Celo Vacation

Rusty and I are on vacation this week, returning to my sister-in-law's place (above) in the mountains of Western North Carolina. It will be about four days of walking the woods and taking pictures and struggling with feeble cell phone signals and occasional wifi outages...mountains have their issues.

The weather forecast calls for dry days with highs around 60 which might seem cool for the tropics but it's usually quite comfortable with some sun and no wind and a few clothes. Celo is a private community of people living off the land as much as they can  in the woods outside Asheville which is itself a fairly crunchy university town filled with shamans and healing auras and goddesses and stuff like that.

It's a great place for a change and a rest. I'm excited to be going back. I think he will be too after we complete the 16 hour drive. Luckily like everything else Rusty is very good and patient in the car.

It took Rusty a few days to get used to huge forests and fallen leaves like he had never before seen in his short life on the streets of Homestead. Once he got the hang of it he  really ran the woods as you might imagine. It will be good for both of us to get away for a few days and see mountains and walk trails and enjoy a crisp refreshing change. My wife has to work so she will keep the homestead in order while we are away.

 

Cheyenne used to like Celo too. I'm always sorry to come away but its too rugged for me to live there full time. Mount Mitchell, the highest point on the east coast overlooks my in-laws' place and it gets pretty snowy and cold and wet and foggy and damp at these elevations many months of the year.

When it's sunny it's perfect. When it's not it gets pretty harsh after a few days of struggling with real weather. It is pretty. North Carolina Highway 80:

A bit of wilderness is good for you. 

Gone a week and then back to the grindstone. Pictures here and on Instagram at michaelconchscooter
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Brother-in-law Bob:
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Sister-in-law Geeta:

With daughter-in-law and grandchild:



Anticipation:

Cemetery Sunset

I haven't walked the cemetery in a  while but was prompted to recently when  I got a call at work about tourists who found themselves locked inside after hours.  I wondered how they managed to miss the sign:

I determined to take a wander in a corner of the cemetery close to the entrance that I usually overlook. I saw a whole family lined up and its this sort of thing that makes you think.  Its not just historical this cemetery, its the place where stories of daily living in Key West get their final punctuation. The son died before his parents.

I love wandering the graves and thinking about these lives neatly encapsulated by dates, some have pictures and the Conchs especially love to add a little drawing of some activity important to the deceased:

Then I came across this gem, close to the gates yet one I had not previously noticed. "Killed by plume hunters..." helping create the Audubon Society, ironically named for the artist who killed to paint.

Here's another one and this photo shows how tough it is to get the light right for photographing tombs. The name on the right is Howard England who was the dude hired to restore a decrepit and forgotten Ft Zachary to it's proper status:

A close up of this exemplary employee's  photo:

 The light was fading, winter hours are in effect and it was only around 5:40pm.

 I wished I could have lingered but I still have to earn my living on night shift.

 I could not resist the pun:

 There are so many graves in the cemetery and many show they are still remembered:

Above ground burial is a good idea in a town built on rock with a high water table. The original cemetery was on the south shore of Key West until a hurricane tore it up and scattered corpses in an undignified way sometime in the mid 19th century. They moved the cemetery here on what was the edge oft own at the time.

 And people keep dying.  Most people in party town don't notice but in my work I take the calls when someone dies at night and before morning the funeral parlor clears the body out of sight, detectives finish their on site investigations and the paperwork is signed off so the city awakes to another day, none the wiser of another loss.

The cemetery is also a short cut across the middle of Old Town. I rather like that amalgamation of the living and the dead though some people get annoyed by transient traffic, even the respectful sort.

 The military plot commemorating the USS Maine sunk in Havana in 1898 and giving rise to the US take over of Puerto Rico from Spain and US monitored independence to Cuba. Key West had the hospital facilities for the casualties of the explosion.

 Well remembered:

"We will never forget you..." Her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren left that sentiment in Spanish, because Key West is a melting pot in a world President Trump wants to be white.

 Falling night, 911 calls. 

Sunset

 A few sunset pictures to end the week.

Photographing sunset feels like cheating  as the colors are naturally so brilliant in these skies:

Seven Mile Bridge looking west from the top of the hump:

A Tourist, A Homeless Sleeper, A Dog

Check out the sign below at a parking lot off Greene Street. People will call 911 to say their car has been stolen. I advise them to call the tow company first and see if they overstayed their welcome. It's an expensive way to teach people to read the signs as getting towed will cost you a couple of hundred dollars and several hours and heaven help you if the car isn't registered to you. Towing is big business in a tight town for parking like Key West:

I posted this photo to my Instagram account but the joke got no traction. A Tourist, a Homeless Guy and a Photographer...It reads like the opening line to a joke. It's just the reality of a town with a mild climate and excessively high cost of living and  a group of people who prefer life on the streets.

This is where I come for Italian ice cream in Old Town. And the pizza isn't bad either. He's an Italian emigre who prefers Key West to New York even though he made more money there. Do you make enough? I ask impertinently and get away with it because I am speaking Italian. He shrugs and admits he does okay. Well then I say, voting for quality of life over profit. 

 Some shop windows are weird.

More Italians in Key West I suspect. "Where Portofino meets Key West" is the slogan of Antica Sartoria a women's clothing boutique decked out in turquoise on the 400 block of Duval. A sartoria is a dressmaker's in Italian.

 Mallory Square and its chickens:

The harbor. I snapped this one on a whim and on Facebook people went nuts over the picture. As I walk Rusty while taking pictures I don't usually have much time to set up the picture and fiddle around with settings so I do the best in the time that he allows me. It is his walk.

More damage from Hurricane Irma I hadn't previously noticed:  the footbridge to the Margaritaville Resort got blown out.

 More damned chickens skulking around:

Ready for the cruise ship passengers who seek the familiar in unfamiliar surroundings:

Garrison Bight Marina

Once upon a time I used to enjoy living on a  boat. I did it a lot in California which is odd because coastal zones in that state are foggy and cold. But there again I never even thought about air conditioning on my boat in Santa Cruz. It was quite the outdoor life for the very extended summers when it doesn't rain, nor does it get too hot. A heatwave in coastal California one could say would be a temperature of 80 degrees or more. 

These days Garrison Bight Marina located more or less in the middle of Key West on the northern side has returned to its bucolic function as low income housing in the city of millionaires. Hurricane Irma surprisingly didn't do huge amounts of damage two months ago. Of course if it was your boat that got wrecked then the damage was too much but most of the marina seemed to pull through unscathed.

A couple of sailboats sank out of sight, only the tops of their masts showing. Most of the damaged boats, and they've removed 1100 so far from the length of the Keys, were anchored out.

In nautical language a bight is an indentation in the coastline suitable for anchoring. Originally Garrison Bight was an indentation on the north shore until Henry Flagler's engineers came along and dredged up dirt to enclose the north side, as you can see in the background of these pictures, and ran their railroad out to what is now the Coastguard base and what was then the ferry terminal for Havana.

Having established that the city marina is well protected from the weather we can also understand that its a bit of a hike all the way round the Navy Base on Fleming Key, through the harbor and out into open water. A sailboat under power will easily take an hour to navigate the switchback channels to get out into open sailing waters. Thus the marina finds its true role as a place to live even though slip fees will be over a thousand dollars a month for most residents. Indeed there are often waiting lists to get a berth here. 

The marina is located right off two of the busiest streets North Roosevelt and Palm Avenue and facilities are fairly basic. You park whatever vehicle you own out in the weather and salt air.

You live cheek by jowl with your neighbors and you don't actually untie the boat and go sailing or anything like that. It's just too complicated to put everything away, unhook the air conditioning, put the plants on the dock and so on and so forth. 

Dealing with human waste is an issue too, and the city offers a boat to go around and collect all that fertilizer by pumping out holding tanks. Better to make the trek to the shower block and use the ablution facilities there. And if it's fancy you want don't look too closely.

Still the facilities are here:

And the showers are for key holders only. I've seen a lot worse in some of the marinas I have stayed at. And you are 1o minutes by bicycle from Duval Street, so there is that for good or ill.

Peaceful water living after a fashion. Boaters like to compare this to waterfront homes illustrated in glossy magazines.

The smaller the boat the more it gets used for traveling around:

Palm Avenue (wherever did they get the name?):

Looking towards North Roosevelt:

On the other side of the marina past the low bridge that is Palm Avenue (unfriendly to sailboats) lies the fishing boat dock called Charterboat Row. If you want to hire a boat and captain come by:

Some Links to other essays I've written on this intrinsic part of Key West:

Garrison Bight Marina in 2008

Garrison Bight Bridge

Spencer's Boatyard