New Town 2009

From the archives this view of New Town on an early walk with the new-to-me Cheyenne:

Fogarty At First

First Street with George Allen public housing across the street. Key West has quite a bit of public housing in this rather bland 1960s style scattered around town. It rather horrifies me in summer when I see open windows and no air conditioning. And across First Street lies Fogarty, heading east.
This street got badly flooded by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, and the high waters were a reminder why people originally kept Key West in what is now Old Town, the drier portion of the city closer to the original waterfront. This house looks like it has been closed for a while:

One saw in New Orleans the outer suburbs going underwater that same year as the levees broke, but their version of Old Town, the French Quarter and most of Faubourg Marigny stayed high and dry. There was often more sense in the habits of previous generations that we like to give them credit for. Which is an ungrammatical way of saying our ancestors were smart from bitter experience. For whatever reason people on this block of Fogarty seem to overflowing with stuff:
Though some people like to keep doors of some sort on their stuff in the car port:While others find the room to park a trailer off the street (on-street trailer parking is illegal in Key West) effectively creating a useful storage space:Hurricane shutters this time of year usually indicate snow birds though I thought several homes with them up appeared to be lived in. It seems rather dark and depressing to me, especially as metal shutters tend to bang and rattle in the slightest breeze, giving one the feeling one lives in an empty coffee can. i take mine down as soon as the danger has passed.
Cheyenne, oblivious to my ruminations, found Fogarty Street quite worth her while, seen here nearing Second Street.
Adirondack chairs set our ready for the cool of winter which has been slow coming this December:Wildlife I spotted from across the street stayed put quite a long time while eying the Labrador's oblivious antics. I'm guessing this is a mourning dove, which is a long shot thanks to my innate inability to identify flora or fauna with any hope of accuracy.A trim little home which I would be tempted to label as "sky blue" in color except obviously it is nothing like the blue sky in question:

A made up mailbox. I was tempted to put the flag up to get it out of the way but I'd probably forget to put it down and then the letter carrier would assume there was mail to be picked up and so...My favorite Keys colors, green greenery, white clouds, blue sky:Not a snow flake in sight though this palm was making quite a show of itself on Second Street.Houses surrounded by vegetation always appeal to me, which may be one reason I am so fond of my little tree house on Ramrod Key. This one does a nice job of camouflaging itself:The Bahama shutters leaning out from the house in the back ground are classic Keys style, as is the eminently practical bicycle in the foreground. A proper daily rider with basket for luggage.
I don't care much for the hoopla of Christmas with the shopping craziness and concomitant stress but I do enjoy the outdoor decorations integrated into the landscaping:This rooster and a few chickens were fenced into a yard like pets. I prefer Labradors myself.

I hope this was intended humorously, because that was how I took it:

And here endeth the brief tour of Fogarty between 1st and 2nd Streets. Classic Key West New Town.

Dry Tortugas Holiday

From Christmas Day 2009 this essay from our last camping trip to the Dry Tortugas, 70 miles west of Key West. Which is by way of a reminder that we should do it again I suppose. It's not cheap as the ferry is somewhere between $150 and $200 each, though the camping fee in the park is as reasonable as only a government service can be, a few dollars per tent site, first come first gets. One big obstacle to taking another camping trip arrived at our home just after this trip...dogs are not allowed on the ferry (though they are allowed on the island outside the fort, so bring your own boat).

Tortugas People

I saved these pictures from our Thanksgiving trip to Fort Jefferson. They had no place in other essays I wrote and today does not seem to be the day for much heavy commentary. Besides everybody is cloyingly sentimental about the holiday thing, so here is an antidote with not one picture that is Christmas related, I promise.

I like to think few enough people will even be reading blogs when they should be with their families, such that my pink crocs (my only footwear in the National Park) might pass unnoticed.This phallic object (below) is called a Parrot Rifle, after it's inventor I think. The rifling referred to makes the shell spin about it's axis as it flies through the air, a common refinement in modern weapons, but it spelled the end, paradoxically for brick walls just like those of Fort Jefferson.
It was cold in November, much more so than December which has more closely resembled summer. We huddled by the fire grate and wore long clothing.Of course summer reasserts itself eventually in the Keys.Sun, blue skies, and brick walls.The life of a Park Ranger is, I think, somewhat less glamorous than one might at first imagine.A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a nice private beach. Except of course for the irritating photographer on top of the fort's walls.
I think this pensive figure was Sarah from Fort Lauderdale who bumped into our party for Thanksgiving. At the time I failed to recognize her, I just liked the picture.
I guess I was quite busy sneaking pictures of stick figures all round the fort.
This lot reminded me of nothing so much as those field trips we used to make as school children. They were actually day trippers off the ferries starting their organized tour of the fort:
This Key West woman was camping with her family and as they got ready to leave her child took a ride in the hand cart, waving goodbye to all that:

Later her kids were throwing themselves off the picnic tables and making their own fun, which is a skill more youngsters need to develop:On the beach I spotted parties of Japanese (Asian really) tourists doing inexplicably odd things. I had never previously seen women in ankle length dresses wearing snorkel gear and then posing for a photographer. Maybe they are gag holiday pictures to satisfy some Japanese (Asian?) fad?

Here was one more conventionally dressed for the beach but the pose looks bizarre, like something out of a Hollywood poster from the 30's. Talk about culture incomprehension; the American pose is barely visible at the bottom of the picture.
Here is a Park Ranger on top of the fort doing something, I know not what, more glamorous than taking out the trash:Jan was drinking coffee from his happy mug, a container covered with smiling flower faces. He posed to try and keep up. Any stray Japanese/Asian tourist watching us might have been culturally confused as we collapsed laughing after the pose was struck.This was Jan as he looks normally. We watched him cross the campground as we snarfed pancakes and wondered if he looked more like a cat burglar after an unsuccessful night, or a mobster returning from a hit.People checking the view. Lots of water out there, with whitecaps on a windy day. People from England call them, rather more picturesquely, "white horses" when the water gets all frothy:
In this next picture Carol was walking back to camp after doing her usual watching the sunrise from the top of the fort. Behind her you can see what I call "buffaloes" on the horizon. When the buffalo are running is when you stay put in your anchorage and wait for calmer weather to go sailing.
A quick look back at the beach on a cool windy day when towels become the equivalent of fluffy warm sweaters. What they were looking at so intently, I have no idea, unless it was a dried up old seashell. Tourists love those.Weather still cool:

Still cool and breezy unless you are a butch male of the species:More Park Ranger work. They nattered for a while poring over their all important list. Then they looked off into the middle distance, thoughtfully. Possibly world peace hung in the balance and I had no idea. I was just camping.This lot stood around on the swimming beach. I wondered what there is to be puzzled about when in your swimsuit on a beach designated for swimming. The woman with fins has the right idea, if you like swimming in rough waters.
Awww! I like dog pictures. Other people, inexplicably, like pictures of small noisy infants.

This next one just makes a child free man like me wish he had procreated and produced noisy, squalling, needy, versions of himself. That's me being sarcastic (not ironic please note, lest you get the two confused).And we close with Kathy glad to have made it back to Key West without puking.
It was a surprisingly smooth ride home from Fort Jefferson. 45 minutes after this picture was taken I was back at work barking orders at police officers over the radio. Camping in the rain sucks, but the memories of the sunny days, the majority of our days, are priceless.

The Imitation Game

Many years ago I interviewed a woman when I worked at a radio station and she had done some memorable thing, so memorable I can't remember what it was precisely, but she had come out and was talking about being a Lesbian long before it was possible for gays to get married in Florida (imagine that!). Indeed I think she was living with a "roomate" in the years after World War Two, so long ago Frank Sinatra was just becoming noticed. I remember asking her what it was like to have to live a life in secret, me becoming an adult in a progressive California university town, she denied her love in a country terrified of people just like her. Was it a source of intimacy I asked, being required to live in secrecy, a privately shared private life. She looked at me, and then through me, and she seemed to be remembering a place and a time a thousand yards behind my shoulder. Her simple reply to my convoluted and hopeful question: "No."

The Imitation Game is playing at the Tropic and while it may not be entirely accurate in its facts, as though any fictional movie could ever be, it opens a window on a world that seems at long last to be behind us. Alan Turing shown below in a file photo was the Englishman credited with creating binary computing before World War Two. His mathematical genius created the groundwork for everything we think of as computer technology today. His claim to fame and the story of the movie is how he broke an unbreakable code in World War Two by creating a binary computer capable of outsmarting the unbreakable German code called Enigma.

He committed suicide at 41 years of age after being found guilty of "gross indecency" which was the same charge half a century earlier that had brought down Oscar Wilde. It was illegal in those unhappy times for two men to have sex together and Turing faced two years in prison or chemical castration for his appalling crime. Good old days indeed! So it was that the brilliant mathematician took his own life and left unanswered the tantalizing question of what he might have achieved in the second half of his life cut short. There is the school of thought that most geniuses do their best work when young; in this case we can only hope so.

The movie is worth a view, its a story well told and nicely paced even though one goes in knowing the outcome. I came away from the theater into a cool breezy Key West evening and I was thinking more about homosexuality than code breaking. Tuesday saw the first gay marriages celebrated in Florida starting in Key West and the whole crazy civil rights debate seems to be settled, even if the homophobe dinosaurs are still thrashing their tails in an effort to prove they still have life. According to the newspapers 70% of the US population can now enjoy the benefits of gay marriage and presumably the holdouts will have to fold and accept that they have lost. Even Arizona celebrates Martin Luther King's birthday these days.

The movie seemed tailor made to suit the occasion, which is the passage of Florida into the gathering of States that allow everyone to marry. Turing in real life was a strange man, and speaking as one with autism the character portrayed in the film, the fictional mathematician Alan Turing certainly came across as autistic. He was brilliant and socially inept, lonely and confused and punished for the crime of "being different." His mind worked differently. There was one scene in the movie that resonated with me, even if it didn't happen in real life...The young Alan is with his friend Christopher who is reading a book on codes and ciphers. Christopher explains that the ciphers allow people to write one thing when they mean something completely different. "Like language," says the young Turing. "People always say one thing and seem to mean something completely different." Ah yes, I thought to myself as I watched. Just so.

Men and machines was the other theme of the movie which told the Enigma code breaking story in flashback. Turing recounts his life at Bletchly Park to a sympathetic detective in 1951. The detective had hoped he was busting a spy ring and ended up embarrassed to be busting a poof for gross indecency. The detective asks Turing if machines think like people. By way of answer Turing names his binary machine after his unrequited schoolboy crush who died while they were at school together. Just as I find dogs suit my stunted emotions better than people, Turing bonded with machines. Ah yes, but it's a movie and in the end the movie tells a ripping yarn, a couple of hours spent alone in the dark bring stimulated. Over stimulated possibly in my case.

Outdoors in Key West when I'd escaped the old age pensioner crowd at the Tropic life continued on Duval Street. That's a platitude isn't it? But it's true, and it's good, life did go on. Watching people march up and down checking their phones, turning on their turn signals, stepping off the sidewalk as the light turns green, all those simple little computations all thanks in the end to the mind of an extraordinary poof.

Whoever told you to work hard, do good to do well, and thus earn your neighbors' respect was, as it turns out not telling you the whole truth. Be normal even as you work as a genius, don't rock the boat of common custom even as you rock the foundations of civilization itself. Wait a minute, the head of Apple is a poof isn't he? And even Turing got a royal pardon in 2013 for his misguided act of buggery 60 years earlier (!), so I guess now it's okay to be queer, at least for some. A bit late but even today every binary act of computation carries a little piece of the genius, who was the poof, with it. Let the buggers marry and live in peace please. They might end up doing us all some good. Imagine that.

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