Sunrise Mangroves

The early season switch to daylight saving time puts me in the mangroves in time to see the whole sunrise event. from the barely perceptible lighter skies in the east to the full golden glow of daylight.

 Rusty trots off ahead on the lonely empty stretch of road and I totter after him, stiff from a night spent sitting at my desk at work. The goal is to limber up before I go to bed, and to walk without rolling like a drunken sailor. 

 Every day, and every way I'm getting better and better. So when I pause in my exercise routine I check the sunrise through the branches and the camera allows me stitch a lace doily in the shadows.

I enjoy the challenge of seeing fresh things every day wherever we might be, as I drive us in an arc of different walks within 20 minutes of home roughly. Carrying my Lumix FZ300 forces me to look and observe and see things that otherwise I probably wouldn't notice. Plus i have a few filters to play with, giving the sun a star burst was the choice of the day:

 Besides which we are not entirely alone, and Rusty handles traffic perfectly, stepping aside when he hears a car and watching it go by from the edge of the bushes. He's getting used to silent bicycles too.

 The moon, oddly taken when not full:

 The sun around which I managed to convince the camera to put a halo, just for fun:

After I sleep the rest of the morning away I take a cup of tea to the deck where Rusty likes to hang out shifting between sun and shade and air conditioning, coming and going as he pleases through his dog door.

 Or sometimes just being weird:

New Beginnings

I have been working out at the Body Zone gym in Overseas Market for a couple of months. Indeed when I started here I was riding my rented electric scooter and crossing my right leg, the broken one, over my left knee required me using a strap to support my weaker limb. I have made progress since then as you might imagine. Which is not surprising considering my regimen of two physical therapy visits per week alternating with three periods at the gym each week combined with daily walks with Rusty. I'd better be getting stronger!

Dean Walters known around town as a musician, conductor and public relations specialist also wears the mantle of a nutrition advisor and exercise guru for the elderly. I am sixty one so I qualify, aside from my injuries, for his classes which are offered under his "Aging Boldly" program at Body Zone. We may be aging, and some are much older than I, but Dean doesn't hold back and 90 minutes in his tender care leaves this senior panting. However I keep going back not least because the crowd in the class is welcoming and funny, but also because they take their lead from Dean, a man endowed with a dry literal sense of humor that tickles my funny bone. He is  also very good at  leading us in a variety of ever changing devilish exercises. His mantra: If it hurts don't do it. I like him very much:

Dean is good for me as he understands my difficulties as he has also suffered assorted leg surgeries which left him in great difficulty for several years.  So when I showed up with a barely functioning leg and no ability to get off the floor he showed me lots of useful tricks and techniques to manage. I used to be very strong and it has taken time for me to start to feel reasonably composed once again. I walk with a slightly weird gait, and I'm not yet strong but I am on the way back and Broga at another gym will soon become part of my weekly routine once again, as soon as I am strong enough. 

Last Tuesday Dean ended the 90 minute class five minutes early (Yay! pant pant) an announced he will be leaving Key West in a few weeks, after 27 years to pursue training prospects in mainland Florida. Good manners require one to be delighted for his ambition and his prospects helping a gym to grow in Ft Myers, but inside, from a selfish point of view I was crushed. Classes at Body Zone will continue into the summer under new instructors I'm told but a large art of this class is built around Dean's exuberant and eccentric personality. He is our age, he knows our physical issues and he  makes our struggles buoyant and funny and in some strange way an intimate reflection of each of us.

I feel silly to be so cut up about Dean's good news not least because change is a constant in this town. I took the photo below in 2014  when Dean was conducting an outdoor performance of the Keys Chorale at the Community College, a memorable and enjoyable evening out. And now I am taking exercise classes from this versatile man who will be gone soon. Time marches on.

I enjoy exercising but only as a way to get stronger, not as a lifestyle nor for the pure pleasure of repetitive boring body movements. My Physical Therapy (below) is a twice a week class with a woman I consider a bright spark in my life, and I look forward to spending an hour with Teresa practicing my balancing, sweating as I stretch my tendons and learning to get off the floor as efficiently as possible.  She doesn't seem like she is going anywhere but in this town you never know...

It is I suppose a good thing to be ready for everything to change on a moment's notice but it is also annoying and exhausting. Getting used to the unexpected takes a bit of...getting used to!

The good news is if you meet someone annoying or irritating you can most likely out wait them and sooner or later the change thing will work in your favor! I have started to ditch my walker and my wheelchair is a distant (bad) memory but I have to consciously remind myself how far I have come since those days last winter. Change is a very good thing sometimes.Not only am I able to walk a bit without a  cane I am also wearing shoes nowadays. My swollen feet only allowed for slippers for the longest time and I hated not being able to wear proper footwear.

I ponder these awkward thoughts about change and constant variations in the early morning as I walk Rusty, not so much on trails which are still hard for me to balance on, but along empty back roads. My walker is in the trunk just in case Im having a bad leg day but I'm trying to complete a measured mile without sitting or  stopping. So far I've done eight tenths of a mile and get back to the car each time breathless. That's how weak I still am. 

I think part of my discomfort at Dean's departure which really is an affirmation of his program, is because I am not a great exercise fiend and to work with Dean in Body Zone or the even more eccentric Sean in Broga is to feel as though I am being mentored by leaders. I am not self motivated, but they give me the drive to show up. I feel like this is a flaw I need to work out and Dean's departure has highlighted this. I need to be able to keep on keeping on no matter who is at the front of the room, no matter how weak my legs feel that day.

Coming out of the gym in the early afternoon, sweaty and tired, the electric  cart for the lesser abled at Publix looks real good to me. I put my cane in the basket and toddle off under power to do my shopping.Part of the problem of severe bone breakage is the repair time is log and it sucks the energy out of you. Never again will I be able to watch a Western where our hero takes a slug to the shoulder and he pauses to put a  bandana around it and carries on fighting for justice. I call bullshit on that scenario. Or perhaps I am just made of weaker stuff. I need a physical therapist, pain killers and  a loving wife to coddle me after breaking my body. I'd never have hacked it on the Wild Frontier. Electric shopping carts indeed!

I keep pounding the exercise routines, learning to balance on my weak right leg,wondering what comes next. More of the same I suppose whoever is running things in whichever gym I happen to be. My goal is to be walking normally and getting stronger by the end of hurricane season. So there.

There it is: anther  change in my life which to me translates into a broader annoyance at what a transient community this can be! It is neither good nor bad necessarily, it just is. And expecting life in the Keys to be stable is a lot to expect in a  community that lacks a lot of the stabilizing structures of more established communities Up North.

Housing is absurdly expensive especially compared to salaries and the whole bar scene, drinking and fishing lifestyle doesn't transmit a sense of seriousness or purpose to visitors who come ion vacation and think they might like living here. My wife noticed we were viewed as temporary visitors despite our jobs until we moved off our boat and into a house on land. That gave friends the sense we mihght be worth investing some time on, that we might be staying awhile. Indeed twenty years later here we are. watching others pack up and leave...

Three In The Morning

Standing in the parking lot in front of Half Shell Raw Bar looking toward Caroline Street.

 My lunch break in the early morning puts me downtown when no one is around.

 All I'm missing is Rusty.

 During the day this place is packed with people buying coffee.

Like this:

 Around the side of the building is their  trademark mural readily recognized everywhere.

 Less obvious was a corner of the Waterfront Brewery, painted colors contrasting with natural shades.

Night

 A few pictures from a  lunch break spent walking and thinking last night. All made easier by the completion of the cold front and  a return to normal warm humidity.

Wires Up

Hurricane Irma landed on Cudjoe Key as a Category Four hurricane. I was at the police station in Key West at the time but the next day I disinterred my Vespa 150 which I stored at work and I rode home, dodging debris and wires down for 23 miles. The wires at the end of my street off Spanish Main Boulevard were knocked down so low I couldn't ride the last block home and had to duck under them and walk the devastated block. My home was miraculously undamaged.

After a few days Spanish Main was swept clean of debris and windblown RVs from the neighboring Venture Out park and even though electrical repair crews were busy our street didn't get electricity for a couple of weeks. 

Keys Energy installed some new poles and slowly raised the wires above car level though we had to live with limited access for weeks. My neighbors worried about how emergency vehicles would enter our street with the still low hanging wires...propped up on pieces of wood to callow cars and motorcycles to pass underneath. A fire truck would never have fit.

Now the entire street is getting new poles and wires in a massive renovation of Spanish Main's electrical lines. The old poles, including the last of the wooden ones, are all being replaced by the latest modern composite power poles with massive crossbeams and new wires.

It is encouraging to see the transformation so hopefully, like the main wires on Highway One our subdivision off this side street stands a better chance in high winds and hurricanes.

We can have high hopes the next hurricane season will find us even better equipped to survive the worst.  I've seen what's happened in Mozambique, in Australia and even here at home in the Mid West and there can be no doubt sooner or later another hurricane will hit.

 I would be quite happy if these poles and wires weren't put to the ultimate test for a decade or more...

But I'm glad Keys Energy is thinking ahead and getting ready for what will come. Being without power sucks, almost as much as being out of water and we can only hope our pipes will do better this time than they did in Irma. But that shortage was another ghastly story.

1492 And The Ocean Blue

It was almost by accident we noticed the Nao Santa Maria was docked in Key West for a few days while touring North America. Fundacion Nao Victoria is apparently the Spanish not-for-profit that built the ship to celebrate the 525th anniversary of the crossing of the Atlantic by Christopher Columbus.

 The ship has a website in rather quaint Spanglish, a translation from Spanish by a non-native English speaking committee but the point is they built this fiberglass replica to the original lines and creating the proper look with wood planking. In this way the interior such as it is remains dry while from the outside the ship looks properly wooden.

The sailing rig to my untutored eye looks authentic enough though there is also a proper modern diesel engine to help along as needed and I have no doubt there is refrigeration and decent food for the enthusiastic modern young crew.

Nevertheless anyone who has an idea the early explorers of the Americas were a bunch of pantywaists will get quite the education wandering around the miniscule spaces on this 100 foot ship, the largest of the three that sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

Even in my noted legless state I was able to get around on the sturdy well built steps between decks quite easily though a couple of months ago there would have been no hope I think.

I heard a couple pondering the sole cabin on the ship, the place where the Admiral of the Ocean Sea would have lived during his mutinous crossing to the Bahamas and they thought it looked quite pleasant. I did not bother to point out that the ship regularly rolled 45 degrees in the open ocean and the planking leaked like a sieve and food was rotten meat and bricks of hard biscuit and the water in the barrels stank.

If you read about the intrepid sailors who huddled in the forepeak or slept on the open decks the only reason they were there was to make a fortune and retire somewhere deep inland with their sudden wealth. Sailing was not a bracing sport or a mind expanding form of travel: it was a way out of grinding poverty either by dying or by discovering gold -every Spaniard's dream in the 15th century.

There was a display of various tools used on board five hundred years ago, and that was just in daily living. Navigation was hit or miss especially as they didn't know where they were going. Contrary to popular belief, and in the face of modern imbeciles who seek publicity by saying the Earth is flat, Columbus knew it was round and had a good idea he was heading toward wealth but he thought the money was in India and thought that mystical land a lot closer than in fact it is. That he bumped into the Bahamas first after a long nightmarish voyage of uncertainty did not confuse him because he knew when he set off there was something on the other side of the ocean. And he knew he wasn't going to fall off the edge. So he called them Indians and called his voyage  good and went home.

This was their traveling space and the replica gives you a good idea how really small and insignificant their ships were.

As much as Columbus was a cruel and incompetent administrator his drive for fame and wealth put him squarely in the cross hairs of history and he did what no other southern European had dared to do. That the Vikings had done it all quietly and competently five hundred years earlier on mainland North America doesn't detract in my eyes from his fearless navigation.

We have modern efficient sailing tools at our disposal today and almost all of us do nothing with them except sail around in very small circles while drinking alcohol and waiting for the sun to set.

 This sort of sailing ship makes you think which is not always a good thing.

One can't help wondering if we will be viewed as intrepid in another five hundred years because we did so much with so little but I find it hard to imagine that might be the case.

Wood rope and canvas was all they had, some really pathetic navigational tools and no maps whatsoever, at least none that made any sense. When I took off sailing I was absolutely dependant on my navigational tools and I pored over my charts all the time as though trying to commit them to memory. 

Just yesterday I was reading about a four engined cruise ship that drifted into danger off the Norwegian coast when all four engines packed up at once. A massive rescue operation got underway of course but  a strong storm put the ship in danger of finding itself pushed onshore. In our modern world storms don't stop tourism, as schedules must be maintained in the face of common sense. I suppose you could argue the elderly passengers showed the sort of toughness that might have come in useful on the Santa Maria!

I climbed to the highest deck at the back of the ship and even though we were tied up there was a distinct and decidedly unpleasant rolling sensation that made me slightly queasy. These were ships with rounded hulls and shallow keels and they rolled horribly at sea.  I can't imagine the 24 days it took this boat to cross the Atlantic.

 The nature of the wind patterns across the Atlantic made journeys to and from the Americas quite feasible even though the ships could only sail down wind with any kind of efficiency. The Portuguese had been exploring the Atlantic for a long time with colonies set up in Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores among other islands and they understood the cyclical nature of the wind patterns.

 Even today the pattern is used by recreational sailors, crossing to Europe across the North in the spring before hurricane season while crossing to the Americas with a lower arc following the trade winds back west closer to the Equator in early winter.

 My wife was busy with her phone while I was pondering the misery of life afloat 500 years ago.

In the photo below the post to the right with the leather loop was called a whipstaff and it was connected to the rudder below decks. Using the staff, held vertically the helmsman steered the boat. Wheels did not come into use for quite a while after the Santa Maria sailed

 I cannot imagine climbing the rigging either at the dock never mind under way and then sliding out to raise and lower the sails as needed. Falling overboard meant dying slowly and very much alone in the ocean, and most sailors couldn't even swim. Naturally the ship had no means of stopping or turning around to pick anyone up. Falling overboard meant death.

Crew quarters were limited to the space seen below called the forecastle (pronounced foc'sle) where spare sails and rope were stored and turned into temporary bedding for the off watch.

I sneaked a peak at the rudder and played with the image of the distant ship. It was a fabulous tour, but in our pansy world I had my Saturday exercise class ("Aging Boldly!") to attend  and we feeble modern office rats had to run off the ship back to our air conditioned car and abundant nourishing rations. Thank Heavens for modern life!

Of course not everyone goes mainstream in this rat race and for visitors to Mallory Square there was the usual assemblage of characters, let's be generous, passing the time of day more or less squalidly in a way that Columbus' sailors might have understood and even appreciated.

Twenty dollars well spent for an hour of wandering and thinking and being grateful.