Cold Front

From the National Weather Service:

In the wake of a strong cold front, the coldest temperatures of the season will impact locations from New York and southern New England down to parts of the eastern Gulf Coast. In fact, the freezing line Monday morning is forecast to surge south of Atlanta all the way to the central coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Temperatures will warm a few degrees for Tuesday, but still remain 5 to 10 degrees below average.

It's a sad fact of life but I am used to hardened Inuit making fun of me when I talk about cold weather in Key West. The good news is that I do from time to time enjoy seeing people from Up North brought to their knees by temperatures they pour scorn on from a distance. 60  degrees in Key West is for some reason, possibly the humidity or the uninterrupted wind, a frigid temperature when one is obliged to live through it. 60 degrees American (15 Canadian) is actually quite cold, and though it's not supposed to get that cold tonight, we face the first solid cold front of a winter that meteorologists promise us will be colder than normal, whatever that is. We have lots to look forward to apparently before next summer.

I do not enjoy cold weather and for me anything below 70 degrees (21 Canadian) is cool enough so tonight's possible 68  degrees is starting to look uncomfortable to me.

BEHIND THE FRONT...NORTHERLY BREEZES WILL FRESHEN WHILE DEWPOINTS
SLOWLY FALL. WATER TEMPERATURES ARE WELL ABOVE NORMAL...SO WE DO NOT
THINK OVERNIGHT LOWS WILL REACH THE UPPER 60S. TEMPERATURES HAVE NOT
BEEN BELOW 70 DEGREES IN KEY WEST SINCE APRIL 1ST. WE WILL HAVE TO
WAIT UNTIL TUESDAY MORNING WHEN TEMPS WILL FALL INTO THE UPPER 60S.

This is after all a city where outdoor living is not meant to be boxed in, where opening up windows and doors is part of the pleasure of winter, where skies are blue and the sun shines is an all year phenomenon.

The fact is that the Lower Keys are not in the tropics, the tropic of cancer runs through the Straits of Florida 60 miles south of here and in winter even properly tropical Havana gets cold gray weather from time to time just as we do.

Monday

Mostly cloudy, then gradually becoming sunny, with a high near 76. Breezy, with a northeast wind around 20 mph.

Monday Night

Mostly clear, with a low around 68. Breezy, with a northeast wind around 20 mph.

Tuesday

Isolated showers. Mostly sunny, with a high near 76. Breezy, with a northeast wind around 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 10%.

Tuesday Night

A slight chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 70. Breezy, with a northeast wind around 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 10%.

 So much as one might prefer to spend all winter in t-short and shorts, there are occasions from time to time when we must adapt. Socks are de rigeur when Jack Frost strikes.

One hears stories of homeless Americans freezing to death Up North, and how they cope in the snow filled states and Canada I can't imagine. Key West has  beds for the homeless but when it gets cold or wet they tend to fill and some street people just prefer to be left to cope on the streets. In a town where frost has never been seen a cold snap is not exactly life threatening. I don't think pets or humans should be outside but they haven't yet  voted to make me dictator so cruelty remains a viable option.

There are people who dislike heat and humidity and mosquitoes, inexplicably, and they revel in snow and ice and the misery of short days and long nights and the rick of death by exposure. A while back someone sent me a picture of a car with a Key West sticker, and I wonder if they were wishing for warmer weather?

My young colleague JW saw  snow in 1997 once in North Carolina when he was nine and he says he loved it. Not sweating and sledding made his young heart sing. When I told him my wife was going to be in freezing temperatures this week in Northern California his eyes lit up with envy. Man, he said, I have to go and stand in the freezer rooms at the grocery store to feel that cold. I miss cold weather.

My buddy Nick also grew in Key West and last saw snow in New York last winter. He is another pervert who likes snow. He wears the badge proudly saying snow gives him a thrill. He likes to be cold. What is wrong with these people?

I don't know how cold it will really get tonight and over the course of the next few days. The run up to the cold weather was magnificent heavy rain and roiling black cloud and strong west winds that lasted for days, a surprisingly powerful precursor to the cold front. Typically it gets hot and humid and winds blow out of the south and swing round rapidly to the northwest which brings clear skies and cold temperatures.  

Perhaps it really will be cold enough to get us looking like these file pictures I took in winters past, socks, jackets, hats, hoods and maybe even gloves. A lot of people don't have heat in their homes and when it gets crisp around here people start to lose their resistance and everyone starts to sniffle and hack with winter ailments. Pathetic I know, but true.

Personally I'm fine with it being 80 degrees (26 Canadian degrees) and sunny all winter long. If I wanted it cold I'd live in St Augustine. I don't need it thanks, not that the gods are listening to me. My ideal, of which I never get bored:

This nonsense makes Richard in Fairbanks' heart sing:

Not Key West

I saw these pictures on the Huffington Post. I thought about it for a while. I have no regrets about where I live. You lot keep the seasons, I'm fine season free.

Arctic Unreality

Here's a first for me, a post with a link, it's actually from a blog I read frequently in my web list from the Arctic Circle. She's a single mother living in Kotzebue in rural Alaska, a place about as appealing to me as the fire pits of Hell (my future address I'm sure), but which nevertheless I find fascinating for the very perverse reason that I'd rather swim with piranhas in the tropics than eat seal meat and watch snow falling in the Arctic. If you follow this blog you'll find that from time to time they eat foods that seem rather, um, robust for suburban America, and are never likely to show up in your local Piggly Wiggly. This below is a tiny suburb of Kotzebue accessible by plane or snowmobile ( or husky sled I'm sure), called Kivalina eking out an existence on a barrier island, not in Florida, but Alaska. The white stuff I am reliably informed is snow and frozen ocean:

The blog is mostly a record of the surprisingly mundane doings of ordinary family life in an extraordinary place but every now and again it breaks out and talks about the aspects of life that are truly odd about life so far north, in this instance a trip by bush plane to the outer villages for purposes not revealed in the story. It seems Kotzebue, a place that resembles Big Pine Key under a snowdrift, is actually the metropolis, and there are people still living in wood cabins the villages dotting the back country. One can hardly imagine it, because I am after all a little miffed that its been dropping to 60 degrees (15C) at night since time immemorial it seems like in the Keys; up there its minus something horrible with wind chill and horizontal snowflakes. In Alaska they take jaunts in small planes in snowstorms, and they do it with insouciance. Here's the link for a view into a living refrigerator:
http://tundratantrum.blogspot.com/

Aside from the arctic barrier island I noticed modern homes built on stilts, not high enough to park under, so their vehicles, left outside, turn into wedding cakes in winter which makes me wonder how little they pay for their cars and snowmobiles if they leave them outdoors to freeze. Quite aside from the pain of defrosting them and getting into them and making them go when needed. I have read that the ground in Alaska is made of frozen dirt called permafrost and if you heat it up it melts and things on top of it like houses and roads sink into the mire, so I'm guessing that's why they have houses on stilts, and probably not because of hurricanes. However I'd rather face a hurricane than endless blowing snow quite frankly. I'm hoping it hits 80 degrees today (27C) because I'm tired of being cold, even at my modest level.

To Snow Or Not

There was a question, perhaps rhetorical, about the possibility of familiarity breeding contempt when it comes to the bright colors bathed in constant sunshine that is the lot of a Florida Keys resident. The short answer is, no it never gets boring, and no, I never take it for granted. Every day is a fresh reminder of one of the chief pleasures of living at 24 degrees north latitude.Yesterday I was training a new dispatcher in the arcane science of the police intranet system that connects law enforcement agencies across the country. We spoke briefly to Nome PD where daylight is down to 9 hours a day, ("It's not that dark, we are below the Arctic Circle," their dispatcher told us slightly defensively), and I'm not sure if my trainee was more impressed by the secure law enforcement network or the notion of policing snowdrifts.
Its getting to be that time of year when it starts freezing Up North and so we have to start policing bad parking, bad public drinking and bad bums begging for money at the tops of their voices on street corners in the Southernmost City. The trick to enjoying life in the Keys is to leave behind as much baggage as you can, and to learn as fast as you can to take things as they are. especially if you come from some button down community Up North where skittles are lined up, i-s are dotted and t-s are crossed. In Key West things just don't work that way. The confrontation brews when people who are used to order and cleanliness come up against chaos and small town clubbiness.
So snowbirds flutter into town each Fall and discover that things haven't changed since last year. And they sure as hell haven't changed either, so disorganized parking, public displays of begging (beggars like warm winters too!) and apparent municipal indifference set them off. What to do? Why, call the police!

Its hard to explain to well dressed people why its okay for smelly people to occupy city parks during the day, but the Supreme Court has outlawed discrimination on the basis of hygiene so its hard to get police officers to arrest people for being dressed in cerements. Impossible in fact, and this state of affairs hasn't changed since the last time the snowbirds were cluttering up the streets and restaurants. The Citizens' Voice Column in the paper is filling up again with quality of life complaints which are rather dull compared to the throat clutching verbal wrestling that locals indulge in while the more strait jacketed winter residents are away.
These unrelated photographs illustrate the beauty of Winter in the Keys, sunlight takes on a crisp white light, and the brisk cold fronts sweep away the dusty summer particles rendering colors that much sharper. My Bonneville is running equally crisply and is a joy to point down the highway. I've passed the 25-hundred mile mark since October 10th and I'm starting to find my way with more instinct and habit than previously. The Vespa is soon to go back on the "for sale" circuit now that we have those lovely wealthy snowbirds in town, and curiously, I find myself missing the Vespa less and less. The Bonneville is proving to be an easy fun ride in the flatlands of the Keys. In some ways it takes less skill to ride the Bonneville, as the twin cylinder takes anything in its stride, head winds, moonstruck tourists, lumbering heffalumps (SUVs) and juvenile testosterone cases. And snowbirds.
Staring at the Straits of Florida south of Sugarloaf Key has its compensations, on a golden winter evening, but there are occasions when a visit to the movies makes sense too. Last Monday it was the turn of Into The Wild an adventure film about a young man taking things to extremes until they get completely out of hand. Only then does he figure out the meaning of life; when its too late. This young man, according to the movie, made a solo kayak trip down the Colorado river, through the Grand Canyon all the way to the Sea of Cortez. He hitch hiked, made friends, disappeared, regrouped, worked and lazed away sunny desert days. But he did just have to go to Alaska, the borne from which some travelers fail to return.It was a fine movie, absorbing, demanding attention and posing difficult questions about age, impetuosity and the meaning of being alive. I couldn't get over the notion that the true test of one's mettle has to be found in the snowdrifts of the frozen north. One sun's oneself in a pansy hammock under coconut palms in the tropics while heroes forge themselves in blizzards and drizzle and cold slippery roads Up North.

By those restricted standards I am glad to be a pansy. I lived for a great deal too many years in the cold confines of Northern California to enjoy the notion of rain and cold. I just don't like it, and no amount of hairpins or mountains or spectacular views across death defying valleys compensates me for the cold in my fingers, the slush on my boots, and the depressing need to take the car on exceptionally horrendous winter days. Sitting by the fire sucks when compared to stretching out on the deck under the illusory cold embrace of a winter full moon. So, no, the winter landscapes never dull or fade or crumble into rust. The moon last night was round and red as it sank into the Gulf of Mexico on my early ride in to work. Today it was cold and steely and threw out shards of ice across the ruffled lagoons in the Saddlebunch Keys. Tomorrow I hope for more crisp and clear and sun, but if not it makes no matter because sooner rather than later sub tropical nature will reassert itself and the sun will shine.

That's what all those visitors and snowbirds come here for after all, not to mention the twittering year round residents, who came for the weather and stay for it too, no matter how unwilling they may be to admit they revere it. The Weather.