Sometimes the clouds turn black and threaten rain, and that's when an alert Bonneville rider checks the windshield wipers of oncoming cars to see if they show traces of rain. That's when one stops and wraps oneself in plastic waterproofing for the imminent downpour. Florida rain is a wondrous thing, refreshing and sparkling as a glass of iced San Pellegrino mineral water, it cools the air from 90 degrees (35C) to 75 (28 C) and then moves on leaving the world shiny and clean and the air crisp and sparkling with ozone. Its the first time in my life I have learned to enjoy rain as a viable alternative to sunshine.
Let's not fool ourselves. rain clouds threatening the Publix parking lot can be a nuisance too, and I like sunshine all day every day as often as I can get it. Indeed the Keys have a much more benign summer climate than one might expect. Unlike mainland Florida ( and mainland Ohio from what I'm told) the oppressive humidity factor in the Keys is much more bearable. Of course this factor is very subjective but as far as I'm concerned I'd rather be here in the summer than say Fort Myers or even Miami. Cement and asphalt reflect lots of heat, buildings block breezes and the closer one lies to the sea the better chance one has of enjoying even a modest sea breeze.
It's still boiling hot in the keys in July and August and air conditioning remains critically necessary, not least to keep dampness and humidity from eating books clothes and bedding...but summer is entirely bearable in my biased opinion. And here's the secret: summers are great.
The summers are not so great for those that live and work in the tourist trade, though there are more and more weekend festivals and celebrations to keep the money flowing. Also the summer months are a good deal less dead than they used to be thanks to families visiting with their broods during school vacations. Its more of an ebb and flow nowadays as opposed to the good old days of "season" and "off season" which led to far more widespread financial desperation in a tourist economy.
On my days off I like to sit out and swelter, read and brood, and watch the clouds. When I've broiled enough I go indoors and chill in the air, or take the boat out and swim and start again. The workaday world at 24 degrees north latitude is for the most part the usual air conditioned indoor office life that doesn't brook sweaty armpits. There are outdoor people and you'll see them lurking in shade wherever they can find it. I like the heat; but I work nights in an air conditioned police station. I never said summer is a barrel of laughs for outdoor workers. I used to be one and I know.
I used to run boats as a commercial captain out of the Hilton Marina, as it used to be known. That was the time people in the city complained about too many cruise ships and now we have less and the city is losing half a million dollars a year in reduced revenues from fewer port calls. I used to crouch in whatever shade i could find in those days, waiting for the passengers and sucking down Gatorade as fast as I could. I still enjoyed the summer! I'm a glutton for heat and humidity and bright white sunlight.
I was riding in to work my last night before I took off for my vacation and I spotted a youth on a Pennsylvania registered sportbike. He had it nicely equipped for travel with soft bags over the passenger pad and the fuel tank and he crouched like a tiger as he rode.
I sat up straight on my old man's ride and followed at a sedate pace, enjoying all the view I am lucky enough to see each day, bridges and sky and mangroves as usual. I caught up to him when the school bus stopped all traffic for a rug rat crossing and asked him if he was having fun. He looked startled. Poor boy.
I took a picture of the Big Coppitt boat ramp with the Bonneville last winter when a cold front had me wrapped up like a babe in swaddling clothes to deal with the 65 degree temperature (18C). At the beginning of June the scene was a good deal warmer, the waters bluer and the clouds big and puffy and white. And there was one of Key West's Elvis impersonators waiting for a fish to bite. No sign of a peanut butter sandwich.
There is that 800 pound gorilla in the back room during summer's bounty in the Keys, and no doubt we will hear more than I'd like about the 2008 Hurricane season in the Southwest Atlantic and Caribbean basin. As I write Belize and Nicaragua have mopped up from the first downpour of the summer brought on by Tropical Storm Arthur. Typically early and late storms develop in the Western Caribbean where the ocean waters are warmer at the beginning and end of summer. By the calendar the hurricane season goes from 1st June to 30th November, though I measure the season by the temperature of the water. When its 80 degrees the water is warm enough to fuel hurricanes as they travel over it.
Hurricanes feed the imaginations of people everywhere, in the same way that people hold alligators in horrified fascination. The way I see it, lots of people live in tornado alley and dozens die every year and they also enjoy the pleasure of shovelling snowdrifts for six months of the year. If my house collapses like a pack of cards in a direct hit I'll change my tune, but for now this is as good as it gets.
Key West Diary started out June 13th 2007 as Key West Vespa, (hence the banner picture, taken the day before motorcycles and scooters were...banned from the Key West cemetery) a blog inspired by other riders full of the joys of their rides and as an antidote to the screaming, mutual rage and contempt that are exhibited on web forums (fora?) across the Internet. I had already learned as most of us do, that curiosity, self deprecation and irony are transmuted into anger and sarcasm on these open forums and I for one didn't want anything to do with them. So last year at about this time I started thinking about keeping a diary. One day, with no word to my wife or anyone else I took up the name Conchscooter, given to me by some unremembered Internet Forum, and started writing my own thoughts down, on the Internet rather than on paper because one does things electronically these days. I started it because it was dawning on me that for the first time in my life I was feeling settled, and such a feeling was a novelty for me so I wanted to record it. I sold the Vespa and bought the Triumph but the blog soldiered on needing a new name. This is not a Vespa:
Boca Chica Bridge
Boca Chica Road 
I try to imagine what this blog might look like were I driving around the Keys in a car. It sounds a bit daft to be honest, though perhaps if the car were correct for the context there might be merit. A cute little SmartforTwo perhaps? My wife is toying with the purchase of a $17,000 Cabrio and has her order in for a blue on silver "Comfort" model (naturally. We are Americans!). I'm not sure she will go through with it though I am encouraging her to sell the Nissan and have two convertibles at her disposal, one good for 31 mpg and the other 40. I'm hoping the Bonneville will be good for another 90,000 miles or 6 years before it needs a rebuild:
So I here I am a year on, trying to be introspective and pull some thread of usefulness from my diary, a collection of photographs of pretty and not-so-pretty places around my life accompanied by some idle observations. From time to time I get a pang, wondering if I should use the platform to be a zealot for some cause be it political or environmental and the urge leaves me as quickly as it came. Irondad blogs to spread the message that training is a way for motorcyclists to save their own lives, a more worthy message its hard to imagine, invoking skills I don't possess. The Honolulu Blog seems designed to inveigle against mass transit ("I apply mascara as I drive to work.." Argh! The true source of motorcyclists' fear), a purpose that fascinates and confounds me. The Alaskan Blog in my list of links is a chronicle of self flagellation in the face of horrendous weather in the despair of Arctic despond. I read it in horrified fascination. Me? I am still foppishly tootling around, happy in my job, my home, my wife, my life. I apologize if this seems too amateurish, or decadent perhaps, in the face of imminent societal collapse, but my missionary zeal to urge strangers to improve their lives and by extension the world has seeped away. I must be becoming a laid back Islander, Mon. Here, have another pretty picture, the Highway of Life.
My companion pronounced the restaurant "ghetto" which is a term I believe of disapproval. When young Diggy eats out he likes table service, not do it yourself which is the low cost theme at Keys Fisheries. But he did like the notion of using a pseudonym to order the food, sometimes a movie star's name , or a figure from history; the day we were there it was song titles:
The fries were declared "not as good as Burdines" by my junior food critic. Next time we'll try elsewhere, always searching for good eats in the Keys.
If I like it I skip to the end (non fiction is best for power reading) and when I am bored I put the book down and try another title, selected at random. I get to peruse tons of books like this and have learned to feel less desperate as time goes by about the number of books still left for me to read as I slide ever closer to oblivion. Even our modest library on woodsy Fleming Street, South Florida's first public library seems overly filled with unread tomes:
So there's this writer dude sitting in a hot tub with some friends and a bunch of strangers and he says he thinking about putting together a list of the best places to live but the only problem is he can't think of what the criteria should be. Much discussion apparently ensues among the occupants of the star lit tub (I remember this bit quite well, I think) and finally one of the nude bathers comes up with a truth that the writer grabs and runs with. The Third Space. That's the criteria for the best place to live.
The book with the crappy title introduced me to this grotesque notion of the Third Space alluded to above. The idea is that your First Space is your home, and your Second Space is your place of work, and these spaces can also be social centers to some extent. But the Third Space is where the social life of the community is on display and available. In other words if you think about places you might like to live you will find they offer vibrant and attractive Third Spaces. The dull, worn out communities don't.
...a place from which to watch the sunrise or even the sunset, far from the crowds at Mallory Square (which is too commercial and touristy to be a proper Third Space).
As is obvious in these pictures shot today this is definitely low tourist season in Key West. 
What used to be the only independent bookstore in town has competition now and thank god for that. The workers at Voltaire smiled when I remarked how nice it was to have a store with friendly people operating it. "We hear that a lot," they said. And yes I have heard from visitors who buy quite a few books here that Island Books is a perfectly pleasant place to shop. 
We don't frequent all our possible Third Spaces, some I enjoy more than my wife does of course, but there are quite a number of public gathering spaces, that we visit from time to time. Some get too much attention from our 
Instead the bulk of the Everglades are as Marjorie Stoneman Douglas put it so memorably and vividly, A River of Grass.There's a lookout platform just ten feet above the grass and it gives a tremendous view across the sawgrass to the clumps of hardwood trees known as hammocks. This is the Shark River Slough, 8 miles wide I'm told:
And in the foreground one can see a puddle of water, proving the truth of the title of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas's book, which I have adapted as the title of this diary entry.
Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, I love the Everglades, whether I'm rolling down Tamiami Trail, or bouncing down the gravel of the Loop Road or taking the back roads through Seminole Country. It's a complete change from the rocks and water and narrow strips of land that comprise the Florida Keys. Also its totally quiet out in the grass, a place where just the wind whistles an accompaniment to the birds.
I left home at 5am today and got home exactly 12 hours and 319 miles later. It started inauspiciously enough as the Highway was wet from earlier rain. Indeed it started to sprinkle around Mile Marker 90, an hour into the ride. I took cover for ten minutes under an overhang and forced myself to stay upright and awake as I had slept badly the night before and I was exhausted. Breakfast at Denny's in Key Largo at Mile Marker 99 woke me up with chorizo, eggs, tortillas and cafe con leche.
After breakfast I had half a mind to turn back and tuck myself into bed by ten o'clock but streaks of blue to the north convinced me the low lying clouds would blow away and a glorious day would burst forth. Fortune favors the bold, and I was right; I spent the rest of the day in sunshine and temperatures hovering between 80 and 90 degrees. The road to Flamingo, 50 miles from Homestead passes through fields of agriculture that remind me of nothing so much as California's Salinas Valley.
The headquarters building, equally ugly if a good deal more bizarre in design still operates with peeling paint and lots of hurricane induced rust.
The views south towards Florida Bay are tremendous
and there is an excellent exhibit about the life cycles of the bay inside the building. Looking inland from the observation deck one is forced to wonder who figured this sort of parade ground set the proper tone for "downtown" Flamingo! Pity the man with the mower.
I though it went quite well, but after a mile or so the potholes were still holey and the vegetation was dense as ever and the road kept rolling merrily along. So I turned back, deciding whatever there was to see at the end would have to wait for another day. I expect it was a campground unsuitable for RVs, but the road was potholed enough it wasn't terribly suitable for Triumph Bonnevilles though the machine acquitted itself just fine.
I got tired of bouncing is all, and I wondered what I'd do if I got a flat. It was hot and very quiet down there, all by myself. 
I was tempted to coast downhill from here but I had taken my time in the morning and now it was time to pick up the pace back to civilization which was still there,not improved, I'm sorry to say, since I passed through Florida City in the morning.
But not in summer, never in summer unless suicide by mosquito is on the agenda.