I like working nights, no administrators in the police department, no callers needing to be transferred, no wandering office workers clutching sheaves of papers, no detectives bursting into dispatch with important background checks that have to be done now! The Chief tucked up at home and his captains too. There's just the officers on road patrol and the three dispatchers and the city, supposedly dormant but more often than not heaving with drama.Lots of the nighttime drama comes from the bars, occasionally before they close but frequently between 2am when some of the slower establishments shut down for the night and 4am when city ordinances require that all boozers quit for the night. The Green Parrot was looking pretty dead when I took my lunch break mid week, around 11:30pm.
I don't go out to bars much, unless dragged by a friend, but I couldn't help noticing how many people were thronging the sidewalk with little black boxes poked in their ears. What did people do before there were cell phones? Bad enough that people drive with them on all the time, but you can't even hang out in a bar without yakking on them too? 
I just liked the looked of the sidewalk outside, a warm night in February, what a luxury. Just up the street from the Green Parrot is the corner of Whitehead and Fleming, which doesn't sound like a particularly enticing intersection, but I couldn't resist standing in the middle of Whitehead Street, pointing the camera at the Mile Marker Zero sign and recording my moment at the end of the road.
For all that its slightly fuzzy I too am a tourist and my motorcycle is there to prove it!
A quick left at Fleming Street and there is the old jail, no longer used to house people, but it reminds me of the movie "In The Heat Of The Night" with Sidney Poitier going home and getting involved in crime detection among the good ole boys.
And just across Fleming from the county building lies the symbol of Federal munificence, the Post Office which was looking particularly toothsome that night.
I find the main post office very evocative, built of brick and looking permanent in its majesty with a huge parking lot and yet it is welcoming too with its long portico and open access to the P O Boxes. I love ducking into the walkway on rainy summer afternoons and watching the water pound the feeble lawn in front of the building.Round the corner from the Post Office we have a back entrance to Truman Annex, a massive development that causes nothing but headaches in the city. Old timers hate the Annex because it represents apartness, the gated community mentality that has sprung up all across the US. This gate says NO ENTRY loud and clear in defiance of the Keys' easy going tolerance.
I like the symbolism of the gate across the city street, the reflectors, the whole "Keep Out!" message reminds me of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin where I stood in 1981 on my first trip around the world. 
I struggle to differentiate the fake "Conch Houses" inside the Annex from the soulless Stalinist blocks of apartments you can see in East Berlin just beyond the Allied Check Point. West Berlin was a vibrant crazy place, much more so than Key West today, and it too was an island, though surrounded by dour do-gooders of the most oppressive sort. East Berlin was ghastly. I just feel bad for the limp retirees who mope around the Annex, and simply want to ignore Key West's middle class naughtiness; they would do better to let down the barricades, just as the East Germans eventually did.There's another fenced in community in Key West and it looks good by night, evocative in its own way, a place where the inmates make great neighbors, they never take the time to bitch about anything.
One of their (living) neighbors on Windsor Lane made the effort to illuminate their flourishing palm:
And across the street is Poor House Lane which leads to Bill Butler Park nestled deep in this residential neighborhood It takes on a mysterious, unwarranted gloom in the middle of the night.
Sloppy Joe's is ambling along and there aren't the huge lumpen crowds on Duval's sidewalks I was hoping to photograph. It always amazes me how people imagine Hemingway ever would have been caught dead, drinking in this sloppy neon studded music bar. I think Sloppy Joe Russell would be astonished how his name has taken off! The two of them must be laughing like drains in the Great Beyond.
The San Carlos stands all but ignored, day and night, on the 500 block of Duval. This theater is generally credited with being the place where a speech by Jose Marti set fire to the Cuban revolution that ultimately saw Spain abandon its Cuban colony. And yet today the restored theater stands as a monument to the exile Cuban community's total inability to think of anything to do with this historic building. It could be a fabulous museum relating the story of generations of Cuban migrants to South Florida. Instead its pretty much ignored.
What a tremendous waste; another reason I have little time for the Miami Mafia as Fidel Castro calls them. I stopped to snap a picture on Petronia Street and a man walking his dogs popped out of Shavers Lane wondering what I was doing. "Oh," I said, " just recording the passing of my life." And he looked around trying to figure out what drew my camera to this section of the street.
All I can say in my defense is that it probably won't look the same in twenty or thirty years time...It looks quite pretty to me right now, and entirely worthy of a picture.
On Front Street I paused to snap these two police cars, parked while their drivers patroled downtown on bicycles.
That was when Kelly and Nick pedalled up and we started a long discussion about motorcycles and Triumphs and Harleys and their relative merits and Kelly had to drool over the Triumph. Silly man he has his own splendid H-D Road King to gloat over.
And then my lunch break was done and I buzzed off back to the police station where I put my headset on and proceeded to send Kelly and Nick to break up a fight and before I knew it I was no longer an observer but a participant in maintaining order and calm in the city by night.
"Bike Team Two, physical altercation at Southard and Duval. Caller advised four women and two men in a brawl in front of Bank of America. No weapons seen...."
I really do enjoy working nights, silly me.
They launch the blimp on the end of a very long piece of string and it can be seen from miles around lollygagging in the sky. 
Aside from the dump and the blimp Blimp Road is also home to a ramp where people can launch boats or simply hang out and fish. Its pretty handy for small craft like kayaks but the ramp isn't very long and it doesn't seem to go very deep, for my taste and I imagine it might be all too easy to launch your car if you got it wrong.There was some kind of old fogey kayaking event going on when I stopped by yesterday afternoon so I kept the hellish machine (which has standard factory exhausts I might note) away from the nature loving paddlers. In summer this is a great spot to be alone with the sounds of wavelets splashing on the ramp.
Then one returns to reality and there is the Cudjoe Pocket Park at Valencia road opposite the entrance to the dump. 
It's kind of weird as parks go, kindly provided by Keys Energy our publicly owned utility company (I like it that my electric bill doesn't go to pay shareholders) and though it is equipped with a bike rack (!), a sign, and an artistic rock there is nowhere to sit. The grass is nice and lush which would make this a good spot for a picnic as lawns are in short supply in the Keys.
It was a glorious afternoon, low humidity, breezy and sunny, a continuation of the absolutley perfect weather we have been enjoying lately. The thermometer on the Bonneville recorded the fact for me, and I guess 92 degrees should feel hot but for my thin blood this was just as it should be:
Valencia Road wound its way back into a subdivision that was tucked out of sight, a criss crossing of dirt roads lined with palms and shrubs of various kinds. There are no canals back here so these homes would be considered "dry lots' in the local lingo but they are quite delightful for all that they aren't boat accessible.
I worked my way back along the lanes and found myself in another world. Aside from the purring of my Bonneville the place was silent, no dogs, no squawking kids no aircraft overhead, nothing. I found my way to the end of Valencia, where the street was closed by a fenced area and beyond was an old geezer walking his dog. He turned to look at me and I waved but he just stared icily back. It was perfect, a place less friendly than my own neighborhood!
I found my way to Spain Road and somewhere near there I came across a couple of horse paddocks. Now, I've never viewed the Keys as the place to come if you fancy riding horses but there they are, happy as clams.
My sisters loved to ride in their youth, and though they still keep horses, because they live in the country, they don't ride any more. Beats me, but thats how it is. I've always preferred horsepower to horses and here I am still riding. I may have imagined it but the nag seemed to be a little envious of my steed, loose on the backroads outside their stockade.
There was more than one barricaded animal in the subdivision, practically every home warned of fearsome canines within, beware of this dog and that on every fence until I came across a dog of a different breed:
Bad snakes? Thats what it says and no I didn't stop to investigate. And no, I have no idea why the first line is in English and the snake warning is in Spanish. As I am frequently moved to explain, asking "why" isn't cool in these islands. Things just are. Like iguanas:
Iguanas drive gardeners crazy down here. They aren't indigenous as for the most part they are pets that have been released and survive pretty well in the climate. They tend to seize up during cold fronts but mostly they plod around looking solemn and eating everyone's flower beds. Some people apparently don't mind the iguanas, I count myself among them, but I haven't put up a sign to that effect.
This house is at most half a mile from the dump; a $5 trip lasting perhaps 15 minutes and this excresence would be gone. But no, there it sits decomposing gently in the lush greenery of the neighborhood, a blight for all to enjoy. If I lived here I'd be hitching up my trailer and counting my pennies for the dump fee!
This magnificent manufactured home structure, complete with gingerbread fretwork is another example of the snowbird style of living. Apparently unoccupied like so many homes in the Lower Keys sitting there waiting for heaven knows what. An occupant perhaps? A happy grateful-to-be-here occupant? And one who perhaps would like to get rid of the gruesome hurricane fencing, but I'm pretty sure I'm overthinking this.
Or at least it would if the County's Public Works department could spell. I think its meant to be Asturias Road, but whats a vowel between neighbors?
There's a decomposing truck next to the crane, as though one was loading the other next to what appears to be a water filled quarry of some sort. It's all terribly bucolic now the engines are reduced to rust.
And then I hear a madly revving engine across the pond, a red truck appears in a cloud of dust and ducks behind a pile of gravel. Harder and louder the engine revs and the red truck appears closer than ever. I put my camera up and the truck spins out in a spectacular cloud of dust that my feeble picture only manages to hint at: 
The driver pulls alongside, a young kid looking worried. "I'm not doing any harm," he says defensively. I start laughing which breaks the ice. Ron is 23 years old and he grew up in the Keys. "I've seen everything there is to see and I've done everything there is to do, " he says gloomily lamenting the lack of variety in his corner of this huge and variegated country. I sympathize, telling him when I was his age I visited key West and left in a hurry bound for the exciting opportunities awaiting me in California. "Its just a way to let off steam," he says of his rough riding around the quarry. He complains that the deputies come out at night and try to put a stop to it. "We're not doing drugs," he adds, making what I think is a reasonable case for some off street fun. This encounter is typical of young people in the Keys; I find them generally to be polite thoughtful and well mannered in total defiance of the preferred model of sullen bad mannered youth reported elsewhere in the country. I wish Ron well and he takes off after letting me know of another secret spot nearby worth exploring. 
When my wife and I lived in Santa Cruz, California we expected our friends would be NPR listeners, which letters in the Reaganite 1980's were often taken to mean Nicaragua Public Radio. Public funding has shrunk since then, and corporate sponsorship has kept a more middle-of-the-road NPR flourishing, which has in turn rendered it less appealing to a listener like me who wantsNPR to be a different voice in a media broadcasting world of blandness and sameness and ownership by the powerful. Oh well!
I used to work at an NPR affiliate and I submitted a number of reports to the network during the 1980's and once the thrill of hearing my name go national wore off I was left feeling bored by the formula, by the editing, by the sense that what was of value was only understood by the newsroom in Washington, not where I lived in Fruitcake, California. I stopped trying to please my masters in the network and retreated to making a nuisance of myself in local news and then, tired of the trivialization of news, I quit what my buddy, NPR newscaster Frank Stasio used to call "show biz." I am a happier man for it. Frank Deford has been heard on NPR every week since 1980 and he's still going strong. He has the longevity that confers greatness. As Woody Allen says 80 percent of success is showing up. 
Deford's talk was centered around his new sports novel called "The Entitled," exploring the role and meaning of the "sports superstar" in our world. Jay Alcazar is a young Cuban-American baseball player overseen by a tired second rate player called Howie who now manages the Chicago White Sox. The book apparently opens with a possible date rape by Alcazar, possibly witnessed by Howie and the plot thickens from there, which was as much as Deford told us, inbetween reading excerpts from the book. He did say much of the action takes place in Cuba a country he has visited twice and is apparently where his plot ends up.
Deford also told of a day when sports players and writers were invited to the Clinton White House for a reception. Deford told his wife he was sure Clinton would recognize him, as the President was a sports fan and Deford had just written a glowing piece about an Arkansas player. As luck would have it the president remained blank when the Marine Officer announced Mr and Mrs Frank Deford, much to his chagrin, but he added with a twinkle, Mrs Clinton interrupted his introduction to gush how his voice woke her every Wednesday morning. "So how are you voting?" asked a voice in the bowels of the Tropic auditorium. "Oh," said Deford, "I always vote for my listeners," to howls of laughter. "But," he allowed,"the other guy is okay too."
Deford had some comments about free agency and how football television royalties are evenly split between teams, stuff I could barely grasp. He allowed as the Paris Open in June was among his favorite events, but he doesn't like soccer except the World Cup when seen live in a European city. he answered my question about NPR with his famous line that his most devoted fans aren't into sports at all, which brought another round of applause from the packed theater. he made a point about baseball that struck home with me. He said baseball is a great sport because unlike all other games baseball allows time for reflection, for commentary, for discussion between pitches. And I have surprised my wife a few times by seeking out the night time AM frequencies on a car trip to listen to some distant baseball game as I drive. 
In closing Deford suggested sports are important to use because they bind the country together in a way that other activities fail signally to do, he also said to loud laughter that sports allow men to argue which is important for them to do. And he made another of those interesting points that keep me listening to him on Wednesday mornings; he said sports unlike any other art form are thje place where the popular and the quality are allowed to rise to the top. He compared good teams to great movies, so rarely recognized at say, the Oscars, or where the best music isn't necessarily heard on radio playlists. In sports he said you have an art form where the best is always the most popular. Deford is a sports commentator alone in a crowded profession. How many writers do you hear use the term sui generis when speaking of a player? Deford is sui generis among sports comentators.
He was of course mobbed by the old biddy snowbirds on his way out but he kindly stopped for my flash and I caught his bemusement at his popularity in this little resort town. Key West I think cherishes its brushes with interesting people because, for such a distant little town it gets the attention of people worth listening to, but they don't stay so you have to catch them while you can. And we do.
Even today there are boats wandering around their anchors in the ebb and flow of the tides in Cow Key Channel and these aren't boats that actually move. They become, over time, elaborate Ali Baba palaces on the water. I look out from the solidity of land, astride my Bonneville and I don't envy them.
As commutes go this bearded water rat doubtless prefers his cormorant neighbors to busy land dwellers among whom he navigates his bicycle locked to a palm tree on South Roosevelt awaiting his return shoreside. I've spent too many nights bouncing around at anchor, too many nights standing at the dinghy dock in the rain listening to the dismal pop-pop-pop of my idling outboard ready to take me to my watery home, to want to do it again.
My home is only 770 square feet in size, larger by far than my 20-foot boat, my 30-foot boat and twice as large as my final floating home which I sold a few years ago. 
Out here on my darkened street I see the stars overhead as crisp and as clear as I did anchored out. I pause my Bonneville on a bridge to take in the watery views, as beautiful as ever they were from the thwart of my dinghy. Beyond the simple convenience of life ashore, which I pay for in the form of a mortgage I like being anchored for a change, in one place with one view, unchanging whichever way the wind blows. Its a sensation new enough it creeps up on me still every single day. I don't regret letting my commercial Coastguard Master's License lapse. I live and work ashore now, a new phase in my evolving life.
I spared a thought for the tourists flying past Fort Zachary under their silk canopy as I got in gear and I headed south to Rest Beach to finish up my lunch break at my favorite bench. And even there I found another active water player buzzing back and forth, like a bluebottle stuck behind a pane of glass.
The winds were stronger and the waters were frothy piling into the corner formed by White Street Pier. Key West gets so active in winter I am surprised frequently by how many people take to the water at the coldest time of year. I miss my skiff but I'm not going swimming for a few months more. Less than 80 degree water temperature and I leave the salt water to the hardy types from Up North. On the other hand Raul outpolled Fidel last week in the Cuban elections. I wonder how much longer the embargo will last? 
I ought to go back and see if they are still there, waiting, in a state of suspended animation.
I left the store wondering what is it exactly that parents are teaching their children? And who is going to be trained to be my cardiologist when I am approaching my death bed? Apparently of gynecologists there will at least be no shortage, and I suppose it would be better were I to be less startled and more accepting of this state of affairs.