Anniversary Dinner

My wife had had a bee in her bonnet about a place called Roy's which is supposed to be some sort of Hawaiian fusion eatery. She's been to eat at one in Bonita Springs with a friend and I was none too sure about this idea. In my head I was imagining a Hula themed Gilligan's Island feeding us spam and sticky rice "sushi" and drinks with umbrellas in them. I was a tiny bit off the mark. And we had a reason to celebrate so she had to be obeyed.

I about died when we walked into the restaurant in Naples and the waiter wished us a Happy Anniversary. I hissed at my wife that I was about ready to kill her as she knows I hate a fuss and the idea of waiters gathering round singing Happy Anniversary and blowing out candles would kill me. She smiled an angelic smile and told me to get stuffed. Opening the menu didn't help:

But you know what? This place is actually very cool. The chef came out and handed us an amuse bouche in this case a scallop garnished with tomatoes and ginger and it was delicious, full of distinct flavors and textures. Hmm, I had to admit this was not looking tool bad at all. No Spam anywhere.

To mark twenty years of struggling to make sense of life together we bought a $90 bottle of Pinot, which oddly enough I had just been reading about in Wine Spectator that day. They really liked the Monterey Marinus and our bottle of the 2009 vintage lived up to billing, smooth peppery and perfect for the meal we pulled together.

I have never had fried calamari in a kung pao sauce but if the idea sounds odd the execution was excellent. Peanuts and squid make a great combination.  The red curry chicken samosas were also nicely done though the curry sauce was more creamy than sharp and I wouldn't have minded a little burn from it.

August in Southern Florida is low season, with families back in school and a few Europeans on vacation taking the sun. It was a quiet evening midweek at Roy's and that was fine by us. I figure this place must have lines out the door eight months of the year, but this time iof year is for locals. 

The main course normally we would share but to mark the occasion we had a steak which was an unusual choice for my wife and I wanted meanwhile to try the ossobuco, a classic Italian dish of meat on a marrow bone. This assemblage was unlike anything seen before (a theme at Roy's apparently) with tender, almost shredded beef clinging to the bone with the Brussels sprouts and potatoes underneath this volcanic creation. It was odd, different and delicious. The steak was perfect of course and naturally we had to bag half our main course for dinner at home the next day.

 We reminisced about the past two decades, marriage in a friend's garden in Santa Cruz, California which should have been a hippy affair but instead turned into a great party after a ceremony composed of Jewish components officiated by a Catholic priest. John Hester was a wild man in some ways. "Next week I'm marrying a Catholic and a pagan" he said after our ceremony. Then of course I got my itchy feet and dragged us off on sailing adventures. We actually honeymooned in the Caribbean renting a sailboat in Grenada for two weeks and cruising the Grenadines  which gave my wife a taste of the cruising life as we got rained on, had to walk miles for groceries, bought jugs of moonshine from shady grocers, and got lost after dark in a rental car (the first of many throughout our lives) on a goat trail somewhere in St Lucia. We survived that and other driving adventures later in life.

Over the chocolate souffle we remembered driving for three weeks round Eastern Europe shortly after the end of communism and getting lost on a foggy night in Poland. We bought wine by the jug in Eger in Hungary and flew home with it in a manner no longer permitted in our strait jacketed world. Then there was the time I got stopped for speeding in Croatia (I get stopped everywhere for speeding, I've lost track in how many countries) and my wife got out of the car and brought my police id with her. Why didn't you says so? the officer with the radar asked.  Because I was embarrassed I said. I rather fancied seeing what a speeding fine looked like in this alien place.

Then as we demolished the souffle further, along with the raspberry sauce decorations my wife wondered how we managed in Bosnia in another rental car, and with no map, we got lost in the Republica Serpska where the Serb rebels smiled like protoypical toothless bandits in the Yugoslav mountains and  we drove through a National park wonderland abandoned after the civil war, that we came across quite by accident in a chasm reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, on a much smaller scale. 

We have had some remarkable journeys together over the years, driving across country in a two door compact car with two giant dogs and no air conditioning.We took turns driving the Geo Metro hatchback, the driver with one dog on the passenger seat and the other sleeping in the back with the second dog, Labrador or Husky. At a gas station we swap and the driver would get out and release the passenger and the second dog from the hatchback. That got us a few odd looks from passersby all the way from Santa Cruz to Key West.

We had a great evening at Roys, attentive staff but not intrusive, great food and we left with our doggie bags and a framed photo they took of us at the table. No candles no singing and no fuss. I was happy.

Cheyenne  got her walk in this rather peculiar artificial development reminiscent in some ways of the fake plasterboard theme park hotels  found in Las Vegas Nevada.

I tried to be generous to my dog but thirty minutes in this spic and span world yielded not much of interest which would be good news to the residents. It was not exactly the rough and tumble street life of Key West filled with scraps of interest for my shameless dog.

 No, this is a land of Venetian lions, fountains, brick paths and not so much as a blade of grass out of place.

I rather liked it. No smell of stale beer either and that's not all bad.

Cheyenne On No Name Key

I  want to explore the backwoods of No Name Key but this is clearly not the right time of year as it's just too hot. That Cheyenne was willing to brave a 95 degree afternoon in the open air is testament to her determination to enjoy herself while she had me alone and compliant with her every whim. I took her to the end of No Name to explore the shady coastline. Not the Unknown No Name I desired to revisit. 

It has been so far a classic summer of oppressive heat which i rather enjoy, with respites in air conditioning and a cool dark bedroom to sleep in, punctuated by dramatic and sometimes violent thunderstorms with wind and rain and darkness in the middle of the day. The views over the waters have been flat and shiny, mirror-like all the way to the almost imperceptible horizon.

Not perhaps as breezy as she might have hoped...

Even the puddles and mud were no relief for her.

These shorelines are no great sandy enticement for most people but I like the gnarled mangrove roots, the sculptures of trees that could not survive, shiny and gray and reaching into the blue sky.

It's primal chaos.

But if I get too busy with my camera and herself gets bored she has a tendency to come and round me up.

Time for one more quick one, mangrove and dead seaweed.

There are large, ankle breaking holes everywhere, inhabited by the hardest creatures to photograph: extremely shy land crabs that wave their claws at your puny lense and with perfect timing scuttle out of sight before the shutter does it's thing. Nice hole though.

Not a long walk, no great action, alone until a car came barreling to the end of the road, pulled a u-turn, as you do in the Keys inevitably, and drove back up the road presumably looking for Key deer wandering in the heat of the day. This is where you come if you want to see Key deer, though we saw none this time.

You would think electrification has come to No Name Key. Actually not yet as far as I know are the lines buzzing with electrons as the process seems to have got held up in the courts. Certainly it hasn't been in the headlines lately. The debate goes on.

There are new Wildlife Refuge signs  reminding people not to feed the key deer, but aside from the power poles not much has changed here, at least visibly. No Name Key was the place where Cubans trained for the Bay of Pigs attack, but the other claim to fame is the pub which is actually on Big Pine Key.

I did not stop here this time but went home to a salad or something equally easy and uninteresting.

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Sombrero Beach, Marathon

Cheyenne and I lived alone for more than two weeks while my wife went to see friends in California and spent half a week in New York city with her sister. It was tiresome living life alone, frankly, doing chores, going to work, and even looking after my dog. One tends to forget how organized one must be to live alone. 

But I was never properly alone with those two brown eyes following y every movement and a large yellow tail wagging wildly when I got home at the crack of dawn...So on my day off last week Cheyenne and I took a drive across the Seven Mile Bridge, me to shop at Publix in an effort to keep the kitchen stocked with vaguely edible foods, she to check out Sombrero Beach. Her program was more interesting so I went with her.

I was last here three years ago (!) but I first came with my camera in 2008 and brilliantly messed up my Picasa account and lost some of the pictures...It hasn't changed much over the years and it is still one of the best beaches in the Keys. It's a sad fact that in a world filled with information a lot of people still come to the rocky narrow Keys expecting to see this and being disappointed:

Of course one byproduct of living alone is I am totally disorganized and I did not bring a swimsuit for some reason that escapes me, so we wandered around leashed together like a couple of overdressed idiots on a hot July day. Luckily the park behind the beach is properly shaded, grassy and comfortable. 

Cheyenne felt the need to check all of it out so we did, one flower bed, one pavilion at a time.

 The toilets are vast spacious buildings large enough to rate as McMansions almost, in Key West:

There is a children's playground, there are information boards all over the place offering inquiring minds all sorts of news about the creatures that call the Middle Keys home. 

 There is a certain amount of whimsy here too.

The beach at Bahia Honda State Park is about 45 minutes north of Key West and it is usually where people go for a day at the beach as there is actual sand there. Very nice it is too. However this place is free, dog friendly which Bahia Honda beaches are not and you can eat out, go shopping and even see a movie in town if you feel like it. All modern conveniences in Marathon, the second largest city in the Keys. 

People were in the park exercising alongside my dog and I ambling. The need to carry potable water at all times (no exceptions) might lead you to think this town is a desert but it's not and I am reliably informed water may be obtained in more than one place in the Middle Keys if a passer by is struck by thirst. I am not fond of carrying water as it is heavy and wet and tastes less than delicious when warmed uniformly in my hand.

 I got this rather impressive aerial view of this lovely beach from Marathon's expansive website.

Shopping done we went home, Cheyenne more interested in cleaning her feet than posing in some cute manner for my camera. Irritating dog.

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Reasoning With Hurricane Season

Traditionally September is the busiest month for hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, with August not far  behind, though hurricanes can arrive before the start of the season in June (very rare) and well after the end of the season November 30th (not so rare at all), This year we looked to be lucky because there is an El Nino weather inversion taking place in the Pacific and that is supposed to suck the energy out of Atlantic Hurricanes. That said we have already seen Bertha chasing it's tail around the western Atlantic. Hurricane Georges in 1998 did a bit of no good to the Lower Keys:

The hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 were really tiring. It seemed like every weekend there was a fresh storm to deal with and some wag created a bumper sticker that read "Another Weekend, Another Hurricane" which felt less like a witticism and more like an eternal truth. The worst of the lot was Hurricane Wilma which wiped out Key West a few weeks after New Orleans got devastated.

Hurricane Wilma was the last straw for a lot of people and  the stream of still functioning cars went off up the Keys to get away from endless storms. I worked through the storm and went to bed in the morning with the police station surrounded by flood waters, my car survived by inches through sheer good luck and no planning (I parked it away from trees worrying about a limb falling on it, not about waters filling it). In the event you do what you have to do to cope.

The city was in s shambolic state for weeks, torn up roads, immobilized cars parked as they landed after being drowned and shifted by flood waters, garbage hanging in fences and bushes, landscaping wrecked, plants dead, it seemed like normal life would never come back. New Town got badly flooded and there were so many temporary RVs on Fogarty Avenue some people renamed it FEMA Avenue. South Roosevelt was torn up and covered in sand:

I remember standing in the parking lot at work a couple of weeks after the storm talking with some colleagues. Suddenly one of their cars started to pour smoke from under the hood. A fireman came running for the neighboring fire station and put it out. Another car wrecked by Wilma! That happened a lot as salt water intrusion ate the wiring of cars that seemed to have survived the storm and all the flooding. 

These pictures of  Wilma's effects came from the National Weather Service  site which also has an extensive discussion of the storm. I do know that the old timers in Key West warn, as a matter of course, that storms from the west, from Mexico tend to produce flooding. So that is one thing I look for during hurricane season.

I thought this modest article  from The Weather Channel was worth a read, not so much for the statistics  but more for the idea that somehow with the rest of the country burning up, flooding, sliding or drying out we are in some manner owed a natural disaster, and it seems we also have a bunch of residents not used to dealing with hurricane season...

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"Heading in to the heart of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, it is interesting to note that it has been 8 years, 9 months and 1 week, since a hurricane has made landfall in Florida.

This is the longest stretch of consecutive years since 1851 that no hurricanes have hit the state. The longest hurricane-free streak prior to this one was between  1980 and 1984.

This is impressive, considering the coastline of Florida is 1260  miles long from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Ocean, and an an average of 8 hurricanes have formed each year since 2005.

Equally impressive is the barrage of storms that pummeled the state before the hurricane drought.

NOAA

Hurricane Wilma (2005)

Wilma made landfall just south of Naples, Florida, as a Category 3 hurricane, producing widespread wind damage in southern Florida.

Charley, Frances, Jeanne and Ivan pounded Florida in 2004, followed by Dennis, Katrina and Wilma in the historic 2005 hurricane season. Rita passed south of the Florida Keys that year, but did produce significant storm surge flooding in Key West.

Wilma capped off the hurricane onslaught when it became the last hurricane to make landfall in Florida on Oct. 24, 2005.

Living On Borrowed Time?

With such a long period of time - nearly 9 years - since Florida's last landfalling hurricane, a number of factors have developed to leave Florida vulnerable for "the next one."

The first is a changing population. As reported by USA Today, U.S. Census population data indicates that as many as 1 million people have moved to Florida since Wilma's landfall in 2005. That's potentially 1 million people who are inexperienced with the impacts of hurricanes and tropical storms and lack the experience boarding up a home, cleaning out a flooded home or battling mandatory evacuation traffic.

(MORE: Get Prepared for Hurricanes)

But even long-time residents of Florida may be susceptible to a different threat: the threat of complacency.

"Complacency is just a dumb excuse people use to say I'm not worried, I'm not going to get ready," Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told the Sun Sentinel in 2013. "The price of living in paradise is to get prepared and quit using excuses."

After nearly a decade hurricane-free, it is easy for Florida's residents to forget the importance, as well as the time and financial resources it takes, of being prepared for a hurricane making landfall. But just because a hurricane hasn't affected Florida in years doesn't mean a hurricane will never image the state again.

(WATCH: What to Pack in a Hurricane Emergency Kit)

The reality is that all Florida residents should continue to prepare for the next one, no matter if it shows up in this year or in 10 years. Florida's lucky hurricane-free streak will certainly end. It's just a matter of time."

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I hope its not going to be this year when we get our next storm, but I've lived through earthquakes, forest fires and landslides and of them all hurricanes seem the least worst on the whole. You get plenty of warning these days and they strike during the warmest time of the year so at least hypothermia is not usually a problem among all the other discomforts and stresses of storm damage. We are lucky too inasmuch as hurricanes do sometimes kill people but in the US a  little common sense will keep you alive in a country with building codes and evacuation plans. Residents of hovels and shacks in Mexico, Haiti or the Dominican Republic aren't so lucky. Cuban citizens, ground under the oppressive heel of godless communism have well planned and executed civil defense evacuations for them and their livestock. But in the end hurricanes, by their nature are stressful and fear inducing no matter where you live. Better if they keep giving the Sunshine State a miss, thank you. 

Mannillo Trail Key Deer Refuge

I was working this past weekend and i was sorry to miss the battle of the bars which I had wanted to photograph for some years. I guess 2015  might the lucky year for the that summer oddity. The other thing which I had to miss, a one off was the memorial parade for Peter Andersen,  the man who sustained the Conch Republic image single handed until cancer got him. I should have liked to have been there for that parade instead of being at work. Oh well.

 I have photographed the Mannillo Trail previously, three years ago it turns out, which was before the great uncontrolled burn that swept through this part of the Key Deer Refuge. The modest wooden infrastructure was burned down, boardwalks and platforms and handrails were gone for a while. I wanted to see how much was restored but Cheyenne wasn't having any. She stopped for a while in the heat so I got to remember Mannillo's contribution to the Refuge:

 And to explaining how to deal with people with disabilities:

Cheyenne's preference for a limited range should have convinced me to come back my myself later, but  I'm sure in winter after the cold fronts cool things down we'll walk all the way to the end and listen to the silence together. 

She is the world's most stubborn dog and I have learned that she knows what she likes. Walking the gravel trail in summer is low on her list. 

People who try to force their dogs to do what they don't like puzzle me. Dogs are smart enough to have a reason why they do what they do if only we were smart enough to listen. Besides, dogs aren't human so if you spoil them they don't necessarily turn into human-type monsters. 

I have found that if I really need Cheyenne to obey I jusdt have to put an edge in my voice and she comes running. The rest of the time, away from traffic or humans or deadlines, I figure she gets to do what she wants.   

So I get time to play with my camera. 

And everybody is happy. 

Drive up Key Deer Boulevard, north from Big Pine's sole traffic light and one you are past the Blue Hole look for a gap in the trees on the left. And there you are, the long and the short trails for  your pleasure. Wilderness in the Keys, not as good as a parade for a local notable, but not bad at all. 

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