Saturday

A few pictures from around town. Southard Street mostly, things that caught my eye as I followed Rusty.

This pile of leaves marked for me a return to normal, no more drifting leaves covering the signs of a lived in city.  I was surprised what an effect that had on me, all the unswept leaves make Key West feel like a zombie apocalypse site.

Rusty at home. He has his bed, two couches, our bed  rugs and carpets all air conditioned but sometimes a hard tile floor appeals the most to the former street dog. Being photographed just annoys him but I do it anyway.

Holding One's Breath

There is, one has to admit a sense of life on pause at the moment, certainly from where I stand. Nationally we seem to be lurching towards a new future whose parameters are not at all clear which leads any sensible person to wonder what might be best, what options could be available, whither the United States? 

Key West faces its own challenges with a tourist drive economy struggling to balance the demands of an apparently insatiable virus against the needs of a population that thrives on tourism. Florida today reported 1900 new cases of coronavirus in the state but I'm not even sure what that means. Is it thanks to new extensive testing? Is it a result of more contacts between incautious people no matter what the testing regimen? Who knows.

I look abroad and I see an extraordinary phenomenon, where people all around the world are adopting the Black Lives Matter slogan making it their own. I feel as though we are somehow failing ourselves by not having that same belief in the value of our own merits. I wonder why we insist on allowing our leaders to ship production abroad when the Made in USA label, on whatever thing for thought it might be, gathers so much credibility. Hong Kong has been protesting for months and not a peep, lots of sympathy but not a peep. The US starts a protest and the whole world joins in. We should amaze ourselves instead of tearing each other up.

I watched the defund the police movement take root and I think as a slogan it is not very smart as it plays into the hands of agitators, but as an idea I doubt it will gain any traction. If as proponents suggest police should be police and social services should be boosted to take care of the indigent and mentally ill I'm sure law enforcement everywhere will cheer them on. But to reverse half a century of dumping social problems on police who have been asked to hold the line on creeping poverty and social isolation, mental illness and juvenile tantrums will take coordinated effort and lots of money.  We've recently seen how tax increases play among the very wealthy whose hands are out for any government bailout. They don't leave much hope for the least among us.

This week I voted on a contract proposed by the teamster for city employees where we extend for a year with no raises and no change. I trust it will pass because it's not a year to expect a city facing what Key West faces to start forking out money like the fat years past. I wake up every day glad to have a job and to live where I do, but the future here as much as anywhere else is lined with uncertainty.

Next week heavy rain is forecast as the latest in a series of storms and tropical "activity" sweeps past Florida.  You know everyone is more or less vocal around here about hurricane season which we started this month. September is the peak of the season and unlike 205 and 2017 which were good years economically 2020 would be a setback year if the keys get a fat strike. The idea of going through the grinder that Hurricane Irma put us through three years ago is unbearable. I look at my photos on this page, piles of garbage, wrecked homes, torn up streets and dislocated humans and animals and as irrational as it is I would like to plead the case for a break please.

Key West as a long history of boom and bust, appalling failures, destruction and rebirth. I have no doubt this unique city will restore itself no matter what because in the end Key West has what no other place offers. You can drive to the tropics without having to go abroad is the short explanation. And that in a. country where fear of the unknown is promoted as a virtue makes Key West priceless.

We are not raising an explorer generation though there are always an eccentric few youngsters ready to take a back pack and disappear, so what we need to puzzle out is how Key West will remain fresh and vibrant for the next phase of life before rising sea levels wipe everything out... Oh yes climate change is still there lurking, delayed perhaps by an industrially inactive 2020 and interestingly the city has taken note of that.

The city commission is putting out to bid a request for development of Duval Street to make this rather dreary main drag less of a drag. I noticed one of the proposal in addition to offering ways of spiffing the street up suggested their bid would concern itself with sea level rise mitigation. That should be interesting.

Proponents of pedestrian priority on Duval are making themselves heard of course but with an election this year the three candidates for Mayor are circling the cruise ship dilemma first. A return to normal or a focus on smaller more gentrified ships? None at all is not an apparent option but the debate should be interesting as summer moves forward.

I took a couple of pictures of the exterior of Charlie Mac's on Southard Street as a memento mori but I have no doubt something new will replace it in short order and this place will slip into oblivion just as have so many other apparent institution in a town that is an expert in renewal.  

I have no idea what the national future holds and I suppose we can hope for enough steps forward to calm the national waters. I am certain though that with minor tweaks and a few changes Key West will barrel on as always, the dream city surrounded by turquoise waters and astonishing sunsets and sunrises. Thats what makes this place so fascinating.

Mangrove Walk

I had a socially distant lunch this week which was odd but very pleasant, seated at a alrge picnic table in my back yard, shaded, overlooking our bilious green canal. 

We talked about the virus of course and impacts on our lives and families and so forth. Gary noted I had been resorting to abstract photographs in the absence of human frailties to document. I suppose a pile of colorful broken tiles dumped in the wilderness to avoid a landfill fee might count as "abstract."

I am astonished by the stuff I have seen over the years dumped at trail heads and even deep down muddy trails far from paved roads. 

I know the location of a very rusty school bus, the engine here, the distinctive roof there settled into the bushes out of sight and out of mind. A car with those 1950s wings is rotting into the tree growing through its rust not a mile from US 1. There used to be a Volkswagen bus in the shrubs on Sugarloaf until someone with lots of effort and time removed the thing. Clean up is a permanent state of affairs I think.

I see construction waste too and sometimes the contents of what looks like a life, a roommate possibly who left town and abandoned belongings, who knows, and some  strange people dump the usual mattresses and appliances. 

I find it annoying as I like these wilderness spaces and don't feel that dumping garbage is good for anyone or anything especially as we have first rate collection services for trash and recycling.

As with all county services everything has to be in triplicate for the lower middle and upper Keys but there are dump stations with full recycling services in easy reach. And I don't find them expensive but I guess others disagree. Now that sewers are self contained after decades of struggle dumping trash no matter how colorful could stop you'd think.

But I am odd I know as I find beauty everywhere in these gnarly tangled woods. I don't find many other people extolling the beauty of mangroves but I find them fascinating and peaceful and all the more so for splashes of color.

To walk in the woods, even if not Walden Pond woods is to see whatever it is you are looking for, a splash of color perhaps.

But never a pile of rust or heaps of tiles no matter how colorful.

Restoring Key West

I took a few photographs wandering up and down and around following my dog who does not always walk in straight lines.  One of the last pictures I took of Duval Street before the lock down was a black and white photo under the colonnade in front of La Concha with  vendors looking for customers under threat of closure, which of course came to pass. And now the wheel has gone round and at least one is back to give a semblance of normal trade on a street that dealing with quite a few closed storefronts.

The thing about business closures in Key West is that they happen all the time. People come and people go and with them go their dreams, their jobs, their businesses. The damned virus has stomped on a greater number than usual I dare say but Key West is the island of dreams and hopes. So businesses come and go. I used to try to keep track of them but now I try not to act surprised when I see a new storefront. Because I am a police and fire dispatcher I like to have a mental picture of the addresses but sometimes I find myself losing track. Luckily we are fully computerized so as long as the power isn't out I have lots of tools to help!

There is always a spark I find in certain people, and I'm not one of them, that sees opportunities for business and Key West seems to fire them up more than usual. The thing is Key West is the kind of vacation town that makes the impossible seem possible. You might find Cancun delightful but setting up a business in a foreign country is only for the hardiest entrepreneur. Key West is Florida, the Sunshine State that welcomes every off beat and mainstream hopeful.

The funny part is once you've been here a while you can find yourself judging a new arrival's chances. If you look back over the years and I've been musing on this page almost daily since June 2007 you'll see I've noted that Key West seems to spit people out if they somehow don't manage to fit in. I can'rt exactly define the parameters but like the judge said in reference to pornography, I can't define it but I know it when I see it. 

I noted in reference to the closure of one business there were comments made  to the effect that the owner never made any effort to fit in and despite the eatery's apparent success no one expected it to stay. I never ate there and i doubt I shall look up any of his businesses in St Augustine next time I'm there. But some people take these things personally as though they had a stake in other people's business acumen or desire.

I have a line for prospective applicants for residence whether via a job or business which is to tell them to give up all ambition. If you're lucky and persistent you can make a go of it but the chances of you rising to the top is unlikely as not only are the best jobs and locations taken, any outsider exhibiting ambitious tendencies may not find the climate the most hospitable.

I knew a guy 15 years ago who applied to be a dispatcher and got in the training program. I really liked him as he was my age and had a similar sense of humor. When he interviewed for the job the boss at the time asked that interview question about where he wanted to be in ten years. "In your job!" he said brightly as he had life experience and had played the game in other business environments. I winced when he told me. Wrong I said, Should have told 'em you want to enjoy being a good dispatcher. Ambition is not a good thing. He looked shocked but in the end dispatching wasn't his thing and he left.

I have no idea how to run a business, nor yet how to run one without ambition, and even less how to run a business in this coronavirus mess but I have no doubt clever hopeful ambitious people will step and give it a try in the wake of the closures. My other piece of advice, worth what it costs to hear, is if you choose to live in Key West be tolerant. Don't thunder around trying to change what you don't like. It irritates your neighbors and things are the way are for reasons that may not immediately be apparent.Key West: the town of unintended unexpected consequences.  

Mallory Square

There were three or four large motorboats anchored off Key West and for some reason they like to disguise themselves as Christmas ornaments while they do it. It may not be immediately apparent  but  Rusty was not the least bit interested in the illuminations offshore and he is the arbiter of all things interesting.   

The barricades are gone, Mallory Square is wide open but this beautiful pre dawn morning was open as though for private viewing. No one was around. So we took advantage.

It occurs to me how far on the edge of reality I do live, down here. The rest of the country is caught up in the Black Lives Matter protests and  Key West had its own peaceful homage to the movement with a gentle amble through downtown. Despite all the rumor mongering online the protest in Key West was a civilized march led by law enforcement properly masked and in support of human rights and decency.  As it should be.

Key West is a complicated mix of social groups, more than black and white and to try to explain it is not easy as these subjects have so many points of view. I hated Venn diagrams when I was a child in math class but Key West is, in effect a Venn diagram of races, cultures and interests. People who have lived here a long time like to call themselves "freshwater Conchs" in a pale and unnatural imitation of people who were born here and have roots here. Conchs argue that being born in Key West makes you one but I, in my iconoclastic way prefer to think that graduating. Key West High School makes you a Conch. Thats where the connections come from and connections are what constitute life in Key West. 

Bahama Village has come under attack in Key West not from intolerance or violence but from the usual bugaboo in modern Key West: money. Gentrification is an avalanche that is overrunning many aspects of life in town and to live close by the heart of Old town is to invite people with money to turn your neighborhood into a winter playground. It's happening in Bahama Village but slowly. Goombay points toward the Bahamian roots of families black and white in the Keys. Loyalists and their slaves fled the US as the revolution took hold and set up shop in the Bahamas. After things cooled down families came to Key West maintaining connections to the Bahamas as they settled here.

Then there is the Cuban community which has its own bifurcated history. Some of the Cubans in Key West have deep roots from the 19th century a time of revolt and war in Cuba which produced its own exile community. Then there is the new wave of exiles from the Castro regime in the 20th century, though most settled with relatives in Miami. The Cuban connection gives Key West a particular  home grown culture which you could describe as ethnic in the sense that it's not Anglo American. Food art and music out of Cuba has a home in Key West quite apart from the Afro-Caribbean influences and mainland US imports that are part of modern American life here. 

Key West is by no means perfect but there are lessons the mainland could learn in terms of tolerance. Unfortunately a lot of Key West's history is ignored in the rush to get publicly drunk. though if you walk Petronia Street and happen to see Dupont Lane you now know that was the first elected black Sheriff in Key West and I dare say if not the first a rarity in the reconstructed South. Annual remembrances for dead law enforcement always pay respect to a Sheriff's deputy killed breaking up a drunken brawl in 1901 Key West. Deputy Frank Adams was also as it happens African American.

CNN ran a story about an all white town that gathered to join the Black Lives Matter protests by marking them in their town, as though somehow with Americans should not be expected to step out like that. I guess I am with those who hope that this is a turning point long sought that may set the notion of equality under the law in stone for once, which would be nice.  Maybe small town America can step up and teach the big cities that tolerance is an everyday struggle for some people and big bursts of protest must be followed by long months and years of chipping away at expectations.

Key West is a frontier town on the ocean, a place where foreigners come and go and wealth has accumulated through centuries of trade with very exotic places. It's a truth about this town, the across the sea connection, that most visitors can't seem to imagine even as they take a sunset sail and play at piracy for an hour or two. The most notable feature about piracy equally often ignored is that pirate chiefs were elected and if found wanting were voted out of office just as easily. Strategic decisions were voted upon and treasure was shared among the crew. Just as there were black cowboys whitewashed by Hollywood there were black pirates living equal and democratically controlled lives long before slavery was abolished among the respectable people ashore. 

Simple prejudice is hard to sustain in a town with roots all over the place. If speaking Spanish offends you Key West has roots sunk into the Spanish and Creole languages that go back further than you do in this town. If men dressing as women annoy you, same story oddly enough. If you don't understand instinctively why Black Lives Matter just as much as your life matters Key West may be the wrong place for you. People tend to be annoying but we are all annoying equally in our own annoying ways around here. And when you live in a small space you lose the plot easily if you don't understand and live by this simple maxim of tolerance. Very expensive homes do not necessarily have offsets in Old Town and neighbors of all stripes of rank and wealth live cheek by jowl. 

There's prejudice everywhere in all of us. and we can each of us take small steps to find our way past our own prejudices. But for government or organs of power to express that prejudice is when intolerance goes off the rails. To me that's what Black Lives Matters means. By all means despise black lives en masse on your own time if you must, but when you show up in society to do a job to dispense the law to be a neighbor, then you show up without your private prejudice. And eventually that private prejudice will get chipped away, but it does seem to take a very long time.

I hear a lot of people yelling these days about freedom, as though freedom is a certificate of merit awarded to those who choose to be free. I wonder how many free people who used to come to the sunset celebration know who Stephen Mallory was? Wikipedia knows and the ironies are amazing to me:

Stephen Russell Mallory (1812 – November 9, 1873) was a Democratic senator from Florida from 1850 to the secession of his home state and the outbreak of the American Civil War. For much of that period, he was chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs. It was a time of rapid naval reform, and he insisted that the ships of the US Navy should be as capable as those of Britain and France, the foremost navies in the world at that time. He also wrote a bill and guided it through Congress to provide for compulsory retirement of officers who did not meet the standards of the profession.

Although he was not a leader in the secession movement, Mallory followed his state out of the Union. When the Confederate States of America was formed, he was named Secretary of the Navy in the administration of President Jefferson Davis. He held the position throughout the existence of the Confederacy. Because of indifference to naval matters by most others in the Confederacy, Mallory was able to shape the Confederate Navy according to the principles he had learned while serving in the US Senate. Some of his ideas, such as the incorporation of armor into warship construction, were quite successful and became standard in navies around the world. On the other hand, the navy was often handicapped by administrative ineptitude in the Navy Department. During the war, he was weakened politically by a Congressional investigation into the Navy Department for its failure in defense of New Orleans. After months of taking testimony, the investigating committee concluded that it had no evidence of wrongdoing on his part.

Mallory resigned after the Confederate government had fled from Richmond at the end of the war, and he and several of his colleagues in the cabinet were imprisoned and charged with treason. After more than a year in prison, the public mood had softened, and he was granted parole by President Andrew Johnson. He returned to Florida, where he supported his family in his final years by again practicing law. Unable to hold elective office by the terms of his parole, he continued to make his opinions known by writing letters to newspapers. His health began to deteriorate although he was not incapacitated until the very end.

We live in complicated times in a complicated place watched by the rest of the world which does envy us and were we to do more thinking and less yelling the ironies of being human may be more apparent and less threatening. I very much wonder what happens next. Whatever path the United States takes, as much as our opponents want to deny it, the rest of the world will follow. I hope we collectively make the right choices.