Christmas Vacation

The idea had been to drive to St Augustine to meet my sister and brother in law and park the van in their hotel lot, sleep in it and visit the city taking care to eat outdoors and take the normal precautions against the coronavirus. I never thought much of this plan as I considered it highly risky with no certainty of Covid compliance in restaurants where we might end up sitting indoors. My in-laws are in their seventies and my wife has no immune system so I was of the mind that such a plan might end up leaving me as the sole survivor - possibly as coronavirus works in mysterious ways and my wife could easily outlive me...we live in weird times.

Happily the sisters saw sense long after the family eccentric wrote this plan off and they joined me on the sensible side of the coronavirus fence and called off contact for this holiday season. My sister in law sounded genuinely disappointed she wasn't going to see me which is an emotion that fills me with surprise. My unfortunate habit of speaking my mind and only later realizing what stupid shit I said makes me a difficult dinner table companion among polite company that doesn't know, or is not married to, my personality quirks. The van in the company of my ever patient wife and adoring dog is actually quite relaxing for a socially incompetent individual. Coronavirus justifies all sorts of behavior usually considered mildly to severely eccentric among the socially well adjusted. The virus has been great social cover for me at horrible expense to normal people.

I asked my wife, who is in constant contact with dozens of people across the country, if I was weird in that I write e-mails to a couple of friends (thank you Webb, thank you Bruce) and feel content. "A bit" she said finally which usually means "a lot." All I can say in my defense is I am harmless even if odd. I got a caller at work asking about Florida's concealed carry laws for out of state visiting hauling armories with them. I haven't a clue about these things so I did what I do and I laboriously opened Google and asked the oracle to tell the caller what to do about carrying guns in Florida. The caller babbled on about needing to drive the length of Florida and "...you never know." And here we are, unarmed and lost in the middle of the appalling home wild unpredictable violence, which has yet to materialize.

Our first night on the road we pulled off and slept behind the old Desert Inn at Yeehaw Junction, a place I stopped and ate in decades ago when I lived in Tampa and explored Central Florida on my wy to see friends on the Eats Coast. Nowadays it is a wreck, supplanted by a modern dreary fast food truck stop a quarter of a mile closer to the Turnpike Exit. My wife who in some respects is as eccentric a traveler as am I thought it was a perfect stop, free and private, marred only by passing traffic largely muffled by our well insulated van. I walked Rusty and she made dinner, Instapot beans collards and sausage related in the microwave. 

I dislike how fearful everyone seems to have to be, afraid of the dark, of each other, of rumors and of discomfort.  When people talk about my infamous motorcycle wreck, knocked down by the classic distracted driver, the focus always is on my recovery but only I see it through the lens of 48 years of hospital-free riding. I have taken with me memories of life on the road on two wheels that feed my old age and push me to not sit back in retirement but to make one last effort to get over the horizon. It should be clear by now if this results in death dismemberment or a wheelchair we are both fully aware. Rusty on the other hand may view this simply as a lucky break from a life already filled with trauma loneliness and despair so I guess he has nothing to lose already. 

I would never recommend change and travel and risk to anyone, certainly my three sisters have stayed literally down on the farm their entire lives and are among the crowd of onlookers who view me as living with at least one screw loose, but if you think there is a thing you want to do and can't do it that is an irrevocable loss, whatever that thing may be. And all too often the collective stomps our dreams into dust for some reason I can't quite fathom. Beauty is everywhere and if you have to drive with a gun under the seat to give you the courage to go find it, then I say get on with it, but keep the safety catch on. I rode a lot, but with a helmet on my head that in the end did save my life. Risk assessment is part of the analysis of a sensible risk take.

As we drove my wife and I discussed travel and we came to a conclusion that has always swirled around our heads: we are travelers. We traveled by sailboat when we were younger but as capable as we were we neither of us lived to live on the water. We sailed in the company of a man who lived to sail, and even though his wife reined him in, Bob would have been happy sailing in circles, through the eye of the worst storm he could imagine, at night, in the vicinity of a reef. He was happy pulling up the anchor, where I was happy putting it down and looking at the shore and wondering what we would discover beyond the Customs office of the new culture we had landed upon. Webb Chiles is the same way: he would be just as happy to never stop sailing as he would be to step ashore and see things or places he has already seen ( and he has seen far more than have I). He is a sailor, I am a traveler.

These aren't value judgements, not least because in my eccentricity I don't place value on choices people make. I see the beauty in staying home and the economic value of not moving around. People who stay put end up with more money and more assets than butterflies like me. Some people make money off their obsessions but I have never had much interest in being a businessman. I take photos to please me, to remind me of my past as I took not enough pictures when I was young. I also try to find beauty through the lens because in do doing I find myself looking more closely at the world around me. As my time starts to run out one of the benefits of aging is taking the time to observe more closely in the sure and certain knowledge all of it will end.

"If we weren't practicing for retirement I'm pretty sure this isn't how I'd spend my weekends," I said to my wife as we searched fruitlessly for a wild campground away from General Gun Season in the forest. Rusty knows gunfire and remembers farmers chasing him with homicidal intent in the Redlands of Homestead. He doesn't even much like cameras so I can safely say he is a dog with his own phobias. The restrictions imposed by the virus have cut us off from our preferred explorations, a wide ranging mixture of urban and woodland. We cannot stop to visit museums, we cannot get closer to a restaurant than pre-paid curbside which does work very well with a van to use as a private booth. Visiting the wilderness is no longer part of a balanced mix of destinations, it is the only one at the moment and is another reason I hope the vaccination program is swift and efficient.

That we ordered the van built for us by Custom Coach in DeLand before the virus was pure coincidence but that we have it now is a great good fortune. We are still working out the details, practicing driving on sand, figuring out how to boondock which means camp where we can and leave no trace, learning to move around a small space without treading on each other even as we watch Rusty create his own new routines for a new life.

I want more time in Key West doing what we like to do, music art culture restaurants, sunrises and sunsets and seascapes and heat and humidity and silence and mangroves. I want to travel with both eyes open to any possibility instead of counting masks, checking crowds, pondering the odds and inevitably rejecting them as not worth it. I want the last nine months of isolation and deadening routine to have been worth it. I want people whose jobs depend on interaction and trade and normal patterns of life to be back at work properly. Just like you I want it all, even if in my case I prefer to watch it from the sidelines instead of seeking total immersion.

For now we have the van, no complaints as it suits us well, and we have limited destinations which remain better than none and we can manage to feel like we are traveling for a little while at a time even if we are not strictly exploring. I read about loneliness and despair and a drive to risky behavior to get past the pandemic and I feel lucky to be weird. I feel lucky my wife and dog indulge me and as we close the year with one last small trip I hope next year, my last full year in the Keys, will do better than this one. 

Front Street Dawn

It has been hot and sticky all this week as we prepare the van to go North and enjoy some crisp cold northern Florida mornings next week. Walking Mallory Square in drippy heat was worth it, to see the sunrise and create  a picture with a suitable message and quintessential Keys scene.

It never ceases to surprise me how little effort it takes to get our campervan ready for the road. It isn't much work as each trip we figure out better ways to store stuff to use on the road but each trip requires refilling the water tank, loading suitable clothes, turning the refrigerator on and stashing food and ice in it, while making sure the tires have air and our bed has bedding. We will be leaving behind the fleshpots and tourist attractions of Key West seeking sylvan solitude and long dog walks. No museums for us on our journey unfortunately as we are dedicated to social distancing. Sigh. 

By the time you read this we should have left home and hopefully we will have cleared the Keys before traffic builds and starts crashing and closing the road at random, and after  that we have no plans. A family gathering vaguely imagined fell through as it became apparent that the coronavirus is not going away. I was rather surprised there were ever any plans to gather but I kept my own counsel and in the fullness of time the plan after much modification was scrapped entirely. Once upon a time I would have made my negative feelings known rather loudly but I am old and wiser now and I wait to give others a chance to catch up.  

I think that when by this time next year we are vaccinated and have the virus on the ropes I shall indulge myself in an orgy of outings to museums and attractions and perhaps even I might do something I have never taken the time to do...

...ride the only escalator in the city of key West:

I took this picture of a scooter parked on Front Street with a  caption in mind: "Your ride awaits."  Looking back I'm not sure what the actual point of that was. But that is the fun of not needing to justify my pictures, even the crappy ones. In my attempts at getting better I hear a lot of professionals agonizing about stuff that leaves me cold, consistency and only publishing the best. I think of myself as documenting, of noticing the passing of time and my place in it. 

I see people starting to fear Facebook and its influence but I gave up on the platform years ago and now I only keep an account to check for traffic problems reported by the Sheriff's office and a couple of group accounts, vans and cameras that can be helpful from time to time. At a time when private pages were dead and forgotten I never did choose to kill this page though I came close a few times. Now I see photographers frantically opening pages with Squarespace which is advertising all over YouTube and telling us to create photo projects...well I started that 13 years ago so I guess I was ahead of the curve long before I knew it. 

Early cellphone cameras were pretty dire though the potential was obvious and I struggled with an Android phone that lacked storage space but had reputedly the best camera setup. Such a faff to adjust the picture with onscreen commands. My first iPhone, a  four I think, was better but eventually I wanted a telephoto lens and that put me in the actual camera camp. And I never looked back.

And there I was sweating in the unseasonal humidity and the sun came up. Key West is like that, lot so stories, lots of pictures, much beauty. And I want to drive away for Christmas. Silly me.

Russell Brittain

Earlier this week I posted a picture of a bicycle passing Five Brothers Grocery but here I took a photograph of their particularly explicit mask message. I hope next year by this time, these signs will be  an unhappy memory only. 

Five Brothers also had a small poignant memorial to one of their own, a former Navy firefighter who, though born in Hawaii, grew up in this town. I never met Brittain in person, the man who was new the city sexton when I started working in dispatch. For him in 2004 it was a retirement job organizing the care of the cemetery and when he called about some abuse or another I could hear the passion in his voice when strangers were disrespectful among his family plots.

People visit the cemetery and get stuck after hours when they ignore the  signs about closing times. Other people get cheap thrills wandering the cemetery at night, not knowing Key West has an  informal neighborhood watch system that calls the police department 24 hours for any likelihood of suspicious activity. Under Brittain's leadership the cemetery got a facelift, a new sexton's house at the entrance and a prohibition on scooters in the grounds. Scooters seem to have the ability to provoke bad behavior and he got tired of it and he let the city know.

Cars bicycles and pedestrians are welcome. I have always had a certain fondness for the cemetery and the history it holds and every time I heard his voice on the phone asking for police assistance I sat up a little straighter.  It was painful for me that I was working the day he died and I had to button up my feelings for most of a very long shift. I missed his calls when he retired a few months ago and now I have to think of the neatly mowed cemetery as his legacy.  Life really is short.

I never quite know what I am going to see walking around town, except that it is winter now and therefore the number of middle aged cyclists shoots up. People who wouldn't be seen dead riding a velocipede in their communities Up North decide they will find their lost youth and turn their bicycles into daily riders around town. It is from what I can see a form of behavior modification that is restricted to Key West. Only an iconoclast (Webb Chiles springs to mind) would deliberately prefer a bicycle as a way to get around even outside Key West.

When I lived in Ft Myers we didn't want to get a second car so my wife drove to her teaching job and I bought a bicycle to ride from our North Ft Myers marina, a wooded cove off the turgid brown waters of the river, to my job at West Marine. It wasn't a bad ride, scooting through the neighborhoods around Cape Coral and riding the bridge over the Caloosahatchee River to the store in Ft Myers. Not only did I avoid bridge tolls but by riding with my head down I found a daily fortune in spilled coins on the approaches to the toll booths as drivers fumbled their coin purses. It was all good fun. 

Yet for the six months I worked there a shift did not end with someone wondering about my bicycle commute home. I was just too weird and while I appreciated the concern I could never quite explain that I actually liked my daily ride and looked forward to it at the end of another dreary shift serving the great boating public. I suppose one has to accept that making sensible use of a bicycle is not normal in a world that craves conformity. Hats off to the winter riders.

A Plant Based Lunch

To my eternal shame I have no gardening ability. And frankly no desire to cultivate.

This handicap does not prevent me from enjoying the astonishing array of colors and shapes growing all around us in the Southernmost City.

Walking Southard Street, a burst of color, below:

Puffy clouds, sunshine, warm temperatures a winter privilege.

I was on lunch break, Rusty was  at home, but I had a canine companion keeping me under observation:

Key West is in the details:

The gingerbread style decoration everywhere:

A pleasant way to walk away a half hour outdoors, one half of my lunch break.

Old Town Night

Duval Street...mine, all mine!

Mine and Rusty's of course. At four in the morning no people no cars, just he and I alone. 

A sliver of a moon in a black night sky:

A single lighted window in La Concha. 

St Paul's Church peaking above the leaves. They advertise services on Facebook to avoid gatherings. I miss the noon organ concerts which I have stopped by to listen to as an escape from the bustle of downtown.

And to end, a propos of nothing, here's a gratuitous Florida Keys sunset photograph on which to end. 

Blimp Road at dusk.

Southard Street

Winter sunlight produces glorious colors on clear sunny afternoons in Key West. I was drawn out of the police station by the quality of the light which my new (used) LX100ii reproduces beautifully for me.

Key West really is pretty and I know how lucky I am to have these streets to wander at will. You can see why people want to make second homes in the city just by virtue of the winter light alone. 

I got yelled at pretty loudly Monday by a caller who was outraged the city is trying to enforce a mask wearing ordinance over the instructions from the governor not allowing fines for ordinance violations. The caller was spluttering into the phone by rights violations and how we all have to obey the law as though I personally were responsible for the decision making process. I am used to that sort of attitude on the phone about any discomfort callers are feeling there and then in their lives and I did what I do whoch was to offer to send help. I actually thought the caller might stroke out on the phone with me he was so far off the chain and my offer to send an ambulance took him by surprise. I suppose he expected me to join in with his street cursing festival which would have done neither of us any good.  

The offer of an ambulance had the effect, to my surprise of calming him down and he started asking me in a rational voice why the city thought it could break the law as laid down by the governor. It wasn't the time or place for a civics lesson but I explained we have had some rather prominent local cases of severe Covid infections and everyone is freaked out and officers are simply asking people to comply. Rarely are they writing fines for non-compliant people and only violent refuseniks may be arrested, we are just trying to protect a small town with lots of visitors and not many hospital beds with ventilators. Well, he said I'm going to another town that does follow the governor, he huffed down the phone and hung up after saying he wasn't mad at me personally. 

A pity really, as I walked and took these pictures while wearing my mask and I promise you once the epidemic is past I will be delighted not to wear the wretched thing. But to enjoy this beauty around me with a  mask is far better than giving yourself a bad case of the jitters and trying to find a prettier sandbox to play in, even without a mask.