The Abandoned Tree

I was striding down Whitehead Street the other day and I passed a pair of cruise ship women, identified by the colored discs issued by the ships and affixed to their ample bosoms, while one was speaking to the other as our paths crossed. I overheard a snippet, "...I don't know," she grumbled, "...something about an abandoned tree." Huh? I thought to myself. Then I spotted a group of tourists standing around necks craning up above their heads.

By the time I got my phone out and the camera turned on they were moving up the street following their guide who had finished spouting about the famous tree on Whitehead Street. I overheard his patter "...the largest banyan tree in the world I'm told is in East Africa and takes up five acres." I took a picture of the crowd shuffling off, away from the now abandoned tree.

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Living In Key West

I have been doing a lot of walking and reflecting this week, more walking than usual in the city, and in so doing I have talked with my wife about where we want to live. Living at Mile Marker 27 suits us both and irritates us both in what is becoming apparently equal measure. We have been giving consideration to making a move.

I have never lived anywhere as long as I have lived on Ramrod Key, we moved into our tree house in January 2005 and over the years we have made what was a fish camp on stilts a comfortable home. That it barely reaches 800 square feet of living space has not been the issue. That we live on street with a bunch of what appear to be retired Republicans afflicted with irritable bowel syndrome (as well they might since the last election) is a source of comfort to me as no one ever drops in on us and wastes my time with small talk. Even the 27 mile commute has pleased us, me on my motorcycle, my wife in her convertible.

In talking to our bank to renegotiate our loan we added up the cost of gas, wear and tear on our vehicles and considered how many miles our commute adds to our high mileage rides and the cost of living 27 miles from town looks hefty. We figured seven hundred bucks a month all in. Wells Fargo bank isn't Bank of America and renegotiation doesn't seem likely. Which fact sparks the adventurous spirit in us. Stay on with an unbearable burden of costs or move and make the move work for us. No contest!

There is no doubt we enjoy life on our canal in what we fondly call our tree house. I find it the perfect place to sleep during the day and when I wake up the views through the various windows are of shimmering leaves in bright sunshine with glimpses of blue sky and galloping puffy clouds. Even had I felt let down by the recent election (which I was a bit as the President is certainly not a socialist by any modern standards) the endless summer would more than make up for the political disappointment. I rarely scowl when I'm at home.

And yet I have to question if the endless driving is worth it. The issue isn't so much the commute Itself but it's the fact that if we want to see people or events in Key West we have to repeat the commute, sometimes we end up driving that same Highway One a hundred miles a day - each! It is that which is upsetting our balance after eight years on Ramrod Key. Faced with an interesting season of music and theater and film in Key West this winter we are as likely to miss as to see productions and events we may strongly wish to participate in.

The trouble is our life at home is pleasant enough that we have found it hard to commit ourselves to making a move. Sit out on the deck to watch a sunset over the salt ponds, or take breakfast on the porch with the sun rising to the east and ask yourself why bother to consider moving. As I sit and write these words I can hear the soughing of the breeze in the trees, the measured rise and fall of Cheyenne's snoring while the hum of the refrigerator is all the mechanical noise I can hear. Give this up to be closer to the Red Barn and Waterfront, the Tropic or the Tennessee Williams theaters? Hmmm...

But if the bank decides against us, as seems likely given their track record, the decision will be easy enough. Cheyenne would prefer to live in the city, she loves walking the streets. A five minute commute would change my life somewhat, though I would have to take road trips out of town as my previous experiment living in the city gave me Rock Fever in short order. I like road trips, I enjoy the sunrise and sunset views over the water as I commute. I should miss that and from time to time Cheyenne would miss flopping into the tannic mangrove puddles that surround our current home.

In talking over our options we have pretty much ruled out living in Old Town as it is more expensive to rent and I have no desire to live among tourists. We enjoy visiting old town but like to get away even if in the future our getaway is three miles instead of thirty. Parking issues, cramped living, crappy housing stock all contribute to the desire not to live crammed at the bottom end of a very crumpled sock. For many people the ability to walk to Lower Duval, drink beyond capacity and not have to risk jail by driving home drunk is a big plus when it comes to renting a hovel within spitting distance of Irish Kevin's. To me the prospect of tripping over drunks passed out on the sidewalks and fending off the unbalanced inebriated yet still ambulatory is only outweighed by the vomit I see in the streets and the numbers of calls we get at work of strangers passed out on people's porches. I'm not a Conch but New Town seems much more likely, with off street parking possible for my motorcycles and easy access to the highway out of town...

For those who dream of moving to Key West these considerations are the real issues facing permanent residents of "Paradise." It's also true that living at Mile Marker 27 limits the desire of your friends to come "all that way out" for a dinner party, and some city people even have a hard time driving four miles as far as Stock Island! Some days I want to go to a movie at the Tropic starting In the early afternoon. If the film ends at 3:30 and I have to be at work at six pm, what do I do for two and a half hours? Too little time to ride home, but too short a time in town to accomplish much and nowhere to nap before an all night shift. Frequently I choose to stay home with Cheyenne instead! That is a loss I do feel, living out of town.

And yet, when I talk to my friends and colleagues appalled by my immense commute I also know I'm talking to city dwellers who don't seem to see the physical beauty I get to enjoy every day. Life in Key West is urban living, frost-free certainly, but it is still life surrounded by cement and asphalt and high walls and short views. I alone see to get the privilege of daily spectacular views across the water, of nature untrammeled by human intervention. It's an effort to get to the theater for me, but it's no effort at all to be alone on the shore and see not one other human being anywhere. And that I would miss. A great deal.

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Change In Key West

This parking sign at the county courthouse will soon become history ( and the glass of beer will, I expect, be gone already). Ward lost the election last month and loses his job in a few weeks when his Democrat successor takes over the top prosecutor's job. Catherine Vogel beat Dennis W. Ward in the party primaries and went on to beat her Republican rival Mark Kohl in the general election in November.

Like so much of public life in Key West the election of the State Attorney in Key West was riddled with the sort of small town politics that belies the urbane sophisticated tourist mecca image Key West likes to project. An e-mail came to light from a Conch king maker whose subject matter, "Payback is a bitch!" was worthy of a high school playground revenge drama. It turns out Ward, elected on an anti corruption promise, managed to piss off the Conch element in town, the real people in charge to the degree that they got together and fired his sorry ass. Their replacement choice Catherine Vogel used to be second in command in the office under Mark Kohl whom she beat and who has been offered an office manager position by the incoming Vogel his former employee. So the world turns among the powerful and would-be powerful in the Southernmost City. Expect prosecutions of Conchs to fade away rapidly come January!

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Ambling The Alleys And Lanes

The light changes in winter, the sun sets lower on the horizon, more onwards the southern hemisphere where they are enjoying mid summer while we get the joys of winter up here. As close as Key West is to the equator the length of the days remains fairly even by nature, except that the time change each summer lengthens the summer days considerably, slightly distorting nature's plan.

As a result in summer it gets dark close to nine pm while here and now it gets dark just before six in the evening and with the sun lower on the horizon the light shines lower in the sky, especially in the evening. Which gives these pictures, taken before dusk a particular lighting effect. The colors are muted and the typical strong whites and lues and greens of Key West take on a pale shade of foggy light. Cheyenne was just happy to be out and about and not suffocating in summer's muggy heat.

It may not be summer's muggy heat but it's still warm enough for shirt sleeves most evenings, temperatures in the low seventies and cool dry air blowing off the ocean. Cheyenne likes it a lot and I do too. This is the time of year snowbound Northeners yearn for Key West if they are allergic to ice anywhere outside a cocktail glass.

I photographed the citrus fruit laid out on the railing above, and Cheyenne contemplating her future below, both pictures on Catholic Lane, so called because it butts up against the Catholic section of the sheer hated cemetery. It always strikes me as odd that in death some people need to be buried in their own sections of the burial ground.

Around the corner looking west on Angela Street into the sun I saw a typical Key West street scene, companionable cycling. Cycling as a way of urban life, and te riders aren't dressed for blizzard conditions either.

The dogs were out as we tried north on Margaret Street. Angela becomes Carey Lane and Molly was poking around minding her own business when Cheyenne came lumbering along.

While the dogs sniffed each other, a very animal yet civilized way to make an introduction, I peered up Carey Lane which is actually an extension of Anglea Street, renamed fro some obscure reason.

this nice lady was looking after her daughter's dog, Oliver the Terrorist who tried to scare Cheyenne who ignored him as usual and kept walking toward Carsten Lane, the street that connects Margaret to William.

Cheyenne was of a mind to follow the terrorist and his minded down Carsten but I was aiming at the car in the other direction. We tussled and eventually my dog yielded.

She got her reward at Michael's Restaurant where they weren't handing out volcanoes for dessert but they were handing out dog cookies. That was nice for Cheyenne but hell for me as I had the devil's own job separating Cheyenne from the cookie jar. It was all stop and start on this sunset walk.

My reward came at Finnegan's Wake after I poured Cheyenne onto her bed in the back seat of the car and settled down with my wife and a pint of Boddington's.

Christmas decorations had gone up on James Street I noticed. I played with my camera a bit which went all artistic on me. I liked the effect.

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Key West Film Festival

We saw two movies out of a slew of films available this past weekend. The Tropic was a relentless unspooling of film after film after film. This was just Saturdays's schedule and the Festival ran Thursday through Sunday.

That we got to see two flicks was through persistence. We intended to see one Saturday night with friends but dinner at Santiago's was so successful the wine and the tapas kept coming and pretty soon it occurred to me the movie part of the evening was not going to happen. The port and bread pudding (made with a brioche) was brilliant and entirely worth it. The place was crowded!

I had the weekend off, as I do every other weekend, and was determined not to miss the movie festival. We had been advised The Sapphires was worth seeing. It's what those ponderous voice overs call "a heart-warming tale of the triumph of the human spirit" about four aboriginal Australians who get a job singing to US troops in Vietnam. The plot is predictable, the women's singing is pitch perfect and the ugliness of racism 44 years ago is put in its place. It's easy to despise the bigots of the past even as we tolerate the bigots today who call the Negro in the White Man's House a "Muslim" or a "socialist" and pretend the color of his skin has nothing to do with the denigration of his character. But the movie is sweet and has its funny moments such that it is decidedly worth a view.

The volunteers in green greeted new arrivals with the cheery words "Here to see a movie?" which I thought was overstating the obvious but imagine my surprise as I headed to the urinal (kindly supplied by the mysterious and unknowable Roger Westerlund) and the greeting was met with the curt "No we are just here to look around," a put down so cutting uttered by a matron with a bosom the size and shape and power of a battleship's prow I felt obliged to share the joke with the volunteer. We pondered for a few minutes why else one would come to a cinema, during a film festival no less, if not to see a movie. Wild bore hunting at the Tropic had seemed an unlikely occupation before that encounter.

Let me not be accused of abandoning my dearest companion to her bed in the car, she who walked more than she needed on Sunday and before we returned to see another unlikely movie she got attention and love and water on the cool breezy afternoon at the courthouse parking lot tucked into the winter shade.

The Festival favorite directed by Dustin Hoffman (!) Quartet was sold out by the time we got our disorganized expedition to the box office after a shared sandwich from Paseo, the Seattle-based sandwich shop on Eaton Street, but I have no doubt it will make it into art theaters in general release considering the high powered names attached. Instead we went to see a dubious documentary about the end of Polaroid Film. I had not known that Polaroid had ceased production, nor had I any idea there was a cadre of Polaroid fans who treat the instant pictures as Art. They were literally driven to tears by the news that Polaroid film was running out and soon would disappear forever. If Time Zero sounds crazy, believe me it is. What's even more crazy is that the movie sucks you in. Pretty soon you too are sitting there ready to abhor the loss of film you haven't seen or used for forty years. Suddenly you too see electronic images as fake and Polaroid as the only true photographic art form left. It will be an appalling loss if a generation grows up unfamiliar with the white framed oddly colored pictures of the instant camera. The SX 70 really was the pinnacle of photograhic camera manufacture. Wait a minute! This is just a movie! It's a stupid documentary! If ever you do get the chance don't miss this crazy stupid film. It will show you a new old way of looking at the world around you.

I hope the Festival comes back next year. I learned a lot about history, the world and my view of it, at this year's festival.

 

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Homelessness As Art

I thought this photograph sums up best of all our middle class fears of ending up on an American street. We look at those we step over and prefer not to imagine that we too might end up in their situation. Social mobility works both ways in freedom loving America.

The Studios of Key West on White Street is holding an exhibit on the homeless of Key West through December 14th, with two dozen large black and white pictures of the subjects themselves, taken by one Sheelman for the creator of the exhibit Erika Biddle according to the TSKW website.

http://tskw.org/exhibitions/hidden-in-plain-view-faces-stories-of-homelessness/

The irony of the stupid "life is good" product logo on the tired old guy's shirt is allowed to speak for itself but the images in the exhibit are powerful such that they all speak for themselves. Which is just as well as most of them have no identifiers except the name of the photographer and the name of the homeless person photographed. Around the exhibition we can find words scattered, a lengthy autobiography of the "How I Got Into This Mess" variety, but there were no biographies attached to the majority of pictures.

This work of poetry seems to apply to the woman above:

But these were pictures, unadorned. There is, for those haters of the homeless who believe living on the streets is the "lifestyle of choice" of the lazy, a certain common element of exhaustion and uneasiness I see in most of the faces, photogrhed with such care and attention.

The dog got to me in this one. The cruelty of seeing children living homeless is matched for me by the cruelty of the incessant regulations and limitations placed upon dog owners by their would be helpers who seek at all costs to separate street people from a reliable and loving friend in a world that prefers to treat street people as nuisances at best. Take a dog to a shelter? Hell no!

The exhibit includes a video loop presented by the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition which does a pretty decent job of advertising their success in helping turn around some of these lives lived on the street. The video can also be found on YouTube which should come as no surprise to we, the very models of modern electronic communicators.

The exhibit also includes the odd life story, snatches of poetry as shown here and then of course the innocent who clearly express those fears I mentioned earlier, homelessness is a lifestyle open to all, and for most it is thrust upon them not by choice, especially among the young.

It's when you are forced to listen to the haters that you realize they have no clue how many street people are mental deficients, or impoverished single mothers and their children. The haters always act as though the street people who grovel around us are able bodied educated and able to work and are simply choosing a life of squalor out of sheer bloody minded perversity. "If they were made to work..." yes of course I reply, and "what about the children?" To which question the haters-of-the-homeless have no answer.

I mentioned the exhibit to a colleague and she shook her head vehemently with blank horror in her eyes. "I couldn't go," she said, "I would be too sad." Which might explain why I was alone in the exhibit when I visited. Hidden in Plain View is a good title for this public display of public indifference. The refreshing thing about the exhibit is that it seeks to place no blame nor offer any solutions to the homelessness issue.

The homeless in Key West number in the hundreds, their winter population increasing in concert with the swelling population of conventionally housed visitors in the cold snowy months. It may come as a surprise but just as those with homes Up North like the mild winters down here, so do the hobos, the transient homeless, the "gentlemen of the road." solutions to homelessness in Key West are often framed as travel problems - give the bums a bus ticket Up North, as though the is a city somewhere in the US that might welcome Key West's human detritus. After Hurricane Wilma flooded the Lower Keys worthy citizens of the southernmost city wondered why we had to allow back the evacuated bums who were not welcome in Miami. The deal was they got bused to a temporary shelter and then got bused back. Just like people with homes.

the poem above was written about a man who lived in a tiki hut, a shed without walls really, on the waterfront in Key West Bight. He lived on the margins in a boatyard serving the shrimpers who used to pack the harbor where modern pleasure boats now dock. The short version of the poem is It got developed and now they call it the Galleon.

I used to find it odd that the homeless like their routines, hanging in the same places, seeking secuortychek in sameness much as housed people do. I had that romantic notion that being free of possessions might make one free of the encumbrances of those same possessions. Instead I learned to look and see the clutter that fills the average street peron's life. Collections of crap weigh them down just as crap weighs the rest of us down in our more expansive lives. It's just that you can look into the shopping cart of a homeless woman and wonder why she burdens herself with that garbage when she could be free of encumbrance. I guess I have come to accept that we all have a deep seated need to create security through stuff in our lives.

I knew I couldn't be a cop when I was out on a ride along as part of my dispatcher training and we came one night, across an old black woman bundled up, despite the summer heat in Bayview Park. Orders were to clear the park so in the headlights of the patrol car the old woman was roused off the bench, and ordered to move along. "Where do I go?" she asked. Away from here, was the answer, the neighbors are complaining. And off she shuffled. It was like kicking your grandmother off the porch as it were and I saw no purpose to it.

Like most people who living in housing I want some idea of how to separate the "deserving" homeless who ask for help, as opposed to the panhandlers who want to take advantage of our sense of guilt and fear of falling ourselves by the wayside. I don't know exactly if I have figured out the answer but I am grateful for theses pictures which bring,e face to face with the public issue of living on the streets.

Key West does a lot for people on the streets offering fod and shelter and programs to help those who want to get back into the rat race of daily life. For myself the idea of living on the streets seems like the most boring existence imaginable, combined with total disdain from all our housed neighbors encountered every day.

I know homelessness is going to get more widespread as the economy remains in the hands of people who think saving pennies by sending work overseas makes sense and thus deprive Americans of living wages and useful benefits. It's hard to remains self sufficient when the tools of sufficiency are taken away by employers. The solutions to homelessness it seems to me lie in properly paid work and commitment to work by employees while employers make their commitment to us the workers. In the meantime I look at these extraordinary pictures hanging on the walls of the Studios and wonder at what I see.

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