Dawn Patrol

How I decompress from nights of taking 911 calls.

I love these spiky cactus plants, even without the bloom. In my ideal world my home would be surrounded by them several ranks deep, which would allow wildlife to approach but would keep humans, zombies, nosy neighbors and predators well away. My idea of a welcome mat.

Rusty was running in circles nose down while I had my head up watching the sun come up. The mornings have had this wintry feel to them lately which is totally bizarre as mid-May is the time of year when heat and humidity make themselves known in the air: summer is here. This year it's not been like that all week.

We stepped out of work one morning to a brisk north wind and Nick the Conch shrugged and said welcome to the new world order where its hot in winter and cold in summer. It has been feeling frigid riding home each morning and I've been forced to wear a jacket. I know 68 degrees doesn't seem cold everywhere but in May in the Keys its an arctic blast. I expect to see melting icicles hanging from the branches of the trees as the first rays of the sun hit them at seven in the morning.

There were a bunch of birds observing our terrestrial progress. I wanted to ask how they felt about cold winter mornings this time of year but they ignored me. 

 I wondered why the woodpecker below looked so plain until I realized I was accidentally in monochrome mode and I was so fixated on his lack of color I failed to notice how puffed up and indistinct he was. Maybe he was feeling the cold too.

I surprised myself photographing this dragonfly far above me in the trees. I could see his jaws moving in the telephoto lense so he was either breakfasting on dried wood -yum- or his teeth were chattering.

It has been rather pleasant feeling cold this late in the spring. Summers around here are long enough stretching well into November so a period of fresh cool weather is quite welcome. It reminds me of Mediterranean summers when I was a child, the low sunlight the col early morning air when I used to get up before the rest of my family and I wandered out into the woods and fields looking for trouble. 

I thought I found it too, a face peering out of a dead tree trunk. The harder I looked the less like a face it appeared to be. No trouble at all actually.

The art of photographing bougainvillea still escapes me  as the blooms end up looking fuzzy and indistinct. I liked the colors though and Rusty was still dodging back and forth, nose to ground tail well up in the air very busy.

 I think he enjoyed himself.

I'm sure he did.

Which is what counts.

On The Water

A few pictures from running about on the flat waters under a blue summer sky in the Lower Keys.

Sunrise Light

The sun was coming up over Key West, through the clouds and trees.

That hour gives a peculiar slant to the light.

Though even the immensely tall traveler's palm can be kept in shadow by a taller home:

A low wall by contrast bright with sunlit color, vibrant:

A pelican keeping guard, grumpily watching me drive away home with my dog:

I snatch it's portrait as we pause at a stop sign. Good bye Key West, for the day.

Gentrification Without Friends

My wife was profoundly saddened this past week by a friend who moved away. He has a portable job and he sold his 450 square foot for a  thousand dollars a foot or more and is now merrily bidding on "proper" homes in central Florida much closer to his family. My wife understands why he left Key West after decades in town, but now she has no one to go to the movies with when I am at work of an evening.

Her first teaching boss in Key West, the woman who took her in and gave her a chance to try a new career away from the law, has retired and gone on a world tour which could take years to complete. At last report Carol was in the Maldives after staining glass in Florence, picking wild flowers in Cyprus and doing I dread to think what on a beach in India. We helped Carol empty her home before she put it up for rent and one cannot be annoyed with a  woman who devoted almost four decades to education in Key West for going walkabout now she is retired.

A fellow teacher left Key West last December to take care of her mother in New York. She texts my wife daily and they talk and my wife reports she is taking full advantage of the cultural opportunities in her new/old city. Good for her my wife says sadly, also thinking about her office assistant who we visited last summer in her new home and new marriage in Illinois. Now she has a job she likes in the schools and is settled into a life away from the tropics. Her Key West adventure is done.

I think every day about what we will do in retirement. Our plan to get a small RV and live in it and rent homes as we go as the mood takes us will pout us too on the road away from Key West and sometimes his plan gives me pangs. Perhaps by 2021 Trump will have abolished Social Security I used to think but now that seems an unlikely way for me to lose the power to decide. With pensions and Federal funds we will be able to live quite well we are told and could even afford to stay in the Keys with financial care. But is that what we want? This town of change. People coming and friends leaving...

I have never liked living anywhere quite so much as annoying irritating vexing Key West. The exasperation factor is always there ready to leap out and remind you that you will be glad to shake the sand from your feet for the last time when you leave. Except you won't. Who wants to be the quitter?

And yet there is more world to see and shrinking time in which to do it as old age creeps forward. And like those who came before and left Key West is changing and adapting to new demands of a different demographic. I lived a good life in California in the 1980s after I decided Key West was too remote.And now after two decades of residence and proper work perhaps it still is for one who needs to roam. Meanwhile those that have left aren't coming back and they are the oxygen that help my wife to breathe. And those friends are slipping  off the greasy pole that is life in contemporary Key West.

Seashell Motel

A story I judged to be somewhat incomplete caught my eye in the newspaper and I am still wondering what it means.  The bare facts as reported in the Citizen indicate the would-be developers of the elderly, inexpensive and somewhat shabby motel and hostel on South Street are having difficulty finding funding for their project.

The Soni family wants to replace the Seashell at 718 South with a  modern eco-lodge as depicted in my rather poor reproduction from the newspaper article. The construction was supposed to have begun a year ago but the developers got an extension on their project and now are asking for another. The reason is only hinted at but it seems they are having trouble raising money to create their new hostelry, which feels like a first in development-mad Key West.

The Soni family earned high  marks as contributors to the community in newspaper interviews with city commissioners. Based I suppose on their conversion of the elderly and ratty El Rancho Motel on Truman Avenue into the modern energy conserving Silver Palms. I snagged this picture of the El Rancho in 2009 as it was being torn down. It was a classic 1950s motel except it was showcased on the main drag into town.

Now it looks like this, or it did when the Silver Palms was brand new in the summer of 2010.  It has actually held up quite well with its energy and water conservation schemes. You'd think it would be a no brainer for the owners of the Seashell to pull off the same feat a second time, but not so.

Is it because the NIMBY wealthy community of Casa Marina doesn't want a  "giant" new hotel in their well-to-do area? Apparently in part  the newspaper says. No funding yet, say the developers. No permits says the Historic Architecture Review Commission, to which the city commissioners respond that owing to a technicality they get to give permission first for this particular Old Town Project. But there are murmurings on the commission, faithfully reproduced in the paper hinting that this new hotel will never happen. Why not? Therein lies the mystery.

Boating

Robert and I spent a happy afternoon playing pirates on his boat. Actually we did useful work but it felt lie a day off from reality. He came by my house with his dog and a measuring pole. My dog ran for the hills when he saw the boat at the dock behind the house so I left him to guard the homestead while we went prospecting for depth.

 The idea is a friend on his way to Key West may want to enter this canal with a  four foot keel and leave his boat for the summer. So the boy scouts of Cudjoe Key had to get busy at low tide to see what was what.

The entrance marked by white PVC pipes, known locally as "bubba sticks" mark the cut through the rock, the rest of the bay is a mixture of mud and seagrass. WE got to work measuring. LOw tide was at third of a foot above zero and we found a minimum depth between four and four and a half feet. So if the sailboat enters on a rising tide he should have six inches or a foot to spare. We found seven feet at my dock so no problem there. 

With the hard work of pirating behind us we settled down to a twenty minute ride to a well earned lunch.

Across Cudjoe Bay heading east twoard Big Pine riding a 15 knot breeze and small waves the 26-foot World Cat Robert bought used and fixed up, rides very smoothly as you'd expect.

 WE should do this more often Robert said. He's right but life gets in the way. Damn!

 The only thing better than being owned by a boat is having a friend who is.

 Salty Dog enjoyed his outing.

 In the fullness of time we reach the excessively long dock at Kiki's On MIddle Torch Key.

 It needs to be that long to find any type of deep water at all:

Salty Dog required us to sit outside amid a fog of cigarette smoke which mercifully dissipated before our food arrived.

We drank Brooklyn Brown Ale which at 5.6% alcohol was a tad bitter for me. I had a snapper sandwich and Robert had a burger. Nothing earth shattering. Salty drank water and watched from under the table.

How pleasant it was sitting outdoors in comfortable chairs overlooking the water (and our transport home). 

 The long (!) walk back to the boat.

The ride back was downwind at better than 20 miles an hour. We were silent and reflective, watching the water thinking our thoughts feeling the wind.

I got a rapturous greeting from a dog with a madly wagging tail who wasn't at all keen to go anywhere near the conveyance. Rusty is a land dog. No boats in retirement for me...

Thank you Robert.