The fence behind the buoy marks the end of civilian Key West and the Navy base is off limits to most people which is why the real southernmost point which is on the base is replaced by this cement structure:
Nevertheless the tourists flock to the site of the purported southernmost point in the continental United States to take their photos.
This is during tourist low season, in summer:
Look at them all milling around patiently in the sun which for them must be quite torrid and humidity-laced. You can come by at four in the morning and be quite alone because they don't pack the monument up overnight and put it away.
And then if you walk up South Street to get back to your toasty car you may find yourself passing the southernmost this and that.
With a convenient replica of the original and here, with some judicious editing you could pose here in the shade in front of the most desirable point.
Or stop here half a block from the great point and have some refreshment as close to Cuba, the forbidden isle, as you can get. Finding oneself this close to Cuba is a great draw in some people's minds.
More southernmost stuff as you get close to Duval Street. I've been to El Paso and never noticed a business claiming to be the "closest whatever" to Mexico. But here, as remote and untouchable as Cuba is in reality, the draw of the pretend relationship is ever present.
Banana leaves umbrellas and palms decorate the suitably southernmost guest house.
And this magnificent wedding cake is the Southernmost House, 1400 Duval Street. You can pay to sleep and eat here if you like. However this too is not without controversy because the last house on the street, the one right next to the famous point has a sign on the entrance gate.
And here it is, the other southernmost house. The southernmost southernmost house. If you didn't believe me before perhaps you do now. Being the southernmost is very important to some people.
There is also a southernmost beach resort. This one is on the other side of Duval Street, not far from the southernmost ice cream store and surf shop as I recall.
I am quite fond of Hawaii's southernmost point which you can like me, view on Google maps. It's a wooden sign in a muddy open space overlooking the water. But that fails to have as much appeal as the big red marker. My friends come for their pictures, including Bill who rode his scooter from Jacksonville:
I stopped by on my first visit to Key West in 1981 on my then very modern Vespa P200 which then took me to Mexico and California:
And as I was uncertain of the outcome of the impending Category Five hurricane I stopped by before Hurricane Irma in 2017. My Vespa S150 and I both survived in the police station during that Category Four catastrophe.
No one is immune to the draw of the mighty Southernmost Point!
Friday I worked overtime and after work I took Rusty to Blimp Road where it was too hot and he cut the walk short and sat by the car in it's shade.
Three storm formations are building the Eastern Atlantic, none of them are rated as likely to build into anything more than rainy tropical rainy waves. When one of them does, there will be much worry about the safety of stuff in peoples' lives.
Hurricane season starts June 1st so the unwary and inexperienced need to be reminded that peak hurricane season is shared by September and October when the ocean waters have been nicely warmed by longer summer daylight hours. Recently the National Hurricane Center in Miami advised the hurricane season will produce some doozies in their estimation: NOAA August 4th.
A lunch break Friday saw me converting our piggybank into a $36 deposit at the machine that sorts coins at First State Bank. The piggybank itself will soon go on Facebook by my indefatigable wife who is selling anything we don't want to store or carry in the van, which amounts to a lot of surplus stuff.
As she is already retired she is in charge of packing, so I have to nail down anything I want to keep, not much, as every day the house attains that state of Zen emptiness that I secretly happen to prefer.
My father threw out my childhood belongings the day after he sent me to Italy to sort out my mother's inheritance which she left to us youngsters and superstitiously refused to write a will. By the time my sisters had finished fighting over the inheritance, a spectacle that revolted me and turned me off to money for the rest of my life, my childhood was gone into the dumpster and was too late to retrieve from my childhood home in England.
That set the pattern for my life, a collection of progressively fewer and fewer things: when I emigrated to the US, when I moved onto a boat, and so forth with each of many changes I shed more vestiges of my history in each move. The result is I have hardly anything to my name, a few books and with the blessings of digital recordings I have an iCloud of photographs. It's easy then to move into the van for me.
And as I came into the world so shall I leave it one day, with no regrets for the things I have scattered along the way and discarded as I went. There is much to see and the weight of stuff slows you down.
In a year and a half I will be on Medicare and the Guardian recently reported an issue that makes me glad not to be contributing to this mess reported below. The City of key West uses Cigna and they did fine by me while I was in the hospital. Answering 911 calls is supposed to be the acme of stress but working in a call center as described below would be impossible for me.
Employees started a petition demanding improvements, including lifting a pay raise freeze and removing pressure to meet metrics
Cigna, one of the largest health insurance corporations in the US, reported an increase in profits from $5.1bn in 2019 to $8.5bn in 2020. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP
Call center workers at Cigna, one of the largest health insurance corporations in the US, are reporting poor working conditions driven by high production demands, fear of being fired, lack of training, and long processing times for customers to receive reimbursement for Covid-19 testing costs.
The unrest comes as Cigna’s profits in 2020 increased to $8.5bn from $5.1bn in 2019. David Cordani, the CEO of Cigna, received nearly $79m in compensation in 2020, a raise of $13.4m from the previous year. In March 2021, Cigna announced plans to increase expenditures on stock buybacks to $8bn over the next four years.
Cigna is closing offices around the US, switching several positions and departments to remote work permanently.
Several months ago, workers started an online petition demanding Cigna improve working conditions, including lifting a pay raise freeze, stopping constant harassment of workers to meet production metrics and providing a way for workers to report abusive callers.
“Customer management requires us to handle phone calls within a specific amount of time,” said a call representative at Cigna in the midwest who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “The numbers are hardcore. They’re constantly on you about them and to me, that doesn’t really meet the customers’ needs. The phone call metrics could go down if customer service advocates were trained better and we had better resources.”
The worker explained they often receive phone calls from customers who have called repeatedly without any resolution to their problem, and that they are constantly being monitored by apps and prompted to move on to the next call.
“I always get pressured on every end. There were days that I would almost be in tears before I would even log in for work, I just mentally, emotionally and physically cannot handle that anymore,” the representative added. “There were times when I was the sixth customer service advocate that they’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks, and nothing is getting resolved. Nothing. This is a customer who has called multiple times and they’re upset. This is their health insurance. This is something that’s important. And when you can’t resolve it for either lack of training or lack of time because you’re having to meet metrics, that gets old.”
A second customer service advocate in the midwest explained a whole new set of issues arose once the Covid-19 pandemic hit and workers were allowed to work from home. Paid time off was taken from workers for any technical issues they experienced while working remotely, and staff handled a huge volume of calls from customers irritated about the delays in processing Covid-19 testing reimbursement claims.
A customer service advocate at Cigna said a new set of issues arose once the Covid-19 pandemic hit and workers were allowed to work from home. Photograph: Bryan Woolston/AP
“The process was unbelievable. It could have been six months before reimbursement and it was going to be in a multitude of checks. We’re given 15 minutes to make outbound phone calls to doctor offices, provider offices, and they get taken away because of the call volume metrics,” the worker said. “The numbers are constantly driven down your throat. Email, after email, after email – check your numbers, make sure you hit your numbers and everything. Our manager would post our numbers daily so everybody on your team knows whether or not you’re meeting your metrics.”
In addition to the increased workloads and frustrating processes, the worker explained that customer service advocates did not receive a raise this year.
“After a year of Covid, and all of us making adjustments for Covid and everything. They were like, ‘Well, sorry, you’re not getting a raise, you know, you’re just out of luck this year,’” one worker said.
Workers said human resources held focus groups in response to the online petition, but that nothing has changed. Several workers have quit.
“Burnout is very high and these jobs, the metrics they have to meet in many cases are impossible to meet, particularly if they’re talking to a health plan enrollee who has a complicated case. But they’re on the clock and there’s an expectation they will handle a certain number of calls in a day,” said Wendell Potter, who worked at Cigna from 1993 until he retired in 2008 as vice president of corporate communications and became a whistleblower on the industry.
Potter added: “You have to deal with people who are in a difficult spot and in many cases angry, trying to figure out their health plan, benefits and why something was denied or why they had to get prior authorization for something. In my view, it’s one of the most stressful jobs in a health insurance company.”
Jordyn Emeree, who worked as a call representative at Cigna in Illinois for two years, quit last month over the stressful working conditions and because she says a manager discriminated against her for being a transgender woman, telling her that she shouldn’t expect everyone at work to accept her transition.
“In the two years being with Cigna I never got a bonus as we’re supposed to get one every quarter. I had to fight for my yearly raise last year as it was not given to me,” said Emeree. “They let the members emotionally abuse us and we can’t do anything about it besides wait for a supervisor to become available to take the call.”
A Cigna spokesperson declined to comment on any individual complaint, but said in an email, “Cigna takes all feedback seriously, including external petitions such as this one. We have a wide range of tools to ensure our employees’ voices are heard. We regularly survey all employees covering topics like workload, conditions, and stress, host town halls, conduct focus groups, and actively encourage our managers to have open and honest discussions with their teams about how we can better support our colleagues. We’re proud of the culture we’ve created, but know there’s always room to improve, so appreciate all feedback we receive.”
My father was a tax lawyer in London, after World War Two interrupted his legal career. He enjoyed tax law, giving tax advice to the rich and famous on the one hand while helping the government prosecute tax cases on the other. In Britain, Queen's Counsel (senior lawyers) are for hire by anyone who pays, from either side of a case. In his spare time he wrote tax law text books for lucky students to study and worry over. I thought his life of endless commuting by train, hours spent smoking in an office followed by appearances in court under a ghastly hot horsehair wig which came over my youthful eyes when I tried it on, was not, in sum, a life for me. I went to the Old Bailey when I was in town and watched him nail some tax pervert for the Inland Revenue Service and his level of excitement at another successful outcome didn't match that of his thirteen year old son -"Did you win Daddy?" "Humph." However his plan to avoid paying taxes himself, and his fees were huge I later discovered taxed up to 90%, was of far more interest to the young me. "We're off to Scotland" he would say on some few winter holidays in the years before he divorced my Italian mother, which divorce stopped all trips to Leckmelm. He and I would take the Rolls Royce and ride up the Great North Road to another world of heather and hillsides and squawking seagulls and weird voices mumbling Scottish, such that Sassenachs (an impolite term for people from England) like me had no chance to understand a sentence as simple as being offered more potatoes with my dinner. Going fishing with a Scotsman as an instructor was a whole new level of difficulty.
Fishing in the Keys is an entirely different affair, because quite aside from language issues, warm water, warm air and plenty of sunshine, it's not at all like the Scottish fishing style where mist and drizzle and biting gnats are the order of the day. Commercial fisherman in the Keys may speak Spanish but that for me is much easier to decipher than a Scottish brogue.
If I were a fishing kind of person I tell myself I could enjoy standing around the Keys staring at the water failing to do anything much. I wouldn't get frostbite or snow melting in my hair.
However I am not interested in angling, as I fear pitting my wits against those of a fish and coming out second best. I am not smart enough to bait a barb or lure a fish, I lack the self confidence to believe they would find my hook attractive. I quit fishing when I got ahead many decades ago in Ullapool, Scotland.
Rusty has his own interests, and he follows his nose wherever it takes him. We had what was called a wire haired dachshund, the runt of the litter scheduled for euthanasia as he was too unattractive to sell. So we got him and saved him for a very long life. When I was growing up Bobby was a bloody minded stubborn brute who mauled the milkman and terrified the letter carrier and never had any doubt at all he was the leader of the pack when it came to hanging out with myself or my sisters. He was not able to come on vacation in Italy with us when we spent summers at my mother's home. That was because dogs weren't allowed into England in those days without a six month quarantine to prevent rabies arriving in the sceptered isle, so he stayed with our housekeeper. But Bobby could and did come to Scotland from time to time. He was not there the day I caught a trout for the first and last time in my life and ate it fried for breakfast. Had he been I'd have shared it with him as I did everything else.
Check out the couple at the top of the hill they are looking at the sunrise at Old Bahia Honda. Rusty as usual was looking for unfathomable things where fish bait was discarded overnight. I was looking for a picture. Silence reigned between us.
My father's place in Scotland is situated on the north shore of Loch Broom. This loch is an inlet from the sea like a flooded valley with hills on either shore. The sun rises out of the eastern end of the fiord and sets over the open ocean in the direction of the Isles of Lewis and Harris, the last lumps of rock in the Atlantic before Newfoundland. The sun, when visible can be quite spectacular in the damp air of northern Scotland.
My father bought farm land when he started to become well know in his law practice, and because he was a tax law specialist he knew how to reduce his tax liability legally, if not profitably, and farm land is apparently excellent for just that purpose. I should not have minded if he had increased my rather meager allowance of ten dollars a term at my boarding school. He had the idea I was not his son owing to the disagreeable state of his marriage so he was not fond of me and he barely tolerated me around my mother. Eventually I discovered he thought I was the product of a family scandal involving my mother and the man she really loved but when you are ten years old these nuances tend to escape your attention. All I knew was that he was his nicest when we went to Leckmelm where I suspect he kept one or more of his favorite hotel staff for his occasional visits. My family was a womanizing mess which goes a long way to explaining why I fled to the New World as soon as I decently could.
A byproduct of all this adult scheming was that the lawyer's son got to spend the occasional winter vacation learning to do outdoor things. I stalked and shot a deer which experience induced me to swear off killing for the rest of my life. I enjoyed the walk over the treeless hillsides while following the deer through the bracken, watching Ian McDonald, my father's gamekeeper crawling and peering through his binoculars tracking and anticipating where they would go. It was only at the moment of pulling out the rifle and actually planning to take the animal's life that inside I revolted. I did it once and knew what it felt like and never did it again. I still regret that shot.
There was a stream running through the farm where trout fishing was a sport that guests could participate in. My father's modest farm had grown into a modest hotel which like the farm also lost money over the years. I never understood the point of losing money simply to avoid paying taxes. Paying taxes seemed a much easier way to live with none of these emotional and financial complexities of operating businesses 600 miles from home and which you visited less often as the owner than you would as a simple holidaymaker. It made him happy though and I got to take road trips from time to time. And Ian MacDonald had a job.
He took me trout fishing, sitting on the banks of the fast flowing stream running through the farm, threading artificial flies on a hook and then standing there waiting for something to happen. The stream looked much the same in 2018 when last I was there, with perhaps less water that Spring than when I was fishing all those years ago:
I have no idea how I pulled it off but I caught my breakfast that morning. Many years after I saw a movie that briefly created a fad about casting flies. It was called A River Runs Through It and I went tosee it at the Aptos Twin theater in Santa Cruz County. After we came out my girlfriend and I overheard two women in front of us and one said to the other: "I wish I could find a man who would enjoy watching that with me." The relationship failed as I sabotaged everything but that evening I got kudos. I noticed in the film they made a complex fiddle faddle about how to go fly fishing. I went out with Ian for an hour and came back with a trout to fry and it didn't seem like a big deal, fly fishing. I liked the trout but I didn't like the process, even though it was much less bloody and stark than shooting a buck.
I don't know why it never took, but the outdoor life never did. Hunting shooting and fishing never stirred my blood. I like being outdoors walking with my dog and my camera but I don't like killing things. I can't even bring myself to run over an iguana. And I don't like iguanas very much as they carry disease are destructive and almost impossible to wipe out once embedded in a tropical environment.
All this preamble to avoid the main point I suppose: why was it such a treat to go north with my father? He set the mood of course but he was always happy to drive to Leckmelm, an 18 hour journey when roads were narrow and winding, indeed the last section north of Inverness was mostly one lane road, paved with passing places like this:
My father was neither creative nor musical so the radio was out. He talked and I listened and though he never did share himself or his feelings much, other than to display his racist and rather bigoted side, he talked of the places he had seen and the journeys he had made. He was born in 1912 and remembered a Zeppelin blimp hanging over Shepherds Bush bombing London in World War One.
He was poor between the wars and took his vacations by bicycle and he rode across Europe to visit the Spanish Civil War and I have no doubt he supported the rebels taking down the Socialist government. He also rode across Germany to Poland and he wasn't particularly informative about that ride either. I was too young to ask pointed questions about the Nazis in pre-war Germany but his stories were still inspiring and in a way bonding even though he was an emotionally frigid man to his family. I spent hours on the front seat of the Rolls Royce, a child of privilege with no idea of my good fortune, listening to stories. He led convoys across the Western Desert navigating by sextant, crashing over sand dunes and being bombed by Italian aircraft patrols. It sounded all terribly romantic, free of feelings and pain and loneliness the way he told it.
He parachuted into Yugoslavia to fight with the partisans of Tito's guerrillas, places of war I looked at from our rental car as we drove across those arid mountains and deep dark clefts on our simple modern vacation after even the Yugoslav civil war had pock marked buildings and wrecked populations. I re-read Fitzroy MacLeans' Eastern Approaches, a memoir that included some of the same theater of travel and war. Oddly enough there was more emotion in the book than in the stories I heard on the Great North Road.
I still recall with clarity the long drives, the stories, the snow, the hotels and the camaraderie that never came back or was replicated anywhere else our lives intersected. And all it takes is watching some men fish half a world away to remind me of those long lost days of driving through the snow.
Thunder clouds were brewing Monday afternoon when I took Rusty out but to my surprise he didn't pay any attention to the rumbling.
Once upon a time the little stray used to cower at the sound of thunder. not surprising as he was chased by farmers with guns in the Redlands of Homestead where he was dumped. Guns and thunder sound the same to Rusty.
These days the thunder has to be overhead and very loud to freak him out, but where once he ran for the darkest corner, usually a bathroom, these days he sits next to us and trembles. It is against all appearances, an improvement.
Meanwhile I walk and ponder and enjoy the silence of the world around me. In Key West there is an expectation cruise ships may be back in September even as the city and the governor fight over jurisdiction. Money from a businessman in Key West with an interest in cruise ships has set the governor firmly against the city. So the mud wrestling continues.
My neighbor was slightly grumpy about the lobster mini season. Jose was passing in his boat yesterday evening while my wife and I were swimming as we usually do of an evening in the canal. He said it took all day to catch his quota unlike years past when they are home with all due lobsters by breakfast time.
Lobster catching during the two day event allows for six lobster per person in the boat, a limit applied to each of two days. Going out with eight people Jose had a limit of 48 and there weren't that many in he water. Don't ask me what you do with 48 lobster (that will live to 120 if unmolested) but I suppose frozen lobster at Christmas might remind you of the halcyon days of summer.
There was a report last week of a drowning at the Special Forces training dive tank on Fleming Key. The newspaper reported a 31 year old drowned in the tank during an exercise. It happens from time to time and one can only imagine how tough the training must be if a 31 year old in peak fitness dies.
Apparently a new report quoted by The Citizen says drowning wasn't the cause of death but the military haven't specified what was. Who knows if the stress of training set off some previously unknown condition. It puts things in perspective when you read about the work that goes on, away from the bars and the parking problems and the neighbor arguments of petty daily life.
We have the almost knee jerk reaction to the military "thank you for your service" and then suddenly you are brought up short by the blistering reality. I see a lot of the daily deaths on my computer screen at work, usually people dying of disease or old age (whatever that is), in a Key West that barley notices them. Sometimes they die in accidents or even occasionally in swimming pools and sometimes those deaths get reported. Never while training for their jobs do civilians die and it does give you pause. 31 years old with widow and children left behind. While training for a job I can't imagine handling.
I'd rather watch the doves preening on the branches of a tree killed by Hurricane Irma.
I was waiting for the bird to take off, my ambition to catch it just in flight, but instead the uncooperative wretch settled down to out sit me. I walked away.
Flowers at least don't disappoint:
A zebra striped street with another uncooperative poseur:
Rusty has entered that time of year when he comes home panting. Me too. It's hot and sticky.
I stopped by on my first visit to Key West in 1981 on my then very modern Vespa P200 which then took me to Mexico and California:
And as I was uncertain of the outcome of the impending Category Five hurricane I stopped by before Hurricane Irma in 2017. My Vespa S150 and I both survived in the police station during that Category Four catastrophe.
