Coconut Art

I had  cunning plan but naturally it all fell apart. However I did get to see coconut art which was I grant you, pretty cool. Check out this lion made from a discarded coconut shell. Actually think it's bloody brilliant! 

The man responsible for this stuff grew up far away, they say, from the land of free coconuts but a long life in Florida produced a self-taught artist. I photographed his biography here (below) and I grant you it is a bit of a drag to read especially on a  small screen so I'll inlude some highlights.

I did notice in the biography a mention of the Anne McKee Fund so thanks to Google I located a page discussing grants for Florida Keys based artists. It's actually pretty cool  offering up to two grand as seed money for specific projects with a deadline to complete them. Clearly that money has done something positive here! 

What fascinated me about this artwork is the amount of expression the artist got into pieces of discarded coconuts. Furthermore I like how he linked the tropical nuts to tropical themes. A turtle, with a giant coconut flipper above and below.

Whimsical fish:

This  is a "Turtle on Lobster Trap Wood" and represents Keys  living at it's...least likely! It's how we all want to live in the Keys I dare say.

 The coconut band caught my wife's imagination as she zoned in on the drummer.

The guy ion the middle here reminded me of my buddy Curt so I think I'd have to say the artist caught the spirit of the Keys precisely!

The contrast between the outside world, Eaton Street, intruding and the sea life swimming struck a nerve. 

The Studios prides itself on creating space for artists with workshops and residence programs and classes and exhibit space. Next year they hope to have a roof garden built which as one visitor suggested to me will restore the ability to us of having a welcoming place to watch the sunset from above the city. the representation of the future is in the elevator:

My suggestion that one can go to the top of the parking garage on Grinnell Street was met with stony silence from the would be local so I didn't mention the quarterdeck of the Ingham floating museum at the Truman Waterfront for sunset viewing. Naturally a sensible rooftop hang out will be welcome and I look forward to it especially since the top of La Concha is no longer a terrace bar:

I'm going to post a couple more art shows from The Studios this week. I missed the Hadden livingaboard exhibit (also a McKee recipient) which was my cunning plan and I'm irritated about that as I wanted to see what he made of my former life style. His photos are something to learn from too:

They did have one picture on show which whet my appetite even more for what I missed. Oh well.

Coconuts On Duval Street

I stopped for a juice on Duval Street, a reflection perhaps that summer is here. It's hot, no two ways about it. I read of blizzard warnings in the Rocky Mountain states and I have no doubt the prospect of skiing is going to render them almost as giddy as the possibility of enough snow pack to end assorted droughts. Splendid.

Rusty does quite well in 90 degrees but his tongue does come out and he does seek out the shade. He has no taste for puddles and relies on me to supply clean water from the trunk of the car.

You can buy a coconut (complete with a straw) downtown for something around five dollars, a practice I find odd as they offer more than can be he with a straw. They get thrown out with all that white meat tucked inside. When I was a child a coconut was a rare thing, a once-a-year fruit and now I find them falling into my yard at a rate greater than I can deal with them.

Spring Break is winding down they say but you wouldn't know it as traffic on the highway is constant and Duval Street is busy. The heat is the harbinger of summer and this is the time of year one looks forward to the change of season. Then by September one will be ready for that other change of season, back to winter. It looks like endless summer, and sometimes it feels like it.

Rusty doesn't much like Duval Street with all the noise and crowds so I am making an effort to walk him as much as I can. But it is getting a little hot for that.

 

 

 

 

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Ode To A Coconut Palm

The move continues apace, boxes, books, odds and ends stuffed into the cars along with all the odd crap one accumulates through ten years of residence in one spot and twenty years of marriage all over the place.

The constant chaos has my Aspergers screaming much of the time, especially when I recall quiet times and routines with fondness even as the move brings new discoveries of old things. I have decided I must read my books once more before I die, and some of the titles will I am sure be easily digestible. I rediscovered an old biography of Robert Louis Stevenson and wild travel tales of North Africa, provocatively titled Hashish and a book of poetry I had forgotten I had. My wife knows I have a tendency to dawdle when surrounded by book so she kept a close eye on me as I emptied the first book shelves.

Cheyenne's role is to keep an eye on things, which she does very well. I have worried that the move, which we hope to complete in ten days, may upset her, but she shows no sign of any inner turmoil. She enjoys the cool tile floor and usually sleeps across the door as the business of organizing continues around her.

In light of what my wife calls this second job, and the time and energy it consumes, I am posting pictures of a coconut palm today, a symbol of stability in my changing world. Actually my friend Robert who has loaned me his vast spacious trailer, invaluable for this job, hates non native coconut palms as they produce much waste for no purpose and threaten unwary heads with their nuts. And yet these trees are the very symbol of the Fabulous Florida Keys that visitors expect to see...

A breezy morning at Veterans' Park.

An android phone camera with too many peculiar settings.

 

I took each picture separately with the camera on a different weird setting.

Amazing what technology can do.

To what purpose I'm not sure.

The new house on Cudjoe Key has a couple of mature coconut palms as compared to the home we are leaving on Ramrod which has a dozen and very messy they are too. But pretty, it has to be said.

 

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A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts

Cheyenne and I ambled down Chapman Lane and passed by the dude from Guyana selling some mope on a bicycle a coconut. I would hand my surplus nuts over for free but that would devalue the while experience. You know what salesmen tell us that if you underprice something people won't buy so you have to make them feel valued by over charging.

Something like that. I'm not a salesman so my coconuts grow in peace on my trees. However the encounter with the coconut guy got me to thinking. He was intrigued by my Labrador - Is that a poodle? - no and then he looked across the street at three West Highland Terriers - Are they poodles? He said hopefully as though any dog was a poodle. I suppose any coconut looks like a coconut to me. I wonder if they have breeds of nut?

Coconuts are not native to the Keys, they were imported to make the place meet tourists' expectations. And such are the expectations that the coconuts are now everywhere, and they produce more fronds than you can imagine.

They grow tall too. Check this one out. I was hold when cutting nuts off the tree to leave at least one as the tree grows too fast otherwise and the trunk gets thin as the tree tries to compensate. This trunk did a lot of meandering on the way up:

And like I said even though they aren't native some people cherish their trees. The tree through the roof thing looks to me to be a not great idea in the event of high winds. In regards to high winds the advice is generally to trim the nuts in June as hurricane season kicks in and to prevent them from becoming cannonballs in high winds. Coconut damage from one hundred mile per hour winds can wreck a house.

The business of selling nuts is a common enterprise around Key West. I've seen piles of nuts at Ana's Grocery on Simonton Street with straws stuck out of them ready for people to pay. I like the juice well enough and it does not give me the runs, a myth I've heard propagated to malign the nuts. However I have also tried mixing it with run and gin (not together) over ice and frankly I prefer coconut juice alone.

I have a love-hate relationship with coconuts. As lovely as they look they are a tremendous pain to manage unlike native scrubbier, less movie-worthy palms. The state department of transportation was going to replace the coconut palms with scrub palmettos or something similar and the coconut fanatics got all bent out of shape. There was no point in arguing that replacing the coconuts with natives would make gobpverment more efficient...Government efficiency is only required when the program you detest benefits someone other than yourself!

Key West Diary: How To Drink A Coconut

I've included the above essay I wrote a while back if you ever decide to go self sufficient and cut your own coconuts.

Key West on Dwellable

 

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I Live With Coconuts And Jack Riepe Envies Me

I had a conversation with Jack Riepe yesterday and consequently he rounded up, apparently, his coterie of neighborhood lunatics to descend on this modest page and flood the comment section. For those of you who have not seen riepe's comment cohorts they are something to behold. That being the case I figured I might as well hold this essay over a day in the hope the fumes from the comment section will dissipate into the ether and not into my pink clad iPad. I encourage you to go to his website and order several copies of his book, at www.jackriepe.blogspot.com I have ordered my copies and look forward to reviewing it here when it arrives. His previous effort was a great read and he assures me this new book is his best effort yet.

One thing I didn't do properly when I was preparing for Tropical Storm Isaac was to knock down my coconuts before the strong winds arrived.

My home is surrounded by mature trees loaded with nuts and in a storm they can become lethal missiles.

I lack the strength agility and skill to climb a coconut tree like one sees in residents of other Caribbean islands so about seven years ago I popped down to the hardware store and bought one of the best most reliable tools ever:

It extends about twelve feet and as hard as it is to wield at that length, this venerable tool can still cut down the nuts from a great distance and I'm lucky because my home has a wide balcony wrapping the entire house. The wide wood balcony makes it easy to put up hurricane shutters and to trim encroaching trees.

I am not a fan of power tools as they need care and maintenance and they make noise and they smell too. So instead I use a machete. I don't care for sports either so we have no need of TV reception which leaves me behind in the red blooded masculinity stakes. Instead I wield a machete and I have a whetstone to keep a blade on the big knife.

Coconuts aren't native to the Keys but they are ornamental and tourists expect to see them in these sub-tropical islands. They produce tons of fronds and lots of nuts when mature. Coconuts in the wild don't look much like the brown hairy orbs you can buy in first world supermarkets.

I like to drink from my nuts while working in the heat and to do that I rest the coconut on a brick and hack the pointy end with the machete. The coconut comes from the tree wrapped in resilient fibers which cover the nut and the meat inside the hard shell. In decades past copra, the white meat was preserved to make coconut oil which has fallen into disfavor in much of the first world.

The brown nut is hidden inside the fiber. Normally I clip the fibrous covering from the pointy end and cut the nut to access the water inside the meat. For clarity I've stripped the outer fiber from this entire nut:

Inside you'll find maybe half a pint of water and it tastes sweet and refreshing. I've tried mixing it with ice and rum or vodka or gin but I find it tastes best direct from the nut.

The fresh meat is sweet and very filling. For those that care you can grate it and dry it and call it copra. Below we see a professionally trimmed tree, as ordered by some snowbird sitting out hurricane season Up North.

I've been told that cutting all the nuts at once off a tree can weaken the growth of the trunk leading to bendy weak spots in the tree, like this:

In the event I've got some time before the next storm to cut my coconuts down but I'll probably procrastinate a bit before I deal with them. That's living with coconuts.

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