George Smathers Sunlight

 Happy New Year and may we hope for better things to come. Like sun sea and sand, today's theme.

The idea was to use part of a lunch break taking photos at the beach to take advantage of cool temperatures and bright sunlight. I wanted to see what mood I could engender in black and white. Well, that didn't last long.

The colors are just too vibrant to be ignored.

People who live in the Keys tend to forget how these islands are sold to the winter bound masses Up North. The easiest way to sell a frigid commuter kicking a snowdrift on the idea of a Florida vacation is to promise sun sea and sand. Which is what we have here and you can see why some people prefer it to snow drifts. Other people like their water frozen but we can ignore them for now. 

The thing is: this is the single longest stretch of beach in the Lower Keys rivalled by Sombrero Beach, shorter but deeper and better for swimming in Marathon, and the pay to enter beach at Fort Zachary Taylor, actually the best swimming beach in Key West, even if it is in the state park which requires you pay to enter, not a to but enough to keep the bums out which could be a plus.

Smathers Beach is built of sand imported from the Bahamas and dumped here to be dribbled away over time by the tides and in bigger gulps by occasional hurricanes. Every morning a tractor pulls a giant rake up and down the beach clearing any possible trash while smoothing out the fine grained sand for the pleasure of those frozen northerners finally enjoying their all too brief vacations in Paradise.  

The beach is named for another weird character with only a peripheral connection to Key West. The other odd name involves Mallory Square home of the famous sunset which is named for Stephen Mallory whose greatest claim to fame is as the Confederate secretary of the Navy. The beach is named for US Senator George Smathers (1913-2007) who was a close friend of President Kennedy and had nothing to do with Key West directly. When you read his biography he reminds of the kinds of people who got elected to public office once upon a time, true public servants. He served in the military, rose through the political ranks, retired and then made hefty donations to his home state. He was a popular Florida politician in the old Southern Democrat mode of fond memory, and I suppose that's what got him immortality on this stretch of sand.  Senators didn't cut each others' cross party throats in those happy days.

I don't suppose visitors to the beach much care one way or another who it is named for, such is the fleeting nature of fame. I like to think about Kennedy and Smathers getting elected to the Senate together and then and learning the ropes of their political trade together. And rumor has it they shared the more social ropes of their trade as well, two handsome young well connected men. Ahem.

Back to the present: I cannot fathom getting into seawater at this time of year. Seventy five degrees? I think not especially with a cold north wind blowing. On the other hand I'm not here on vacation and summer swimming suits me best.

It does make for a pleasant lunch break to come out and sit and stare for a little while, even in long pants and closed toed shoes to watch the light play on the waters, to see boats actually deploying their sails, to feel a frisson of cool air on your cheek. Before you go back to the office.

To do nothing in particular except to watch the clouds and the bicycles and the active people being active. To remember Senator George Smathers while at the beach. A pleasant afternoon's distraction.

Tropical Storm Winds

With Tropical Storm Laura passing about 150 miles east of Key West even before clearing Cuba's west end, the wind made itself felt.

Key West has always done well in these situations thanks to the reef, which keeps coastal waters shallow and tries to break up wave action. However it's not a seawall and energy reaches the land one way or another.

There has been a long standing joke in Key West that the White Street Pier is the stump of the bridge to Cuba, closed by sanctions. It's not true of course but it raises the occasional tourist eyebrow and represents  some of what we miss by being cut off from that island. On days like yesterday the sense of isolation was enhanced by the seas boiling.

There is a certain pleasure when the weather is like this, as there is no threat from a direct hit by an actual hurricane with all the drama and chaos that brings, but like this we can be reminded of how we survive violence in nature and eventually overcome. That feels good.

It's vulnerable living close to sea level with a scheduled hurricane season for half of each year. We are coming into the busy month so the fact that Tropical Storm Laura is passing us by en route to dusting the Gulf Coast is nice for now, but there is no guarantee as to the next circle of pain coming across the Atlantic. It could be our turn next and we all know it. Especially now that we hear the hurricane may land in Louisiana and Texas as a Category 4, just like Irma landed here in 2017...

The spray was flying over the seawall such that when I got home Gannet 2 got a hose down. I was extra glad my camper van had that undercoat I had applied in Miami. South Roosevelt Boulevard always gets salt water and sand and chaos when we take a direct hit from a storm. And usually boats duck and run for marinas or mangroves to get some protection. 

Instead the order to evacuate RVs mobile homes and boats has been rescinded by the county and liveaboards can luxuriate in the simple of act of survival.  With the rain blown through for a while, the skies clear and a setting sun to illuminate the scene being alive on a boat, be it ever so humble, can feel pretty damned good.

We had a call this past week for an ambulance for a man suffering downtown on the street. They took him away and later he died not alone but looked after, at least that. His sister called to try to figure out his personal effects from far out of state. I don't think he had much of great value but it was what she had to remember him by, including his much loved bicycle.  His bicycle. I directed her to the proper place to find his property and she left me sitting there wondering about what we leave behind. A bicycle in Key West is a valuable tool, a way to get around even in the face of strong winds and heavy seas. I hope his sister knows her brother depended on his humble bike. I rather suspect she does and somehow she will be reunited with that critical vestige of her late brother's life. I wonder where else in America a cheap beach bike is a valued heirloom. I wish it were true in more places. This guy was pushing hard against Tropical Storm Laura and reminded me of the value of decent bike.

I had to take the van to work as the Fiat after 106,000 miles decided to burst a brake line. I am a quick study with a hand brake so I didn't crash.  I got it to a safe parking spot at work so that later the wrecker could  haul to the shop. Thank you Triple A.

I like driving the van, high up and ponderous and no one cuts this tank off as I bowl down the road towards them.  I will be glad to get the 40 mpg Fiat back, for my commute later this week.

I am ready for the wind to die down, the seas to stay where they belong for now,  and no more storms for the next couple of months. That would be nice. Naturally we wouldn't mind if these two storms spare serious damage to their next targets in Louisiana and Texas.

May we always be so lucky to get a. nice refreshing breeze and some photogenic waves.

On The beach

Working an evening shift I drove into town late afternoon and paused at Smathers Beach. I figure in a few days the coronavirus carriers will be in town forgetting to maintain simple rules to keep our numbers low. Might as well snag a few pictures now to remember how it was.  

I was regretting not having my own swimsuit with me as the toilets/changing rooms were open and the freshwater showers were available and not being used...I could have been refreshed and dried and back in uniform in less time than it takes to tell. 

Those waters just looked too inviting and even the birds were maintaining their social distance. Unlike our crowded neighbors photographed in thick crowds Up North we in the Keys mind our manners..!

There are hard core athletes in the Keys, running in the summer like heat, showing up at the newly opened gyms where machines are spaced, classes are reduced and yet I know I am not hard core enough to share their breaths with them. Not yet. I exercise at home thanks to YouTube and keep my germs to myself.

I was left to sit in the shade in my long pants and closed toed shoes, which ended up trailing lovely yellow Bahamian sand all over the place, and I looked and thought and hoped for the best, while thinking about all the calls I have received at work from people anxious to vacation in the Keys. Are the Keys open yet? they ask, unable to use Google to find the answer for themselves.

I hope in the long run nothing changes, nothing happens, life goes on, money flows in, work blossoms,  and we return slowly inexorably to normal. They tell us we will be living a new normal in the future but my reading of the past tells me we will slip back to stasis, because entropy will lead us back to the old equilibrium because we want to fly across oceans, to eat out, to gather in crowded arenas, to drink in public to go shopping to walk the malls and what we are living now in the First World isn't normal.

I have read about plagues past and I am struck by how virulent they were, how little people knew or understood about what was killing them and thus they never figured out how to stop the next plague, the next yellow fever from coming back and killing them.

I have had dengue fever from youthful times in Central America. I was scared of being shot  as I found myself in the middle of a civil war but the bullets I dodged with not too much difficulty though they scared me whizzing past my head. Dengue fever instead got me good and I went home feeling the full effects of "break bone" fever. The Salvadorans I left behind got tortured and shot and they died of dengue, in droves. I had access to food and fluids, clean drinking and washing water, a proper toilet and lots of comfortable, stress-free rest. A couple of weeks and my girlfriend was nagging at me to get out of bed. Then she wondered why I didn't feel like marrying her. I like to be coddled.

When I was a teenager in Africa I met other overlanders talking about chasing down women and carousing in the brothels of West Africa. Even though neither I nor anyone else had heard of AIDS back then it dd not seem like a very good idea to me. I stuck to my motorcycle and kept riding and seeing and living my ordinary life in extraordinary places. I still got sick!  That time it was jaundice and I had to fly home from Cameroon a nasty shade of yellow and sick as a dog. The French residents of Cameroon to their eternal credit packaged my Yamaha SR500 and sent it home to me. I must have inspired much pity.

Central Africans died in droves from what I had contracted simply from being young and stupid and inattentive. I got an isolation room at the hospital in Italy, first rate care in the form of free socialized medicine and a month later I was the thinnest I had ever been and free to live my young stupid life. I got back on my motorcycle and looked for more horizons to ride to and get sick on. I toured the US on a Vespa and managed not to get ill. Yay!

It's easy to read the words and ponder the misery of desperate times in the past. For instance the 1918 'flu which originated in Kansas and killed millions in rapid and horrible ways all over the world. Again no one had a clue what was happening and they tried quarantine, isolation, face masks and prayer. And still they died.

We live in more enlightened times we hope and we chose collectively to try to save the old and infirm in a collective moment of economic shut down in the hope this thing will go away and not come back. I am betting that when I return next week Smathers will be populated and social distancing will be an artifact of another era. I hope not but if that happens it will be interesting to see what happens next.

I am not a social animal inasmuch as I don't miss the bars or the rituals of eating out.  I don't like crowds nor do I enjoy gatherings of people who don't know me and my quirks where I can't be myself. Yet I do miss the crowds and the people if only at a distance which surprises me as I'd have thought a total desert would suit me best. Thus I have learned of some deficits in my character by living through the throes of this very weird pandemic. I have had to work through the pandemic and maintain a schedule acting normal as everything around me shut down. It has felt odd I must admit.

What I miss is the effects left by the people if not the people themselves, the vapor trails they leave as they drift through the periphery of my life. I have discovered that contrary to my previous belief the zombie apocalypse subtracts photographic opportunities instead of multiplying them. The quirks of people and their inexplicable behavior are all forgotten in a world devoid of people where nothing changes, where streets are empty and the debris of civilization is covered by leaves and animal foot prints.  It's an odd feeling for me to discover it is people who in the end feed my photography and I am finding myself forced to admit that I am missing that part of my inspiration. I have tried to use the lock down to see beyond what normally makes itself apparent to me on my walks, to see details and angles and colors, but in the end the debris of our civilization is the part that is missing and the lack of it has made itself felt in an empty town.

Empty streets and clean empty sidewalks.  Nothing to see here, move along. Until next week.

The Beaches

Checking the sign below you'll notice that Higgs beach is owned by Monroe County even though it is surrounded on all sides by the City of Key West. The signs are clear and the beach is empty. 

There are a few people wandering around keeping proper distances from each other and enjoying some fresh air and exercise.

The chickens are there of course which is not surprising as they live there and are enjoying a relatively human-free life which I dare say involves seeing fewer scraps too.

The African cemetery is open. That's the monument to the slave ship detained en route to Havana whose unhappy human cargo was rescued and brought to Key West where many died and others were shipped back to an uncertain fate in West Africa.

 For some, beach restrictions don't hold them back, for they are on the high seas:

 For others the most you can get is a perch from which to admire the waves and turquoise waters:

 Children's playground: as empty as if it were 4 am.

 Passersby on foot and on wheels and not very many of either.

Smathers Beach had a few souls littering its vast expanse but they were not exactly bunched up crowds. It looked more like a handful of local unemployed enjoying for once what so many come to Florida to vacation on: golden sand.

Miles of emptiness even in a  town as small as Key West. Closed to outsiders and living with remarkably little confirmed coronavirus. I wonder if possibly isolation actually does work like the scientists told us?

Flying By Parachute

It was a perfect afternoon to go fly a kite off the south shore of Key West, and because it was sunny and breezy and pleasant it was also an excellent moment to have a lunch break. No surprise then when I showed up at the beach there was some parasailing underway.

Parasailing is the sort activity you just about expect to see when you look across the water from Key West. You'll see brightly colored parachutes wafting back and forth along the horizon like shadow puppets against a screen.

I ended up watching this flight as by chance I found myself observing the end of the ride, which was in reasonable range of my camera's telephoto, though at the limit of the high resolution view. The riders were winched down and the parachute caught and folded with no fuss at all, quite amazing.

It was in just a few minutes that the two passengers were coming right back to the Smathers Beach ticket office of the parasail company. Just like that it was all over, and I suspect they had a glorious ride.

Ready for the next ride and it really did look as lovely as it appears in the picture.

And no one knows the fun they had aloft, now they are regular beach goers, back in the world.

I was actually looking for an old landmark that used to crop up when I started dispatching first responders 15 years ago. The corner of South Roosevelt Boulevard and Bertha Street used to be known as "The Ramp," because there was an actual ramp at the spot. You can still see it here:

The ramp is not really noticeable as you ride by and you can see that modern traffic would not make it easy to back a trailer up to the ramp, position it precisely and leave the tow vehicle sticking out into what has become a busy roadway.

 It had to go I suppose, but in reality slabs of concrete aren't that easy to remove so here it still is, as steep as ever but simply cut off by use of heavy cement blocks.

 All ready for the winter months, and no boat ramp needed.