I was rushing up the stairwell at work, the ends of my motorcycle jacket flying, my hands encumbered variously by my man purse and my lunch box. I was minutes away from being late for work, the first time in a couple of years and blam! Who should I bump into on the stairs but the Great Gawd Almighty City Manager himself. He's smiling cheerfully and its 4 minutes to six in the am. I am not smiling, I'm gasping, and with a brief "goo..mo..ning" I'm gone down the corridor motorcycle boots thumping on the carpet as I skid into the doorway of the 9-1-1 call center. What the bloody hell is he doing in the police station at this hour of the a.m.?
"I'm never usually this late," I wanted to shout over my shoulder, "but I was nearly knocked off my motorcycle by a flying dreidel!" As if he would have believed me. An excuse worthy of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin indeed. The manager was cruising down to the briefing room to meet the troops, who were no doubt equally enthusiastic as I was to meet him for the first time.
The morning had started off well enough, with a brisk alarm ring at four minutes past four, followed by an instant leap out of bed and into my t shirt and shorts cycling gear. A pair of crocs on my feet and the bicycle is downstairs illuminated by the harsh glare of the outside lights. I am properly awake.
The ride was excellent, a half hour whizzing through the mangroves, past the dormant Cuban Deli, under the harsh orange glare of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority pumping station's street lights, and so back home in a tingling lather. I am an unfit suburban rider far from the world of spandex, tour de France and racing ten speeds. I pedal sedately upright on my three speed automatic. Very refreshing.
My commute started less well after I pointed the Bonneville south on Highway One. Four smooth gear shifts and we were purring along at 60mph on an empty highway (speed limit: 45mph). Up over the 40ft Nile Channel Bridge things got sticky, stuck behind a 50mph truck with a Proud to be American sticker (I'd like one that reads Cheerfully American, or Grateful to be American on my Triumph) and a large flag decal on the tailgate.
We purr through Summerland Key under the streetlights (45mph zone continues) at a respectable if timid 55 and in the glow of the street lights I can just make out the time: 5:25am. I'm on target if not ahead of myself. It's on Cudjoe Key that things become unglued. Were I not wearing heavy gloves (its 74 degrees) and a full face helmet (its 74 degrees I say) I'd rub my eyes in disbelief for the Proud American in the full size pick up in front of me has slowed to 38mph (45 zone continues) and peering round him I see a car with a stalk on the roof and a red light on top of that. Absurd, I think to myself, that can't be right.
Can it? Anything's possible in the Keys. But why so slow? Argh!
Sure enough, we take the wide sweeping corner at Square Grouper and there in front of the car I see two more cars also equipped with red light poles on the roof and a slow work truck towing what appears to be an elaborate outhouse. By now I can barely bring myself to wonder what the hell is going on so slow is the parade. Further up ahead I can see more illuminated masts riding on cars and an RV and some sort of machine between them with what appears to be a billboard on the roof.
Then the penny drops -it's Christmas! This must be some peculiar traveling circus of strange religiosity coming to Key West to offer season's greetings to the southernmost hedonists. I've never found eternal salvation to mix very well with 20th century advertising razzmatazz.
And to make things worse, they are driving slowly and by the light of the lamp over the Sheriff's substation I see its gone 5:30am. Time's a-wasting as the red lights wobble on the carefully proceeding cars.
Finally we crawl past the traffic light at Sugarloaf School and just as I am about to open it up (45mph zone continues) and zip past the Proudly American truck and the illuminated mobile roof ornaments a car crests the bridge ahead and I have to wait. Then, past the bridge, Mile Marker 20 opens up a long sweeping stretch of roadway with a gentle curve to the right, it takes a flick of the wrist I'm hitting 75 (45mph zone continues) putting me past the truck, the three cars and the rolling outhouse. Up ahead the billboard is illuminated and visible beyond the other three cars with lighted poles on their roofs.
The outhouse was weird. It had writing celebrating Hanukkah on it and the walls were painted like faux New England brick work. This is a Jewish caravan? Curiouser and curiouser muttered the motorcyclist into his helmet. Especially as New England brickwork, I'm pretty sure never was seen in pre-Christian Palestine. But what's a little historical inaccuracy between believers?
The cars up ahead met their fate when finally we were all free of the 45 mph constraints and entered the highway beyond Sugarloaf Lodge. Here the limit rises to 55mph and I jerked the Bonneville out and beyond the illuminated poles tucking in behind the billboard to avoid oncoming cars.
It was a dreidel, illuminated from within and twirling gently from one side to the other in the slipstream of the car beneath. It looked delicate like rice paper and fragile enough to flip backwards, cutting its bonds to the automobile and toppling onto the Bonneville behind. I throttled back.
After a decade of pootling through the Saddlebunch Keys we finally trooped through Big Coppitt where a few startled dog walkers paused to check out the mobile-museum-cum-illuminated-RV trailed by a flying dreidel and a motorcycle outrider. I was aware the time was 5:45am and I was at Mile Marker 10 with eight long miles to go and a current speed set at a divinely inspired 37mph. Soon though we crossed the bridge to Rockland Key (Mile Marker 9) and the Highway turns gloriously to four lanes (55mph zone) and a straight shot to Key West and the police station.
The final insult as we dropped off the causeway onto the four lane was when the dreidel meister and his cohorts, instead of slipping politely into the right lane took up station in the overtaking lane. Argh!
I like to think the Jewish God is a forgiving sort (my wife assures me He is) because I was ripping His devoted followers all sorts of unmentionable orifices as I dropped two gears and gunned the Bonneville to an embarrassingly high speed in order to pull past before they spread like locusts across all available lanes at a stately 37 mph. I'm pretty sure my rapid fire swearing combined with the slipstream of my angry passing wobbled that dreidel worse than it had wobbled all the way from wherever it originally came.
And that is how I nearly mowed down the City Manager on my to work. Not quite late, but entirely out of breath cursing a group of sweet defenseless Hanukkah lovers out to spread the light of good cheer across the land.
I am a brute and I am sorry. I could have just left the house five minutes earlier and avoided putting my immortal soul and the spirit of the season at risk. I am humbled.
It surprises me but I like Christmas in the Keys, not least because there is, against the odds, a community down here and holidays are holidays and if your's is Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, its all the same thing. Key West is the first place I've lived where tolerance and diversity make halfway decent bedfellows, so if someone else's Christmas tree is my wife's Hanukkah bush that's okay too. 
Of course this is America so the consumer frenzy that is modern Christmas is in full swing, catalogues worn thin by thumbing, UPS desperately looking for fill-in help, all the usual high stress rubbish. For some of us its a great time to have a second childhood, and make it a really good one this time around. Happy Holidays to the mainland under snow ice and drizzle, but I've got to go ride my Bonneville.
Duck Key sits south of Highway One at Mile marker 61, across a short causeway decorated with columns and signs that don't actually say Keep Out but that's the theme. You can't keep a good Bonneville out.
Duck Key was the creation of Pritam Singh, the hobo turned Sikh developer born in Boston and settled in Key West who famously drove himself broke buying the Navy Base that became Truman Annex. He made a fortune ultimately and turned his hand to making Duck Key just north of Marathon, Paradise in the Middle Keys, as it were.
This wide spot in the Highway is a shared paradise, half occupied by a mixture of elderly cement homes, in the raised style of the sixties. 
These are being taken over by Money and turned into Palm Beach by the Keys. 
I love these massively expensive homes tiled with Mediterranean roof tiles that'll blow halfway to Tampa in a hurricane. Actually these objects of conspicuous consumption irk me to death. I see no value in making expensive exurbia of a Florida Key, a place traditionally reserved for scrounging a living, not lounging a living. I suppose a traditionally inclined Conch sponge fisherman might sneer equally at my level of indulgent living, a weatherproof home equipped to excess with air conditioning, running water and a low flush water closet. The height of bourgeois excess no doubt. My little island has no Mickey Mouse bridges across the canals.
On the other hand Duck Key, the half that isn't Singh's exclusive Hawk Cay Resort, could never be described as plebeian. 
I mean, one has to wonder a little bit about this opulence doesn't one? Especially considering that most of these homes are unoccupied. These are the homes of people who show up a week or four every year, and the rest of the time they are the domain of electricians and plumbers, gardeners 
and Mexican weed whackers. Some idle people fish off the canals, for fun:
but that's too close to life in the rest of the Keys, I think. So the anglers are a lone breed far from the majority of elderly housebound millionaires, yet hardly close to the world of commercial fishing.
We have met the enemy and he is us. My kind of Socialism I suppose.
This is a town with narrow streets and way too many cars already so for up to 8 months out of the year finding parking is a drag and people shove and squeeze their cars into excessively small spaces in an effort to create a space where one might reasonably be assumed not to exist. In New Town, the more expansive outer two thirds of the island, parking spaces are more reasonably proportioned by collective madness seems to take over local drivers and they ding and bang each other's cars as though they were in the narrow confines of Old Town. 
The net result of all this mainland attitude meeting the island reality of limited space means that there just isn't a really good reason to own a cage unless you have off street parking and like to drive to the mainland from time to time (I qualify in both categories). Nevertheless when seventy percent of the cars on the island drowned following the Wilma inundations of 2005, almost everyone I can think off went out and bought new SUVs to replace their lost transport. The net result is crowded streets, as badly clogged as ever.
My mainland vehicle is a 5 year old Nissan Maxima and it has its share of scratches and scrapes, though it runs perfectly and is a fine 3.5 liter machine for passing slow pokes on Highway One. My wife is girding her loins to replace it, as it approaches the 100,000 mile mark, with a convertible. She's hesitant partly because she hates spending the money (she doesn't mind buying me a motorcycle though- women!) and partly because she knows that if she gets a glossy Sebring or a Solara it stands an excellent chance of getting dinged- bright clean cars attract scratches in Key West's Old Town. By contrast our "Conch cruiser" a ten year old scarlet Geo Metro is crisp and clean and completely scratch free. I figure its just too modest a car to attract the attention of the sociopaths who feel compelled to put scratches on strangers' cars. 
I guess if I lived in the city I would not bother with a car, its easy enough to rent one, and off street parking is rare as hen's teeth in Old Town. Even in New Town, land of suburban styled American homes, garages are usually converted to living space, so cars end up where kids can egg them, drunk drivers can sideswipe them and disgruntled pedestrians can key them. But you can't separate most Americans, even emigres to island living from their cars. Its a tribute I suppose that around one third of city residents have chosen to deprive themselves of their cars. 
I doubt the Autoridad in charge these days would be too impressed were we to return and expect a transit for our 34-foot catamaran through the canal. These days its a self funding operation and every transit has to pay for itself and sailboats are very low on the totem pole. Our buddy Anna rode through with us to check out how she and her husband Ian were going to cope with their boat Joss. We had a minor crash later when the tug we tied up to left us in the lurch and we were slightly beaten up as we were dragged through the lock sideways by the currents. Damage was minor but we stared death in the face for a few awful minutes.
Days later Joss made it through fine, though I was always worrying about what had happened to us as we locked through on their trip. Ian confided in me later that he couldn't get the image out of his mind of Miki G swirling helplessly through the lock like a leaf down a drain. 
Miki G moored for several weeks at the now defunct Pedro Miguel Boat Club, next to the Pedro Miguel locks on Lake Miraflores. The marina used to be a Canal Zone perk, but during the US Administration it was also an excellent place to tie upto make repairs and rest from the culturally arduous business of cruising Latin America. Pedro Miguel was an English speaking, boater friendly, oasis even in the years after the Zone was ended and Americans only stayed on to help transition to Panamanian Administration. However the Autoridad del Canal de Panama has shut the place down after a long legal battle and pictures such as this can no longer be taken because the club is gone (plus we sold the boat to a friend in Key West who isn't interested in cruising right now!). One of these days I'm going to write an entry about all the place I've been that no longer exist. A depressingly long list, indicating an excessively long and well traveled life I think, even though the places themselves weren't that great; the USSR and East Germany high on the lackluster destinations I Have Known. 
I keep this picture framed in my office to remind me of our mad cap adventures trying to find places to walk the dogs away from the prying eyes of the officious Customs agent who was determined to enforce Panama's 'no pets ashore' rule. Emma, our Labrador stuck close to me while Debs, our Husky dived into the bushes like the little explorer he always was. Everyone in the rest of the country ignored the quarantine rule and we took the dogs everywhere with us, into Panama City, into Darien by rental car, and up into the mountains in the middle of the country.
After we got through the Canal we spent several more idylic weeks in the more famous San Blas islands on the Caribbean side of Panama. These Kuna indian islanders practice a low tech medieval lifestyle in their own autonomous province known to them as their Kuna Yala, with their own system of justice and social pecking order, similar to, but more idylic than, a US Indian Reservation. These islands resembled the Keys somewhat, in as much as they had coconuts, narrow sandy beaches and lots of scrub vegetation. We sailors gathered in calm anchorages and hung out barbequing under the stars, telling stories, swimming and playing cards until our supplies ran out and we had a private plane fly us out the fixings for a massive Thanksgiving dinner in November 1999. Believe me, we were absolutely bulging with thanks that memorable desert island holiday.
Teaching kids to pet the dogs (with treats of course!) on the Rio Diablo/Corazon de Jesus footbridge in the Kuna Yala. Kids are kids in the most remote places and Labradors do like their treats.
