Sink And Swim

It's started raining, thunderclouds are piling up and we've been treated to some hellacious lightning storms, all the sturm und drang of summer in South Florida.Which is to say that the City of Key west has officially entered the doldrums of tourist season. It's too early for US families to be taking summer off with the kids and Europeans are still hard at work in their socialistic paradises, waiting for their summer months off work, so the Tourism Development Council is hard at work drumming up reasosns for people to show up and spend, spend, spend. It is what I call "silly season" with each week producing another daft show of public inebriation. Memorial Weekend was the turn of the Minimal Regatta at Schooner Wharf Bar:It is a boat race and it does have rules, though they may be hard to discern in the midst of the general hilarity. Sinking is as good as winning if it is done in spectacular fashion:The blue boat in the picture above is my mechanic Dave from Monroe County Tire and Auto of Big Pine Key actually winning his heat in Bass Akwards, after his competitor sank half way round. I had no idea it was him when I took the picture and it was only later when I met him with his work partner Donnie (who also looks after my cars! What if they had both drowned?) I discovered what they were up to on their holiday weekends off:There was no sign of Donnie's wife so I don't know if this was a sanctioned activity, but I will have to go round to the shop to see how they did in the end. Dave as he points out, is a big guy to be in a home built kayak and it was a feat to keep it upright. Not everyone succeeds:This one looked good, didn't it? It turns out it was crap at staying upright:The local lumber company, Manley DeBoer sells regatta packages before the race, two sheets of plywood, fasteners, and duct tape, a length of two-by-four and no caulking materials. The end results tend to look like kayaks, or boxes or some other thing sometimes:The two by fours tend to end up looking like paddles or oars:And the crews often enjoy dressing the part:A local radio DJ, Bill Hobee, emcee'd the event from high above Schooner Wharf with color commentary from Evalina Worthington, owner of the bar who sounded just like Ariana Huffington funnily enough, and as he watched the "butterflies" launch their fragile craft he kept chuntering on about how he's like to be a flower...And then he dredged up a long line of puerile inferences when a boat named "Morning Wood" made it to the start line. And doesn't that sort of humor make me think I want to join his legion of fans on his morning show.The Minimal Regatta draws a ton of people, some like Nancy, visiting her old haunts from her new home in Ocala, decided it was okay to sit in the shade next to Lazy Way Lane away from the action and chow down on some fish:A good spot to watch the teams get ready to launch, or tear down their craft after a failed heat:I got into the middle of the crowd on the boardwalk and pointed my camera at the action as best I could: And that last one is somewhat topical as the Vandenberg is scheduled to be sunk tomorrow, which, if it is, I have a place reserved on a spectator boat which should be interesting. The spectators lined all four sides of the course on land and on the water:And there's another Memorial Day Weekend in the bag.

Finca Vigia

We've all seen the pictures of the 1950s American cars on Cuban streets, and even though we aren't allowed to visit the Forbidden Isle we think we have some faint idea of what it's all about. And then some of us find out different if we are lucky enough to cross the Straits of Florida. Kathy drove four hours to Miami earlier this month, then flew an hour to Havana and took a few pictures of her cultural exchange with the Godless communists across the water.She was part of a Key West Botanical Garden trip to Cuba, and on that trip she traveled in a group that included someone intimately associated with Ernest Hemingway in some manner I can no longer recall, and thus it was she got a rare private tour of the writer's home in Cuba. When she showed me her pictures I begged to post them here and eventually she yielded a glimpse into the rare world that was Ernest Hemingway's favorite tropical retreat, Finca Vigia.

In English the house name means "Lookout Farm" and it is pronounced feenka vee-hee-ah, approximately, with the emphasis on the hee. It lies just southeast of Havana, in a suburb apparently known as San Francisco de Paula, close to the main autopista to Cienfuegos and miraculously enough you can look it up in Google maps! The home was built in 1886 by a Catalan architect who seems to have enjoyed creating a light and airy tropical environment very different to the Hemingway House in Key West, which I wrote about here July 17th 2008.

For Key West, Hemingway is a meal ticket and his stay in the city, which ended in 1938 with a divorce and the arrival of the completed Overseas Highway, is touted as one of the city's major claims to fame. Finca Vigia on the other hand has been closed to tourists by the Cuban government though I have read that they do allow some visitors to stand outside and look in these days. Naturally, thanks to the preposterous continuing embargo I am unable to verify that myself...The World Monument's Fund has, according to the Internet placed it among the one hundred most endangered sites, but there again the house has apparently received major maintenance and now appears in good shape, at least from the pictures. The claim is that the house has been left exactly as it was when Hemingway left for the last time in 1960, down to the place settings on the dining room table and the location of the books scattered around the house. I don't suppose there is any way to verify this for sure of course, but by all accounts it is entirely possible that that is the case as the house still looks lived in- in 1950s style! Furthermore his boat Pilar, still showing it's home port of Key West, Fla, is restored and kept in a cradle under a roof on the grounds of the finca, fully fifteen kilometers from the sea...Hemingway bought the home in 1939 after his wife apparently found an ad for it in the paper. He shot himself while in Idaho in 1961 so he used this house a lot longer than the ten years attributed to him in Key West.Furthermore I have to say I have always found it profoundly odd that the Hemingway home in Key West is privately owned. There is something unnatural to me that a building that is claimed so forcefully by the public imagination in the US isn't actually a National Monument, but there it is. Paradoxically in Cuba where everything belongs to the state, more or less,the Hemingway home is perfectly preserved and at the same time largely inaccessible.While the architecture is very different the interior touches, all those dead animal heads are definitely Hemingway's style:I read somewhere that Hemingway had a library of some 9,000 volumes in the house and apparently they are all catalogued by the caretakers. And a few of them by Kathy too:And I have no idea what this member of the party was photographing, if indeed that was what he was doing:This lot look rather studious:I also read that Hemingway had a collection of records, classical and jazz, and that his phonograph still works. That one I don't know, but the records are in the pictures:I wish I could have been there but I gleaned what I could from Kathy's pictures, little details but stuff that one day soon we will all be able to see in person, perhaps:Just one hundred miles south of where I'm sitting, and it might as well be on the dark side of the moon.