Grainy And Dark

I shouldn't have done it but I did. I got a count down app for my phone. I can now tell you with confidence how many months hours and seconds it is from now till 6:00pm June 8th.  Yes I know I should live in the moment but there are times when daily living requires you to look up a  moment and stare at the future and think about how different it will be.  I am an odd fish because as much as I enjoy the prospect of change I am also quite full of nostalgia and to that end I wanted to be able to remind myself of early mornings with Rusty.

On the mornings I have to be at work in Key West I'm up at the 4:25 and  if I'm not up an impatient snout in my face will bring me back to reality. Rusty likes his mail check walk even though he may spend just 15 minutes checking the neighboring streets, or sometimes 30. I trail along close by with flashlight and plastic bag to hand.

Digital photography is amazing to a certified sceptic like me. It costs nothing and is endlessly entertaining while making it very hard to wreck your pelvis in the pursuit of a picture. That's a good thing. But at the same time it is endlessly fiddly with more settings than the human brain can easily handle. So I figured I might as well spend some time pushing those settings to their limits to see what happens. Coronavirus has shrunk the palette of things to photograph already and its not like a fresh season in the tropics brings fresh topics to photograph. Might as well test the camera with the same old views. By day these streets are a brilliantly lit stage, by night the darkness is impenetrable.

I was really quite surprised by the pictures which evoke for me the nostalgic views of those all important early morning short walks with Rusty. He pretended to ignore me as long as I was close by and obviously watching him. If I slowed down to focus the camera he walked ahead and sat down to wait for me as I fiddled with the apparatus. To be a dog requires patience if you are going to be around slow poke humans.

 It is our time to be out like vampires in the moonlight. 

Wandering these streets with a camera is  not going to yield much of interest, at least not to me. The Keys are a hundred miles long, normally less than a mile wide and no more than three feet above sea level all of which conspires to require homes be built on stilts. By the time you've done that there is much room left for individuality or innovation or eccentricity to be expressed. 

On my days off I like to drive Rusty in to Old Town to take advantage of the lanes and streets and old wooden houses but around here I have long since worn out out the photographic possibilities. Except for this little experiment with light sensitivity. And by now it is clear that this is an essay in the vein of a diary, a memory preserved.

I felt like I was getting away with something holding my tiny pocket camera in my hands when I looked at the pictures on the monitor on the back of the camera. To my astonishment I found what I hoped might be useable images. Rusty ignored me, head down, checking the mail left by dogs passing this way during boring bright lights of daytime.

Street lights are not very common on these back streets so pools of light don't do much to make the whole street visible.

Mostly I found bright moonlight more useful. One weird lone political sign. There is one Trump flag in the darkness of my own street but most people around here don't go for lawn signs. This guy went large, not holding back. It shore like a beacon in the darkness but I don't know who it was going to convince to change their minds.

I am still impressed by the clarity of the picture. Granted there was a street  light shining on the sign but even the blades of grass are discernible.  Modern technology saves me from tripping over my own feet.

Around the corner we marched, me testing the camera in the darker spaces, Rusty sensing the barn not too far away.

At this hour there is no traffic to be heard, though sometimes a single car might head south from the main road towards this area, most cars turn into Venture Out the trailer park before arriving at this end of Spanish Main. We are alone.

At 4:30 in the morning human nonsense seems remote and watching the clouds fly across the face of the moon is entertaining, much more so than people who are all asleep and out of my life temporarily. My 911 starts at 6.

By 5 o'clock at the latest we have to be home and our short time together is over. Rusty chews his bone while I get ready for work. More car accidents, lost wallets, angry break ups and some minor theft to fill one more day at my desk when I should be spending it with Rusty.

I try to avoid checking the countdown clock, it is enough that it is there in my pocket for emergencies.

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. 

Checking The Mail

My alarm goes off at 4:25 every morning I work. I have a second alarm set at 4:55 in case I fail to wake up and that is about the time I have to get into high gear and get ready to go to work. That first half hour belongs to Rusty. We eave the house together and check the mail.

I read a long scientific article about a dog's sense of smell and thoughI came across it years ago the information I discovered has stuck with me. It explained a lot about the behavior I see in Rusty, his ability to smell in stereo, directionally and also his ability to separate smells by time, not only space. Dogs don't find smells disgusting in the same way we do, as they dissect smells for information, not for pleasure or to pass moral judgements. 

So it is that he takes great interest in the neighborhood, checking where other dogs have walked, noticing what's new and who might be new. He chooses the route, he selects his own stops and I trail along with a flashlight and a plastic bag always at his service.

We are alone at the hour, even the party goers have passed out and a neighbor's cat has got used to Rusty padding by at an hour when civil creatures are asleep. I don't know what the cat is outdoors by himself but I am forced to accept not everyone is as overwrought by their companion animal's welfare as am I. Rusty's freedom to operate is limited by my watchfulness and subsequent irritation if he does something stupid.

It is a walk that is only the preamble to my wife's more leisurely arrival on the scene and she takes him off in the car for a longer walk after dawn but before she settles down to teach at home. Rusty and I get back around the time the second alarm goes off and he goes off with a treat while I head towards the usual ablutions, uniform, lunch bag packing and all that daily nonsense.

He sits next to the ridiculously overgrown greenery at the top of the stairs and watches me go away to a world of unimaginable delights that won't release me back to him until 6:30 that evening when we get in the car and go off again to watch the sun set over the mangroves. 

I can't help but feel that we might all of us benefit from the simplicity and the lessons to be gleaned from an unambitious dog secure in his routines and not needing any great plans to keep him happy. 

The Flag Pole

When we moved to Cudjoe Key five years ago I was glad to get out of our street on Ramrod Key, a long narrow single lane where the neighbors at either end disliked each other and we were in the middle of a lot of angry people. I felt like the middle child in a family at war with itself. Change is hard but we fell on our feet moving four miles closer to Key West with a wide street, pleasant neighbors and a canal we can swim in with hardly any boat traffic. But every paradise has its serpent and we were warned in rather uncertain terms about the big downside.

 "Those people" at Venture Out we were warned "will ruin your life every winter." The cause of the ruination was never made completely clear except that crowds of snowbirds walk their dogs along Spanish Main and clog the street with traffic. Plus they live in trailers.  As you can imagine someone who has lived much of his adult life on boats isn't put off by trailer living or any alternative lifestyle (see: vans!). Dog walking? Nothing wrong with that; God forbid. And after five years of living next door the worst I can say is the occupants of Venture Out have a tendency to run the stop sign at the entrance to the park. Forewarned is forearmed and I look out for their rolling California stops as they leap onto Spanish Main. The dog walkers are careful and I have never seen any dog eggs left behind. They have to be the cleanest dog walkers in the Northern Hemisphere, people whose example I try to live up to with trepidation. I take Rusty on the street  as he likes to sniff their trails when we walk in the middle of the night and the ground I find is super clean. There is never a noise complaint from the park and I never see the Deputy Sheriffs over there breaking up relationships gone bad. They are ideal neighbors in my book.

One evening as we drove back from a trip to Miami my wife told me she always looks for the flagpole at Venture Out as she commuted home from work in Marathon, and indeed the slim white pole rises up out of Cudjoe Key, an unmistakeable landmark from across the water on Summerland Key. It is a landmark, a reminder of home all the way down the mile long drive on Spanish Main after you turn off the highway. If the flag is not there you know there's wind in the forecast. If it is halfway down making room for the flag of Death at the top you know they are telegraphing something to the neighborhood. This weekend obviously it's Memorial Day. And a windy rainy weekend we were promised too as you can see, yet the flag is still flying perfectly spread by the east wind.

Today is Memorial Day of course but every day when you drive past the Venture Out flagpole is a day to think about home and loss and good fortune and all those emotions that make up daily life especially in a time of pandemic.

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:

Cudjoe Blimp

I find myself taking too much advantage of Blimp Road on Cudjoe Key.It's only two miles long in a dead straight line dead due north from Highway One. That intersection is pretty much the point at dead center of Hurricane Irma, the Category Four hurricane that landed here in October 2017 and for the most part the vegetation, though trimmed is coming back green. I say I take advantage of Blimp Road because it is a straight line and cameras love the perspective afforded by such geometric precision. Plus you get the wavy asphalt effect though when you drive it, the roadway feels more like a billiard table than it appears to be here. 

How do they do that? I walked around looking at the burn out marks and someone laid down a a very thick layer of rubber to achieve that effect. It looked quite spectacular to me.  You can imagine the boredom factor kicking in for youngsters in the Lower Keys. On the one hand boating and fishing are easily available but the modern youth's normally outlet in malls and fast cars are severely limited and being young they tend to notice what they lack, not the advantages they have. Hence the rubber:

Rusty went on patrol. He and I haven't been here together since the accident but Layne has brought him here several times. He has to check up what's been going on. 

There is a dog out there somewhere if you look carefully. I walked the walker thirty feet into the scrub on a pitiful excuse for a trail but it was far enough to get Rusty going and off he went. He always wants me to go at least some of the distance with him:

He had fun. When we got home later he took the time to lick my face copiously, his way of thanking me for a good time. He does it from time to time and I find it touching. He is a remarkable dog.

Of  course I came across some flowers whose identity is a total mystery to me. Which didn't stop me from photographing them.

While I walked Rusty down Blimp Road, which is an exaggeration as he ran ahead and I basically stood with my walker and watched, I took the time to check out the blimp that gives the road it's name. Someone asked if the blimp was still flying so instead of guessing I checked it out. There it is:

On the ground thanks to predictions of strong winds, it was looking like a gloomy day.

We got in the car and went home.