Serendipitous Serendipity

When I pass cars on the Overseas Highway I sometimes notice a box sitting on the dashboard, carefully obstructing the driver's view of the actual road with a picture of the road on the GPS screen. I wonder why drivers on the only road available even need a Global Positioning System receiver in their cars. Except of course to block their view.And when on a mainland road trip I am an advocate of leaving at least some of the route to chance, a concept that GPS cannot compute. Which is a rather long way round explaining how I found myself here and not at Matheson Hammock State Park as originally intended..."Here" in this photograph is the picturesquely named "North Canal Road" heading towards Biscayne National Park east of Homestead.It was the day I left home with no fixed plan and no fixed route, other than the inevitable ride North on Highway One. After I took my pictures at Anne's Beach I figured it was early, not yet ten o'clock and I wasn't working that night so I pressed on. The (paper) map of Florida i carry in my saddlebag has only the faintest representation of South Florida on it and I really didn't look too closely. I followed Highway One north out of Homestead following my nose, ready to turn right or left as the mood and the signposts urged me. I paused under the cover of a gas station to fill up with premium and allow a rain cloud to move away while I drank with fizzy high fructose corn syrup with caramel and zero calories at 99 cents a can. I also chilled off with a frosty glance from a bandanna'd Hardly Ableson driver next door keeping his hot leather chaps out of the rain.I followed a brown sign into the void of South Florida agriculture. "Biscayne National Park" it said, an organization that had yet to penetrate my consciousness. It sounded rather watery and I was game so off I went, leaving behind the four lane madness of pawn shops, car dealers and Latin hairdressers lining the highway. And indeed there is a marina next to the National Park, and for some unaccountable reason this large sub tropic spider got caught up in the web of my lens: I am quite fond of spiders and bats and any creature that eats insects, though I like to leave them to their habitat as long as they leave me to mine. It is generally an easily digested agreement.It was a hot overcast humid morning but there were a few cars in the parking lot, transportation as we shall see for some hunter-gatherers with fishing poles and a couple of other gawkers, tourists like me with nothing better to do of a weekday morning. I at least had a camera with me to record the immortal moment in this unheralded place:There was a massive imposing visitor center, but I wasn't in the mood for statistics (Biscayne National Park comprises x number of tennis courts if you stuck the bay end to end, that kind of thing) so I went for a walk instead,
and took a look around at a National Park out of season, and thus peaceful:

It's when you visit places like this that you know that people who hate the gummint are full of crap. I loved the combination of wilderness area spilling over into the crisp organized park ambiance on shore, the mowed lawns, the wandering boardwalk, with rocks growing... ...out of the post-consumer recycled plastic planking: A playful conjunction of natural and not. All overseen by the heavy summer clouds promising more rain later:
Where we would be, I wonder, without the tradition of open spaces and parks instituted a hundred years ago by the Federal Government?
I envy the anglers their patient ability to sit and stare out at the waters of Biscayne Bay while waiting for good things to snaggle themselves on their hooks. Just above this woman's head the black spots highlighted against the bay waters are dragonflies. There were hundreds of them eating mosquitoes, the mossies repelled by my chemical layer: This fisherman was dangling a delightfully old fashioned cigarette holder:

A little to the south of the Biscayne Park Headquarters lies Florida Power and Light's Turkey Point Nuclear generating station. FPL claims lots of good things from this plant, including warm water habitat for manatees in the winter from the plant's cooling system and a park around the plant has helped endangered American crocodiles breed and flourish in peace. However plans to expand the plant's generating capacity are being opposed at the moment because the cooling waters apparently produce salts that drastically change sea water salinity. Which I am told is a problem even as Miami gets hundreds of megawatts from these light water Westinghouse nukes, and gets the electricity without spewing carbon by-products into the atmosphere.

However should this thing decide to go mutant the neighbors have a warning system set up, just in case:

Turkey Point has been operating for decades with no history of major problems and it survived a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. So I guess it's okay to paddle in the waters of the bay. I've done it and come away unharmed...
Camera-less tourists. I think they were foreigners which may explain that eccentricity.

I watched the dive boat coming into the marina down a long, well marked channel. The coastal waters around here are shallow enough it would be difficult to drown a grasshopper.
Then I got inspired to walk all the way down the causeway that sticks out into the bay. I crossed the path of the camera-free tourists here and he gave me a decidedly Francophone "Bonjour" about here, where they gave up and turned around. I pressed on.And what a magnificent edge this is. I love the look of the flat waters of summer:

There was somebody out enjoying the waters of the bay. I had some memorable sails on Biscayne Bay when I lived on my boat anchored at Jack's Bight on the Coral Gables waterfront.

Even modest breezes give good performance on protected shallow waters like these.I was getting near the outer end of the little causeway and wasn't I surprised to see Spencer Tracy organizing his lure. I had been under the misapprehension the actor died years ago:
Up close he was actually fishing with a younger Latino, quite possibly his son. They nodded amicably and kept their eyes on their lines. I stared out at the empty waters for a minute and pondered the meaning of this sign:
Far to the landward side lay the magnificence of the visitors center and the footbridge out to this causeway:
I have been hunting for manatee desultorily for some time and I have no doubt I will try again this winter. This was the best I could do here in summer: It was too hot to lounge and enjoy the day so I stood in the shade and ate a granola bar and drank some of my home-collected rain water from a carbon neutral flask and got back on the road back to civilization. Here represented by the Homestead Speedway track, a castle lurking in the middle of the fields, suspended between the bay and the noise of the city of Homestead. I dodged rain clouds and got back on the Highway home, arriving two hours later, only slightly rained on, enough to be cooled down, but not enough to stop and put on my waterproofs. Just think, had been following my GPS to my real destination I'd never have found this place. Matheson Hammock will still be there, when I get it together to go, but now I need to plan to come back here and wander the lush visitor center. And I won't need GPS to show me how to back track there.

Late Dawn Patrol

The plan was a good one: get up early and go for a ride to Anne's beach, take pictures, come home to a late breakfast. The plan came unstuck when I awoke a little before dawn as my wife rustled her way into her work outfit, whereupon I promptly sank back into the memory foam pillow and stared hard into the backs of my eyelids. By the time I pulled myself together and left the house it was showing 7:50am on the Bonneville's aftermarket analogue clock. Still and yet the sun was struggling to break free from the early morning castles in the sky: As I approached West Summerland Key (inexplicably located well east of the main and better known Summerland Key) it occurred to me that in addition to a flask of water and a couple of granola bars I might well have done myself proud had I remembered to pack a swimsuit and a beach towel. My plan was unraveling with every mile I rode east/north on the Overseas Highway. I find flat ocean waters very enticing and this is the season for breathless skies and flat waters: It had been a week of training at the police department where we have a new to us, computer-only phone system installed in the 9-1-1 center, and I had spent a couple of days learning to use it (I hope) and was thus waking and going to bed like normal people at civilized hours. Like normal people I was struggling to get out of bed when the alarm beckoned before sunrise. Commercial fishermen do not seem to suffer from these mortal foibles. These trappers were busy long before I fired up the Bonneville:
It was many years ago that a friend who published a book about sailing catamarans gave me some advice. Rod Gibbons, a catamaran dealer in cold and rainy Seattle, said the only way to publish a book was to put your boat next to a palm tree on the cover. It is advice I have never actually used, but it is advice that has never left my consciousness. Two perspectives on a lonely palm tree at Bahia Honda:
On the subject of advice a newspaper photographer I have cause to mention previously once told me the best pictures are close ups. Bill Lovejoy, an improbably named employee of the Santa Cruz Sentinel told me a photographer can never get too close to a subject. It's advice I have learned to trust over the years but sometimes distance helps a composition. This next picture violates the rule because I wanted an illusion of expansiveness. Visitors tend to notice the lack of land mass in the Keys, I see a broad field of opportunity among the islands, like this picture which looks like the Bonneville was parked miles away in a meadow:
In fact there is a broad shoulder on the north side of Bahia Honda Key, at the southern end of the bridge, and I had parked the Bonneville close to the Overseas Highway while I walked down to the water's edge to photograph the palm tree.
There are ambitious plans afoot in a state that boasts a budget deficit, so far, of around a billion or a trillion or a quadrillion dollars, expected to triple in two years, to build a bike path the 160 kilometer length of the Keys. The idea is to pave a path on the land next to the highway and join the pieces together for the entire 100 miles by rebuilding Flagler's 1900-era railroad bridges. It sounds like a delicious irony, first the state demolishes segments of the old bridges and allows them to deteriorate then wants to refurbish them for recreational cycling. Personally I think an electrified narrow gauge railway might serve us better in a future freed from the tyranny of infernal combustion, but who am I to argue with Progress? Every Eden has it's serpent and the new segments of Trailways bring with them new demands on our attention:
Bi-lingual instructions on how to use a cycling path; let there be no fire, camping, trash, mooring or alcohol on the trail- in two languages. Presumably if you speak Indonesian or German or Swahili all things are possible. Here's another non-closeup to violate Bill Lovejoy's rule:

I wish I weren't so enamored of infernal combustion but even these long straight roads fail to dampen my pleasure in simply going for a ride, at a rate of 43 miles per gallon of irreplaceable crude oil ($67 for a barrel these days as it comes out of the ground). This is me crossing the seven mile bridge (if you want to see more pictures of the bridge see this essay: http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2008/05/ninth-wonder.html ):
Having failed signally to organize my journey north I had no caffeine in a thermos with me so I stopped at Villa Blanca Cuban restaurant at the south end of Marathon, close to the West Marine Store. Which on this morning looked more like a scene from one of those cute TV shows with Little rascals getting up to no good:
His companions inside the restaurant were not quiet and composed eaters, and the TV was blaring Hispano-commercials featuring loud over-made-up women in impossibly tight dresses selling unnecessary household goods; all of which didn't add up to the peace and serenity a man needs for recuperation from the vicissitudes of the road. The woman at the counter treated me more like a dominatrix than the normal relationship one expects in a restaurant between customer and owner. I came away wondering if signs of her personality abuse were visible on the exterior of my person, and I suspect Jack riepe would have sweet talked her into producing the whip she so desperately wanted to be wielding. I got one Cuban sugar in my large con leche, which is the equivalent of seven Anglo sugars so my teeth were on edge and the remaining 23 miles to Anne's Beach passed in a jittery blur.
Some people think it's easy living and riding in the eternal summer of the straight roads of the Fabulous Florida Keys. Other people think I'm demented because I like to pass cars dawdling on the highway. I blame the Cubans, all of them, no exceptions, them and their coffee.

School For Scandal

Score one for the Bubbas, Jim Hendrick isn't going to jail, according to the Key West Citizen, and Friday's ruling in Federal Court has some people who weren't born in the Keys, in a snit. Jim Hendrick, an accredited lawyer, was convicted of helping a former county Commissioner try to avoid getting caught for taking a bribe to support a development. The former county commissioner died before he could be nailed, the man who offered the bribe skated and Hendrick was left holding the bag for assisting the bad behavior. Prosecutors asked for a re-sentencing but the judge simply added on some more community service, probation and another few months of house arrest.

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With the rapid conviction last month of Randy Acevedo on charges of helping to cover up his wife's school district theft (she has yet to face trial curiously, even though his trial was predicated on her guilt), the vocal Outsider community in Key West figured they had the Bubbas on the run. Not so fast apparently. And on the Monique Acevedo front, her father is saying she is being treated for mental afflictions of one sort and another, thus presumably setting up a defense strategy if she needs it. It looks like she will try to secure a plea agreement and I suspect her alleged kleptomania will figure in the defense's argument even if it is being put forward by her father rather than her attorney at the moment.

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With Hendrick continuing his ankle braceleted freedom one has to wonder if Randy Acevedo will get jail time following his three felony convictions, not least because his wife is in treatment and he has two children at home and he did not actually do the stealing just like Hendrick didn't in his case. Outsiders are braying for blood, Conchs are frowning. I am looking at the Florida Keys Community College watching the next shoe drop.

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The Hendrick acquittal ties in to the College President's travails too, weirdly enough. As part of his community service the lawyer Hendrick, with three felony convictions to his name, was sent to the Community College on Stock Island as a consultant. The President of the College, under siege from anonymous e-mails and angry administrative staff, fired him before his re-sentencing saying he was working against her. She also poured public scorn on a particular bid for a dormitory development project at the college. A bid that that Hendrick's developer friends the Spottswood family had submitted.

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The Spottswood bid has a special clause in it that if the eight million dollar dormitory building to be erected on a parking lot leased from the College does not get built, the Spottswoods get the land. No really, as a friend of mine put it they have written in an incentive for themselves to fail. It sounds like a joke but it isn't at all, and President Jill Landesberg-Boyle's opposition to that bid over a more rational bid from a company Up North is widely rumored to be the reason for the dogs of war being unleashed on her at the College.

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There was a paragraph last week in the paper announcing, whispering really, that the College had approved the winning bid for the dormitory project. The Spottswood's offer was apparently one the embattled college president couldn't refuse. I don't know if Boyle threw in the towel as a pre-departure fuck you or if her acceptance of the domination of the Spottswoods in the Keys is the start of a fresh effort on her part to build the College back up. If she is eating humble pie I hope she now understands the limits of the possible and moves forward undeterred in improving the academics and leaves the money printing to the Spottswoods. That's all they want or have ever given any indication they care about.

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While that fiasco unfolds the School District mess continues apace. The school budget is being finalized and the new Interim Superintendent "Super Joe" Burke is settling in to his new digs. And he trails the whiff of scandal into town with him... I am told he fired the whistle blower Kathy Reitzel because he wants to bring in "his own people," which was his defense when the State Attorney Dennis Ward tried to speak up in support of his star witness in the Acevedo conviction. And the idea that Superintendent Joe Burke wants his own financial staff in Monroe county is giving some people pause.

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Another whisper campaign has started suggesting Super Joe had his own scandal Up North. He worked in Dade County schools for 27 years and was superintendent in Springfield Massachusetts for seven and then came back to Florida to work for the Department of Education not least to secure his Florida pension.

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I perused masslive.com http://blog.masslive.com/breakingnews/2007/12/burke_out_of_picture_for_state.htmland and all I found were banal articles about Burke's tussles with a "Control Board" member who didn't seem to much like him. I will watch with interest how his people cope with the vicissitudes of life in the Fabulous Florida Keys, where being not well liked can have a very deleterious effect on one's career prospects when those people doing the offering are in a position to make offers that simply cannot be refused.

Conch Cottages

A request to photograph my favorite Conch Cottages would lead me to photograph places I have already snapped, like this old decaying structure around the corner from Solares Hill, the highest point in Key west, variously estimated at 14 to 18 feet so I split the difference and call it 16 (5 meters).The home is modest in size, raised off the ground slightly, has a porch and a metal roof. It is of course made out of wood and is close to the street though fenced off by an ugly but inexpensive hurricane fence. It would probably cost $300,000 to buy if it were for sale. Twice that if it were in good condition. A home at high elevation, in the most flood-proof part of Old Town commands a premium. I also happen to think it's cute. This next one is restored and doubtless valuable because of that though it doesn't get my vote:It is pretty enough, painted fashionable pale yellow and surrounded by a more expensive though cuter picket fence. This home has decorative shutters, not the folding out Bahamian style shutters and it has a huge extension in the rear with an elevated portion to peer over the back fence to look at God knows what. The home occupies all the square footage of the yard that it possibly can and as far as I recall there was no OSP. Without off street parking what is the point of a restoration sez I? Here are two more examples, the one nearest has a skylight, an escape hatch for heat rather than an entry point for light. Conventional skylights don't do well in Key West where strong sunlight weakens them and hurricane strength winds use them as a weak point to get unde otherwise solid roofs.The more distant cottage is an eyebrow style which was designed to allow upstairs window to open in sun or rain and remain in shadow and out of the down pour. Instead they discovered eyebrows, the roof that projects over the upstairs windows retain heat and keep the upstairs airless. Pretty but not useful. Good for restoration sez I because they are rare and pretty and air conditioning does the job of cooling these energy intensive days.
This home on Fleming, across the street from the Library and around the corner from the last two on Elizabeth, reminds me of New Orleans style shotgun houses, which look attractive but I find not practical to live in for my taste. This home is elevated, has a porch overbooking the street and has a tin roof. No OSP but I like the looks of it. This next one I like a lot, on Grinnell Street wedged between Five Brothers Cuban Deli and the cemetery, Dead people make excellent neighbors I find. As long as they are completely buried. This cottage has mature greenery, OSP and has had a modest make over in the original style, at least as viewed from the street. And the back unit is for sale with a pool and a couple of bedrooms for three quarters of a million (the equivalent these days to half of Detroit). Weird huh? The economy goes glug glug and still people expect to get gold plated offers on key West homes. Sticking with my theme of liking the cemetery for a neighbor this home on Frances Street is taller than you might expect a cottage to be in Key West and has a hedge out front, which if you are a recluse like me, works very nicely. I like the giant spreading trees as well on this block.
This home also displays the traditional fish scale type metal tiles of Key West homes.
Now we are getting into my favorite neighborhood, outside of Old Town proper, the Meadows used to be a field before it got developed. Here we see a home made of Dade pine, which is resinous and maintenance free but has been essentially wiped out in Dade County and nowadays comes from the Panhandle in much smaller quantities.

This home shows off those essential Conch aspects: no offset, raised on small piles and featuring Bahama style shutters which I think look very cool. A friend of mine lived with them and said they are a nuisance, rattling in the least amount of wind and not great protection in storms. They still look good though. The pilings on this house are well worn by the passage of time:

I remember years ago a friend of mine lost his girlfriend's small dog in this area and we spent hours hunting through the Meadows with flashlights looking under all these houses calling for the wretched dog. We found it later safe and sound after it took off in the opposite direction and was picked upon the Navy base. I still think about that ghastly, frantic weekend when I ride through this neighborhood 18 years later. The girlfriend and the dog are both dead by now, but their memory lives on. Boy was she pissed off when she found out we had mislaid her dog for two long days...Anyway back to Dade pine- this house has greenery and a porch though no OSP:Perhaps my obsession with Off Street parking stems from my work at the police department because we get lots of calls, especially in winter when parking is at a premium. Issues over where to park one's car drive people crazy.Some people mark "their"spots illegally with trash cans, others only move their vehicles in the direst of emergencies. Snowbirds amaze me, leaving their cars on the street all summer long. Thats why there are storage areas to park your unneeded vehicles:In the suburbs where I live I park underneath my stilt house and parking issues are non existent on my narrow street. Living at Mile marker 27 I have to commute and my home is relatively modern compared to something Old Florida like this with jalousie shutters made of wood:these are more usual made of glass to allow light as well as air into the home. I like my a/c for the hottest days of summer.

This is one of my favorite Conch homes in my preferred neighborhood. The right style, OSP, mature trees and......tasteful additions added to the rear of the original cottage in the proper style. Each section of roof has it's own style of metal work to reflect the era of the additions to the original cottage.
a nice wide porch which wraps around half way and gives a view of the street makes it perfect:
But to live here means you are living in the city, carbon friendly I'm sure but what a pain with all this tight living, noise and cement of urban life.