Call The Police

Photographed by me last October seeking a 1930s effect

I was at work a couple of weeks ago when a woman called the police to report something suspicious. She told my colleague someone was photographing the pond in front of the police station. The pool of water is at the corner of Truman Avenue and Eisenhower separated from the police station by a wall of mangroves. I suppose in the right light it may be photogenic, I tried to get a certain old school effect in the picture above, but the woman was advised that taking photos in public isn't  a crime.

We live in strange times, I have to keep reminding myself of that. Cameras are everywhere, with home insecurity systems rife in a town where far too many people have second homes you will be photographed walking down the street. They spend most of the year somewhere else anxiously watching their remote screens for illicit activity..

I see a lot of beauty in Key West but not enough to sit and face it all the time. I was figuring the bench below was positioned so someone could test the theory about the boredom of watching paint dry.  Why else have the bench facing inwards? Some obscure city ordinance?

Once upon a time wearing a mask in public was suspicious. Should I have assumed the man below was robbing Sandy's Cafe or buying lunch while protecting his neighbors from germs? Either way I confess I failed to call the police and continued about my important task of dog walking.

Sometimes people call to report a dead body on the street. I think he's either drunk asleep or dead. Dead? I doubt it. When people are dead passersby know it in some visceral way. If they are unsure I can guarantee the "dead person" is sleeping it off. I can hear it in a caller's voice when they really are with someone who died, there is an unmistakable tension in their voice. Either way we send help of course and in a town where people drink to excess there are a lot of people sleeping on sidewalks. Or there used to be. Nowadays of course there is no one anywhere.

Chickens roam everywhere to take up the space formerly occupied by people. I can't escape them. That or I just notice them more now that they are the only signs of movement on the streets.

One can joke about watching paint dry but Key West is full of picturesque views and colors and shadows. It  would be easy to do this and no more were we not called to work and do things and be active. 

When I was  a child in England the Highway Code taught us to look left, then look right and then look left again before we stepped off the curb. It was backwards because they are in the third of the planet that has recreation driving on the left so traffic comes from the wrong direction. But the principle remains valid and yet all that good training about looking both ways is going to waste in this pandemic.

Truman Avenue can be crossed with relative ease most times of the day, rush hours excluded, and I wonder how long it will take to train Rusty to respect the traffic again. Probably one walk as he is pretty smart. 

There will no doubt end up being a call on record sooner or later as paranoia mounts, about some idiot walking his dog with a camera on a  public street. That will be me.

Night Truman

I was quite surprised at the amount of vehicular traffic on Truyman Avenue at four thirty in the morning. Rusty stuck to the sidewalk as we walked toward Duval but I really wanted to get away from the main drag. It was just too busy. Looking toward Truman on William Street, this is the light right next to St Mary's Minor Basilica.

I wanted to haul my tripod along but honestly I can hardly keep with Rusty as it is, so stopping to assemble the tripod and set long languid exposures is just out of the question. And going for a walk without Rusty is absurd...so we do what we can.

If I weren't with Rusty I'd have an opportunity for some mediation in the adoration chapel at St Mary's open twenty four hours a day. 

I think too much, I know, but I saw an African mission among the trees, not one of the earliest Catholic churches in South Florida... It's been warming up a bit and it feels much more like summer now so thinking equatorial isn't as odd as it may look!

Rusty found Windsor Lane to be fascinating but after about an hour my pelvis starts to ache quite a lot so I tend to watch from afar and as we were effectively on a side street we were left to ourselves.

We walked through Bill Butler Park and for some reason Rusty found one side of the pocket park scary and he crept along all alert and worried. No ghosts popped out, so all was well. When we are out in the wilderness I pay much closer attention as I'm never sure what he might have noticed lurking in the scrub. But I figured alligators boa constrictors or panthers were unlikely in the environs of Bill Butler Park and in the end my lack of caution was proved correct and we came through unscathed.

A  quick burst of the much disliked flash and I got a nice  shot of a Traveler Palm, so called because ostensibly it has drinking water stored in it's  stems. From what I've read the liquid in the palm is black and dirty and tastes foul so I suppose it could save your life but there should be a better way to get  a drink in extremis. Most of the time I don't use the flash as the light is rather harsh and uncompromising and havinga  remote flash is as time consuming as a tripod and equally unfriendly to the needs of my dog. Would you believe it?

 Elizabeth Street and the chapel can never photograph too often:

A few more assorted pictures around Bill Butler: 

 Elizabeth Street looking down the hill, as it were, toward Truman Avenue:

 Olivia Street, between Bill Butler and Truman Avenue, looking toward Windsor Lane:

And now for something completely different: Higgs Park where we went later as Rusty was still showing signs of being energetic. We walked in a  circle round the park and I listened to a BBC Radio documentary about Errol Flynn's involvement in the Cuban Revolution - who knew?- while Rusty trotted ahead, nose down. 

And so home to bed early on a Friday morning, with no prospect of work till Saturday evening. 

The Look Of The Thing

Those "Conch Pride" signs tell the story- sports is a big deal in Key West, home of the "fighting conchs." I like the small town feel these signs express, the part of Key West that belongs to families that have always lived here, who live apart and don't much care for the face Key West turns to the world.

I read in the paper the head of the Historic Architecture Review Commission is retiring. The suggestion was that his departure might end the practice of approving these weird additions to the Old Town uniformity of wooden homes and picket fences. 

This one further down Truman Avenue wouldn't be ugly in many places but it sue looks out of place to me.

 I like the beach towels drying, vacation time uder the bright orange petals of the poinciana. 

I like walking around town with a camera around my neck so I look like a tourist. People leave me alone and i fit in as I watch them all go by intent on squeezing their vacations dry. Make lots of memories though there is a lot more peculiar stuff in this town than a restaurant that makes sexual innuendos out of it's menu.

I am glad payphones are going away. I wish I hated my iPhone but I don't. I like my kindle app, my magazines online, my camera my maps and so forth. I don't miss the bad old days of hunting for quarters and asking directions and breaking the spines of  heavy books hauling them around in my backpack. I see a payphone and I fondle my iPhone happily.

 The gym at the St Mary's school. I thought the Catholics had gone all Kokopelli for a moment.

Here is how Old Town Key West should look.

Dusk

My photographs were not entirely successful and I was going to toss them but the more I looked the more they evoked something in me. I hate fuzzy pictures as a general rule but when I went through these, none of which even show Rusty on his leash, I saw a summer evening in them. 

 One of the few things I do not like about living at twenty four degrees North is how short dusk is around here. The closer you get to the equator the quicker the sun sets. In my youth when I lived much further north I remember long lingering dusk, the sun might set at nine but I could read a newspaper by daylight at eleven. Dusk was a magical time of serenity and fireflies, smells of the country raised by increasing humidity and the slowly encroaching darkness.

For me sometimes it is hard to discern how dark it is, hence the fuzzy pictures. It seems like daylight and then it's not, just like that. Which deprives the camera of the light to take a decent picture unless I am paying attention and keeping the apparatus steady. If you want to know more about Key West's Grotto of Lourdes look HERE

On Truman Avenue my dog and I were wandering him with nose down me with head up, bowled over by young Spring Breakers eager to be somewhere else. I was happy watching the night close in as we ambled.

And then it was dark.

 Lovely.

Seasonal Key West

Key West has come into the best time of year when the humidity levels are dropping and a fresh breeze comes back after the stillness of summer. I love the bright sunlight that yields crisp colors and well defined shadows.

They say photographers are supposed to prefer muted light and stuff and I dare say they do. I don't. I love the blue sky and the greenery and the white picket fences and white clouds.

 To me those are the colors that best represent these islands.

 And as the sun passes lower across the southern sky the angle of sunlight changes and it becomes less steamy hot and yellow and more crisp and white as the winter progresses.

Fantasy Fest is the mark of Fall though it is not unusual for visitors to be hit by heat stroke when they find themselves drinking in the Fantasy Zone under a hot October sun.

Young Rusty loves the heat, a true Carolina Dog and I have had a complaint that I don't photograph his face enough. It's not that he's ducking in the shade, it's that he doesn't seem to much like the camera. But I am human and he is dog and in the end I will outwit him.

I also got his resting bitch face which I find so adorable.  I really like Rusty a lot. He has wild curiosity and tons of energy and he is devoted to me. What's not to like?

 Public art in Bayview Park has been quite weathered in the sun over the years.

Bayview Park alongside Truman offers lots of shade but no benches. The homeless like to congregate here so the city, in its infinite wisdom likes to remove public seating.

The tennis courts are another mark of the seasons. When the city fills with the energetic idle rich over the winter, that's when the courts fill up with people and racquets and balls bouncing all over the place. 

 Nice one I thought:

 More shade at the Harvey Government Center:

 Good for small brown dogs, thick  grass and lots of shade.

 And some lonely window shopping to remind us this is still the quiet season:

 Oh yes I like bright sun, bright colors and Key West architecture:

And a reminder if you are thinking of taking a short cut to secure affordable vacation space be aware there are scammers on craigslist: