Garden Club

The West Martello Tower at Higgs Beach is home to the Garden Club of Key West. The Bonneville in the foreground is my motorcycle, lest you forget.The garden club used to be a quiet corner doing it's own thing and offering tropical plants for sale once a year at a well attended sale. Nowadays they seem to be casting around in public for support.I dropped a fiver in the donation box and went for a walk. The library in the tower felt like a brick lined reading room at an old English club. My old man was a member of the Athenaeum in London and it felt rather like this, in a very broad sense.
I should have liked to take a seat and read a book, one of those pre-kindle bundles of pulp, but as usual I had no time to linger. Naturally I have no clue what this stuff is though it looked lovely. An orchid perhaps?I have only previously been here for the plant sale, just to get a chance to look around. This place is utterly lovely, and it's not nearly as crowded as Sloppy Joe's Bar.
Beach alert! Higgs Beach outside and quiet wending paths inside.
Beach view: Flower view:This is one of the minor pleasures of small island living, everything close by, creating variety side-by-side.

Beach and Art.

Shady seating inside:

And as small as this place is, it packs a lot inside it's brick walls.

The Martello Towers were built to support Fort Zachary up the coast. The artillerymen at the fort used this Martello for target practice and it is now much more tumbled down than the East Martello out by the airport.From a previous essay:
http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2009/02/east-Martello-art.htmlAnd from a previous essay on this martello, this was how I saw West Martello by night: http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2009/01/ghostly-west-martello.htmlThis year Sculpture Key West was split into three locations, an idea that didn't do much for me, but I guess everyone wants a piece of the successful show, so one share of the exhibits was on display here:Xeriscaping is the new waterless gardening style though this display was rather uninspiring.

The garden club member who took my donation was proud of the fact that Key West Citizen columnist Mandy Miles got married here and a fine location it would be.

Art or whimsy.

This is a fine place to loiter even though you do so at risk of arrest after hours.

With lots of parking.

I must come back to spend more time here.

Eagle At 17th

A hot summer afternoon in April in New Town. I was much cheered by a call from a friend in Santa Cruz California a couple of days ago. The weather report? 45 degrees, rain, "it looks like winter." Cheyenne and I were huddling under the inadequate cover of a tree before venturing out under the sun on Eagle Avenue.The house is shut up, the car is for sale. Hmm, a possible replacement for my oil burning kennel.An occupied house, a car not for sale.New town used to be open fields and there was a dairy around here in the days before Key West spread past Division Street, now known as Truman Avenue. Division used to divide the inhabited part of the island from the open space. Open, no longer. For Conchs of the day New Town development represented an opportunity to sell their tumbledown homes for ridiculous sums and build proper American homes on decent sized lots in what used to be fields.Off sets are are a good deal wider than in Old Town.It's starting to get hot if you happen to wear a fur coat out in public. But not so hot that one loses all interest in the outside world.A delightful tree house in a very large ficus (baobab). (see comment below...)Classic ranchette style, car port, open landscape, lots of off street parking, no tourists. People who visit and inhabit only Duval Street have no idea how non touristy the rest of the island is.The real estate market in the Lower Keys is sending mixed signals. Realtors tell us the market is regaining strength -come on down!- but foreclosures seem to be increasing and as they come on the market prices are weak. An acquaintance was recently advised the real estate office where she works is cutting her pay by one third (!) and her share of recent sales commissions have not yet (!) been paid. Her response was to cut her own hours by two per day so she saves herself the cost of daycare. My wife was rather freaked out by that piece of news.Dropping house prices enable sales but they don't feed the machinery of the local economy like the recently inflated prices used to.

Around here a large swath of lawn is nothing to be amazed about in New Town. Space like this in Old Town makes the owner a millionaire, even today. I like wide streets, off street parking and large offsets. If I had to live in the city I'd be looking around here, far from the drunken crowds.Happily I'm not yet forced to give up my mortgage. I'm sure Wells Fargo is delighted, I fed their last quarter's absurd profits so it's more bonuses for everyone at the bank. Lucky them.

Dusky Bonneville

Most of the night Nelly and I were going to be running the room alone and even in a town as small as Key West you can't run a police/fire/rescue communications center with less than two people. It's hard enough some nights with just two dispatchers but we still can't find enough people to keep our communications center fully staffed so needs must. So in order to get a break at all I had to leave work before 9pm which meant the sun had just set, and the city, coming on to summer, looked lovely. Casa Marina.Earth Day comes at a poignant time for me, I was twelve when the first one happened and I doubt I will be around for the eightieth Earth Day in forty years from now. I am not planning to live much past my Biblical three score and ten, so when I learn that by 2050 the Southernmost Point may be underwater I hope that everyone else's children are ready to cope. I know I'm not.
I have no idea what my carbon footprint is but I suspect most Keys residents who drive improbably vast cars have less impact than do I with my 43mpg Bonneville that I ride incessantly. It has 37,500 miles on the clock since I bought it in October 2007, which mileage doesn't include driving or riding my wife's Vespa ET4.
When I was a youngster politics was the name of the game and changing the world was the game and until the need for material wealth overwhelmed all other considerations my generation made some important changes. And failed on a lot of counts which leaves one vulnerable to the same charge we leveled at the ones who went before, a lyric that went something like "... boy, you lot sure balled things up for us!" I find the old Navy warehouse on Truman Waterfront evocative. It should be gone soon, when the city commission stops wrangling over what to do with the 34 acres they were given by the military. A park, a gift to developers for a rich yacht marina, an old folks home, a water slide, you name it, they are at each other's throats over this. I like it as it is but entropy is bad I am told.
This ship was built in the Great Depression and is sitting out it's second Great Depression in retirement, soon to be a new floating museum. How lucky we are to have these night skies, and to be able to ride around under them helmetless, in shirt sleeves at nine o'clock at night in April.
I have no idea what climate change will bring to my life though no doubt it will be worse in the delta of the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh where brown people will drown as always, in their tens of thousands to general indifference during regular monsoon season. In the face of the dire predictions of youthful agitated activists it seems rather absurd and more than a little ironic to start pondering the value of an electric motorcycle at my stage in life. Pollution reduction depends on wealth and wealth has shrunk, even though that simple truth is not being accepted or even acknowledged most places I go. How are we, the newly poorer, to spend more money reducing an invisible carbon foot print? It is a conundrum, and when you throw the oil of politics on the scientific bonfire you might as well give up altogether.

Simonton Beach boat ramp. Will the floodwaters menace us from here?Environmental activism is promoted nowadays in Key West, amidst the clanging unrecycled beer bottles and screaming two stroke scooters, used as toys by the tourists. I used to think the green living idea was a good one but it is a status quo organization, a rich person's pastime, a conscience salver. It isn't a group dedicated to the paradigm shifting of my more youthful days. We don't see the promotion of solar electrical generation. Keys Energy would be threatened. Using rainwater cisterns to reduce our dependence on the South Florida Aquifer would wreck the Florida Keys Aqueduct's billing cycles they think so we never mention such environmentally sensible radicalism. We ride middle class bicycles and don't promote bike paths (they would cause controversy God forbid) and we drift along in the same old manner driving a Prius instead of a Pontiac.

Earth Day- may it make you feel good as you daub body paint and worship Gaia and commit your all to saving this or that. Me? I'm riding my Bonneville, drinking my rainwater, recycling, composting, growing my vegetables and developing my sense of ironic detachment. And I play with my camera to enhance my feeble attempts at seeing the world through the eyes of Art.God, I love my internal combustion. And in a country that is seeing essential services cut back and the mantra of no new taxes entrenched in the public psyche I am glad to see Key West, the improbable trend setter, forging ahead with no talk of cuts, no talk of unbalanced budgets, no threats of changing the status quo. Indeed, Fire Station Two may get a whole fresh building for the 21st century, and after they twice saved Duval Street from burning down this past year, you'd think they've earned it. At public expense.My night time walk is out on the White Street Pier. The sun has set, it's closing in on ten pm and time to return to work, at my unionized, taxpayer funded job, sitting up all night and being grateful for the chance to work in a world where nothing seems certain except perhaps, that more people will be alive to call 9-1-1 and ask for help. Other people's misery is my job security. Key West at dusk is a lovely place, but it wouldn't be the same without the dead dinosaurs that power my ride around town to see it and photograph it.

"How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

I'd have gone easy on the "beauteous" had I been William Shakespeare, but Aldous Huxley's soma? I could use some of that.

"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."

Happy Earth Day earthlings.