Koreshan State Park

Show up at this state park at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning in October and find the place to yourself. It is southwest Florida so if I say it was cool and fresh at that hour you have to allow for the acclimatization of the human body immersed in sub tropical weather for far too long. So for anyone looking out the window at snow drifts, orange leaves and gray skies it was hot and muggy. But either way we had the lot to ourselves.

After years spent trying to wedge myself into the narrow confines of acceptable behavior in mythical California the land of Hollywood free thinkers, the relaxed attitude the State of Florida takes to pets is still a feature of life I marvel at. Friends in Santa Cruz recoil in horror: "Florida? Ugh, isn't that humid and buggy?" they ask imagining life in some hellish low tax, redneck organic-free swamp. Oh yes I reply, eager to reinforce their insular prejudices, but I can take my dog to the state parks whenever I want. The Koreshans found a buggy humid swamp when they came here at the end of the 19th century fresh from Chicago and full of ambition. Early photographs show a less lush, manicured environment but what one sees today on the banks of the Estero River is really quite pleasant.

And dogs are allowed on the grounds on a leash but are not allowed inside the buildings. Excellent.

Less than eighty degrees and no humidity at eight thirty in the morning. Also excellent.

The founder of Koreshanity spent decades trying to get people interested in his very particular view of the cosmos. Cyrus Reed Teed was a doctor of medicine which fact slightly boggled my mind considering an educated man of science could believe the nonsense he espoused. His name sounds like an anagram and not content he decided to take what he thought was the biblical translation of Cyrus into Koresh. And naturally named his movement for himself. David Koresh, decades later led the Branch Davidians to a fiery death in Waco, so this lot were considerably ahead of them. Koresh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The story of the Koreshan Unity is a classic American tale of a handsome charismatic leader who dreamed up a bizarre philosophy that wouldn't let go of his imagination, such that he felt the need to spread it around among the unbelievers. Being as how he was the charismatic handsome dude aforementioned he attracted women like crazy. In fact he became the object of several law suits accusing him of alienating the affection of several Chicago housewives from their angry husbands, so Koreshanity moved south to the land of the mosquito.

The thing is though that these people, mostly women, weren't just some Jim Jones nutters in the jungle. Teed laid down some pretty strict rules in keeping with his meticulous if crazy cosmology. Celibacy was the rule, women led the community and the belief was that the earth was a hollow sphere looking inward not outward because Teed couldn't imagine the extent of an eternally expanding universe. So he simply inverted the cosmos and decided the sun and moon were inside the earth. I decided it made no sense whatsoever so I gave up trying to figure it out. And I'm not smart enough to be a doctor.

The state park ranger who opened the Planetary Court, as this house was called, showed obvious affection for these people that she has studied. She wound up the phonograph which was suffering from a weak spring because she wanted to illustrate the love of art culture and literature that inspired the Koreshans. By modern standards they were by no means threatening and we would find them unexceptional today. Seven women each representing one of the seven known planets lived in this building and led the community. Because women weren't acceptable as leaders to the world outside these privileged three hundred acres, seven men represented them in public. Women didn't get the vote in the Land of the Free till 1920.

 

They were middle class intellectuals and artists and the ranger delighted in showing us the rather poor handiwork of their construction standards. The exception was the staircase, beautiful and intricately built by a shipwright the community gave refuge to for a period of time. In payment he built them a magnificent staircase. Rising damp inside the upstairs closed off the area to us so we could only admire it from below.

We got a condensed version of the Koreshan story in a film produced by the local public TV station WGCU,Video: Koreshan Unity: A Quest for Utopia | Watch Untold Stories Online | WGCU Public Media Video.

Teed's study looked better set up for a temperate climate to me. I cannot imagine hanging out here in July reading the paper and listening to a record or two. The ranger said they used cross ventilation to good effect but I am a fan of air conditioning especially in the breeze-free interior of southwest Florida.

The story goes that a first the Koreshans were welcomed into the wilderness by the few people that lived here. The railroad put Ft Myers on the map and what had been a frontier fort in the Indian Wars became a railroad stop and an outpost of civilization. But this was a world of survival not of lives lived large. The music and theater the Koreshans integrated into their daily lives brought color and recreation into frontier life and it was enjoyed by all.

The trouble started when the Koreshans got involved in politics and upset the locals with their drive to incorporate the new town of Estero, between Fort Myers and what would become Naples. Like I said this is an American story of following a dream created by the followers of a handsome and charismatic leader but these relatively wealthy cultured outsiders ended up clashing with the locals. It's a story we all know and have seen before. Hell, we see it today in Key West where people like me show up in town, and then want to change what they find, an impulse I have largely resisted, though I say so myself.

It seems that a decade after they first arrived a group of Koreshans got into a banal political debate that devolved into a punch up in town. Teed went down supposedly to break it up, perhaps to get involved supporting his own, and in the event he was knocked to the ground and ultimately got arrested.

This stupidity was the beginning of the end of the Koreshans even though they hung on for half a century more. Teed lingered and died in 1908 apparently from his injuries and with the loss of their charismatic leader the followers, some 200 of them put his corpse in a bath tub and waited for him to come back to life as Koreshanity predicted he would. No surprise, his mortal remains rotted and a week later he was planted as ordered by the authorities. His grave was washed away in a hurricane and effectively he vanished forever.

The problem with charismatic leaders is that they frequently find themselves preaching nonsense and their cult lasts only as long as belief in the nonsense can be sustained. We've seen this in our modern era when raggedy assed prophets show up announcing the imminent end of the world. The world doesn't end (though sometimes it feels like it should!) and the followers either a) kill themselves or b) bugger off back to real life, the sadder and wiser for their deviation from reality. The rest of us mock them for their gullibility and ignore whatever revelations the experience may have taught them.

The Koreshans soldiered on, a few them, continuing to believe their cosmos was turned inside out, hoping for resurrection when it was clear none was to hand. Celibacy is bound to hamper a movement, as Catholicism has discovered in the diminished numbers of priesthood applicants, but Catholicism's back up plan calls for families to be fruitful and multiply. With neither a charismatic leader nor children Koreshanity was headed toward oblivion.

In 1961 the last four handed their lands over to the state to create this lasting memorial to the commune that flourished briefly on the banks of the Estero river. The Koreshans were the first to have electricity in these parts as they adopted Thomas Edison's direct current generating method, first by steam power and then by diesel generator two decades before commercial power was made available in 1946 to southwest Florida at large. All of it has been preserved for us to see and admire.

We spent two hours on the grounds enjoying a couple of the buildings and then taking the nature trail along the river. There was so much to see we barely seemed to have scratched the surface and a return visit will be in order. The last Koreshan, a woman predictably, died in 1982. She was a refugee from the Nazis who found a home here and resented bitterly her label in her last years as the last Koreshan insisting they will live on forever.

There is a community foundation in their name run by some of their descendants hoping to exploit 75 of the acres deeded to them to build a lasting memorial to the movement and they are mentioned in the movie. Whatever their accomplishments may be this property of lovely homes and neatly manicured grounds and a serene wooded trail are the monuments worthy of the memory of these strange obsessed people.

In a world filled with uncertainty and ugliness you can see the attraction of yielding to a leader, agreeing to some ridiculous ideas and living a life of beauty and worthwhile work in a place surrounded by like minded neighbors.

And yet the search for meaning and immortality and denial of basic human nature sank these people because being human seems to require the ultimate sacrifice from all of us. We cannot it seems just live. I continue to be astonished by the fervor daily life seems to require of all of us. I wondered at the time why the invasion of Iraq was so necessary, a war that killed thousands and contributed to half the national debt we have so far accumulated. We continue to live beyond our means and who can blame us? We prefer that to the reality of a life deprived of that which we think we need, believing industrialists who promise us easier living as they take away meaningful labor. Our politicians fail every day to represent us, and a short fantastical walk through the alternate reality of the Koreshans is enough to make you think that, hell yes, I can believe the world is a hollow sphere and the sun and moon are but illuminated discs, if that's all I have to do to leave in peace and true shared prosperity. Then the dream fades and reality intrudes once more, sweat, heat and buzzing insects.

The nature trail seemed endless and the sun was high in the sky and it was actually starting to get hot. Cheyenne's tongue was getting longer so we turned back before trail's end and clumped through the campground toward the distant parking lot and our car.

The sun blazed down out of a clear blue sky and I thought about the land clearing of the first Koreshans, living in tents and using hand tools to make Utopia out of scrub land and pine trees. They were brave people, leaving behind what they knew in Chicago to come down here and carve a communal life out of the wilderness.

In the end I suppose we can conclude they got it wrong, but I'm glad they gave it a shot. We had a good day on their land, among their dreams and their hopes. Not a bad legacy in the end and I'm sure Cheyenne would agree.

No one is going to open a state park in my memory so the last laugh is on the Koreshan Unity I guess.

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A Reflection On Cruise Ships

I read this article in CounterPunch and figured this might be worth a read considering the recent vote in Key West

 

Invasion of the Cruise Ships by ALAN FARAGO

A week ago, a referendum by voters in the city of Key West, Florida, resoundingly defeated a plan that would have lead to vastly more cruise ship passengers. Voters came from different points of view; some environmental, some fed up with the ceaseless river of low-brow tourism, but a strong majority agreed the cruise ship industry has harmed the fabled island’s quality of life. What is interesting is that voters were given a chance, at all.

The cruise ship industry is a major component of global tourism and one of its fastest growing segments. In the 1960′s my parents took an expensive Lindblad cruise ship expedition to the fragile Galapagos. While cruise liners had a storied history shuttling passengers across oceans, it was early for adventure travel to a destination made attractive by difficult transit to a unique place. What would keep millions of travelers from visiting the Galapagos, I wondered.

Nothing, it turns out, but supply and demand. In the past half century, the cruise ship industry has matured into a global leviathan, politically powerful and insulated by international law, serving all classes of passengers to every exotic local on the planet with a port to handle the transfer of passengers. What happens to the places and the people, themselves, who live in cruise ports? And beyond the question of people, what happens to the cultural fabric of a place when cruise ships disgorge hundreds of thousands, or millions of people, on a place?

One industry publication wows, “More and more homeports in Asia are now capable of serving large, luxury liners — of note: the number of international liners arriving in Shanghia’s specialty port of luxury ships was 62 in 2012 and is expected to jump to 150+ is 2013.” Venice, Italy had been buckling under the weight of tourism well before the cruise ships arrived.

But what happened, since, has fundamentally altered the balance of commerce in one of the world’s unique and special places. Trinket shops, serving cruise ship customers, have pushed out local businesses on every principal route in the city. Indifferent mass market retail outlets cast an ugly shadow on street scenes. A strange separation prevails between high-end travelers who buy hotel rooms starting at $1000 per night, Americans who can no longer afford four and five star hotels because of the plummeting dollar, cruise ship passengers who pay significantly less, and local citizens who– if they are not landlords or property rich– may appear like dispirited flotsam at the industry’s ebullient high tide line.

So far, the local people are getting the worst of it in Venice as they are in Key West, Florida. The numbers of visitors simply overwhelm the local culture that was the attraction, in the first place. What survives in its place is a hybrid, manufactured experience that retains the outward appearance of the original culture but is otherwise wholly re-fitted to serve a transient mass market. The T-shirt shops, the trinket stands are all outward manifestations of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Not that the industry isn’t working in over-drive to sell its version of careful, sensitive incorporation of cultural values: Crystal Cruises is launching a new alliance with Hollywood’s Magic Castle, with magicians from the world-famous private club coming aboard to showcase and teach secret magic tricks in an uber-intimate setting.

The line also is partnering with the renowned USC School of Cinematic Arts, which brings sophisticated movie-making education onboard, enabling guests to create iMovies on their iPads.Additionally, Carnival Cruise Lines is introducing a new Hasbro, The Game show activity, which offers larger than life adaptations of popular Hasbro games such as Operation, Connect 4, Yahtzee, Monopoly and others presented in a TV game- show format popular in the 1970s. Kids love the excitement of the game show while parents feel a sense of nostalgia for the games and shows they grew up with.

An exciting new “Dancing with the Stars” experience will be featured on board Holland America ships. Six theme cruises in 2013 and early 2014 will feature “Dancing with the Stars” events including dance lessons, a chance to meet the dancers, ask questions and take photos, and a dazzling production starring celebrities and the famed dance pros. In collaboration with PLAYBILL®, the theatre’s most recognized institution for over 125 years and a name synonymous worldwide with Broadway, Regent Seven Seas Cruises is introducing a “Spotlight on Theatre” voyage that will star two-time Tony Award winner Patti LuPone, Tony nominee Norm Lewis and two-time Tony Award nominee Howard McGillin as they sing their hit songs, participate in live Q&A sessions and more.

The cultural erosion caused by cruise ships is inescapable. Cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale essentially become pass-through locations, bearing the weight of services with little benefit to the local tax base. In Venice, the costs of maintaining an island economy, under stress from rising seas and commerce depending on boat transportation for every activity, are difficult enough. But the essential character of the place — its food culture — has been infected by a kind of lassitude. For the 99 percent, Venice is coasting on appearances, including chefs and restaurant owners. It is not just Venice. What the cruise industry fetishizes — the commodification of culture — eats at the core of community.

Cruise ships cast a depressive shadow over coastal destinations, no matter how many Disney attractions are summoned for support. The industry measures its progress in breathless tens of billions of annual revenue and investment, disgorging passengers as regularly as the geyser Old Faithful. Passengers with passing knowledge of places they visit, have queued in remote airports, packed bags at TSA checkpoints, and aimed through concourses toward the ubiquitous all-you-can-eat buffet. The profit model: feed the customers like crazy, let them out for a walk in ports, buy a t-shirt, but return them to spend more on board. Letting people out for air is what cruise ships do, but for the culture they overwhelm, there is no relief. Local economies only benefit from the cruise ship industry where insiders have managed to figure out how to sluice passengers to their inventions.

The local insiders who spear-head cruise ships need turnover. They need volume, and the profit machine — limited though it may be to insiders — tends to also overwhelm due process and democracy. Allowing citizens to vote on cruise ships, as occurred in Key West last week, is the exception to the rule. The default rebuttal of the cruise ship industry and its assorted parts is that they are only providing what the market wants. Supply and demand. But if simple economics harm the very underlying attractions of place, there ought to be government.

Otherwise, every coastal community that serves cruise ships will eventually revert to the mean: providing walks, carts, and conveyance routes so people can be aired in herds before recollected to eat and spend after tax earnings, aboard. Ocean liners in the early 20th century bore the imprimatur of romance and adventure. Is this dystopian vision of the industry too harsh? Can coastal communities otherwise cope with declining economies like fishing (too much demand, too little supply because pollution and failure to manage fisheries) or end-of-the-road, small scale economies that offer few opportunities for children? What ought to determine outcomes, in the regulation of the cruise ship industry, is maintaining character of place and cultural fabric.

These are tangible, core features of coastal communities that have struggled, often for centuries, for independence. In destinations sought by cruise ships, citizens beware: the industry’s rising economic tide does not lift all ships. Then, too, wisdom on this matter is buried in the groaning expectations of the buffet line. The industry’s belt needs tightening, and only local destinations are equipped to do it. In Key West, for the time being, the voters just tightened the industry’s belt.

 

Alan Farago is president of Friends of the Everglades.

 

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Recycling Continues To Fail

Behold a Key West recycling bin.

I have no explanation why people would throw trash in recycling and leave their trash an empty:

Nowadays recycling is pretty simple in Key West where we have single stream. Clean your cardboard plastic and metal and dump it in one container. That's all it takes. Plastic bags are not recyclable, nor is food or dog shit or rags and cotton waste. How hard is that?

Impossible for a lot of people who live at water's edge on a small vulnerable island very close to nature. I'm not one to imagine that we will reverse global warming or gain Utopia by virtue of recycling, and maybe the whole program is nothing more than a feel good measure for a population that generates twenty five percent of the worlds trash (while generating one third of the world's economic activity I might add!). Nevertheless it is a mark of the lack of any kind of social commitment or discipline that recycling bins overflow with common-or-garden trash every single day across this town. Wherever they be from.

Waste Management finally got the much desired blue recycling bins and at the same time the count commission scrapped requirements for competitive bidding for the waste contract which sounds at best unethical and at worst illegal so one wonders what kind of legal eagles are advising the County. Perhaps that was why when I wrote an email to waste management enclosing he first photograph asking what happens when recycling gets polluted, my reply was a form letter of no apparent substance or decipherable meaning.

I remember decades ago when a friend told me of an article she had read about how people in New Zealand had to clean and crush cans before they threw them out and we wondered at such strict trash requirements. Since then I have taken to recycling as second nature without much of a thought about it, except when I see stuff that makes me wonder, once again, about the self interest of my fellow humans. Washington State is a marvel of disciplined trash disposal, and if the San Juan Islands can do it, why can't we?

It's not that hard to do, and if it does no discernible good as critics claim, it does no visible harm either as far as I can tell.

It's time Key West got serious about recycling, as serious as it got recently on the subject of rejecting bigger cruise ships.

 

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Lignumvitae Channel

I advocate stopping to check out the views as one drives up the Overseas Highway, so I took my own advice.

There are lots of places to stop and walk or sit so bringing a camp chair and maybe a folding table would be no bad idea.

In the photo above you can see the water main installed with the new highway in 1982. It's the pipe that supplies water from the South Florida aquifer to the islands. Most weekends this quiet spots near the water are filled with anglers, visitors from the mainland enjoying their fishing far from the big cities.

The waters are shallow and still relatively clear though the clarity has been reduced by the years of pollution washing through these islands.

These dried cement bags are widely used to support the land at the waterfront. They make an interesting pattern.

Tall boats and sailboats have to pick their channels to get from the south (ocean side in local talk) to the north side (gulf side) of the Overseas Highway.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that lots of people prefer not to stop and actually get out of their vehicles but instead slow down to an aggravatingly slow speed on the bridges to take their photographs. It is a reminder of the unusual nature of the highway that went to sea for those of us that live here, but I do wish they would stop, get out and do their photography as one should.

Tis is where the salt water brushes up against the land.

And splendid views they are, even from the road itself.

Lignum vitae - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Boulevard Construction, The Never Ending Story

There is much excitement in Key West at the prospect of major changes on North Roosevelt Boulevard, principally the plan to start two way traffic on the Boulevard on the morning of the 12th, except now it is postponed till the morning of October 16. Deadlines are not the contractor's strength. Businesses have been pleading for the change saying their sales have dropped by orders of magnitude since the Boulevard was torn up and made one way last year. I got stuck in it this morning on my way back to work from my flu shot.

The change may improve sales but there is a certain amount of trepidation that drivers will be confused and wreck, rain may flood the street enough to close one direction of travel and back ups will extend forever as cars try to cross the opposing direction of travel to go shopping. This is in the future when the change is made but locals are already feeling the effect of the planned changes.

At the moment, after months of inactivity the contractors have burst into life, paving smoothing and doing all those construction jobs day and night that if embraced from the start would have seen the entire $40 million job completed by now. And in order to accommodate the activity surrounding the plan to open essentially three lanes (one each way and a turn lane, maybe) by Wednesday, inbound traffic is reduced to one lane only.

The back up is monumental. Traffic is monitored at each intersection by blue flashing lights and a police officer so the flow is orderly but it is so slow it feels like rush hour on the mainland. Will two way traffic improve this or will it choke in both directions? About the time the Federal Government defaults on its debt we should know the answer to that....

It's like a funeral procession, eight miles an hour with lengthy pauses at traffic lights. The former speedway inbound on two lanes is long gone and the complaints in the paper about epic speeding should also disappear, likely to be replaced by epic whinging about the delays.

The construction has been necessary for a long time. The crown of the boulevard is too high and the road has been subject to inundations with rain or high tides or a combination thereof. Supposedly that's been taken care of by excruciatingly slow work on improving the storm drains. The road surface was quite torn up so now we should get a median with cut outs for turning and also a new traffic light at Searstown just to slow down the flow a little bit more. One day, after I'm dead most likely, Key West will discover intelligent traffic lights that respond swiftly to the weight of traffic approaching the light.

The prospect of the incoming flood of thousands of people for Fantasy Fest in two weeks doesn't make this mess any the more palatable. I avoid it as much as possible preferring the slower and more scenic route of South Roosevelt, along Smathers Beach. Hence the drop off is sales I suppose along this monumental scene of trench warfare. Among all the orange barrels there is one inbound lane and one brave cyclist figuring out the cycle path and pedestrian "sidewalk" through the construction. Everything else is closed to traffic.

One more year of this? Really?

PS Two way traffic was initiated on the morning of  Saturday the Eleventh and though traffic does have some bottlenecks a week later it seems to be working okay. Intense work on the construction site has slithered back to a more laid back pace so nothing will be completed quickly.

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