Gratefully Cow Hunting In South Florida

I drove to Sarasota last week, 300 miles to deliver my dog to my wife who was at a teachers' conference there and who had a plan to drive to Pensacola with Cheyenne and spend Thanksgiving week in the panhandle with my dog and her friends, leaving me to cook my own meals and work plenty of overtime in Key West. Which is luckily an interesting place to discuss my favorite holiday of the year.

It started when Noel lamented he has to drive "all the way" to Marathon (50 miles) for a family get together and I happened to know he was getting white people's Thanksgiving food. His Cuban family is breaking out this year and instead of roasting a whole pig in a metal lined "coffin" they are eating turkey and "what do they call it..?" Noel's sister-in-law Belen struggled to remember the name of the critical non-Cuban ingredient...stuffing! I lamented the fact they aren't having a proper Cuban Thanksgiving with the plantains rice and beans and yucca which gives the familiar holiday a tropical twist. Shannon butted in at this point and said sternly that Thanksgiving is all about eating Pilgrim food and that means Turkey with the trimmings just like the first thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock in..where was it? Maine or Massachusetts or somewhere up there. Besides Shannon, a Florida native went on, I have a turkey fryer. Excellent said Fred a man who knows his food, but Fred is also our resident Curmudgeon truth teller, Conch and Contrarian: The first and only Pilgrim thanksgiving was fish, pine nuts squash and boiled turkey he insisted. Gross we all said in unison imagining big pieces of pink slippery turkey thigh glistening with jellied steam. All I hope is the fire department comes through this year and remembers dispatch on the day with plates of everyone's favorite thanksgiving food (the food you didn't have to cook yourself) as I will be sitting at work all day earning holiday pay while my dog plays on the beach on the Florida panhandle, 800 long miles away. I do not plan to spend the overtime money wisely, though my wife will have her say. Another reason to be thankful else I'd be in penury.

I decided that if I was going to Sarasota to have dinner with my wife I would take the back roads and enjoy seeing the fields and farms that make a total contrast to life along the Overseas Highway. It was cane burning season judging by the coils of thick gray smoke that rose above the fields on either side of Highway 27. Southernmost South Florida is all swamps and mangroves and and rivers of grass, but central South Florida is cow hunter country, all fields fences and and isolated farm houses. Lunch time saw me past the Everglades and in Moore Haven a city on the cross state waterway system, wrecked in 1935 by a hurricane that swept across the entire state, and nowadays decrepit in the wake of the 2008 financial tsunami that has destroyed so many ways to make a living. I drove through Burger King, the least likely carrier of botulism I figured in this wreck of a town, and with my chicken sandwich I sat by the Caloosahatchee River wondering how many lives we have to sacrifice to keep the one percent in caviar.

Cheyenne is not a joyful traveler but but she enjoyed a long walk in Dagny Johnson State Park in Key Largo at the start of our trip so I guess she was doing okay out of the involuntary ride, but Moore Haven didn't do much for her digestion. She walked fifty feet and gave up on the city. I'm thankful for the Kindle function on my phone which puts an actual library in my pocket.

I make a point of pointing out when I am in this part of the world that Florida has its own cowboy culture as different from the Western myth portrayed so effectively by Hollywood as the Seminole Indians are from the movie myths of the Plains Indians. Cow hunters in Florida still exist and Arcadia, a small brick town lost in the vast prairies east of Lake Ockechobee is the rodeo home of Florida ranchers.

In making this drive across the state on Highway 27 and then on smaller roads, dead straight tributaries pushing west and north like geometric divisions of this flat land, I decided I wanted to get some pictures of cows. This is cow country and they call cowboys cow hunters because their animals roam at will across these spaces so I figured I could make myself an honorary cow hunter for an afternoon. My pink Crocs were at home safe and sound and my politics were in my hip pocket out of sight so I figured I could navigate my way as an outsider in this world which so strongly resembled the rolling hils and farms where I grew up, occupied by salt of the earth god fearing conservatives. Farmers the world over!

I'm thankful I emigrated out of the world of agriculture that my sisters love so much. They would see no resemblance in this place of extreme flatness to the hills of Central Italy where they live, but I do. I pulled off the highway to let Cheyenne roam under the huge live oaks set in a park-like setting. Cheyenne probably would have preferred downtown Arcadia and it's dumpsters, but I wanted a quiet rural moment. It was warm and the air was thick with the scent of freshly cut grass, a rare and evocative smell hard to find in the pea rock and limestone world of the salty Florida Keys.

A farmer drove by on his tractor, leathery skin, thick stubble and a cap askew on the back of his head. Cheyenne's presence made me respectable, as respectable as I can get, and we exchanged glances the middle class dog walker and the dust covered son of the soil, as he John Deere'd back to the highway. He looked shy and he half smiled at my indolence and I could hear my brother-in-law laughing at the antics of visitors driving past his Italian fields then stopping to take pictures of his rural lifestyle like it was a phenomenon worth recording. This guy went home wondering how and why outsiders think trees and fields and orange groves are worth recording. But they are.

I dare say trees like these might grow in the Keys were there soil enough, but the islands are crowded enough that when trees get too big, our leaders chop them down because they pose a threat to the huddled masses who live and recreate underneath them. Here in the wilderness they are free to flourish. I am grateful they get to live somewhere in Florida, and here they grow too vast for my puny phone camera to grasp them.

I wished I had my Kermit chair to sit and read for a while in the silence, but lacking that I made my dog happy for a few minutes in the sand and grass. All dogs deserve joy, for they are the gods of frolic. I see so many fearful dog owners who act in public as they have leashed a cruise missile. Most dogs will be joyful if you let them be and if they haven't been damaged by human cruelty. I like to think Cheyenne is grateful for me, despite the numerous and endless road trips.

I was fully twenty miles from Sarasota when I finally spotted some cows being cows by the side of the road, which put me in mind of the sainted Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons. This one in particular:

Sarasota is a Florida haven of wealth and education and urbane civility, and to juxtapose New College literature courses and millionaire snowbirds with cow pastures might seem surprising but there is no sign of the beach town this far inland. This is Sarasota County in all it's rural glory:

I suppose its time to reveal something not widely known about me, and as unaccustomed as I am to blowing my own trumpet, I now have to reveal I can reproduce a rather intriguing cow moo. Generally I find cows to be curious animals, and when I was a kid I would break out of my boarding school and go for night time walks, as I was always a traveler and explorer I guess. I do remember those Somerset cows would follow me across their fields and I would get to the exit gate closely resembling a pied piper of ruminants; believe me not a happy position when they are jostling you like anxious beggars who see you as their last best meal ticket. This lot in Sarasota meadows took one look at me and buggered off for the horizon as though they'd seen the anti-Christ of the cow world.

I actually became a bit anxious lest a farmer see me across the cow plain harassing his wealth, and here unlike in Italy, I don't doubt farmers travel armed like war lords of small Third World countries. I tried my famous soothing moo and I got some quizzical looks but these cows are selfish bastards because they abandoned me, one of their own, to my unhappy fate, as exemplified by this faremer's gruesome sense of humor: "Abandon hope all cows who enter..."

Through all this nonsense Cheyenne declined to descend from the comfort of our rented automobile, all walked out and ready for her long delayed daily nap.

I hurriedly got in the car, my cow hunting mission as complete as I could make it without actually trespassing... and off we went to meet my wife at the end of her urban conference. All's well that ends well and no cows were harmed in this expedition.

I greatly admire farmers for their tenacity and love of their land, especially as tenacity is not my strong suit and love of the land is a concept I have read of but have no feeling for at all. Especially if that love is expressed by cultivation. We like to sit and watch, Cheyenne and I, as the world hustles by being tenacious and productive.

That evening back in the world of street lights, strip malls and exotic food my wife the explorer took me to eat Peruvian food. We ordered the oddest dishes we could find, dried beef stew, smokey and tart with heavily spiced rice and beans, while the second dish we shared was a heavy creamy chicken fricassee studded with olives and potato chunks. This was food from Latin America as we had never eaten. I am anxious to fly to Buenos Aires to rent a car and tour Argentina from Cape Horn to the River Plate tasting famous Argentine barbecue along the way. We pondered how to incorporate Peru and it's startling menu into this already ambitious proposed tour.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday in the calendar. It requires no particular zealotry of civic or religious pride, it is a unifying holiday by its very nature. Who among us cannot find elements in their lives for which to give thanks? You can thank your gods or good fortune, you can glorify your life skills or your family, but in the end giving thanks is completely universal. Like all such holidays this one is built on myth and legend and sketchy details (fish? turkey? roast pork?) and commonly held beliefs. I like taking one day in the year to be mindfully mindful. I enjoy Thanksgiving even if I am working.

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Reconstructing Key West's Hotels

The approach to Key West on North Roosevelt has never been anything much to write home about, but now the eastern end of The Boulevard resembles the front lines of the Bosnian civil war. Without the burned out streetcars, but it's still a horrid mess.

The bad news was that Key West has lost it's Waffle House and for some people that was a crisis of itself when the news came down that the restaurant wouldn't be relocated during construction. I don't know that there will be a Waffle House anywhere after the construction is done. I kind of doubt the Spottswood family tucks into Waffle House fare and they aren't a clan noted for their empathy for any eeriness outside their own rarefied atmosphere.

If you didn't know it these rabbit hutches used to house travelers at premium Key a West prices. There's not much left now is there? Originally the plan was to replace all these funky elderly hotels with a sparkling new convention center which was going to offer conventioneers he Key West experience with none of the drawbacks of the actual city -who wants to trip over bums and chickens or get their delicate business nostrils assailed by the smell of stale beer?

Part of the convention plan was to get the county to spend forty six million to build a new terminal complex at the airport. That went off swimmingly (except for the death of a worker in an accidental construction collapse). Now we have a brand new magnificent departure terminal where travelers get to pass insecurity indoors but we have no convention center.

This spate of construction has started apparently because the convention center plan is happily dead with a stake driven through its heart. In similar fashion a proposed shopping center on Stock Island has become low income housing because funding post crash is easier to come by from Uncle Sam and the madly churning printing passes of the Federal Reserve.

Once again I feel myself struggling not to become gentrified but the entrance to Key West is now and always has been a mess. I hope this contstruction will make the public roadway look a whole lot better one way and another with a fresh roadway, broad sidewalks, landscaping and hopefully modern attractive hotels.

It's worth noting that I saw room availability at the Courtyard Marriott this year at Fantasy Fest which shocked me in light of hand loss of 500 of these rooms already. Perhaps this island needs to ponder precisely want kind of tourism it wants to sink under. It was I thought quite revealing that the newspaper carried an article last week rpmoting a dire headline from state tourism officials. Voters in the city recently demolished a plan to study widening the ship channel to accommodate new mega sized cruise ships which are supposed to be under construction.

Supporters of the dredging study said Key West would lose cruise ship dollars if the channel isn't widened and their argument,nets fell on deaf ears. As expected the losers were sore about their loss and lo and behold the state stepped up with dire predictions for Key West's future without "modernization." I suppose the pressure will continue to build especially as a majority of city commissioners seemed to support the dredging study and were taken aback by the vehemence of opposition.

Meanwhile the construction on the Noulevard we are assured is proceeding to plan and will be complete by July. And about time I say. I went to meet state engineers revelry when they made themselves available to the public and they confirmed there will be a new traffic light at Searstown, but they say all eight lights on the Boulevard will be sync'ed so a car traveling the speed limit will meet only green lights. Ho hum, I'll believe it when I see it. They were unimeressed by my request for smart traffic lights which they insist have to be on set timers, so I figure Florida road engineers need to go to California and check their light sensors that can sense motorcycles and bicycles even...

2014 one way and another may be the year of change in Key West and I hope it will be for the better at least on the ground. I'd like to come into the city and see nice landscaping. Is that too much to hope for?

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Dog in Mangroves

Cool weather is a relative term and when I read of Richard Machida's pathetic excuse for not riding his sidecar combination around Fairbanks, Alaska I could come to only one conclusion: I am not cut out for frontier life. Richard's Page: DNR* (Did Not Ride) Excuses

Cool weather for my dog and I is a day when it may be eighty degrees but the humidity is gone, a gentle breeze blows and Cheyenne perks up. She is no fan of summer heat and she becomes positively puppy-like in the relative cool of a Florida winter. Right now she's in the Florida panhandle with my wife visiting friends for Thanksgiving, a holiday not much respected by 911 operators, and she will be reveling in a proper winter with rumored night temperatures hovering around 50 degrees.

In summer I could never get Cheyenne to even look at a mangrove trail in the back country but for some reason she took off one day on Sugarloaf Key and wanted to check out the countryside. My little heart sang as I love the open spaces and silence of the back country. Cheyenne finds her own pleasures among the mangroves.

It is lovely countryside in its own way, yet no agriculture, no rolling hills and no secluded valleys no isolated country pubs, lacking roadside hedgerows or clumps of colorful flowers...hey wait a minute here. This is all we've got?

Well there are Clyde Butcher's Florida mountains up above rolling over us in the manner of clouds.

http://www.clydebutcher.com/

This is the nitty gritty of life among the mangroves with mud, salt water and dead wood and rocks and Labradors. Because humans have visited every nook and cranny of this land you will find rotting cans, tires, whole vehicles sometimes, bottles, planks and mattresses and even rotting clothing. There is no undiscovered land in the Florida Keys.

Streets dead end into the mangroves and sometimes the red diamond signs topple over, and because they are left there they succumb to the fecund conditions of growth among the mangroves. It's hot and wet around here in short and stuff grows. Does that look like a happy dog to you?

Abandoned homes. The signs of a stagnant economy are there, but Key West is a place where the very rich come to play and homes that look expensive to you and me mean nothing if they are more than a stone's throw from Duval Street, so they collapse under the weight of tropical damp and heat and sun and neglect. There' shouting available here but ordinary people can't afford it and the one percent aren't interested. Market economic forces at work.

I read in the paper that respected economists (respected witchdoctors you might say) think we may be spending the next several decades in this stagnant economy with high unemployment, sky high among the young, no consumer confidence and no prospects for improvement. More or less where Japan has been for decades. What a prospect.

Cheyenne is a happy girl sniffing the edges of a long line of empty lots for sale. When the middle class thought they were prospering in the era of easy loans these lots represented future retirement homes and they were snapped up. Now? Take your pick at fifty grand a piece or triple that if on a canal. Good luck getting a building permit.

It's my dog that reminds me that all I need in life is a long walk, a full food bowl and a soft couch. Everything else is superfluous.

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What A Funny Old Life I Found

My latest visit to my Big Pine hair clipper was of no great note, a quiet afternoon when I expected to be in and out in a jiffy. Instead this little kid was in the chair in front of me and boy was he exacting. He wanted more here and less there and on and on and on. Even his mother got tired of his pretensions. I dread to think what kind of fashion maven he's growing into. On the other hand maybe all modern kids are like that. I hope he tipped well; I did.

I never gave much of a toss about my hair style and even now I tell the cutter to clip round the ears and make me respectable and those are the extent of my instructions. Leave the beard alone I say now after suffering some major clipping. I aspire to look like Rasputin below the chin...but I do have clippers at home to help keep the professional beard rippers at bay.

My boss says I should be going back to night shift in late February- probably- and I miss working nights but we are doing good work training on days in a special new schedule I and my boss dreamed up. Having dreamed it up she anointed me to implement our first training program on the new regime and here I am still working during daylight hours in the 911 center. Belen was waving hi! while her sister-in-law Nelly was looking pensive. Don't be fooled they are tough opinionated Cuban women and they keep me toeing the line obediently.

The advantage of working days is I get to take walks during daylight and maybe do a little light shopping on my lunch breaks. I also get to be in town in the evening after work if I can bring myself not to hurry home to my dog 27 miles away. I saw this realtor's sign and got a kick out of the weed filled landscaping combined with the sign offering the "finest real estate. " Marketing hyperbole as usual, and I'm tired of it all.

I found out what Waste Management does when they come across a recycling bin filled with trash. They put a polite note on the bin and try to educate the owner. Fat chance. I saw my friends Robert and Dolly had bought a big blue recycling bin for use in their home in the county and I decided to do the same so now we have a 45 Gallon bin and we seem to be filling it easily for weekly pick up. Our trash output is minuscule by comparison.

I love these old fashioned signs "Tag Applied For" like they are fooling anyone. If you don't have a tag it can't be on the road if it is supposed to have one and if you really have applied for a tag they will pass it over the counter to you when you pay for it.

Here's another one. I'm a non smoker but anyone who thinks a Key Lime Pie flavored cigar sounds good should be one too. Grotesque.

We saw two movies at the Key West Film festival and they were both monumental downers. In Big Sur Jack Kerouac went through a ghastly depression and all the interesting people he knew in his life were kept at arm's length making the movie a depressive monologue under the dripping redwoods and above crashing ocean waves all under foggy skies. The last time I rode Big Sur it was summer and I froze my ass off from Carpinteria to Carmel even though my Yamaha 650 Maxim was equipped with a full Vetter fairing, so my love affair with Big Sur is a mixed memory. Oh and monstrously priced hamburgers at the Nepenthe restaurant. No wonder Kerouac was depressed. We walked out before the end, else we'd have slit our wrists.

Then we went back to the Tropic Cinema to see August: Osage County a two hour epic of women screaming at each other and everyone incestuously chewing each other to pieces in a giant old suffocating farmhouse, set in Armpit Oklahoma. All I could tell my wife as we left the screening at the end was that my family wasn't as bad but they were real while those harridans on screen were at least fictional.

I really like my old age in this crazy town a mixture of culture, madness, sunlight and heat. What a brew.

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