Sunday Sunset

I thought that a Sunday without words might be suitable. I hope it is.

Summerland Key

I grumble to anyone who will listen, and there aren't many left who care, that y days off are marked by rain and heavy gray skies. Wednesday went exactly that way. Boo hiss. Rusty didn't care, he ran and splashed ahead of me.

I was surprised to see a tree stump in the path looking like a cow skull. I knew it wasn't anything so esoteric as the hound rushed on by without a second glance. And from there we moved from Georgia O'Keefe to the Henri Cartier Bresson moment, decisively.

The French photographer who died five or six years ago created a belief in the value of the "decisive moment" in photography, exemplified by one his most famous pictures, a fat man in a hat and raincoat jumping a puddle in 1932. Cartier Bresson said later it was a moment captured when he stuck his camera through a gap in a fence and he simply squeezed the button. I saw my decisive moment coming and this was the middle of three attempts. Rusty continued to ignore me naturellement.

When first I saw these pipes organized into a battlefield I also saw a lot of spent paintball ammunition on the ground but these days it seems the war is won as the graffiti are fading and the ground is clean. I hope the right side came out on top.

There is an awful lot of cement out here in the abomination of desolation. Once upon a time the mangrove swamps were seen as useless and fit only to be used as a dumping ground. I've stumbled across vehicles of every description along the trails and around here I have photographed a gently decaying cement mixer of all things.

Graffiti mostly looks like scribble with the occasional obscenity thrown in to shock but every now and again one wonders why the artist hasn't gone on to greater things.

I found a courtyard lifted from the lost city of Atlantis, or possibly a pile of construction debris laid out symmetrically for some obscure reason.

Bits of rubber, light poles, cement and wires. It's all here decomposing.

It was my day off so rain threatened all the time we were out but after an hour it was time to go home even though the threatened rain had held off. 

This area must have been a gravel pit before it became a dumping ground. It used to be legal to dig holes in the mangroves and remove gravel for construction before anyone figured out you couldn't have fish without mangroves. So now they are protected and dumping is not allowed.

Highway One runs next to the not so pretty but probably hurricane proof block that is for sale on Summerland Key. It's right next to the highway but it has some space surrounded by a high wall right on a  canal. Sounds ideal for an unsocial millionaire who likes traffic noise.

The weather is become hot and sticky already so Rusty has adopted a summer posture of a slow pace, much sniffing and frequent dunks in murky warm water. He got his bath when we got home and he remained annoyed at me for about thirty minutes after he escaped the towel rub down and scampered off to seek solace from my wife.

A seaplane.  Not fascinating, I know but I find them to be the most interesting planes I see around here. Next year, virus permitting, I want to fly onto a  glacier in Alaska and  those flights  go on planes equipped not with floats but with skis. Alaskan planes go skiing. 

Back on planet Earth where humans are meant to roam I started looking down at the rocks and shapes underfoot, temporarily exposed by low tides and a rapidly receding  dry season. 

I had anticipated the summer flooding season so I was wearing my Crocs, a consideration Rusty doesn't worry about. 

A snail or something similar had been for an underwater walk, spinning out a graffito because crawling off to dry land through the puddle:

A little sunshine, a little color and a reflection.

On our way back the non skull stump was still there sitting proud in the puddle. Rusty, panting heavily had to come back with me to reality and chores and deadlines and stuff.  

The Painted Quarry

I look back over decades spent walking the mangroves and I find it astonishing I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have met people on the trails. This thought came to me last night when a strange woman waved at me from her bicycle. You looked puzzled when i waved at you my neighbor said to me later when I was at home. I had dutifully waved back at the brightly dressed woman on a blue bicycle with no clue it was Paula. Silly me.

Then up the trail I was wandering looking at dead white buttonwood trunks when a flash of artificial white illuminated the trail. A man's shirt I thought to myself, the gender of the occupant given away perhaps by the size of the cloth through the bushes, accompanied by a yellow dot - a dog apparently. I looked back from my buttonwood exploration and no one was anywhere to be seen. The sight of Rusty and I convinced another walker that the trail was reserved for my pleasure. Good man, leave me alone. I don't know what the world is coming to when winter visitors think they can explore my trails at will. 

Clearly, in case my taste for irony escapes you these trails aren't mine at all and I don't drag trash out here to burn it. Nor do I spray paint abandoned cement pipes, nor do I stage them as a secluded paintball field but I do enjoy visiting from time to time. There is a sensation of abandonment out here, all these signs of chaos and urban guerillas chasing around the cement yet when Rusty and I come out to listen to the wind we are alone with the merest hint of traffic on Highway One a mile away across the mud and mangroves.

I don't really see the point of dragging spray cans out here to inscribe these big cement tubes in the middle of nowhere but I suppose art must have it's outlet, even if the art in question is nihilist and of dubious originality.

Rusty and i walk, he sniffs and I make pictures and leave no trace. I once did meet a bunch of all terrain vehicles out here, mud warriors trying to pretend they are in some vast expansive woodland filled with gnarly trails and then they cross paths with an old man in Crocs and a dog who watches them from the cover of mangroves they could never hope to penetrate. A wave and they were gone. Never seen again.

Last spring I saw a pick up truck parked at the entrance to the trail and indeed later I found his camp, clearly visible from the trail and he left behind a mess of pallets, household trash, bedding and the like. It was not a good time to be living in the mangroves with much rain and mosquitoes and I don't doubt he was was not a happy human playing at boy scouts but he should have had the common sense to clean up. Trash engenders ill feeling.

There was a time in the Keys as everywhere else, when these spaces were considered "wasted" if not dedicated to human use, so the best use was to dump crap for free among the mangroves. They didn't do things by halves and i have found old cars,  a Volkswagen bus, a school bus, numerous tires, a cement mixer and on and on. Including this old trailer with a  load of tiles of all things. Just dumped and left to rust and get covered in graffiti. 

These areas were slated for development before attitudes changed. Developers bought the swamps, advertised vacation plots for sale to northerners stuck in snow storms and in an effort to make the uninhabitable useable they tried to suppress mosquitoes. You may remember the bat tower which was destroyed on Sugarloaf by Hurricane Irma. That was a natural mosquito killer plan developed early in the 20th century to have bats eat insects except they hated the neighborhood and left.

Here we have two pictures of gambusia trenches. You will find these all over the back country in the Keys. The bad news is you can trip in them and your fat Labrador can get stuck in them (I miss Cheyenne sometimes) and they are full of mud so when you pull her out you look like the survivor of a very  gruesome disaster. The good news is the rock chewed out of the ground to make them is piled alongside in low berms and if you get three feet up you suddenly get much better views...of flat green mangroves. The idea was to fill them with gambusia fish that eat mosquito larvae and hibernate in the mud in dry season.

Grand fail. But the trenches are left  as are the berms and look what you can see if you are five foot six and suddenly elevated two extra feet. I told you the views here aren't really extraordinary if you expect the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. 

I was out walking one day a few years ago and I heard the sound of a motor purring through the bushes. Imagine my surprise when a gray Vespa 250 came bouncing round the corner. He was cheerfully negotiating the mud and rocks on his $6,000 scooter and we stopped and chatted for a second. He seemed surprised when I told him the trail didn't go anywhere and didn't change much. I rather admired his nerve; I have never gone blindly off road on my scooters in the mangroves. I really do enjoy walking!

I saw Keys Energy improving the electrical lines on the hurricane resistant cement poles. Its a bot early in the year but already this winter we've had a trickle of people coming to the police station looking for hurricane re-entry stickers...my usual response is "Do you know something I don't, any storms coming?" Being prepared is a good thing but I find that sort of level of preparedness a little unnerving. I think this year I am going to evacuate if they will let me. I never have since 2004 and I think I'd like to try it especially as I have the van. I have to confess a week in the van in the Blue Ridge sounds a lot better at my advanced age than a week in the Keys with trash everywhere and no lights. My last hurricane season I hope.

Never mind hurricanes, never mind the noisy busy world that awaits. Rusty needed to sniff and I needed to enjoy the moment.

Some parts of the back country aren't trash and some aren't even marked by the passage of people, they are just patches of color and light. As the trails should be.

Mangrove Sunset Backwards

Much to my annoyance the computer downloaded my pictures backwards. I was grateful it downloaded them at all as sometimes Blogger is reluctant to add pictures to my page for some reason. The engineers have upgraded the service with all the usual screw ups change brings in its wake. Besides I am in a happy frame of mind at the moment, the Republic is secure, I am halfway vaccinated and the outside temperatures haven't caused me to break out in a  spontaneous sweat for several weeks. Life is good.

So I thought to myself I shall turn this upside down lemon into lemonade.  It was dark by the time Rusty and I were back at the car on Summerland Key. I had finished the walk by taking pictures in black and white and I rather liked the atmospheric views of the road, a departing Jeep, a stationary dog. Not, I hasten to add in the same place at the same time.

Look! A Christmas tree out of season!

I have been reading about locked down photographers unable to travel and who are as a consequence bored. Some days I leave the house more focused on giving Rusty a good time filled with not much faith that the trail will produce anything worth looking at and yet. and yet I see things.

I don't see dead people or anything exciting like that but the landscape yields some great sights even in these monotone flatlands. For every minute spent trying to capture it I get ten minutes of standing, or walking, and staring. Imagine the silence.

A plane full of Covid 19 and humans flew overhead into the sunset leaving a suitably pink contrail.  Grist for my camera.

I walk and I see stark white tree trunks in the gloom. I like that so I put a dark background behind them to make them stand out. Non Floridians worry about rattlesnakes and alligators. I worry about getting sufficient contrast.

Fat Albert framed, below. I have been reading some RV comments about Florida and there is universal dread of alligators. These are not people who follow Clyde Butcher very closely, a photographer who wades through the Everglades for the pleasure of finding pictures. I just walk through the mangroves and the most aggressive creature I find are horseflies.

I see signs of human passage, tire marks usually but I am very lucky to be alone on these trails almost all the time. Especially in a time of pandemic I feel privileged.

And here we are at the beginning of a forty minute stroll, a dead tree reaching up to the sky.

If I didn't photograph it would it still be there?