Little Hamaca Interlude

Two years ago I didn't own a campervan. Two years ago I wasn't walking properly either. In the wake of my scooter wreck I was loaned a wheelchair friendly apartment in Key West to give me time to get on my feet. So it was that I would bring Rusty and my walker to Little Hamaca where I would totter after him, my grossly swollen feet in slippers as we shuffled around the park. He was I have to say a very patient dog as he slowed right down to accommodate my slow shuffle.

So nowadays to come back to Little Hamaca is to remember the winter of two years ago and to be glad all those hours of physical therapy, time in the gym and long walks to nowhere pushing that dammed walker have paid off.  I got to hate wearing wooly slippers instead of proper shoes and the heels of my hands grew thick calluses where I held on to the walker frame for dear life. The parting injunction from the hospital was to not fall over and i lived every waking moment concentrating on not wrecking my pelvis or the numerous nuts and bolts holding me together. It was a very interesting time.

I found the most annoying thing about being in the wheelchair was relying on my wife all the time to pull it out of the trunk and line it up with the door so I could lift myself into it. Even now every time I get in or out of a car I spare a thought for those days spent clinging to the roof, unable to rely on my legs to hold me up. I took lots of pictures of Little Hamaca in those days, my practice ground for learning to walk.

Aside from all the nostalgia stuff  Little Hamaca is a place to get away in the middle of Key West. 

You will see some dog walkers lots of bicycles, a few homeless people especially in winter and a few joggers. People wandering with cameras, like me, are few and far between. I met Mick sheltering from a shower and we exchanged a few words. I didn't mention it to him but I used the same walker as part of my recovery when I was able to walk a little better. I seem to keep coming full circle in Little Hamaca!

The old Hawk Missile Battery towers left behind after the Cuban crisis ended in 1962  make for for something different to photograph and I take advantage:

The mangroves and the salt ponds are of course everywhere, even here in the city, next to the airport.

Rusty likes it after all these years:

I find the mobile home an ideal spot to hang out and be by myself. With Rusty of course.

A new start in an old place. 

Alternative Living

I was in Little Hamaca City Park next to the airport when I realized something was amiss. The homeless were gone. Of course one day with swallows does not a Spring make and conversely a day without residentially challenged people hanging out in the park doesn't mean they've migrated but it kind of looked that way.

I stopped to inspect the park bench where one old guy hung out every day during winter. I brought Rusty here a lot when I was recovering and staying in an apartment nearby. And every day the old dude was sitting at the picnic table staring into space. It looked incredibly boring.

Rusty found nothing to hold his interest and i looked out at the road for a bit and wondered if I should have tried to engage the old guy in conversation. Probably not, not least because it feels to me like an invasion of their (public) space.

The weird thing in Key West is the migratory pattern of many, dare I say most? of the homeless. Summertime and they join the snowbirds in leaving town. I find it rather odd.

Rusty and I wandered around a bit then went further down the park, to a more shady area with a  convenient handicapped parking spot.

And lots of inconvenient reminders of the former denizens of the open spaces:

Rusty checking it all out:

I also found Nature doing its thing:

But I did have to ask myself where did they go and why leave?

Seagrapes getting ready to mature and taste good when they get dark purple:

I guess they will be back next inter the hobos. Maybe I should just ask them where they go...

Government Road

The Key West city commission has turned its laser focus on Little Hamaca  park and in a few years this wilderness will be transformed into playing fields for young people. Very laudable I'm sure but I will miss the wilderness.  Just as I miss the ope spaces at Truman Waterfront now tamed with cement and asphalt. 

The final form has yet to be determined but the over riding consideration at the moment is planning the cost. A smaller field for three million or bells and whistles for five? Might as well go for broke as far as I'm concerned if the place is to be torn up.

One can hardly complain about giving the rug rats sports facilities, to oppose it would be like opposing apple pie and the flag but I do enjoy coming here and feeling like I am in the middle of nowhere, disorganized and abandoned. Actually its a useful storage area of the city for bits and pieces that have no home but really its just an abandoned missile site left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

These  containers have been vandalized with pictures of genitals in the tired pointless unimaginative way half wits with spray cans manage and the city comes after them with heavy black paint and order is restored.  None of this seems like it amounts to much and that is the pleasure of coming here, stepping out of the  tourist flow as it were.

The airport is next door and I am always surprised how many planes take off from this small town, one after the other. It's hard to feel any envy for people lodged into these flying machines getting hauled back to the winter cold Up North at hundreds of miles an hour. I tend to look at people traveling and feel a twinge of envy but not around here.

Nature's airliner:

I love these clunky old seaplanes returning from trips to the National Park at the Dry Tortugas. They make a coupe of trips a day and I've seen them landing on the lagoon in front of Fort Jefferson. They then nose up to the beach to drop off their passengers for a few hours sightseeing. 

A rain gauge! Mosquito control puts them out all over the place. Best not to interfere with them.

Back to my seaplanes. The little wheels they have actually make them amphibians as they can then land on the runway at the airport. Very cool. Key West Seaplane Adventures. Pretty website too.

Then there's this sad old pile rotting in the back lot of the airport. It was hijacked to Key West on an internal flight in Cuba and instead of returning the plane as is normally done a judge ruled it was to be handed over to a Miami family who were done wrong by Fidel Castro as I recall. Naturally they could do nothing with the plane which was never returned, never flown never used again. Here it sits nominal reparations in violation of international law. Our relations with Cuba are so weird. 

It was hot enough Rusty took his ease for a while in the shade of the car.

I stood there and pondered the weirdness of this strange relic of past hostilities. And maybe future ones too though it seems to be getting harder to interest wealthy south Florida Cubans in prolonging their family dispute across the water. Fidel Castro is dead and Raul seems likely to follow soon. Their brother in law Diaz Balart in Miami seems to have peaked so possibly a new generation can cement better relations. 

And one more plane popping in for Christmas. I read in the paper five people died when a private plane crashed on take off in Bartow bound for Key West. Just like that they were gone no Christmas no lovely flight across the water...startling.

Little Hamaca Park

I like Little Hamaca, the scrubland between the airport and Riviera Canal and I go there from time to time to take some pictures and walk a dog when I'm in town and he doesn't want to walk the streets...This week the reason we were there was that I had to take my wife to the drop in clinic as she had caught my flu and needed the dreaded pills to ease the course of their nasty break bone illness. Rusty and I saw no value in sitting around waiting for the long line of patients to dissipate.  Even though I wasn't feeling very strong I could totter behind Rusty on the new boardwalk they've put across the park.  It's a five minute walk to the Riviera Canal which was on an extremely high tide at the recent full moon.

The walkway used to be made of wood but I guess it was time for an upgrade. The piling appear the originals sunk into the mud and water below.

The Blue Paper has a video this week discussing "little known" Little Hamaca. I don't usually watch videos as I haven't the patience but what with being in bed with the 'flu, nothing lost...Luckily they ran with the video-dramatic history of the place focusing on the Cuban Missile Crisis that saw Hawk Missiles based at the end of the park now marked by blast berms and radar towers.

Rusty and I spent a little time here before we retreated to the shady boardwalk through the mangroves.

There are warning signs about crocodiles so be aware. There have been reports of reptiles in the Riviera Canal so consider yourself warned. I've never seen one in Key West but I don't live in these mangroves so if it were me for instance I probably wouldn't swim in the Canal these days. But on the boardwalk? No problem.  Rusty is not a suicidally inclined dog.  I've seen him get very wary when we were walking in the Everglades and whether he detected a large snake or a croc I don't know but I respect his wisdom and we beat a retreat. He has good instincts and I don't argue with him even if I see nothing.

The city has put some energy into making the park accessible but in summer it tends to be a pretty quiet spot. Runners run on Government Road but not out here. It's very serene.

The houses you can see through the trees are on the far side of the canal. 

Looking east down the Canal toward Stock Island:

No crocodiles, no homeless people and no tired lonely gay men looking for a good time. 

All "known" hazards at Little Hamaca that have never bothered me.
I must give off the aura of wanting to be left alone in the wilderness. 

Rusty Does Little Hamaca

I had lunch with Robert, we parted ways and Rusty got up from sitting quietly under our feet (it was outdoors). Rather than gallop home I decided to reward Rusty with a walk. One day I will run out of new places and he will be disappointed. Today  was not that day.  

The walkway in Little Hamaca City Park has been modernized with aluminum to replace the old wooden handrails, which were here when I came with Cheyenne:

Rusty trotted on ahead and he is devilishly  difficult to photograph as he moves so quickly:

Unlike his predecessor, the late lamented yellow Labrador Cheyenne who was fast enough:

The old information signs are still here, decomposing into illegibility: 

The essence of the story, oft repeated here is that the Spaniards understood the Indians to be describing their beds "hammocks" when the Indians meant the mounds-of-high-ground-that-are-dry, when asked about their sleeping places. Hence the confusion and the name given to outcrops of dry land in the middle of the Everglades ( and Key West it turns out): hammocks where hardwoods thrive in the midst of water.

The walkway crosses the path above the dirt and the salt water and eventually arrives at the Riviera Canal. 

There used to be space to tie up a boat here for water access to the park. Nowadays the aluminum rail is solid and uninterrupted. Not many boats ever used the dock and I expect fear of falling into the water motivated the change:

And so back whence  we came:

The gambusia trenches are still here of course. They used to keep mosquito larvae eating fish in these trenches to help with the insect problem in the Lower Keys. I suppose the silting up problem is more trouble than they are worth:

This is where the story gets a bit sticky. I sort of wandered off the trail following Rusty and playing with my camera, and before I knew it I wasn't at the edge of the trail but I stepped off far enough to be properly lost.

Rusty thought it great fun, but I was wearing socks and sneakers and my feet got wet, the branches snagged me and it was an awful sweaty struggle to get out of the maze. I have no idea how I managed this feat of idiocy.

 Twenty minutes later all was well, feathers unruffled once more...

The wretched dog enjoyed himself enough to demolish a bowl of fresh water:

 Rusty was far from exhausted so we had to tour the old Hawk Missile site, a Cuban Missile Crisis installation now rotting away. And from the tops of the berms that protected individual rocket launcher sites we could see all the way back to the Riviera Canal:

In this picture you an see the berm of mounded sand and gravel built to protect the rocket launchers:

We climbed them together and I felt like I was twelve years old again, except that now I have gray in my beard and an iPhone instead of a slingshot.

 And a brash brisk explorer of a dog:

They are trying to beautify this area too, but I hope it remains as open and untrammeled by signs and fences. Fat chance:

 My dogs, past and present love exploring this place:

Past above and present below, barely visible through the leaves:

Another berm-top view, this time of the Las Salinas and Oceanwalk complexes at the eastern end of Key West:

 They have done a lot of clean up around here which is nice, I grant you:

Rusty will be sad if this place gets closed off or overly gentrified:

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