Bahia Honda

You get a day off and if Rusty is worn out you get to sleep in a  bit and then the first decision of the day springs to mind: where to? I like Bahia Honda in the morning, a place by the water which attracts a few fishermen on overnight angling expeditions but no one  else stops here early on a  weekday morning in summer.

So I missed the golden hour of sunrise, fair enough. I've been here more than once for a spectacular sunrise or two so yesterday was the day to walk and reflect. My wife retired on Tuesday. I'd post a picture here but I got a comment from anonymous remarking that they feel sorry for my wife being stuck with me. I told my wife and she laughed.

"Who said that?" A coward I said, hiding behind anonymity. Bizarre she said. We've been married since 1994 and have traveled all over the place together and apart. She learned Italian to talk to my family in Umbria; we sailed central America together for a couple of years and after the Berlin Wall came down we spent three weeks driving round eastern Europe marveling at a world we hadn't been able to visit freely during our youth.

If the virus eases its grip we plan to drive from Alaska to Argentina starting in 2023 which seems like a long enough lead time for the vaccine to take effect everywhere. The odd thing is she has already seen Iguacu Falls, Rio De Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Easter Island, and on and on. She speaks Spanish and taught English as a second language. She used to be a lawyer and has been threatened by clients in prison, she ran a women's shelter in Alabama at a time when young carpet bagging hippies were not welcome and she enjoyed the madness. 

After we get tired of South America we have a few ideas about what next, assuming the van is still running. We have no parents or children, no obligations at all, and we will for the first time in our lives have a monthly income while we goof off. To say we might come home seems rather odd as we aren't sure where home is. We will have a mailing address in Crestview Florida to maintain our Florida residence, and our bank account in the Keys to collect our pensions. May the power of the dollar never grow less.

The great disappointment of Key West was something we came to terms with shortly after we settled here. Key West we had hoped might a be a springboard, a launch pad for travel. What we found instead was a city that represents the end of the road for dreamers, the furthest point of adventure seeking for that dreamer tied down to a life in suburbia. The highest aspiration is to go to Key West. We landed not quite by accident in Key West from a life we already enjoyed. I had friends here from previous visits, we got jobs we settled down, we fell into the trap of Key West as end of the adventure. We were happy. We were normal!

We stayed because my wife's arthritis had felt a lot less painful during our time in the tropics, away from the cold damp California coast. Key West seemed like a good place to stop. It was my wife's idea to try to make a proper go of it and get pensionable jobs. Having done the sailing trip I was ready for a break and I rashly promised to do the pension thing. Which was how I ended up in the unlikeliest of jobs at the police station, and she became a teacher.

The year 2000 was a time of plenty in Key West when decent jobs were ten a penny and everyone who came worked the bars of Duval Street where drinks flowed and tips were vast. We settled to our plodding government clerical jobs and looked forward to a routine that was made bearable by the eccentric nature of life in Key West. 

Office work in Key West is made easier if you show up reliably and don't question authority, show signs of ambition or criticize anyone you work next to. Relationships in Key West are tight and intimate and the person you confide in probably went to school with the person you are bitching about and then the whole calamitous Conch phalanx closes ranks and you are shut out. Forever. I in some manner I cannot explain, managed to navigate this Byzantine bureaucracy and figured out how not to piss off the people in power, the power behind the throne that is. I made mistakes and I suffered the cold shoulder but I am good at apologizing and making up.

The good news is if you prove yourself to be reliable and silent and a supporter when things go wrong the ranks close around you and the value if life in a  small town makes itself felt. Key West has been very good to me and I know that had we stayed in California I would never have found the peace and security I have found in Key West. I may be mobile for the next few years but where my wife is from Santa Cruz, I am from Key West. It has been an incredible place for me to grow and learn to cope with life.

I do resent the fact, the cold hard fact that the bright cheerful eccentricity, the literary basis of Key West is being stamped out by money. This has always been the case to a certain extent and a monied class in a a necessary lubricant to keep the wheels turning in a  tourist town.  And I am well aware that each generation feels forced out by money when their turn comes to step off the Key West escalator. So for us the decision to take our futures in hand by fulfilling our dormant desire to see the world one last time was obvious.

One night in May 1982 almost exactly 39 years ago I got on my motorcycle and rode to Chiasso in Switzerland, eight hours north of my home in central Italy. In those days Italian currency, the lira, was too feeble for traveling and I had a Swiss bank account in Lugano procured for me by a friend where I held a few thousand dollars which I could spend freely anywhere in the world. Currency controls in Italy made traveling a very difficult proposition for a young man like me. When people accuse me of being a communist, and they do because I am an indifferent capitalist, I tell them they have no idea about government bureaucracy. Italy in the 1980s was kafkaesque. 

From my bank account in Lugano I rode my Yamaha SR500, my partner in my ride across the Sahara desert to London where I stayed that summer organizing details of my student visa for California. I emigrated, I got married, I created a new life and I never spoke to my family for 25 years. Why? Because they told me I was crazy every time I took off, they told me I was gay because I wasn't married, they mocked my dreams and they discounted my feelings.

Now when I go back to Italy, a country no better off than when I left they tell me I was smart to emigrate. I pay about as much attention now as I did then. I know what I want and I lay plans to get it, then  get impatient and try to hustle my way to an early start.

It's my wife who lays out the plans, who steadies the timeline. She retired on Tuesday, so as of next Monday her full time job is stripping down our lives.  

We have to plan as though the virus will be gone by 2023. If it isn't we will happily live in our van where we can, BLM land out west, exploring towns and museums in New England because there is much to see in the US and we haven't seen it all. We hope to spend more time doing that after our overlanding adventures are done and we are older and more feeble. Driving a cross the US is easy for us, enjoyable but not difficult. Same language, same currency, easy to understand customs and habits, lots of help and so forth.

We bought the van last year and fitted it out to have to bed in the systems and make sure it worked as planned. Up next we have to take care of ourselves. Teeth need to be checked, eyes, colons, the usual catastrophe of aging.  A friend of ours turned us on to a doctor with a long waiting list who will be able to inoculate us against the usual array of tropical diseases. All the drama about virus vaccination passports makes me laugh. I've had a World Health Organization yellow inoculation record since my first trip to Africa in 1977. I still contracted break bone fever in El Salvador and I got hepatitis in Nigeria before a vaccine for hepatitis was invented. I love vaccines and I scoff at anti-vaxxers. Modern medicine is astounding and I take advantage of it every time I can.  

I have a friend slightly older than me who got polio before the pink sugar lump was invented. I took the sugar lump and Joe walks with a limp. He doesn't remember his time in an iron lung fondly. I watch people in poor countries die for want of a virus vaccine and think there but for the grace of a strong dollar go I. I know how to be grateful, I knoww to measure risk. And when things go wrong I know how to shoulder my burden of responsibility. I am an adult.

I got a call at the 911 center on Tuesday from a man in a rage because the garbage truck was blocking the street and the operator was being slow emptying garbage cans. I kid you not. He said he wanted it "on record" that the garbage truck was inconveniencing people. I said I heard his complaint and he hung up. There it is in a nutshell. Key West streets are narrow yet people still produce garbage. What is the solution? Flog the workers. The driver could have done what i do which is spot the truck and take a detour. But he didn't and the police needed to know.

Live your best life. Grab opportunities when they beckon. Follow the beat of your own drummer. Our social media world is plastered with these stupid aphorisms. I know they are stupid because when you actually do try to pay attention to the quality of your life and step out of the world of obedience and fear you get shot down. Key West used to celebrate being different and there was patience with weirdness and that made this place my home. I find that sort of acceptance now when I am rootless and shiftless and evanescent.

Flora brought up a good point in a comment and it's an issue I wrestle with. How to describe places when you have but a fleeting acquaintance with them? This is going to be difficult and challenging and I hope I can rise to the challenge. All I can say now is I will be aware of the problem and will be working to find my way through it. In short I'm not sure how my words will flow in describing strange places but I'll give it my best shot. This page won't change format just because we change location. I'm not doing YouTube because it's too involved and needs too much bandwidth and I'm not asking for money as so many do because we don't need it. I've been a  civil servant for twenty years to buy my freedom and my travels won't cost you a penny nor will you have to look at an advertisement.

In closing I want to say that I know what I'm doing and my wife, who manages our money and fills in the details of my expansive dreams, has the last say in how we live and how we travel. Rusty is cherished and though he can't have a vote we know him well enough to know what he needs when he needs it. I have little doubt he will end his life somewhere far from where he started it and I am prepared to bet he will enjoy the journey as much as we will. Our choices aren't yours but in a country where freedom is bleated constantly as a watchword what you are seeing on this page is that concept lived out fully. Look away if your fears overcome your joy because this is our life and our choices and our consequences when it all goes wrong. You won't be affected one jot. 

Of Bikes And Bums

Marilyn was at the Tropic taking her  ease as usual, even if it was five in the morning.

As Rusty and I wandered downtown we were not entirely alone as usual. Underneath the arches at La Concha, in front of Starbucks:

This guy sounded a bit like me when I'm not using my CPAP, reverberating from a  profound sleep. I stepped into the street to avoid any chance I might wake him. 

Self important roosters kept Rusty on my side of Duval as he doesn't much like chickens:

I thought they were arguing for a minute but they were just making a point. We exchanged good mornings as they walked by and one of them admired Rusty as he waited for me to catch up. 

You can see the effects of the recent rains. Summer has kicked in with clouds heat and humidity and random rain squalls.

The two guys had walked on ahead as I dawdled with my camera and Rusty dawdled with his nose.

I found bicycles streaming past me most unexpectedly.

I always look both ways at intersections whether I'm on foot or in a  car as bicycles come from all directions. 

They do it silently on Duval at six in the morning. And I catch a glimpse of them departing.

And, as the sun started to come up, a runner. There are usually flocks of them in winter when the energetic are among us. We went home to sleep, did Rusty and I.

Searstown

Rusty is a living, breathing, alarm clock as I am reminded each morning at 4:23, two minutes before my phone alarm goes off. The  only place I can walk him at that hour without fear of tripping over mangrove roots or getting lost in the woods, or worse getting bored walking the same few suburban sidewalks is to drive 25 minutes to  Key West,  city of light and smells and interest.  One day I found myself  not keen to drive an extra twelve minutes to Mallory Square so I stopped at Searstown on the eastern edge of town. To my astonishment Rusty became totally absorbed in the place, trotting back and forth nose down. He didn't miss Duval Street at all. Good boy!

Downtown Key West has produced pictures for me for years but like most people the urban/suburban industrial grime of the shopping centers had passed me by. Being driven to record as much of key West as I can now I figured I might enjoy a different view. And it turns out I did so I brought Rusty back. Who needs Mallory Square for a backdrop?

In the years before the pandemic I think my pleasure at eating at Outback was one of the conch-iest things I did. Native born residents of Key West love Outback and I do too, much to the chagrin of visitors who ask me where do the locals eat? Miami Subs and Outback I say, because it's true.  Conchs love Outback because its good value unpretentious and its warm and efficient in a town where finding good help is getting harder and harder. Now of course after the virus fiasco every outing will be an adventure. I think we are meeting friends at Off the Hook next week so that will be a start.

            

Sears Roebuck is continuing to fade into memory but the signs are still posted. Sears created the modern shopping mall experience for Conchs in 1965 offering services and seen only on the mainland, and the company paid well and gave employment for life. In the age of Amazon where you shop and they drop Sears sounds quaint and I suppose in the end it was. I can't stop thinking about how Sears was the Amazon of the wild frontier supplying settlers with catalogs and shipping by US mail. Going...going...

                   

When we travel and stay in hotels which are modern roadside accommodations thus usually plunked right next to shopping malls which are similar to Searstown, though of course much bigger than this. Just like at home if you plunk Rusty down in a Hampton Inn he wakes up like an alarm clock and I, even more grumpy because I'm not at work and entitled to sleep,  assemble room key, leash, plastic bags, phone and camera and creep out of the hotel to explore at 5 in the morning.

       

By now it was close to six am and the early workers were starting to show up. You have to wonder how many jobs they have to hold to pay rent. Stock Island is under threat of development and no one would say the trailers there are a joy to behold but they are cheap-ish and house many of the low paid workers that keep Key West functioning.

           

I took a complaint call on Sunday from a resident of Casa Marina, the posh neighborhood, saying someone was sleeping in the car on her street and he made her "uncomfortable." She wanted him gone by the time she got back from church. Okey doke. I did my duty and a police officer cleared the suspicious sleeper from the street. ( That will be me next year - don't think I'm not taking notes on how to avoid being noticed...).

Later the man called and wanted to know why he had been moved along. I explained that those calls are a response to citizen complaints and I wasn't sure what is illegal about sleeping in your car during the day. He told me he works the night shift at the airport and he was tired, too tired to drive safely home to Miami and he wanted to take a nap before he started the drive. I sympathized and I think he understood we are all cogs in a bureaucratic chain. I felt bad for him, much good my empathy did.

Here's the thing: more and more people are coming to the Keys for better paid jobs while living on the mainland in more affordable housing. It's been going on already for a while in the Upper Keys that are closer to Homestead and Florida City. Nowadays it is starting to happen with greater frequency even in Key West. This situation must be giving community leaders for pause but there is no sign of any sense of urgency about how to make the Lower Keys sustainable with workers committed to the community.  I find it extraordinary and disheartening.

Even in police jobs that pay well the cost of housing and the economic commitment required to raise a family is too much. For officers from out of town there is no family support to help raise children while spouses may not make enough money to on one of these hospitality jobs...It takes luck and persistence to have all the possibilities line up so by contrast its much easier to live well somewhere else and there goes the exodus.

                                

It's never been easy to live in Key West and I suppose its safe to say when we landed in town with the idea of remaining we had no obligations and our boat gave us a place to stay. After that it was having a plan combined with persistence and of course good luck. Nowadays it seems as though having a comfortable berth in Homestead might be just as useful. That's a hard concept for me to wrap my head around, working by three hour commute. I belong to a different generation, we did things differently then to land in Key West, we walked from our boats.

And so, after fixing absolutely nothing in my head it was time to go home to bed. Just another magnificent sunrise over US One.

 

The Holiday

RIP David Thorpe

 David Thorpe was an English photographer who kept a blog about photography and wrote with the sort of self deprecating wit I enjoy. He made YouTube videos and photography with an emphasis on gear which interested me less. Obviously video spread his name further afield which is nice, but his written words were gold. He died of cancer May 26th and amid the usual online lamentation I found myself revisiting photographs from his time as a newspaper photographer. He posted this picture below, of refugee children in Central Africa. His  picture and his commentary are typical of the man, the thinker and photographer. I am not one of those who thinks "everything happens for a reason" and  I question the how people living comfortable lives can suggest that it does, in the face of these horrors:

"Covering the Rwanda genocide changed my view of the world. I realised how utterly bloody awful life could be if you were unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I realised (maybe not realised, more understood, felt) how lucky and privileged are most of us. We just take it for granted, as we would.

Look at these kids. In the West, they would probably be being taken to school by their mum or their dad. They'd have friends and warm bedrooms and fish fingers. Here, in a camp in Goma, they have nothing. Their parents are murdered or have died from cholera. They have just been hosed down to clean them.

I went on this job with my friend and (then) colleague Stuart White. We were camping with Oxfam people, surrounded by death. Late in the evening, we heard music. In the darkness, we made our way towards it. There was a hotel. There was a band playing and the restaurant was full of aid workers. We went in and ate a 3 course meal with wine.

It was surreal. I still find it hard to believe. Why were we eating a 3 course meal in a restaurant when a mile away people were keeling over from hunger and disease? Because we're worth it? I don't think so. Because we're lucky more like it."

                                  _____------------_____

He took pictures of war and celebrity, of human interest as he calls lovely animals-with-people pictures, and he thought about life as it is lived. But even in the small things, the weirdness of everyday living gave Thorpe cause to ponder and say something profound:

"A few years ago I went into a Darty electrical retailer in France to buy a digital clock alarm. it was €3.95. I unpacked it, plugged it in, set the time and it worked perfectly. But there was a little voice inside of me saying “this doesn’t feel right”. Like anyone else, I’m happy to buy something that’s a bargain but this struck me as somehow immoral. I may sound mad but it should have cost more. I’m used to good value for money but this went beyond that. If it had been three times the price it would still have been good buy and I would still have bought it. It was worth more than that. It just seemed plain wrong to me."

I miss David Thorpe already and I never met him or told him how much I appreciated his wit. He made no bones about being baffled by the technology he loved and explained so eloquently:

"I remember one day being in Hampton Court Park when a robin landed on the handlebars of my Brompton bike as it leaned against a tree. A charming little snap. I needed to act fast but simply couldn’t get the Lumix G9 to fire. It seemed to have a mind of its own. No amount of fiddling made any difference. I switched the camera on and off to reset it to my standard Custom setting and got my focus back. No joy. The robin, having watched my bumbling, ascertained that I was not threatening its territory and therefore had no need to peck out my eyes. So it flew away."

Standing, Not Walking

I feel stuck in a  rut at the moment and I don't know quite how to get out of it. A fellow I met on the road many years ago remarked that he expected me to run out of words sooner or later. Bob Leong was one of the nicest people you could hop[e to meet on the Internet and made friends all over the place. I thought he was wrong and I told him so at the time. 

Aside from riding motorcycles Bob was an avid Corvette owner in his corner of far Western Canada and on a  trip to the heart of Corvette-land in Kentucky, you might call it a pilgrimage, he died in his sleep in distant 2014. As sudden and as unexpected as it was, his death caused all of us that knew and liked him to sit back a second and think. I remembered his words and even after he was no longer around to debate with, I continued to disagree. Now I wish he were here to help me unravel this conundrum that he had predicted: some day you will use up all your words.

I'm not sure if I've squeezed Key West dry and thus am ready to see something new, or if, as I believe more likely I am ready to see something new and thus am failing to see Key West in a fresh new light each day. It is a conundrum. Thinking about it put me in mind of the wisdom of the late Bob Cheong.

The every day beauty is here, but my ability to capture the essence of daily life here is slipping through my fingers. I cannot believe reading about the tightening noose of lack of economic sense in this community makes for interesting reading. I am constrained from writing about my difficulties at work where we have 15 budgeted positions and only eight of them are filled. Going to work constantly short staffed  is wearing me down, I admit it.  

Normally the rush of people this time of year slows down and for a couple of months before family summer vacations we see a period of quiet, of refreshment after the winter crowds. This year as usual Covid has changed all that and the pent up desire to travel and be away means Key West hotels are full and some of the money lost during the height of the pandemic is being made up.

I am told the city itself has done okay during this time of stress, with cautious budgeting and planning for the worst, so the city according to our union negotiators is not in bad financial shape. Good news I suppose for people looking at a long term job situation. But Key West as I frequently point out has an astonishing capacity for reinventing itself and surviving. 

 I keep walking Rusty, taking pictures, seeking new angles or shapes or perspectives, different light, sticking with an awkward lense to force myself to see and not take things I've seen for twenty years for granted. I want new horizons and different challenges and ther thought of learning to see on the fly, as we drive by makes me nervous. I know what to expect in the Keys, rainy season or dry, morning noon or evening or night.

Places I love, the origami tree shadows against the colors of the setting sun, the clouds of summer, the shadows of noon with the sun overhead, the irritating sweat of summer walks fogging the camera and my glasses and my mind. It's what I know. It's safe. 

Time for a change, time to risk making a mistake, time to see new things and new places and put my view of them on this same page. My wife is wrapping up her last school year, her last class is taught, she has some papers to shuffle and graduations to attend but he career as a teacher is over.  Next week she starts her new and important job of Chief Planning Officer for the Alaska to Argentina expedition of 2022. Rusty the Chief Security Officer has been practicing sleeping in the van under the air conditioner these hot summer days so he is transitioning nicely. I am still showing up at my desk holding to the routine. It seems unfair but my wife says she started working before me all those years ago. 

This time next year I hope to be in Alberta, or the Yukon perhaps, depending on the snowline. Bob Leong country, as it were. I wonder what I shall be seeing. This page will still be here, I've added a url to it already, thegoldenvan.com but it simply forwards along with Key West Diary  to this same page: conchscooter.blogspot. A different photograph, a new tag, the more things change the more they will stay the same. I hope new words will come with new environments and I hope my camera will reveal them to my eye.