Summer Returns

My wife sent me this picture from her iPhone when she went to visit family in Rock Island Illinois. She wasn't happy to hear me tell of a sunny and warm weekend in Key West while she was gone. It's that time of year, when people from Up North abandon their factories and farms (...farms?) and come south to spend their retirement monies in sunny Key West.This is what they come to see and do, wear summer dresses in January and ride motor scooters in America's quaintest town.They get serenaded by more or less competent buskers on Duval Street:Or they buy palm frond art from Michael, busy at his spot in front of La Concha Hotel:People needing to apply some color to their knees can check out the menus in front of the restaurants:I have no idea what this lot were up to but they looked...uh...picturesque? Some people bring the whole family to do some light shopping on Duval:

Some people come to restore their faith in the value of romance:

And most people like to put their toes at risk in sandals. At least these two weren't riding along dragging their feet.

I was slightly surprised to notice this man wearing substantial footwear on Duval. Then I realized he was riding that overpowered cruiser known as the Yamaha V-Max and probably needs all the help he can get to keep that beast under control:Self control is a lost art in 21st century America, and while I agree 84 degrees (29C) is on the warm side I am firmly of the belief you should come as you are as the Tourism Development Council pens the slogan for the Keys, but have the good sense to cover up on main street USA.Or cool off rather than flaunt your gut. I prefer the locally produced Flamingo Crossing Ice Cream, if anyone cares. Here's a new one, new to me at least:A flash of thigh for those in the Northern Hemisphere snowed in for months to come:I had no idea you could buy knives like these on Duval Street.

Drinkers at Mangoes were so overheated they needed a fan to stay cool in the outdoor bar. Chicago this ain't, not in January at any rate:Friday afternoon on Duval Street was like an informal contest to see who could show the most summer skin:

These two on bicycles were a study in confusion. They had helmets, like good little snowbirds, but perhaps they had been in town too long because they wore cloth headgear and stored the safety helmets on their bicycles. No, I don't know why they were taking their helmets for a tour.A glance down a side street towards Bahama Village showed a bright summer afternoon street scene:This sidewalk artist, with suitable northern pallor was comfortable in the shade and intent on his work:I think this place used to be a coffee shop, but it is now called, whatever it was before, Cork and Stogie which cuts through all the crap, I guess. These patrons don't look like they miss tea and coffee.I found this chair going begging, sitting in the middle of the street somewhere off Duval:

This dude was looking extremely cool on a hot afternoon in front of Johnson's Grocery Store:

A summer afternoon in January at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park:

See, walking around half naked at the beach seems reasonable enough to me. I'd like to think they were all dressed when they were shopping at Fast Buck Freddie's, whose shopping bags they carried.

I liked this picture of a walk in a meadow of an August afternoon.Actually they were two visitors to Fort Zachary in January. Ah, Key West.

Lost Part II

According to a quick scan of the map this strange unmarked road is called South Street and may be all of three quarters of a mile long (one kilometer). We took more than an hour to meander along, taking pictures checking smells and looking into these odd pits dug out into the bushes.

This may also be horse country, according to the signs in the mud:

The beauty of winter in the Keys is that it's dry season so it rains when it's hot in the summer and dries out when it's colder. I like that combination.The return to warmer weather and bright crisp sunshine is welcome.

At this western end of the road I did start to see a few pine trees that were alive and flourishing:And I came across was a set of concrete blocks cemented together with re-bar down the middle. There was no sign of any construction around there but there were a few planks in the bushes. Just another Keys mystery lying around.Cheyenne was lost in her own world, and with no cars around she could wander at will.

Even in the midst of this wilderness we could see a line of houses in the distance to the south, with one tin roof winking semaphore at us as the sun passed overhead.At one point the road took a jog to the north through the bushes. Barely visible in the picture, Fat Albert was hovering over it all:

Finally a sign of civilization:

And over my shoulder brief whisk of a white tail and a Key Deer summed us up and vanished.

A mown lawn, a sure sign of people:

And our walk ended in the blank walls of dwellings on Big Pine's Fern Street at Guava:

The good dog was outside, free and busy sniffing:

And there between the thick bushes the unassuming entrance to South Street from the west:

Cheyenne was still full of beans and doubling back and forth as we made our inexorable return to Key Deer Boulevard. It seemed like a lot further than seven tenths of a mile to me.

Killing Kasztner

I have a habit, when my wife goes out of town, of selecting Netflix discs that I like to call "boy movies." My wife calls them my Hitler Channel movies, because as much as time goes by, the quantity and quality of films about that peculiar moment in history doesn't diminish; it seems to increase. A case in point at the Tropic Cinema they are showing a documentary (my wife hates documentaries so I scored two points with one movie) called "Killing Kasztner." It is a fascinating, impossible story of no human logic and dreadful inhumanity. I was riveted to my seat.There is, it seems a well known documentary film maker called Gaylen Ross who decided to discover what she could about the life and death of a Hungarian Jew known as Israel Reszo Kasztner. He emigrated to Israel after the war and got a job with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's government and was murdered in front of his house by a right wing Israeli terrorist called Ze'ev Eckstein, who was caught and sentenced to life in prison for the deed.

Ross interviews Eckstein, free these forty years, about the murder and he spills the beans. She interviews Kasztner's daughter and her daughters and they spill the beans. It is amazing stuff. But get this Krasztner saved more than 20,000 Jews from the Holocaust and he was branded a collaborator and hated by everyone. He got Adolf Eichmann to agree to save 1845 Jews and put them on a special train, Schindler style and they eventually got to Switzerland via a detour to the Bergen Belsen camp outside Berlin. Additionally Kasztner got SS Colonel Kurt Becher to agree to send 20,000 Hungarian Jews to Austria instead of Auschwitz and there they survived the war. Every single one of them. Yet Kasztner came out of the war loathed and labeled a collaborator. He was the only person to save any of the almost one million Jews in pre-war Hungary. One of the children seated in front in this picture, of the train en route to Switzerland is interviewed in the movie.

However the film reinforced my own prejudices against people in general, and the saying that no good deed goes unpunished is liberally illustrated here. Kasztner comes out of this amazing detective story as a true hero, unsung, unappreciated except by those he saved and not all of them even! There is an astonishing moment when a survivor dismisses Kasztner's efforts to save her own life, by blaming him for getting her sent, briefly to Bergen Belsen! This is an astounding movie.

Put it on your Netflix list. I think even my wife may be ready to see it. When we toured Auschwitz together she got enough Nazi anti semitism to put her off even discussing these things. But I think Kasztner's astonishing story piqued even her interest when I told her about it.

Lost Part I

I was driving north up Key Deer Boulevard on Big Pine Key with a vague destination in mind somewhere around the Blue Hole possibly when I spotted a dirt road heading west.We parked at the baseball diamond (possibly the site for a planned dog park) and took off to check this road out. It had possibilities not least because it was unpaved. The other good news was that I could see no mail boxes at the side of the main road and there were no power lines, which told me there was no one living down here.I was enjoying a bright sunny day with alight wind out of the southeast and no humidity. Finally we were getting some proper winter weather, at 75 degrees (22C) no need for socks at last.I am noticing a lot of colors in the mangroves and I'm not sure why. I don't recall such glorious reds and oranges and yellows all at once in years past and I was wondering if perhaps our recent bout of cold weather had done more than kill off a great many fish. It was looking like New Hampshire in the fall (I'm told not ever having been to New England).It was perfect riot of colors though considering all the dead pine trees i trust the mangroves will recover from whatever is making them change colors all at once. You can't swing a cat in the back country around here without hitting some defunct household appliance abandoned to save the former owner $11 in fees at the dump.

Even the most crass vandal can't destroy the beauty of these places.
I did spot this sign buried deep in the bushes. I rather think they have probably given up hope of closing a sale...The colors were splendid, of leaves and sky:

The street, unnamed as far as I could tell, wound on most alluringly: And Cheyenne was busy doing her usual snuffling act:As rural as these places look they are never complete silent, there is almost always a backdrop of human activity depending on the direction of the wind. One can generally hear an engine or two on a roadway, or a plane overhead, or even a helicopter from time to time.

The black turkey vultures are silent and quite graceful as they crowd the air this time of year:I am of course no botanist (my perpetual disclaimer) but I seem to recall a bark beetle was responsible a few years ago for doing in many of the pine trees that give the island, the largest in the lower Keys, it's name:

And what nature doesn't trash humans will. What the point of this apparent bull dozing was, we'll never know:

The presence of a non native palm tree indicates possible human activity in the wilderness:And there it is, a roof line among the clump of trees:

No sign of any actual people, or roads yet. But we were only half way across at this stage.