Alligator Alley

The two lane highway opened in 1968 to connect Fort Lauderdale to Naples and they called it the Swamp Pike and Alligator Lane, derogatory names for the people stupid enough to risk their lives on a narrow strip of roadway built up on the muck dredged from deep ditches either side. The road was unfenced and patrolled by wildlife which mixed it up with the drunk drivers and the sleepy drivers causing carnage among humans and beasts. It was not an easy 80 mile drive. It became known as Alligator Alley, a romantic alliterative name that has stuck, even unofficially, now that it is part of I-75 from Miami to Sault St Marie, Michigan. I have indeed crossed the Mighty Mac Bridge labelled I-75 so I know it's true. If you ever feel like dumping your snow chains and breaking free this is where I-75 ends, and no you won't see any alligators along the freeway. Sorry about that.

People still die here though you have to figure they must work at it because the dead straight road is properly fenced for all 80 miles and the median is huge so all you to do is set the cruise control and stay awake. In summer it is much less trafficked than a normal winter season.

In Florida speeding tickets are given out when you drive more than five miles an hour over the limit (cops can always get you for reckless or speed too fast for conditions if you annoy them...) so it is pretty much accepted that you can add five miles an hour to the limit...However if you do make sure you stay in the slow lane. The Miccosukee Tribal Police make a comfortable living pulling people over on the stretch of Alligator Alley that runs through their reservation as the ill informed think long and straight and boring equates to any speed you feel like.

Much is made of the name Alligator Alley and in myth this is a long hard drive across the southern part of Florida...you are driving through the mystical Everglades swamp etc. etc...which most people think looks like a cypress swamp with dank Spanish moss hanging off dank dark trees and all that. The Everglades are known as a river of grass because that is what they are, named by a South Florida environmentalist (Marjorie Stoneman Douglas) who wrote about the necessary preservation of the marsh to filter water and maintain wildlife. The Everglades are wide open and flat and may very well surprise you. Even where there are trees, below, there ain't much to see.

Big Cypress is more like it, a relatively small chunk of the Everglades preserved for the trees. If you want to see alligators and dank hanging moss and stuff you need to go further south. Alligator Alley is all business. This is where you drive if you want to cross the state with no fuss and at speed. An hour and fifteen minutes and you are done. Blast the air conditioner, listen to the radio and put your phone down. Cell phones work all across these days so you are never out of touch, lucky you.

There are places to stop along the way. Most of the recreation areas are on the eastern side in Dade County. They offer boat ramps and some picnic tables trash cans as well as  scattered trash and you can launch a boat or an airboat off a trailer or push a kayak into the water and paddle your brains out if you like. I don't know much about fishing but kayaking would be as boring as paddling through a haystack in my opinion. All you'd see from water level would be the stems of river grass, important stuff for the water but not scenic,

There are two rest areas along the way including a fire station, toilets maps and vending machines such as you'd find in any rest area on any freeway.  All the stopping areas are good for a night's sleep especially if - ahem- you have a your own van to sleep in. Do not confuse bridge turn outs with rest areas...this is where the Highway Patrol parks and puts you under the radar gun. "Official Use Only."

This is a recreation area. Open year round in hunting season expect hunters marching off into the swamps. There are no facilities here, just a parking lot but they are great places to walk your dog  or to peer up close at the dreaded swamps.

There is one truck stop along the way, at Mile Marker 49 ( Mile Zero is in Miami, Mile 101 is south of Naples). It is run by the Miccosukee Tribe and offers the usual showers trinkets food and parking. The gas at my most recent visit was 20 cents a gallon above the inflated prices along I-75 in southwest Florida and that wasn't the worst of it. They are building new modern facilities and you can't pay at the pump at the current facilities. I had miscalculated my range and unwilling to pay $2:40 in Naples for regular I pressed on and lost my nerve. I bought $20 of regular at $2:60 a gallon and I had to stand in line inside for the privilege. I was annoyed at myself. You can exit the freeway here and take Snake Road  (a mildly twisting two lane) north to the Seminole Reservation and Immokalee beyond.

At Mile Marker 80 there is one curve in the road. It's actually a 'Z' first left then right. This where I-75 joined up when  they converted the two lane  Swamp Pike into Alligator Alley. I remember the road work in the early 80s when the brand new freeway became a mud pit and you had to pick your way between bulldozers as they joined up the section from the east with the section from the west.

You may think you are lost in the wilderness but there are constant reminders you aren't. This is a modern freeway. There is one intersection near  the Naples end of the Everglades. Highway 29 goes north to Ave Maria, the Catholic town in the swamp. Due south you get to Everglades City, a rustic pretty small town that never developed into a "city" and you also cross Tamiami Trail, Highway 41.

Tamiami Trail is where you want to go if you want to see alligators and the Cypress Swamp and all the rest of it. The speed limit varies between 65 (Collier County) and 60 (Dade County) and it's a two lane highway that was built in the 1920s well before Alligator Alley was completed in 1968. It's scenic and has lots of places to stop, with rustic restaurants and the world's smallest post office. Best of all you can take Loop Road a 24 mile gravel road that actually dips into mainland Monroe County and will take you through actual wilderness guaranteed to see alligators and swamps. If it's your first time in South Florida take Highway 41 and Loop Road.

You might well see cars stopped by the side of the road on I-75  but with cellphones comes rescue.

And soon enough news arrives of the end of the road.  The roadway was built as a toll road and it was completed early and paid for a few years later. The toll persists. For a car its a Sunpass toll of $3 in either direction. If you don't have a Sunpass (why not?)  you have to stop and pay by hand. There are no tolls to pay if you join Alligator Alley from Snake Road or Highway 29. 

When I am in a hurry this is the way home. I-75 goes to the Fort Lauderdale airport via 595 and joins I-95 and the Florida Turnpike so you can turn south and go straight to Homestead. Recently the state has finished building a four lane highway connecting Homestead to Highway 27. Krome Avenue (named for Flagler's railroad engineer) is now a freeway to Homestead, with a few traffic lights. I find it preferable to fighting traffic on the Turnpike through Miami.

The west coast of Florida boasts some of the most horrendous traffic in the state, worse even than Miami's death trap racers. Speeding is endemic which I don't mind so much but when you combine fast driving with undisciplined lane changes, tailgating and impatience  I-75 between Tampa and Naples is a nightmare. I have found that three-laning the whole road has helped and driving a  big box van helps too as people see me coming and stay away even in their over sized trucks. I put cruise control on 65 to save gas and trundle up the slow lane ignoring the chaos. It works for me.

The art of merging with traffic from an on ramp needs to be taught just as learning to pass on a two lane highway would relieve a lot of tailgating stress. The problem is the drivers coming onto the freeway don't achieve escape velocity on the ramp and they combine that with not looking over their shoulders to see what the state of traffic might be. They just blunder on, force you to change lanes and then speed up and away once they have disrupted your zen. Weird. Once again the big box van helps. They can't help but notice it and it does actually convince them to take evasive action. If you are in a  car be warned, driving skills are not practiced here: be extra defensive. 

I really need to go and spend some time on Tamiami Trail, much more scenic, more fun and as I know how to pass on a  two lane highway I can find my own way home without tailgating. For wasting least time the romantically named but decidedly pedestrian Alligator Alley is best.

Things I've Seen

Just walking and looking.

Outside Fausto's on Fleming someone had eaten a box of ribs, picked them clean, then left the bones in the box and walked away failing to connect the trash with the can.

One of those pandemic positives we see from time to time: sidewalk dining which should be a common sight in Key West but isn't. Better indoors with air conditioning seems to be the rule.

Overexposed picture of Duval Street, I was going to dump it but I liked the mood of burning heat it imparts. It wasn't really summer hot but I liked the look:

This plaque on the drug court complex caught my eye once again. I remember all the county commissioners listed. Three dead, one retired, one sitting. Time spares none of us. Commissioner David Rice gave me my psych test when I applied to be a police despatcher. I've been around too long.

Key West is pretty no doubt about that.

Mangrove Sunset Backwards

Much to my annoyance the computer downloaded my pictures backwards. I was grateful it downloaded them at all as sometimes Blogger is reluctant to add pictures to my page for some reason. The engineers have upgraded the service with all the usual screw ups change brings in its wake. Besides I am in a happy frame of mind at the moment, the Republic is secure, I am halfway vaccinated and the outside temperatures haven't caused me to break out in a  spontaneous sweat for several weeks. Life is good.

So I thought to myself I shall turn this upside down lemon into lemonade.  It was dark by the time Rusty and I were back at the car on Summerland Key. I had finished the walk by taking pictures in black and white and I rather liked the atmospheric views of the road, a departing Jeep, a stationary dog. Not, I hasten to add in the same place at the same time.

Look! A Christmas tree out of season!

I have been reading about locked down photographers unable to travel and who are as a consequence bored. Some days I leave the house more focused on giving Rusty a good time filled with not much faith that the trail will produce anything worth looking at and yet. and yet I see things.

I don't see dead people or anything exciting like that but the landscape yields some great sights even in these monotone flatlands. For every minute spent trying to capture it I get ten minutes of standing, or walking, and staring. Imagine the silence.

A plane full of Covid 19 and humans flew overhead into the sunset leaving a suitably pink contrail.  Grist for my camera.

I walk and I see stark white tree trunks in the gloom. I like that so I put a dark background behind them to make them stand out. Non Floridians worry about rattlesnakes and alligators. I worry about getting sufficient contrast.

Fat Albert framed, below. I have been reading some RV comments about Florida and there is universal dread of alligators. These are not people who follow Clyde Butcher very closely, a photographer who wades through the Everglades for the pleasure of finding pictures. I just walk through the mangroves and the most aggressive creature I find are horseflies.

I see signs of human passage, tire marks usually but I am very lucky to be alone on these trails almost all the time. Especially in a time of pandemic I feel privileged.

And here we are at the beginning of a forty minute stroll, a dead tree reaching up to the sky.

If I didn't photograph it would it still be there?

Saturday Afternoon

 It was not a lunch break to spend indoors so I took my big camera (a Panasonic FZ1000 with a one inch sensor and four hundred millimeter lens if you care) and went to look for things to look at. I didn't even get out of the parking lot before I spotted a group of three shady characters loitering in front of the police department:

I got to Garrison Bight and pelicans were floating around, slow and easy to photograph and an elegant reminder that it is winter in Key West:

Winter in Key West, 75 degrees, sunny and a light cool breeze blowing over everything:

There was a fair bit of small boat activity. It is an axioma that the smaller the boat the more it gets used:

Garrison Bight residents watching the traffic from their waterfront home:

A sudden flurry of wings announced the arrival of an unwelcome drop-in:

"That way!" Nautical mansplaining I dare say.

The intruder with the sharp beak took up a position underneath the bridge and quietly watched what was going on. he seemed unwelcome and rather lonely. No one wanted to play with him of be decapitated by him either.                                                                                                        

Houseboat row in the sunshine. They used to be tied up along the seawall on South Roosevelt near the Riviera Canal Bridge. Then a developer decided to build two million dollar condos overlooking that stretch of seawall and the houseboats were deemed unattractive. Money talks and the scruffy houseboats were walked over to the city marina and offered docks in the heart of new town. 

Other boaters live on the city mooring field outside Garrison Bight. They pay a few hundred a month ion an area wide open to north winds and minimally protected from the prevailing south east winds. They get dinghy dockage with showers and trash collection. 

The pigeons watched the boats come and go and wondered when the kestrel might leave.

When I was back at work I got a 911 call from a man who was being yelled at by a couple on one of Key West's narrow lanes. The picture I was painted after some slow patient questioning revealed that he had come across a car stopped in the narrow street blocking his path and he felt they weren't unloading their vehicle fast enough so he tooted his horn. The reaction he got was not a  quick apology and a rush to move the offending vehicle. The mild mannered guy got full on in your face yelling from the busy couple. So he called for help. It's what people do all day and all night in contemporary Key West. In the old days it would be a case of "what up cuz?" and an offer to help unload. I wondered if the pigeons had called 911: "There's a creepy looking bird of prey landed in our midst and upset our afternoon routine, threatening us. Can you come and move him along?" It used to be in Key West you waited and pretended it was cool to be on "island time". Now its all yelling. Be a pigeon.

People ask me when to call 911. Generally I say the time to call is when you are afraid, not when you are angry. Sound advice rarely heeded I fear. 

The self reliant pigeons took up positions on isolated lamp posts with clear views in all directions and waited for the passage of time to remove the intruder.

Winter is the time of year for fighter pilot training at Boca Chica. Every time I see them fly overhead I wonder how soon cheaper drones will knock these romantic expensive planes out of the sky for good. Time and technology waits for no one, as I look at my futuristic pocket phone unimaginable in 1945 when dogfights ruled the air.

That's my pigeon soulmate up there on his own far from the madding crowds, far from any office enjoying the sunshine.