A Walk At Dusk

Photos taken earlier for use on a Sunday when I am trying to just post pictures of the Keys I like and that you won't see anywhere else as most people have no clue these paths and trails through the mangroves even exist.

Mosquito repellent makes it possible to stroll aimlessly without leaping around like a puppet on an out of control string. the little nasties will leap up your trouser leg if you don't cover yourself properly with cancer causing chemicals especially just after it has rained. 

Nevertheless in the right circumstances, like a cool evening breeze and a few clouds in the sky it's a great moment to be out getting your exercise.

Above I used the proper outdoor white balance, then just for fun I went with ondoor lighting to produce an intense blue.

A shiny seagrape leaf at high intensity camera recording levels (ISO 3200), all shiny and new like a fresh seagrape. 

These are a few of my favorite things at  dusk..  

Waterfront Walk

Rusty can be very patient with me when I put the viewfinder to my eye but he won't pose no matter how long I take to frame the picture. I liked the shadows of the posts all lined up but I shouldn't have minded at all had he chosen the moment to look over his shoulder at me...would he hell.

Some visitors to the Keys are being really difficult about wearing masks. Our numbers are going up, locals are not too happy but we are stuck with lots of people clumping together and an outspoken few make a fuss about covering their noses and mouths.  The idea is to wear them indoors and anywhere when you are closer to strangers than six feet. All that means you should walk around with a mask in your pocket if not on your face. Some people get quite creative with their storage solutions as they social distance:

Simonton Beach is officially a city sanctioned boat launch location. Most people launch kayaks but some people get serious as these tire tracks show:

I spotted the common or garden residentially challenged resident rapidly becoming an endangered species in our expensive gentrified town. Some lucky folk make homes afloat and come to town for supplies, others find quiet spots to hole up away from the conformity of the homeless shelter and the recovery programs available in town.

If it weren't so boring living on the edge with nothing to do all day I might envy them the panoramas of their idle al fresco lives:

I like to think the seating arrangements are far enough to inhibit the vapor trails of virus on the beach:

Three pigeons into two pieces of  bagel won't go; so they had to squabble and share the bagel pieces tossed by an overhead hotel guest.

I never did get into fishing unless it was at Winn Dixie. Others prefer to go out and hunt for themselves:

And some quiet mornings they leave a powerful impression of passing wakes to mark their departure:

Enough people and boat watching, time to get Rusty back to the car.

Negative Space

I greatly enjoy bright sunlight and sharp shadows and absurdly saturated colors, especially in my pictures. People who have more time to spend arguing online than being out taking pictures talk a lot about the qualities they like in still photography and I have been discovering that I am less enamored of reproduction than I am of creating something with more color and contrast. I like the void of darkness or light that can be found in these sunny latitudes.

We are told to call it negative space, the area that has nothing in it, that creates a background or balance for whatever action there may be in the picture. I greatly enjoy silhouetting trees and branches and leaves against the sky, which can be any of a number of colors and shades.

At night black and white pictures give me a chance to find a black blank canvas to drop objects into negative space. For some reason the human mind prefers objects clumped in uneven numbers, one or three (as here) or five possibly.

Three Mallory Square palms photobombed by my dog at four in the morning.

Mangrove roots jutting into the negative space of a reflected moody sky: 

The best negative space of all: Florida in 1823, a long marshy peninsula of negative space, Seminoles living away from prying eyes, a few invaders at the southern tip and a few pioneers in the northern tier and the rest of previously Spanish Florida suspended in peaceful negative space with hardly any human habitation at all. Just those Seminoles soon to be attacked and moved and overrun.

I'd love to own this $175 print but ironically I lack the negative space in my van for such a large display of self indulgence. Oh well, something positive in the negative then.

The Yellow Brick Road

The end of the road, that's what they say about Key West. I crossed paths with some guy at a  party when once upon a time I attended such events, and he was new in town. He couldn't get over the fact that at last he had made it to the end of the road. A giant dead end. He was proud of himself. I think alcohol got the better of him and he faded  back Up North. And left behind this image in my head of me living at the end of the road, a kind of yellow brick road of dreams, at the bottom of a dead end jutting out into the ocean. He found the notion fascinating, I find it slightly unsettling. I had quiet a nice life even before I stumbled into Key West looking for work.

If you look closely at the inspection cover in the street above you will see the letters USN stamped in the metal plate. That's because this was a city filled with US Navy bases and artificers who put together  a lot of the infrastructure you see today around the city. There are still seven navy installations around here but this is not a town filled with bell bottom pants or gob hats anymore. It is a frontier town one has to suppose on a border with a country with whom our leaders are not very friendly but none of that really impacts daily life in the tourist set. Visitors are titillated by the thought of the Godless Communist Isle just 90 miles away, closer than the nearest Walmart, but it's presence has no impact on life here.

I watched the two figures stepping away from me on Whitehead Street and then I thought about making a picture and the point I wanted to illustrate was how we live in Key West, the blue uniform walking to her hospitality job, the yellow t-shirt jogging to better health for a happier vacation memory. A few of us who live in between the two types work for the government in one capacity or another. We live with regular pay and boring hours and normal shifts in a  town that celebrates vacations! That is a little off kilter.

Here's another funny little thing while we're looking around Whitehead Street. The dude on the bicycle in the picture below, is riding into Truman Annex, the former Navy base converted  to civilian housing. He is riding through the pedestrian entrance next to the gates that are never opened to vehicles. 

They are called the Presidential Gates as they are supposedly only used by Presidents who used to visit the Navy base and stayed at the Commandants house later renamed the Truman Little White House as he spent so much time there. Indeed the columns alongside the gates have Uncle Sam's monogram cast on them.

The water tanks  from the days before water was piped to Key West from Miami. Before World War Two the city survived on rain water and stored water for passing ships to resupply.  the war forced the Navy to rethink things and they built the water pipe alongside the new continuous road to make sure the Navy had enough water here to monitor the southern approaches and engage in anti submarine patrols. The water tank has fallen into disrepair as much history has in Key West.

Sometimes small dogs like to rest and watch the world go by. So we stop and do just that until small brown dogs are ready to move on. It's his time devoted to his needs so if he wants a break he gets one.

I love this weird cargo tricycles operated by a  charter boat company. I saw them years ago in Mexico and I was sorely tempted to buy one and stick it on the deck of my boat and bring it to Key West. I had no reason to own a cargo tricycle other than the lust for one so I didn't follow through but here they are...

And it turns out they haul quite a load. She pedaled by with nary a squeak from the overloaded machine. Now I know I want one with still no reason to have one. We aren't taking bicycles on the back of our camper van so a tricycle is decidedly out of the question.

The yellow brick road that ends at Margaritaville Resort as all good yellow brick roads should. It's all part of the schtick I mentioned earlier. I go to the police station when I come to Key West. When the rest of America shows up they go in search of Jimmy Buffet. I met him once in a former job and he was very nice passing the time in idle chat during a  work break (my break not his). I had no idea who he was, everybody else at work knew and made endless fun of my ignorance. That's why I know I met him. My Key West moves in different circles from him or his fans but I do see his parrots from time to time.

Miami Heat

The van in Miami. We made it 130 miles from home for a day in the big city. The van acquitted itself better than we did.

We left home at four thirty in the morning on Monday with a plan to drive to Miami to get my wife infused with her  anti arthritis drug, a disease of long standing that has left her with a compromised immune system and thus total vulnerability to the coronavirus. One more reason to travel self contained. However I did manage to forget that we had the van plugged into the house electricity and we cheerfully drove off until we heard a noise and memory returned in a  flood.

$75 by mail order from an organization I expect to get more intimate with as time goes by....etrailer.com. Should be here by Thursday...and it arrived as advertised! Silly me, every new sailor gets warned not to forget the shore power cord as apparently does every van driver and I managed it well when it was my turn! I am very good about minding out for the high roof...so far.

It was a steaming hot day with a fell-like high estimated near 105 degrees and by early afternoon it was still baking. I like summer heat in Florida mostly because it stays near 90 and even though there is high humidity that doesn't bother me near as much as these kinds of desert like summer highs. I found a shady spot near the doctor's office and after a run in the grass in this huge strange open space apparently undesirable to any Miami developer, we settled down to a few hours of reading and waiting.

We both enjoyed ice cold water from the fridge and I whipped out our Kermit chair and settled in to some quiet time while Rusty buried himself in the shade of a droopy palmetto. It was actually quite pleasant and serene in the middle of the urban madness.

The plan was to do a little light shopping and perhaps spend the night. In the event after the infusion we  hopped over to the Jamaican place next door for some patties eaten at the dinette table inside the van with the air conditioning going full blast, and then we stopped by Trader Joe's and The Container Store for some storage solutions in the van's  spaces. With those three stops as my sample I can say social distancing, limited numbers of customers at a time and total mask compliance were the order of the day. The complaints one hears in the Keys about "those people from Miami" and their bad manners and endless masks violations were not at all in evidence in the Miami we visited.

With some creative parking, at the corner of the lot in this case, one can cram a 21 foot van into a car space. Most people like to crowd the spaces closest to the entrance so choosing to park across the lot makes it much easier to find a spot without blocking anyone else.  The van has a back up camera and an extremely tight turning radius thanks to front wheel drive so that makes it easy to maneuver. It's bulk also gets attention a lot better than our diminutive Fiat 500 so people and cars tend to notice us and not take a chance. I don't even have to scowl to get compliance...

The outdoors was so hot that Rusty who gets a chance to go outside at each stop, hopped off the asphalt in the parking lot right onto the grassy medians. He is not yet much of a fan of the van which is cavernous and makes strange noises that our little Carolina Dog is not used to, though being a creature of habit he is learning to cope, but slowly. The air conditioner could barely keep up with the heat and at 120 amps of power needed to run it we had four hours of run time on our batteries at full strength. When combined with the engine air conditioning while driving the interior was quite cold but clearly these levels of heat would have needed a campsite plug in to stay cool overnight. And we had no plug thanks to distracted me...brilliant! So a back up plan we had of going to Everglades National Park was scrapped and we drove home.

It wasn't a wasted trip as we got some containers to help sort the contents of the cupboards and we found some stuff at Trader Joe's as you always do but my wife was ready to sit back while I did the driving. It wasn't a terrible drive home once I managed to pass a couple of very slow tourists going 45 in a 55. I am obviously very familiar with the bewildering variety of speed limits on the Overseas Highway and the locations of the passing zones but the Promaster's passing abilities are new to me. It does quite well though the engine roars rather  a lot to get up to passing speeds. I enjoy it at 70 or less on the freeways and on the Overseas Highway it is a pleasant way to cruise all high up. The trouble with slow drivers is they cause people to clump up and get impatient. Most people don't know how to pass on a  two lane highway and no one (except me) bothers to pull over for impatient drivers. My tactic is to try to stay away from all of them and stick within five miles of the speed limit and not have to worry about getting a ticket. It's not easy to do but I was happy I could find a quiet space even with the Promaster van and leave the tail gating slow pokes well behind. Rusty found his happy place too. 

I mentioned to my wife I was feeling a bit tired after a long hot day and she said to pull over after we got off the bridge and she would drive. I said okay a bit surprised as I hadn't wanted to push her into driving the beast but off she went. I got in the back with Rusty to avoid me back seat driving and while she learned how light and easy the beast is to drive, I got wise about my poor dog sitting in a  cave at the back where he often likes to look out of the window of the car as we travel. So I opened  a side window and got some air and opened the back curtain and he started looking out avidly. I think I figured out how to make the van desirable to my dog. He ignored me and lay there watching the world go by backwards. He didn't even have to sit up.

Not at all the trip we expected or planned for. but my wife, as she drove confidently into our driveway announced that she felt we had learned a lot on this first outing. As usual I think she was right.