Miami In The Keys

I have been meaning to stop here for some time, it's on my ride home in the morning and the big white wall looms up in my headlight like an iceberg out of the dark. It was only when I was wandering the overseas highway one evening on my wife's Vespa 150 that i stopped for pictures.

One seems to end up inevitably on a long straight street when turning off the highway. And a dead end follows as sure as eggs is eggs.

Dusk is a great time to be out with all colors muted and the light giving way suddenly to dark.

I have mentioned it before, but one thing I do miss about life at higher latitudes is the length of dusk. I remember how long it takes for it to get dark after sunset at fifty five degrees north latitude, an endless shading of night. Around here it seems like one minute it's day and the next it isn't. Just like that.

So the keen photographer has to get a move on and grab the sunlight while it's there. Even as it reflects off Fat Albert, the Air Force surveillance blimp which flies above Cudjoe Key. Seen here pointing north into the direction of the wind.
Here's a cheerful mailbox in a tropical vein, another one for Celia's collection:
And there's the sun again making a dive for the horizon:

Somewhat to my surprise, South Pointe is a neighborhood of huge houses, luxury homes with massive yards and all the appurtenances one would expect of a 5,000 square foot 450 meter) home:And here is the classic dolphin mailbox holder:

Modest enough, that little sea mammal, when surrounded by these vast luxury dwellings, an endless parade of them:Perfectly manicured in all the details:

I recently got endless grief for gardening in my birthday suit (which wasn't true) and here is a guy standing around in the garden all day in his birthday suit and not one peep did I hear about it.

The sun, refusing to disappear completely, struggling to stay in sight:

In the distance a car turning north onto Highway One, the gloom showing up in the long distance shot as the absence of daylight rubs out the details:
More magnificent gardens, the antithesis of what I think of as "Keys Living:"

A Vespa ET4 in the frame never hurts:

Just think: if that sign hadn't been posted there I might have got it into my head to trespass...

God Bless America and top tax rate lower than anywhere else in the industrialized world.
There is still room for one more if you have plans and a permit ...and some spare cash.

Looking south the night is closing in:

And looking north to Mile Marker 16 one can see the lights of the Sugarloaf Lodge:

South Pointe would make an excellent base for a quick commute to Key West some 15 minutes south of here. Of course it doesn't seem like many of the residents of the neighborhood would even need to think of something as plebeian as commuting. But still, if they ever did, they would be well place.

Who Killed Kennedy

Solares Hill, the free weekly paper subsumed into the Key West Citizen's empire has not been my favorite paper for a while. I used to enjoy the Thursday read when Nancy Klingener used to edit the paper. She was the best to come after David Ethridge got tired of running the paper and faded away to retire someplace Up North. These days I feel the paper is being edited by a reporter, and to me that's not a great thing. A good reporter isn't necessarily a good editor and it shows in the weak articles Solares Hill seems to be ready to settle for. there are those who will tell it was only great decades ago when everything in key west was great and it has all been polluted mercilessly by outsiders and people of low morals from elsewhere.Be that as it may Solares Hill has been off on a bizarre tangent all it's own lately, reporting sporadically on the Key west links to the John F Kennedy assassination in Dallas lo those many years ago. This past week (Solares Hill appears nowadays as a supplement to the Sunday Citizen)the paper offered a solution to the enduring mystery of who killed the President in 1963. In various articles over the past couple of years the paper has woven an incredibly complex tale drawing in various Cuban exiles and anti-Castro personalities in South Florida and the Keys, including the training on No Name Key of the potential Bay of Pigs invaders and it talked at some length about the CIA front company operating on Stock Island to monitor Cuba and infiltrate agents onto the island. The articles are numerous and the links are incredibly complex.

If I have it right Solares Hill suggests that Cuban exiles posing as Communist sympathizers of Castro hoodwinked Lee Harvey Oswald to murder the President, and they were planning in spiriting him away after the assassination, a plan thwarted by Oswald's early arrest. Apparently the murder involved Cuban exiles who were angry about Kennedy's lack of enthusiasm for an invasion of Cuba and hoped to pin the murder on Castro, thus prompting an all out retaliation by the US. They were apparently backed up (this is a complicated long drawn out story and I may be missing some key points here) by members of the mob who were also keen to get back to Cuba to pick up where they had been forced to leave off by the fall of the Batista government.

One can well imagine the Mob doing the deed and saying nothing, but it's harder to imagine the Cuban exile keeping their mouths shut about such a monumental thing. It appears word did leak out, but I suppose the Anglo press in the US isn't going to pick up the hints and rumors that Solares Hill's correspondents have managed. I find the story fascinating, I confess, even as I wish Solares Hill would give this sort of coverage to the daily dramas of the Keys, more consistently and more forthrightly than they have lately. Nevertheless I also hope they get recognition for this crazy plausible tale of who it actually might have been that organized the unsolved mystery of who killed Kennedy.

Mailboxes Etcetera

This post is along overdue promise for Celia who wanted mailboxes on my blog. I now know where to find a vast assortment to spice up my blog when I feel like it.

I used to think the idea of a mail box project was overwhelming until I ended up on Caribbean Drive on Summerland Key. Every other mailbox was personalized:

This one was one of those East Coast style lighthouses built on land. Not the metal screw type used in the Florida Keys rock:

I liked the mermaid with her rouged cheeks and lips in a permanent pout:

I hope I can get closer than this to a manatee this winter, above, or this grouper (?) below.

While I grant you this stand pipe isn't technically a mail box I have never previously seen such a thing do double duty as a house number marker:

And to close out this series of tropical mail boxes here is mine on Indies Road on Ramrod Key. In the picture I managed to mask the fact that I recently dropped a coconut on it when pruning the tree above it, giving it a large, unsightly dent. My wife, who warned me of potential missile damage as I pruned the fruit had not a harsh word to say to me after I bombed our own mailbox. It is thanks to such forbearance that our marriage survives.

Mind you it took a fair bit of work on my part to bury this bugger in a bed of cement. We may tire of the decorated box but I promise you, that post is there to stay, come hell or high water.

Thanksgiving

Im Abendrot- Evening's Glow

Through want and joy we have walked hand in hand;
We are both resting from our travels now, in the quiet countryside

Around us the valleys fold up, already the air grows dark,
Only two larks still soar wistfully into the balmy sky

Come here and let them fly about; soon it is time for sleep
We must not go astray in this solitude

O spacious, tranquil peace, so profound in the gloaming.
How tired we are of travelling – is this perchance death?

( Joseph Eichendorff )

In Im Abendrot, at the line “can this then be death,” Richard Strauss quotes the Transfiguration motif from one of the tone poems that made him famous, Tod und Verklärung (“Death and Transfiguration”). Strauss wrote in 1894 about Tod und Verklärung: “The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things which could not be fulfilled here below.” On his deathbed, Strauss said: “Dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

Thanks to my wife for learning to understand me and the patience to put up with me and the promise to be there at the end. It's been an excellent trip. Long may it last.

Dry Tortugas Thankfully

As you read this I hope to be with half a dozen or so friends settling into a campsite at the Dry Tortugas National Park. The house, the vegetable garden and the Bonneville (without the ignition key!), are in the care of a house sitter and for four glorious days and three cool nights we will be under canvas somewhere here.
The blog will have to soldier on without me, as will Key West PD until I get back on the Saturday afternoon ferry and rush off to my uniform waiting for me in my locker when I take up the reins of civilized life once again. I am very happy to be escaping the bonds of civilization for a few days, and I very much appreciate this ideal wilderness we have just 70 miles (110 kilometers) from Key West. At Fort Jefferson there is no food, no water, no cell phones, no nothing very much unless we load it on the ferry.
The weather forecast advises us a cold front is about ready to hit the Keys and we can expect rain in squalls with wind and cooling temperatures, possibly into the mid 60s at night (17C). We have a supply of extra blankets and red wine to fight off frost bite. As you might imagine, with half a dozen women in the party we will leave nothing to chance. Last May I was a pack mule getting our modest heap of stuff from the ferry to the campground.To those that wish it, I hope you get all the snow, yellow leaves and changes of season you can stand. To those forced to stand in line in airports, or in traffic jams on freeways, felicitations, I'm sure your families appreciate the sacrifice. To riepe, I apologize in advance for the posts the next few days which will look exactly like normal but I won't be available to be your whipping boy. Tell your bud in Alaska that if God and I were on speaking terms I'd be asking for a Government Writer's Program like the WPA had, for Christmas. Failing that perhaps we can ask China to annex us to Hong Kong and send us Cuban doctors to take care of our health needs. Remember: They may have a perfect welfare safety net in Norway but they don't have seascapes like these: Till next time then, I'm off to find a campsite and eat turkey on my very own, more-or-less private, desert island. Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! (Even Canadians who've hogged the turkey and had theirs in October, greedy guts).