I am very relieved we are not Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, from whom nothing much is heard anymore. I did read that on St Johns they still have no electricity at all.This is Florida and be it ever so tenuous we are connected to the mainland. Yet this, after six weeks is how my street looks:
I have electricity, internet and air conditioning and running potable water from the faucet. Fantastic! My driveway is clear, my street is a mess. We call it Beirut-by-the-Sea, a jumble of trash, broken homes, wreckage and and rat infested piles of debris worthy of a civil war. The main road that connects our subdivision to the Highway is called Spanish Main, and here they pick up some trash and pour more in it's place:
US One, the Overseas Highway shown below as I was driving into Summerland Key is a mess. The trucks hauling wreckage spill stuff as they go and you are as likely as not to come across bits of RV parts, appliances, sheet metal wood and tree limbs as you go on the main road. Riding at night requires total alertness, even more than by day.
What makes it all so bizarre is that there is a three way public argument between the Florida Department of Transportation, responsible for highway debris, the county contractor responsible for side streets and the county. The state stays aloof and does its job meanwhile the county contractor can't get the required 200 trucks to clean the sub divisions along this hundred mile mess. He says FDOT pays too much and he can't compete with the state pay scale. He has but 78 trucks working. None have showed up on my corner of Cudjoe Key.
Imagine: this debris field stretches more or less from Mile Marker Ten a hundred miles north to Key Largo. In the newspaper county officials say they have removed 400,000 cubic yards of wreckage, as much as was generated by the hated Hurricane Wilma and its floods in 2005. They estimated there are 2 million cubic yards to clear this time around- five times as much. And the county contract says my street should be clean by next weekend...No chance.
It just doesn't end. there's always something going wrong. There are no working gas stations on Summerland or Ramrod and only one in Big Pine. Think about this: cable television has been absent from much of the Keys since the storm. My neighbors got their first technician visit from Comcast last Saturday. We've had AT&T internet in my house for three weeks (we watch streaming TV) so we are lucky. Things just aren't getting done in some areas and as much as we cannot blame we cannot feel good about this chaos. I have seen societal collapse and I did not like it. Losing water, electricity, phone and medical services, fire protection and law enforcement all at once was a lot to handle.
This Mount Trashmore on Ramrod Key is the scene of multiple trucks and excavators loading up every single day but the pile never shrinks. There's a bigger one at Summerland Key and a vast such pile in Marathon. It's endless. We have to give up the pretense that this lot will be cleared in anything less than months. Meanwhile it rains and smells mature.
I am not one of those who cares if people come by to photograph our misery though I have seen posts on Facebook protesting disaster tourists as though they should refrain. I understand the fascination but I would like amateur photojournalists either to not slow down or pull completely out of the way as they photograph our precious trash piles. I am so used to driving past wrecked homes and exploded RV trailers and piles of garbage I barely notice them. But I do notice people slowing me down as they crawl by fascinated by the detritus of lives upended by a Category Four storm.
There's plenty of crap to stare at too. And I'm not showing the houses torn apart, the subdivisions submerged in mud. Here is the refuse of all that destruction. This trash represents workers who can no longer live in the Keys and do their work. People living in FEMA hotels kicked out to make way for better paying tourists.
They say flying the flag upside down is a symbol of distress. Well, we have lots of streets signs doing the same thing. I hope someone with authority to do something notices.
I have always wanted to live on a canal with a boat at my dock, and now that I do and have done for half a decade I find myself still marveling at my good fortune that my canal on Ramrod Key is overflowing with mangroves and the houses follow no distinct architectural models:
And then a pause for incoming traffic:
Finally up onto a plane, 20-something miles per hour out into Newfound Harbor. My boat, a 14 foot (4 meter) Dusky, has no lights or instruments, as simple a machine as I could find after years of struggling with systems on my sailboat, but it tracks true across the water:
My idea was to buck the light south wind for a mile and take a short cut to Niles Channel where I will head north with the wind at my back. The day was hazy and the water was hard to read but the bubba sticks made it easy to find my way:
Past the boats anchored near the Niles Channel Bridge; these are the waters I stare down upon from the crown of the 40 foot bridge as I pass over on my Triumph:
The ability to be down here from time to time makes it entirely pleasant to be up there commuting, knowing that with ten minutes in my boat I can be down here. Some days I'm up there and the weather is foul and I'm glad I'm not down here, being tossed around. Beyond the bridge are the open waters of Niles Channel stretching to the Gulf of Mexico:
With the small matter of a shoal area in the middle marked by two mangrove islands. the northernmost one was I believe called Money Key, until a wealthy musician bought it and changed the name to Melody Key, though the chart shows it as Howell Key. The island is a couple of acres in size and has a house on it:
It seems an inconvenient place to live, a fact that has occurred to the current owner apparently, because for the unattainable sum of four point five million dollars, reportedly, this lump of mangrove could change hands. The views aren't bad if you, like me, enjoy flat waters:
Because I was alone, footloose and fancy free I decided to bugger about a bit off the main channel and explore the mangrove passages. I cut directly to the west across the top of Knock'em Down Keys, a spot that seems godforsaken enough that no one would be there yet, lo and behold, an angler:
Travel between mangrove islands in areas where the charts (if I'd had one) show shallow water is easy enough if you have a grasp of the basics. First read the water, and you need sunlight from behind you to do that. The ditty goes: Brown, brown run aground; white, white yes you might; green, green nice and clean; blue, blue straight on through. Which may or may not be helpful in determining water depth. I try to keep an eye on the vegetation because it's easy to slide too close to one side or the other of a channel if you aren't keeping your eyes open. Luckily the bottom in the back country shelves pretty uniformly in most places and it's unlikely you will go from four feet of water to none without warning. One hopes. If all else fails wave to the military at the blimp base on the northern tip of Cudjoe Key. Maybe they will take an interest in your welfare.
You'd better believe they'll take an interest if you stumble ashore on their heavily protected base. And as one turns and heads north again to open water there they are again, anglers feeding the fish all over the place:
And then finally, about 45 minutes after I left my dock, the object of the exercise hove into view, a long line of mangroves, from a distance a dark patch on the water, one island among many. Except, this one has a beach:
Tarpon Belly Key has the distinction of being an actual island with dirt, pebbles, a very little sand and trees of the casuarina type growing above the waterline. There is also evidence of human use on the island with large blocks of cement lying around as though tossed carelessly aside. Tarpon Belly was once used to farm seafood, shrimp as I recall and my friend Robert remembers when there was a functioning truck sitting on the island used to haul materials around. Now all is in ruins and very picturesque it is too, overgrown and deserted. Except I had forgotten this was Easter weekend and everyone and his brother was out splashing around at Tarpon Belly Key. It looked like an RV Park:
I figured this was neither the time nor the place for a meditative swim off the beach so I got back up on a plane, and made like a leaf and blew. Back out on the water buzzing along, the wind in my hair and the sunscreen bubbling under the sun, it could have been worse. They'll be gone soon, I said to myself, and I'll still be here. And presumably Tarpon Belly Key will be there too.
And so back to Niles Channel Bridge. I was pondering so deeply on the injustice of other people getting time off at the same time as myself that I managed to take a wrong turn and found myself once again blundering around in mangrove channels unfamiliar to me. This time it wasn't fun because I wanted to get home. It's amazing how invisible the Nile Channel Bridge can be when there is a mangrove island between you and it, for all that it rises to the giddy height of 40 feet above the water. Eventually I got my bearings and got going again. I wonder how people will ever recall the peculiar feeling of being lost, even if for a moment, in a time when people turn on their GPS receivers even when driving even on Highway One, the only road available to them.
I slowed down for a bit and played with the camera and the Old Flagler Bridge and the new arching Highway bridge.
And then, off I went to park the boat and take a walk..
...but that is another essay for another day.