On The Road, In The Air

In flight somewhere over Northern Canada five miles up in the sky, you have to wonder what an extraordinary world some of us are privileged to occupy.  Living in the Keys seems like fortune enough,  driving the Overseas Highway: 

And then of course in a Saturday afternoon cold reality strikes as traffic backs up remorselessly in Islamorada. After we drove through to Miami a major wreck closed the 18 mile stretch to Homestead. We just saw slow speeds as we took the only road out:

We took Card Sound Road passing for the last time through the manual toll collection booth. By the time we return in early August the toll takers will be gone and an automated system should be in place, taking Sunpass tolls, by February. 

We didn't have long to wait. A hamburger and a moment to pause and they were boarding Turkish Airlines flight 78 to Istanbul. Squished over heated and upright for 11 hours across the Atlantic. 

We ate dinner, I surfed the web and posted a picture to my Instagram account. This blog post may be a little ambitious for the feeble in-flight internet service. I chose pasta for dinner over chicken. It did the job in unspectacular fashion. 

And so, to bed. Trying not to think about Rusty safe and cared for among kindly strangers who I trust. Meanwhile this little tube flies me fast away at 600 miles per hour. 

Overhead Flights

I am allergic to noise. The idea of living within range of the military jets that circle Boca Chica Navy Base endlessly practicing maneuvers is more than I could bear. One of my issues with living in Key West is noise. I have long maintained that Americans aren't trained to live next door to each other with no offsets as tightly as Key West requires. Consequently the streets are littered with signs demanding good behavior ("No Parking!" "Keep Off!" "No Dogs!" "No Trespassing!") and the newspaper's Citizen's Voice column is littered with anonymous complaints about every kind of behavior under the sun.

The airport in Key West is a case in point. There are quite a few flights in and out during the day and the single runway which points more or less East and West means aircraft tend to fly directly over Old Town on their approach. Departures climb into the sky over Stock Island and turn north.

They aren't so bad as they come into land but they are noticeable and their presence overhead reminds you how small this town is.  

The newspaper had a front page story announcing direct flights to Chicago starting this month which will change some people's travel plans no doubt. Key West describes itself as an "international" airport but the time they tried to fly to Nassau in the Bahamas the flights were unsustainable. Chicago is as international as it gets. Along with Tampa Miami Atlanta and I think Orlando. 

I rarely fly to or from Key West preferring to drive to Fort Lauderdale (or Miami if I have to) and thus saving a huge bill and the possibility of missed connections on the way home. There's nothing worse than arriving late in Fort Lauderdale and missing the connection because then you are scrambling to get a rental car to make the unexpected four hour drive home...I prefer to have it planned and there is lots of good airport parking available.

The airport lies on the Southeast corner of Ky West separated by salt ponds and fences. I took this picture from Government Road in Little Hamaca City Park alongside the runway:

 Airports to me are mysterious places though I can see the attraction of flying your own plane to and from the Keys, fast and efficient if you have to go back and forth all the time.

 The airport's general aviation also accommodates other business flights including the seaplanes to the Dry Tortugas, a  flight I want to make before too long.

And there is enough room to leave this old hijacked Cuban airliner rotting in the back lot. A Cuban living in Miami won a rather peculiar lawsuit against the Cuban government and was awarded the plane as damage compensation for the monies ostensibly owed by the embargoed Cuban government. It seemed  like a violation of international law which requires hijacked planes to be returned but the ruling did no one any good and here it sits years later:

Flying has changed the way we live and travel. However I prefer to keep my feet on the ground as much as I can.

And the noise all that flying make still bugs me. It just does. 

Falling Out Of The Sky

It may happen that if you are around Mile Marker 17 on the Overseas Highway and you look up, you might see this.My wife and I were heading into Key West and we stopped, as we frequently do to walk the dog at the Bat Tower on Sugarloaf. To get there you turn north on an unmarked road next to the aircraft parked near the lodge. It's an old single engined plane, decommissioned and used to advertise the Sugarloaf Airport, a single runway airfield that also offers one the opportunity to jump out of a plane far above the earth. Simple aircraft have the ability to enchant us as we stand anchored to the ground, but people dangling and floating have the capacity to make us stand and stare slack jawed. I have no desire to try parachuting myself though when one looks at the website advertising Sky Dive Key West: http://www.skydivekeywest.com/ it is possible for even someone as firmly grounded in the dirt as myself to see why people do this craziness: There are many more such pictures at their website, where a mere $250 can get you doing the same thing. Rather them than me, thanks:I have watched people indulge themselves in this form of flight and for whatever reason one seems to feel the need to dangle with one's legs wide apart.It just seems so unprotected.

And so it goes whirling and twirling silently to the ground, like an autumnal leaf.
There is an ample meadow for landing nearby, the casuarina trees are just foreshortened by the camera. This is the headquarters of the operation, fully equipped with a splendid hammock, possibly to rest up after the exertions of flight. It is hard to imagine but just a few hundred years ago the thought of being to fly, literally as free as a bird was an impossible dream. And here they are reduced once again to mere mortals like the rest of us.Last year I wrote an essay about the airfield here, a place I find charming and evocative: http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2009/06/sugarloaf-airport.html and I also wrote an essay about the Bat Tower mentioned earlier. http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2009/05/sugarloaf-bat-tower.html a place that crops up from time to time in these essays as I like to walk Cheyenne around there.

Conch Republic Air

I do not associate the Florida Keys with flying, which shortcoming lies in my mind, not in the facts. People who choose to live around Boca Chica Naval Air Station are made well aware of the importance of flight with all the training jets swooping overhead. For some reason the pompously named Key West International Airport has its sole runway aligned directly over old town so city residents can take joy in the sights and sounds of commercial aircraft's underwear drifting loudly and lowly overhead several times a day. I, in my roost far from the madding crowds, hear the low lawn mower buzz of small aircraft from time to time. They remind me of summer insects but in fact they are the objects of much love and attention from their owners on nearby Summerland Key. People who devote their entire homes to the business of flying.

I am fascinated by these stilt homes that house aeroplanes in the garage instead of expensive cars. The houses themselves aren't much to write home about, architecturally speaking, but the notion that one lives breathes and flies aircraft is fascinating to this reformed sailor.

I have mooted around the idea of getting my pilot's license, more perhaps as a thing to do for its own sake than as a means to an end. I have held at one time or another just about every kind of vehicle license, boat master, cab driver, truck driver, school bus driver even (pity the poor kids! but the job offered excellent health insurance) but pilots license? where I feel at home on the docks or in a marina I feel all at sea around airplanes.Up and down West Shore on Summerland you will see the usual agglomeration of stilt homes, boats for sale, palm trees and..aircraft hangars? It's an odd mixture of dwellings and a block behind the airstrip, next to the canal, the homes sink into the usual historical Keys landscaping style of discarded boat parts and decomposing appliances and gently rusting cars:And you can call me old fashioned but I'm one of those people who feels that had God intended us to fly she'd have given us wings, and I know whereof I speak.

Many years ago a new "sport" came into the public consciousness and they called it "hang gliding," and had you ever tried dangling from beneath a plastic bat wing you would know that the name is closer to the truth than one might find comfortable. I was looking for something to fill the void of a recent divorce and I threw myself into activities that, in retrospect one realises were plain foolhardy. I went at it with a will, launching myself from the top of a sand dune near Fort Ord, California, kicking like a newborn while lurching 20 feet above the sand underneath the stork that would bear me crashing back to earth all too soon. My instructor would appear alongside galloping and screaming "Run! Run!" but my brain had emptied itself of all instructions thanks to the magic of flight and I would hit the sand and tip forward with the force of a projectile banging my chest on the cross bar and the bat wing collapsing about my head like a parachute. I kept trying until one day I asked my leader what one did when one qualified to hang glide alone, like a bird."I go up to San Francisco and we hang glide off the cliffs," she said and I went and looked at the hang gliders at Fort Funston and I saw them dangling underneath their wings like popsicles staring out at the foggy ocean and I realised one could do nothing with hang gliders but dangle and honestly it all seemed rather boring, so I quit before I broke a limb.

And that was that. When I decided to move out of my apartment I realised one cannot live on a plane, at least not comfortably, so by default as it were I ended up on a sailboat, on the theory that a SAIL boat would be cheaper and more effective than a motor boat. I was delightfully naive in those days.So it is that I am naively curious about the flying Keys lifestyle and I hang on the periphery wondering. Wondering who thought a golf cart might be an effective way to tow a plane for a start. I met this combo as I was turning onto the main street and the sight nearly wobbled me off my Bonneville: two men perched on the cart towing a plane backwards across the road.They loaded up some extra victims hoping to impress the ladies no doubt (thats what we sailors do at any rate, always living in hope):Then they parked at the end of the runway where they revved the engine up to make sure I assume that all would be well in the air, like commercial jets do, though the engine sounded like a lawnmower in distress to me:The next thing I knew they were gone wobbling off into the wide blue yonder, until all I could hear was the summery lawnmower buzzing gently somewhere up among the clouds:I'm not saying never and perhaps one day, after the economy gets back on an even keel and after my wife stops forcing me to go to school to improve myself I might find the time and money to try to get my pilot's license for the hell of the thing. Until then I'm going to fly like everyone else, as a way to get someplace else in a hurry:My wife snorts when I tell her that in retirement I shall only travel by boat or by train or by sidecar, but I still think that if God hadn't meant us to have fun while traveling she'd never have given us motorcycles.