimp road this last time I was there and he had not one but two expensive cameras on tripods aimed in the general direction of the pink tinted clouds that promised the arrival of the sun. He seemed rather reluctant to share good mornings with the guy with the dog so we steered a wide course around his expensive apparatus and I amused myself with the my cheap pocket Panasonic.

We wandered away, Rusty and I with expensive tripods unmolested and the silent photographer happily snapping away at the sunrise and I was thus reminded how lucky I am to see this stiff any day I feel like. 

I am also lucky that Rusty is smart and sensible and stays away from people that don't want him around. He seems like he cam read my mind sometimes, another reason to keep my thoughts pure when I am out with him.

Upside down reflected in the water, or right side up a firm speck against the wafting clouds there it sits, the blimp of Cudjoe Key.  So all is well. 

Water Lines

The brown stripes on the road mark the limits of the high tide. That's how high the King tides wash over the roadway.  Interesting for Rusty with all those smells annoying if you dive and don't want salt water spraying up under your car. 

Those red dots which I illuminated with my camera flash, mark the end of Blimp Road which ends in a launch ramp for boats.  They put the reflectors in the roadway because more than one person has driven off the road. Most notably last year a tourist spent the night in her car after she drove off the end of the road afraid that if she got out of the car she would drown. That the water was only two feet  deep and she was one car length from the ramp never occurred to her  and she spent a wet night in her car afraid she was going to die. They found her in the morning and gallantly walked her up the ramp to safety.

Blimp Road has a thirty mile per hour speed limit for its entire two mile length which runs dead due north for its two mile length so you'd think there would be time to slow down and come a stop before hitting the water. Most people do manage it.  

Blimp Road is lovely at night.  The flats on either side are wide open and the breeze blows across the road just enough to keep the mosquitoes away. When there is a moon it's unearthly with moonlight reflecting off the salt ponds on either side of the road. 

And there's a reason they call it Blimp Road.  They fly Fat Albert from a pad behind locked gates at the end of the road, and from high in the air the blimp looks for smugglers coming across the Straits of Florida. Standing by the launch ramp you can hear the almost silent hum of its stabilizing engines  high in the sky at the end of it's rope.

Visible from miles away at all hours. After dark it carries flashing red lights:

The flat waters north of Cudjoe Key all the way out to an island on the horizon which looks heavily wooded but most likely is  a tangle of mangroves with little or no dry land at all. Not dog walking country then.

We have had a long dreary wet summer and autumn is going the same way with sudden storms and rain here and there. Beautiful to look at though:

How Are You?

How are you? That loaded question in my life requires more of an answer from me these days than a simple formulaic reply. I have never found much appeal in the pat reply -I'm fine thanks. And these days when people who haven't seen me for a while ask that polite question they are actually trying to elicit a real response. They follow up with -How are your legs? Well, they are still attached I want to say. Sometimes I offer my party piece and squeeze out an unsupported squat. I'm fine, I'll tell them.

Yes indeed the bionic man walks. He walks his dog and stretches his legs and goes to work and drives a car and rides a scooter when it's not raining.  He wonders why he is alive at all, and in wondering about that he he is forced to accept that there is no escaping it: life goes on. 

I have been reading about near death experiences lately and I am struck by the search for scientific rigor in pursuit of the unknowable.  Everyone would like proof of life after death it seems and travel to the edge of  existence is supposed to offer tantalizing hope of proving that which cannot be proved. My own experience proves nothing, as I failed utterly to find anything other than a profound detachment from the here and now. I did not go down a tunnel of light, I did not see life forms or people from my past though I was hoping to meet my previous dogs as I lay there and wandered away from the scene of the accident. I felt a great detachment, an annoyance that I had run out of time, and a feeling of lassitude in a silence that was not part of the busy scene of disaster I left behind.

I spoke recently to a woman who suffered a sudden and acute loss of blood after childbirth and found herself fading away to her own near death experience. She saw darkness encroaching as the hospital room around her faded and went silent, so in fact we shared many similar symptoms. For both of us there was a sense of serenity and silence, an abstraction of self in her case from the doctors trying to "save" her, and also like my own experience she found dying to be physically comfortable and easy. Neither of us floated out of our bodies nor did we follow a light down a  tunnel but we were both aware of the death we were floating towards. My conversation with this woman gave me a fresh insight into  what happened on the highway last August. I felt less alone.

I have had strange glimpses of similar experiences among police officers at work, sturdy men (only men as I spoke to no women police officers about this); they are men who suffered physical torment in previous jobs, military men shot on the battlefield who in unguarded moments talked to me about  those near death visions they usually feel unable to share. I found myself accepted among them only by virtue of what was essentially an accident, not a willful act on my part, certainly not a pursuit of heroism or a distinction gained on a battlefield. They opened up for a little while, a  momentary twitch of a curtain that they pulled back briefly offering an admission of what they see as weakness to a fellow traveler. I find myself unexpectedly sympathetic to the travails of PTSD sufferers. I have always noticed handicapped access or lack thereof since my Catastrophe but these conversations have opened me up to other forms of shared pain. Obviously I am reminded frequently of my time spent in a wheelchair living on faith that I would walk again, but I  have never expected to find myself led into the world of post trauma stress as suffered so privately by true uniformed heroes. Yes indeed when you ask how I am I barely know how to answer.

Webb Chiles wrote on his web page words that have stirred my thoughts:

"  I have written that April 29, 2019, ended the ‘being’ part of my life.  Whatever value and meaning my life has is already established by what I have done and written in the past forty-four years.  I expect that I will do more, but it ill be incremental, not determining." 

One cannot, in the world in which the rest of us live, plan out a life the way he has, yet the simplicity of the sentiment, the narrow and focused determination to do from a young age, resembles only the life lived by extraordinary people. The rest of us need not be concerned that we live our modest lives at random. For my own part I never did see a grand plan to my life. I responded to stimuli and when life with my family grew unbearable I high tailed it to California only as a place to catch my breath far outside the scope of my insular European family members. That I settled in the Golden State was a fluke and when the opportunity presented itself I married a woman (not my current wife!) and settled down with no great plan of action in mind. Yet I suppose that's how most of us live, with occasional bursts of planning and forethought thrown in.

My Catastrophe has forced me to put a big bold period in the middle of my life. There is the before and there is the after and I am struggling to come to terms with what this means. Like the act of dying itself which I found as I said to be serene and peaceful, physically comfortable and devoid of pain, the act of living now has to be carried out with a certain serenity. I frequently tell myself I am living on borrowed time as it seems to me my physical destruction was such I could not reasonably have been expected to live. When the paramedics brought me back to Earth and I came to myself  on a  stretcher being asked necessary but annoying questions I don't think neither they nor I expected me to see another sunrise. The nurse at the hospital told my wife to brace herself for the worst. Which leaves me wondering what to do with this allocation of extra time in my life.

In conversations with a particular doctor in Intensive Care I pointed out my family has a history on my mother's side of dying young, that in fact I have outlived generations of my Italian ancestors. The doctor told me to be prepared to live for a while as I am apparently endowed with physical strength. I think he meant it by way of encouragement but instead I have managed to take those words and mix them up with Webb's thoughts on living an intentional life and I wonder what the hell am I supposed to do now? Should I engage in intentional living even though it seems a bit late in my life to do that, and yet the point here is that if I do have years ahead, far more than expected, nothing in life need be "too late."

I wish I had a more colorful story to tell of seeing visions or encountering angels or devils but the facts are bald and simple while the feelings left behind are not. I find my physical return to normal isn't matched by an ability to leave behind the memories and feelings that swirl through my mind. There was never a question in mind that others could benefit from my experiences in the hospital and the long process of physical recovery but I have seen why it is that so many people prefer not to speak about the mental changes brought about by near death. The funny thing is I remember my own feelings of  evasion when faced by a person who had been mangled by some accident in life, civilian or military. I don't apportion blame for others not wanting to confront my own descent into introspection. The more time passes the more I seek solitude and  I wonder if that is the correct path forward. Perhaps it is, as every civilization needs its hermits.

Rusty doesn't care what I think about as we walk, though I wonder what he would think if he kew I have every intention of taking him travelling with us when we retire. He likes coming home and checking things out after he has been away for even a few days. I can't imagine what he will think of spending weeks away in a camper van. I do know that since I returned from the hospital he has been much closer to me than previously.  When we go for walks he checks in on me and makes sure I'm okay on the trail. He is much more inclined to be near me at home as though he is aware of my close shave and doesn't want to lose sight of me. He isn't clingy but when I call him he comes bounding and is happy to share a couch or an excessively large share of the bed for at least a little while before he goes off to do his thing out of my sight.

So how am I doing? On the whole I would say well enough. I walk with a slight limp but I am gaining strength and flexibility all the time as one would expect after so many classes at the gym, so many hours of Broga  pretzels. That's the easy part, getting back the physical strength I had before the motorcycle wreck. The hard part is figuring out how to live well in the wake of that blaze of consciousness that reminded me  how short and uncertain our time really is.

I'm doing pretty well at faking it in public. I answer questions about my time in the hospital and in rehab, I try to reassure the timid that I am not at death's door still, and I am not scarred by the experience, but I do refrain from talking about that other thing that sits silently picking at my mind. Now I have this extra time, am I using it well? Am I living intentionally? Am I being as Webb might say? Is this borrowed time being borrowed to good effect? What could I do better is a constant refrain.

It's hard to convince people in real life that any good can come of such a wreck as I lived through. Yet to me there are good things that happened  all the way along.  I learned what hospitals are like from the inside so when the time comes for me to return to a hospital I shall be better equipped than ever to cope. I have  attained  a level of serenity regarding my mortality, even if I have not come to terms exactly with the immediate prospect of my death. I now know I should have not freaked some people out with the notion that good can come from bad, but I don't regret sending back reports of my life changing hospital stay, an experience not often talked about in polite society. I value my own opinion more than I used to and trust my instincts with more assurance than before. I still think of Nikki with gratitude for her kindness at the accident scene even though I cannot remember her presence at my side as I was off exploring other realms at the time- and I might add conversing with her  while I was away. How I did that I have no idea. If my musings have helped you I am glad; if they have confused you I apologize, the fault is mine not yours. My only word of advice is not to fear death, for as far as I can tell the experience itself is not at all unpleasant. I wish I could say with certainty what happens to those of us who do not come back but I have no idea based in experience.

Meanwhile life has to be lived and we all have to navigate amongst people who confuse us and misunderstand us and fail to trust us. The trick I am finding is to try not to worry too much and keep on keeping on. In answer to the original question: fine thanks and I hope you are too.

Blimp Road

Blimp Road is one of the destinations where I walk Rusty from time to time.

 For some reason he likes it a great deal, running and sniffing and obediently sitting when the rare car drives by exploring a dead end street.

 I pass the time with my camera.

 I wonder how the wood got this morn.

I have no answers.