Vignettes XL

If this Little Torch Sign means "No Noise After 6pm" that seems a little early in the evening to me, though I appreciate the sentiment overall. It's that time of year when winter visitors are busy telling everyone what to do and how to do it. Cheyenne and I were riding down the street with the boys and their dogs when Cheyenne was showing signs of restlessness so we stopped the car and I let her out. She ran off deep into the bushes across the street and rooted around. The man who lives at that house across the street, a winter resident who appears with his RV in winter and retreats to inflict himself somewhere else in the summer barked at me: "I hope you are going to pick up after it!" ( I live my life with plastic bags in my pocket). Which was an odd sentiment to express so nastily to me as a) Cheyenne was out of sight in the mangroves and b) after he leaves in April I will be free to sling tons of dog shit into his immaculate yard all summer long. I won't of course because I am a nice bourgeois neighbor not really interested in blood feuds. I left those behind when I left my village in Italy. Lucky for him.
A quick shot of sunrise over Ramrod Key taken from the top of the Niles Channel Bridge. While my wife was out of town I commuted by car, dropping Cheyenne off and picking her up after work from Wayne and Chuck's place on Sugarloaf Key.

So I had the camera easily available and for no particular reason that I can recall I took a few pictures. Oil is above $90 a barrel and gas around here is above $3 a gallon. Economists say oil is pricey enough it can stall economic recovery. I wonder which recovery they are talking about? It's Christmas at the end of my street on Ramrod. Witness the Christmas tree sprouting off the power pole. Wayne and Chuck Zuzu and Tootie. Thank God I didn't get a dog from the pound called Tootie. I have lots of gay attributes but walking around in public calling "Tootie Tootie!" would be over the top even for me. Cheyenne always struck me as a rather inappropriate name for a dog assigned to me. It sounds rather Western and butch. But we're stuck with it by now.
Dogs are astonishingly resilient creatures. These two Vizlas were treated, as Chuck puts it, like cattle and yet after a year they are acting like dogs, shy dogs maybe but dogs nonetheless. Cheyenne is apparently a good influence on them though I think sometimes she is just an Alpha bitch. When staying over with the boys she sneaks the girl's rawhide and makes a big play of chewing it in front of them. She needs to get a job with Wells Fargo Bank so she can puts lots of people in their place. She seems to be good at it. We walked for a while on Crane Boulevard. The big experiment here was to see what happened when a Vizsla walked off leash. It would be totally nerve wracking for me to have a dog so skittish she might not come if called. Wayne and Chuck have the patience of saints. There was a Dutch ship moored at the Navy Pier in Key West last week. It must be a tremendous drag waiting for permission to go ashore and taste all that Key West has to offer. Though I hear the Dutch authorities are clamping down on decriminalized drugs thanks to outbreaks of violence. You can rely on people to screw up a good thing. I notice the debate here at home is how to pay to keep millions of people incarcerated. If the pacific Dutch can't handle decriminalized marijuana I wonder how well such an idea might work in the land of out-of-control addiction...This whole line of idle thought was based on my observation of the flag at the stern (back of the boat). It looks Dutch to me. Perhaps it's Latvian or something in which case all the foregoing speculation was even more pointless than it actually was.
There was a flag on a Ford Mustang at Truman Waterfront.Pirates in paradise was another of those events with a minimal grasp on reality but it's a way to amuse the children and get some visitors to part with some cash of a weekend. Pirates had some attributes not frequently considered in the rush to absorb the cinematic versions of history. They elected their leaders which was a rash revolutionary act at a time when the Divine Right of Kings kept everyone subjugated (as Goldman Sachs does today). When their leader screwed up they deposed him and hired another one. Pirates were indifferent to race color or creed and all were welcome. Don't Ask Don't Tell wasn't part of the program.However Key West was not on their itinerary. Key West was the base for anti-pirate activity by the Gummint and when Commodore Porter was blisteringly successful at keeping the Florida Straits free of pirates he was hounded out of town as a spoilsport and a nuisance. Pirates were actually based in Nassau on New Providence Island after they were booted out of Old Providence Island in the Western Caribbean. The Florida Keys were shallow, full of currents, lacked wood and water, and were awkwardly placed to intercept merchant ships. Never mind, the myth lives on, all clean cut and not at all smelly.I hope they got people to part with lots of money, by hook or by crook.

My Day To Whine, Thank You.

December has barely begun and already we are getting frozen in the Florida Keys. I am perfectly aware thank you that this is a sore subject for people who are employing snow shovels and are walking on water, but as far as I am concerned the recent temperatures in the sub tropics have been, to put it bluntly, Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.I awoke two mornings ago with one hand incautiously lying outside the covers and it felt like a block of ice. If this goes on much longer we will fire up the reverse cycle air conditioning, which we ran for four months last winter, which was intolerable. Frankly I don't think it is at all suitable to get into the car to take the dog for a walk and see 56 degrees (13 C) at this hour of the mid morning.Cheyenne loves this weather as one might imagine. Arriving home yesterday morning after a long night of not doing much I just wanted to crawl into bed after stripping off my freezing cold motorcycle gear. Yes indeed, I rode to work Wednesday night knowing full well it was going to be cold. Cheyenne greeted me by prancing around and the standing hopefully by the car door. With as much grace as I could muster I stuffed her in and drove five minutes across the island to the Ramrod Pool, an open space surrounded by sturdy bushes where she can wander at will at 6:30 in the morning and I can hope to discern a few headlines in the paper as daylight arrives in all it's glory.Yesterday morning it was COLD. All right I know that in Minnesota or Finland a chill winter morning is some degree of frost beyond anything I can imagine but the temperatures here are laced with water vapor and even hardened skiers and stuff from Up North admit a 60 degree (15C) day in Key West can give a seasoned person goosebumps.

Besides its all in what you are used to. I remember once I was driving across North Dakota with my fiancee and her family and we stopped for gas outside Bismark. It was a sunny day, bright and fresh after a snowstorm had blown through filling the countryside with drifts of frozen water. My leather jacket clung to me like a sheet of frozen cardboard, my woollen hat sat on my head allowing shafts of piercing cold to drill through the holes in the weave and drive into my skull like ice picks. I tottered out of the Toyota van (a four wheel drive contraption that could plough through any amount of foul weather) and offered to fill up the gas tank. My fellow North Dakotans were standing around in minus 20 degree weather (-29 C) in t-shirts as though it was summer. I could barely operate the fuel pump and my breath felt like razor blades slicing my chest from the inside.Thursday evening I didn't bother to ride the Triumph to work. Rain had fallen while I was sleeping and even though the skies were filled with thick billowy gray clouds their celestial insulation did not help to raise the temperature. I took Cheyenne for a walk on Big Pine and after about 55 minutes the skies opened and rain started spattering through the pine trees. We aimed for the car and started walking fast.I don't usually mind the rain but rain and frigid cold is over the top. It sucks. It's unnatural. It makes me ask myself why I am not living in Charlotte Amalie or Frederiksted, or someplace close by, in the true Caribbean, the true tropics, America's true Paradise Islands- the US Virgins. Probably I'm not a USVI resident because I like road trips, I like a lower crime rate and I enjoy the weather in the Keys 49 weeks out of the year. Well, at least probably 45 weeks. More than 40 weeks out of the year for sure. Especially if you don't count unbearably hot weeks in August and September. It's not clear in this next photograph but my Labrador was looking at me in adoration yesterday morning and her tail was wagging nineteen to the dozen. Her thirty minutes at the pool had made her a happy girl.From Richard Machida's Blog in Fairbanks Alaska (opinions expressed are certainly not those of an institution as august as the University of Alaska and anybody who suggests otherwise is an idiot) I read about the trials and tribulations, minimal really, of refurbishing an elderly BMW motorcycle. I have a vague unformed hankering for an R100RS the first factory faired sport touring motorcycle ever built and I find his blog encouraging. http://blog.machida.us/ However there was a throw away line at the end that gave me palpitations. It seems it's a good time to strip the bike because:

This morning, it was -33°F. The weather is trying to make up for the unseasonably warm temperatures of last week.

Holy crap! -36C, how does one cope? I keep pestering him to detail a day in the life of someone who lives this Ironman life and he shrugs it off as just no big deal. Looking out the window at the black clouds and rain I feel my will to live seeping out through the soles of my feet.There is another blog, http://www.behindbarsmotorcycle.com/ which in his latest essay presents as clearly as anyone ever has the muddled attitude someone like me has to the whole notion of outdoor winter sports.

What stuns most folk below the Mason-Dixon though, is going outdoors in winter - for fun... sledding, snowmobiling and the most admirable, ice fishing. All of which are popular enough to warrant entire industries producing goods to keep them going. Hobbies that require a resistance to frigid cold in addition to a healthy lack of good sense. And, if you don't know what ice fishing is, it involves a truck, a frozen lake, boring a hole, and sitting around all day waiting for lethargic, half-frozen fish to find your hook – And, is also a great way to keep your beer cold without your wife ever knowing you bought it. Not the kind of activity for a people afraid of the cold. Better suited for a people who think, that like climbing Everest, something difficult is something worth doing - something worth striving for.

My wife is one of those, raised in Northern California who has never appreciated the cold. She was armed for bear when I crossed her path at the gas station at the end of our street. I was coming home from the pool, she was on her way to work, to teach the little dears wrapped in wool with Ugg boots on her feet.Her language was not at all ladylike as she pumped regular gas at $3.11/gallon into her car. Her Sebring has heated seats and this time of year they are on all the time. If temperatures drop below 80 degrees (27 C) and she wants the roof down, on comes the heated seat. That's her tolerance level for cold. She has announced at last that the heat is coming on at the homestead, and we are among the lucky ones who actually have central heat through reverse cycle a/c at our house. Lots of people don't.

I remember last year we arrived in Asheville, North Carolina about this time of year to visit her sister's family in the mountains. It was cold, and they always tell us, "It's not normally this cold in Asheville." Or "It hardly ever snows here." And every time we show up the weather turns to shit. Just as it did last year, because when we showed up it was twelve degrees (-11 C) and we were seriously frozen. We staggered into the house where the family was gathered to greet us and instantly they treated us like mental deficients. Of course it's cold, where's your cold weather clothing? Of course we had on every stitch of cold weather clothing we had and when they understood our plight out came the puffy jackets and wool accessories and the sympathy. That's right, we don't actually possess cold weather clothing around here. Last winter people were getting cold and lamenting they had no socks, never mind parkas, in Key West.

There is a saying which I have heard attributed to Norwegians which goes something like this: "There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing." And there is a great deal of truth in that. However in the Keys one doesn't plan one's life around periods of exceptional cold. If last winter's long freeze is emulated this winter we may have to reconsider as climate change or whatever alters our patterns of local weather. Tourists come to the Keys to lounge by the pool, to throw of their clothes and their cares in varying degrees. They don't come to huddle and to try to ignore roiling gray clouds and piercing cold wind. The Keys are sold on the (false) premise that these islands are tropical and that they are a Caribbean Paradise. Much of the time they live up to billing but for a few weeks in the year they don't. And it sucks all round. Partly perhaps because when the weather doesn't suck around here it is absolutely perfect, summer or winter. But when it does suck I shall make a point of whining about it. If you choose to live where there are seasons and there is snow and you do it by choice my hat's off to you. When the weather, the great attribute of my home town, lets me down, I might as well be shovelling snow or wearing electric motorcycle gear. And that's not something I'd do by choice. Not without a lot of whining.

Boca Chica Beach

The sky was cloudy, and I hoped it was a good day to go deep into Boca Chica Beach, a notoriously buggy place. We parked the car, Cheyenne and I alongside the only other vehicle currently at this most popular beach, a van whose occupant had the engine running and a laptop perched on his steering wheel. He nodded cheerfully as we stumped by and then my Labrador and I were alone in the beach wilderness.I had plans this early morning (8 o'clock is early for a lot of people) and they involved walking as far as we could in ninety minutes before I had to drive in to Key West to meet my wife. The old road was torn up by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 but prior to that this stretch of asphalt was open to cars and it was much wider than the narrow strip still open to bikes and walkers. The ocean is unchanging if a little melodramatic this fine morning.I had remembered to apply copious layers of insect repellent so I'm not sure if precautions were effective or if the threat of cool weather was enough to keep mosquitoes at bay.Boca Chica is a strip of public land backed by the Boca Chica Naval Air Station which regularly flies jets off the runway here. They fly low and loud simulating aircraft carrier exercises, but the beach itself is open to public use, this side of the green hurricane fence. The power poles along here mark the old state road bed (not Highway One as some believe. The Old Overseas Highway used to pass through Boca Chica Base itself and a portion of it is still used as a second entrance gate). I have seen these "State Beach" signs for sale on Duval Street. There is no doubt however that people fling their clothes off with gay abandon around here, whether such activities are state sanctioned or not. Not, most likely, as Florida has a government that enjoys very much interfering with people's private passions. In the name of freedom, naturally.

Anyway, by the time you encounter a middle aged naked man (not me!) down here you will have been amply warned. Someone with too much time on their hands has been adding to the sole tree on the beach. A testament to the indestructible plastic pollution of our coastal waters:This Cuban chug used to be further down the beach closer to the tide line but it has apparently been pushed up further onto dry land. It was quite a sophisticated home built escape vehicle, with a hull made of sheet metal bolted together sheathed in fiberglass to make it water tight. It has engine mounts inside and seemed to have canvas flotation rings around the top of the hull. It is also filling up with trash after long exposure to lazy passers by. The US Coastguard OK is supposed to indicate the boat has been inspected and accounted for as much as possible by the Coasties. Cubans are always floating over, or dying in the attempt, when the ocean is calm and the breezes die down.Speaking of time on your hands there is a stone hut construction also on this beach and very elaborate it is too.It has chambers and paths and decorations and everything. Crusoe would be at home here.Further down the beach the way is obstructed by water, a pond spilling out into the ocean. Across the salt pond the eagle eyed guardian of Boca Chica Naval Air Station.Hurricane storm surge has made a mess of the coastline here. It's what Nature tends to do, tearing up the dirt and making human access more complex. Someone has strung up a set of polyethylene rope between the trees to enable people to totter dry foot using rocks as stepping stones. Cheyenne and I, properly clad fear no water- my Crocs and Cheyenne's paws are amphibious.A good spot to pause.Someone left a copy of Conch Color magazine in this pleasant reading spot on a small chunk of waterfront sand, well shaded with a nice ocean view. Here is a surviving culvert from the old road. We had to get our calves wet to cross another outgoing stream of salt water to get to the next chunk of beach.Another someone with a lot of time on their hands has been piling up rocks to create another causeway. They need to buy and wear waterproof Crocs instead.More old road, more old power poles stretching to the horizon.These rocks mark a divergence in the trail. To the left follow the beach picking your way through mangroves. To the right turn inland.Quite a few years ago I brought a bicycle down here and rode to the end of the road. The road peters out at the end of the island, ending abruptly in the middle of the bushes as I recall at the spot where an old wooden bridge collapsed.We were alone in the shrubbery, still drippy and wet from recent rains.And, technically speaking, not completely alone:I was surprised to come across this magnificence in the middle of the road. Later I spoke with Robert about this channel which allows the salt ponds to flush with the tides and he said it was built a couple of years ago. The steel plates looked quite new.We stood on the bridge for a while watching the water flow under the road and then it was time to turn back toward the car. We walked briskly along in companionable silence cutting the return journey in half, and in less than thirty minutes we were back at the car.