Loading Gannet 2

I think in at least one respect I am like most men inasmuch as I like to be, if not clean at least tidy. My wife respects my neurosis but I have to say that tidying up a house we are trying to empty is an art that has got away from us. It's a sort of moving target, today the kitchen is neat and the spare room, well, not so much. Tomorrow we tidy the bedroom and then we have to empty a drawer somewhere so we pour it onto the bed and then slowly sift through the contents, some for discard and some few to save for storage. and on it goes.

The van is such a small space cleanliness and tidiness go hand in hand but fortunately the 70 square feet are easy to clean and sort in no time at all.  Layne designed the bed/couches to sit above a hidden storage area we call the basement, which is where we keep all the stuff we won't use daily. On the left in the pull out drawer we have our table and sand mat to sit outdoors, our Moonshade awning for cover and the air compressor to inflate the tires. In the middle cupboard we have our recovery gear, the treads, straps, shackles and rope and shovel. As well as the mythical Deadman to wrap around boulders or trees or bury in sand as an anchor for the winch:

All on the off chance we get stuck.  I don't want to go four wheeling but I want to have the ability to stretch my exploration a little with the ability to take care of myself in mud holes or sand pits. So last week we did our first test run loading the van. It went okay.

My wife has decided the right hand locker, the shortest basement door is for the exercise gear, weights, rubber bands, a mat and so forth. Her domain even though we both exercise on the road as we do at home. Old age is unremitting and I certainly don't want my legs to seize up for want of movement after all that time I spent learning to walk in the hospital. The round silver thing is the water tank cap where we can fill the water tank by hand if there is no hose available. We even bought water filters to purify water as we fill the tank. A stream will do as our source if necessary. I would rather just plug a hose into the other pressure filler and let the water pressure do the work but I like having simple back up systems. We could live in the woods for a long time if we wanted to, as long as Kindle keeps functioning...

The middle cupboard of the basement with all the recovery gear and stuff is actually pretty huge. Inside the living space of the van the basement forms a step up from the kitchen floor. In this way we were able to scrap plans to carry a bulky and awkward box on the back of the van on a hitch and put equipment we may need from time to time out of sight. 

On the roof we have our four 100-watt solar panels which put out up to 20 amps combined between all of them every hour in the  brightest and most overhead sunshine. If we don't run the air conditioning and we have a reasonable day of mild sunlight the roof will keep our massive battery bank well charged. We run our inverter all the time and keep the electric fridge on and all our wall units and cooking accessories available.

All our outlets work when we want them just as one does at home. The idea of having to ration electricity seems very uncomfortable and annoying to me in this era of modern technology. The little black box is a fan and the big black box is the air conditioner which we run off our batteries with a cell phone booster mounted on top. I'm not sure the booster does much but everybody swears by them...

Under the bed in a distant compartment we will store our new winter clothing, a puffy jacket thermal underwear and waterproof boots. We are resigned to facing cold damp weather even in summer and a large part of dealing with that is having at least a few bits of clothing that will help. 

Getting the clothing right will be a long difficult curve after so many years of treating a  fleece as heavy duty winter clothing.

Boxes bins and an increasing number of empty spaces on the walls define my life at home. I had forgotten what a long drawn out drag is the process of packing up a house. 

Rusty sleeps through chaos. An example to us all.  

Retirement, At Last

I have signed my exit papers and my last  day at work officially is October 2nd.

Between now and then I work a few more days and then burn off my accumulated leave. Essentially I am done and am turning my attention to helping Layne complete the packing and sorting the innumerable details of separation from daily life and working for a living. 

It would be invidious to go into the reasons, and there are several, why my wife and I decided to push the process up. One big consideration  is the rampant spread of the virus and the contact the police department will be forced to have with the Fantasy Fest super spreader event. Partial cancellation won't do enough to limit crowds and may only damage the incomes to be made from an event that seems startlingly out of touch with the spread of the virus. 

My wife and I are fortunate we can protect her weakened immune system from a lot of potential exposure and it seemed silly to go on risking transmission for no clear reason. I signed my retirement paper with a mixture of sadness and elation.

It has been a fortunate career for me but the employment situation in Key West is such that working permanently short staffed with people half my age who have a different work ethic to me has been wearing me down.  It startled me but my wife confronted me at home after my last shift and said you need to retire right now. I guess she noticed me falling asleep earlier and earlier and me dragging my ass more and more. Working two person shifts was wearing me down after years of expecting three people to be in the room. The stress is increased exponentially.

I am grateful to my wife for insisting we get jobs with pensions and I am grateful to the city of Key West for the chance to work in such a place with the opportunity to learn skills I never imagined I would learn. I can now speak "police" a language I never expected to need to know. I understand the difficulties of police work a lot better than I did two decades ago and my respect for the work that has to be done, in the face of the bad publicity from the big cities, has not diminished. I know I completely lack the patience required of a police officer in the street.

But I am also very much aware I am a dinosaur in a dispatch center full of dispatchers who seem to lack the basic skills of cherishing each other and working together. If someone needed a day off we used to club together and figure out coverage to help a colleague see a doctor or have a chance to swap a shift to be with family. I don't see that collegiality among my younger brethren and I blame myself for expecting too much of people who work and live and speak in a  culture different from my own. I simply don't fit in, and perhaps I never really did but Key West used to allow you to smooth over rough edges and we got along. Most probably I am just old and weird and out of touch and they are happy in their world of dispatch. I hope so because answering 911 is hard enough and doing it permanently short staffed is exhausting.

Finally I have to admit I am also old fashioned inasmuch as I have plans for my life. We always plan and try to follow the plan rather than just pile on debt, work and hope it all works out. My reward for working too much isn't an expensive car or jewelry but a vacation, a journey, something different to remember all winter long.  My wife and I are both passionate travelers and we know what it takes to get on the road. We have been discussing our post retirement life for the past five years  and staying in the Keys was never on the cards. It's not just the expense, its the return on investment. For us the lack of access to services, from plumbing to medical was going to be an issue. Road access is growing annoying as traffic gets heavier and slower with every passing year on the highway and the drive to build up and limit access to public spaces seems a constant feature of life in these islands. The latest census shows 10,000 more people living here and thousands of wealthy demanding middle class suburbanites have replaced the drunks and idlers and pirates of common myth. Besides I do not enjoy fishing or drinking so for me there is every incentive to leave once the anchor of work is removed. There is a world of fog, mountains, towns, forests and coastlines to explore and photograph.

I have long said Key West is an enchanted place if you can find satisfying work that pays well, and I did just that, pretty much by accident. And my wife the lawyer turned teacher did too. For us it was magical to get to work and play in an endless summer. Consider this:  my wife commuted the seven mile bridge for years one of the most iconic views in the Sunshine state! We were lucky to have serious jobs we liked and to be allowed to work the daily grind in a community where eccentricity was once prized and a point of view was simply the basis for a friendly conversation over a con leche. Incivility in a small island community was social death.

 The content of this page will change and I hope become more interesting even though it will obviously no longer be about Key West. I have felt for a while the burnout must be apparent but I would not wish to disappoint so I have done my best to find material to write about without sounding repetitive but it hasn't always felt successful. My plan is to change the name of the page to The Golden Van and I have purchased thegoldenvan.com which if you type it in even now will redirect to this page. However the underlying url to all of this is conchscooter@blogspot.com which isn't changing.  You will still be able to type in Key West Diary as I also own keywestdiary.com and have that address redirected! 

I may not be able to post an essay a day after November 1st as there will be no more sitting at a desk growing fat and restless, besides I will be dependent on a Verizon wireless signal to be connected. But I will keep posting pictures and commentary here for what I hope is an adult readership that is interested in more than what I had for breakfast and the view I saw out the back doors of the van. Van Life at my age is a tool to explore, to see and to learn. Video is too labor intensive, time consuming and band width sucking for me to want to get involved with YouTube.  So the more things change the more they will stay the same here.

Expect US travels visiting friends for a few weeks followed by a  winter spent exploring Baja California I hope. Next summer we plan to drive to Alaska before seeing how the virus will impact an attempt to drive to Patagonia. All is dependent on our health, the health of the van and whatever else may be going on in the world. There is always lots to see in the good old USA, though if it were up to us we'd like to do that when we are older and less able to cope with adversity than we are now.  I find US travel very low stress and easy.

That's it for now, my life may be changing but yours isn't necessarily so enjoy low stress with much fun whatever you are doing, and if you are in the throes of change you have my sympathy because change, as much as it may be desired, is by its nature disruptive and therefore hard. Speaking as an almost former dispatcher, stay away from Covid, even if it doesn't kill you it's nasty. Vaccinate, wear a mask and think before you act. 

Best wishes

Michael.

The Nomad. Panama 1999

Costa Rica 1999

We spent the summer of the last year of the 20th century sailing through rainstorms in Central America. We didn't know it yet as we hadn't crossed the Panama Canal but the Pacific Coast of Central America was very different to the Caribbean side, and in some ways much more pleasant. Debs was the brown dog and Emma was the yellow Lab who sailed with us from San Francisco to Key West. And seemed to enjoy it. The boat was a Gemini 105, a 34 foot catamaran which was a novelty in 1999 in Central America.

Fishing through the massive albums of photographs I find Layne and I both took more pictures than I remembered, though I do remember wanting to document the journey as both of us had fallen short in our separate lives of travel before we got married. Zip lining was a new thing 20 years ago but we were ready to give it a go. Gloriously free of safety gear, a harness and a pair of garden gloves was all we needed.

I was never too mechanically driven but  could do basic maintenance even if grumpily. My main goal in traveling by van now is to keep the machine as simple as possible with the least systems. Back then I insisted our dinghy outboard be a very small simple two stroke two horsepower engine that drive us at a gentle walking pace. We did rather envy our neighbors zipping to town on a plane with 15 horsepower motors but when we accidentally drowned the engine in the surf we could as you can see bring in back to life with a toothbrush and some careful cleaning. 

Surf was a constant of the open coastline swept by the Pacific Ocean. When we anchored in a bay, and Costa Rica had quite a few, it was a joy to know I wouldn't get wet crashing onto the beach through the waves with two dogs anxious for their twice daily walk.    Here I ran Miki G up onto the beach at low tide and cleaned the bottom and with Ian checked the condition of the two rudders. Debs pounced on crabs until one caught him and bit him on the nose.

We thought we were isolated, Robinson Crusoe style with a machine to make fresh water from salt, a tarp to catch rainwater and a propane fridge filled with food. In fact we were never very far from the fish counter of the local Publix. I am not a fisherman but I know how to buy them so you can imagine we ate well.

Bob and Barb were our other boat neighbors and we sailed with them all over Central America and the Caribbean. He was a retired computer executive and played engineer with great joy. He loved to sail and he became a bit of a father figure to me. He died back in Arkansas a few years later, suddenly, of a heart attack at the gym. His widow Barb, got remarried to a  really nice landlubber and lived in a retirement community in Arkansas where we went to visit her one last time. I look at this picture and all I remember is laughter as we got stuck in the mangroves, Bob fought the outboard and Barb forced us ever deeper into hopeless  exploration.

They were glorious days of being youngish, around 40, and not having to do anything or be anywhere. We weren't ocean crossing fiends like Webb Chiles but we were cultural explorers and my wife was indulging my desire to do it on a boat. We both came to love the independence of having our own home, an escape pod from the culture that surrounded us.  The burn out of living out of a suitcase never affected us and we had our life and our dogs and a familiar space wherever we went. Books too:

I have heard from other sailors with children that their offspring tended to break down barriers with the locals. I found in the pharmacy at Paquera in Costa Rica big happy Emma did the same for the assistants stuck behind the counter. 

We checked out of Costa Rica, turning in our cruising permit, getting a permit to leave Costa Rica to prove to the next country that we left behind no debts or obligations. Costa Rica is always sold in the US as the most middle class "safe" country in Central America but we found it rather dull especially compared to Panama. We were in no hurry to check in so we dawdled along the coast, technically between countries, and did some more Robinson Crusoe stuff living among deserted islands. Debs was not thrilled about bath time but effort-free water was too good to pass up. Rainy season has its benefits.

It's hard to overstate how heavenly it was to live that life. The islands were uninhabited, occasionally we met fish camps but we walked the hills surrounding our anchorage until our dogs were exhausted. We had supplies enough to need no one else for several weeks and we took advantage. At night we played spades and slept the sleep of the just.  In our own homes.

Ian and Anna from Seattle became like siblings for us, people who would be there for a while sharing everything, and then when we separated we always knew we would catch up later and carry on for a while as though there had been no break in the routine. We plan to stop by in the van and see them again in person after a long break.

In northern Panama I tried my hand at river navigation, my first attempt since I had run hard aground a decade before up the Napa River.  It took two days to reach the river town of David ("Dah- veed") with no serious lapses. Our boat drew less than two feet of water, a traditional sailboat rammed a rock in the river with  a  five foot deep keel. In Panama we had to deal with dog quarantine. That was fun.

A Second Chance

I made  a promise when I left the hospital after three months and I made it to the nurses who looked after me, and the therapists who repaired me, and the surgeon, Doctor Quinnan who spent hours sewing my pelvis back together. The promise was that if I survived the ordeal I would life a life worth living. 

I went back to the hospital when I could walk with a walker, with my still swollen feet in the hateful slippers, to thank everyone for their trouble and they were surprised I showed up,  telling me patients always say they will come back but they never do. I was and remain too grateful not to tell them in person. I wish I could go back now that I am walking as normal, to tell them that I am not holding back from seeing them, but they know but Covid has other plans for us all. Hospitals submerged by the virus are closed to us non patients. No visitors and I wonder at the burnout these brave workers face now...

I was reading an article about a man called Michael Caputo who was a fierce political consultant ripping opponents to shreds, until he got cancer in the head and came face to face with death and radiation. He has found God and a new calmer self. I can see how that might have happened even though I find my path forward to be rather less spiritual and rather more practical.

I didn't  find God but I did find myself questioning how to spend the rest of my life. I suppose to some extent that question has been in my head all my life with a  certain amount of thought and planning involved, and a certain amount of the usual blind luck. The accident and the aftermath gave me a great deal of clarity and certainty which translated into a much easier life, oddly enough. Bystanders  tend to think a severe accident will cloud your life but for me it swept away doubts and self questioning. That notion of making every day count became much clearer and simpler to me.

Too often the gurus tell the seekers to be mindful and aware and live in the moment which is all very well but impossible to do because perforce the effort wears you out and the notion slips away. Its absolutely impossible to make every moment count so have found myself seeking out curiosity as my way of being mindful. I try not to take things for granted and I never assume things "happen for a reason." Make lemonade out of lemons of course but in my world view there isn't anyone out there chucking lemons at you; shit just happens by chance, sometimes helped along by poor preparation. Those of us in the first world have better tools for coping than the helpless and hungry and abandoned of the world. Why they get ripped off and starved with no recourse makes me sick, but for someone to tell me everything "happens for a reason" makes no sense at all. Tell that to a Somali mother watching her children starve or Haitians getting flattened by earthquakes, or Yemeni families bombed to obliteration by Saudi Arabia. They suffer for a reason?

As I lay in bed wondering if feeling would come back into my legs I asked myself what to do for the rest of my life? The conventional answers came back but I have never been, by nature someone designed to sit still in one place and teach others to read or to cut carrots at a  soup kitchen, things I have done but not found satisfying. Webb Chiles actually proffered a solution to the question that accompanied my thoughts as I lay in my hospital bed motionless in the middle of the night as the Percocet wore off and the pain came back. (How is it that legs you can't feel and can't move can cause aching pain at the same time? Weird).

"While most think of me as a sailor, I think of myself as an artist and have defined the artist's fundamental responsibility as going to the edge of human experience and sending back reports. That is what I have done for almost half a century."

Webb Chiles

My wife was always there worrying about me, shopping for me, defending my treatment needs at the weekly meetings at the hospital, arguing with the insurance company to get me more days in rehab. She drove 10,000 miles over the weeks to keep an eye on me and manage her classroom in Marathon. Even Rusty was roped in to the support committee. I ended up with an unheard of 58  days in rehab, most people's insurance pays for a week or ten days. My wife wasn't having that and I got the full measure offered by Cigna.

I talked to her about what we might  do afterwards. She never allowed herself to think I might not walk again and as I tossed ideas around we settled on traveling as a form of self expression. Send back reports as Webb would have put. As he did in fact put it to me. Just so you know I was absolutely terrified of the parallel bars. I look at this picture below of me struggling to get to my feet and I recall the feeling of staring into the abyss as I hung on tight with my hands and tried to drag my useless feet under me. It might as well have been walking a tight rope across Niagara Falls

We had been thinking about retirement even before the wreck but we went into high gear. I stopped riding motorcycles partly from PTSD, no doubt, but also because I wanted to travel together not by myself anymore. I no longer felt the need to take time away. I quit being a  supervisor at work, took a pay cut and shed the burden of responsibility that I had never wanted in the first place. We had done this before when we went sailing and now we decided we wanted to see more, to be on land, to make travel easier and the exploration more in depth. We settled on a van for our retirement and found a builder to meet our specifications. Custom Coach Creations in Deland.

I was pleased that Webb gave his seal of approval and indeed asked me to name the van after his record setting boat, a Moore 24 called Gannet and totally unsuitable for the circumnavigation he made on board the 24 foot ultralight racing boat. In point of fact it's only the human that may be unsuitable, and even though no one thought you could sail around the world on a Moore 24 Webb did. I'm not of his caliber obviously (who is?) but I know a modest, comfortable Promaster van isn't deemed suitable for gnarly long distance travel but I trust I shall be able to muddle through with Layne and Rusty to keep me on an even keel. Most over landers drive four wheel drive monsters capable of scaling cliffs and fording rivers, but that's not for me as I prefer an gentler form of driving. So when Webb said to name the van after Gannet I, disbelieving, agreed of course.

Layne enjoyed pulling Webb's leg pointing out we were cramming 3 people (Rusty is a person here) into a 21 foot waterline and he sails alone with 24 feet to his name. But the honor is all ours. And whatever happens next is by our choice, a choice made with our eyes open wide. We left a  life in California in 1998 that didn't need to be left and we do the same in 2021 from Key West. We could have chosen to stay here, keep our benefits, keep our salary, keep our vacations, keep our seniority, but for me and it turns out for Layne that path leads to a slow inner death. I've died once and I don't want to do it again without seeking out something more. Perhaps I'm greedy. 

Whatever happens on the road, however far we get, however much things may go wrong, or right, none of it is planned, but none of it will be unexpected. I set off from home three years ago on a banal ride to work like so many others. It all went wrong, completely unexpectedly, for no discernible reason, but in the end I cast off with ease so many strictures of daily living that had held me back. I know what I want now and I have no interest in holding back. Whatever the experiences to come they are mine, I asked for them, Layne agreed and Rusty will have a better life than he otherwise would have. This is my last chance at life and I shall blame no one, not even myself, whatever happens.

The Madding Crowd

Summer is back because the southeast wind has dropped, at least for now. Humidity is my friend in September, though I keep it at arm's length with air conditioning until I step out of the car, when I release the hound and take a look through my camera to check the settings. 

With an all-in-one bridge camera and a built-in zoom lens I don't need to haul a  camera bag around with me. I do make sure I have a microfiber cloth in my pocket separate from the leash and plastic bag. To get rid of the fog on the lens it's best to wait for the camera to warm up and the external moisture to fade. The you wipe up the rest and you are back in business.  Tropical fun!

I was doubly pleased I rolled out of bed on my day off to watch the sun come up. On the one hand I hadn't been to Bahia Honda for a week or more and then on the next day I got a text at four in the morning announcing a dispatcher had called out sick. Rusty had woken me up for his pre-dawn mail check, the walk we take before I go to work, and on my day off he waited till five. The text meant no day off together as we are so short staffed one sick call out throws 911 into crisis. Off I went to save the day and make 12 hours overtime.

It's a schizophrenic life switching between closeted days stuck in a room answering endless calls for help, rants, and queries I can't answer without referring to my friend and savior Google. I'm a civilian and I have no idea how old you have to be to drive a jet ski in Florida. I never went to the police academy nor did I study law enforcement in college. I simply send  help and it is a misunderstanding to think a 911 operator can help you unravel legal questions.. The other half of my life involves me tramping around in silence with my mute dog and my unresponsive camera. What do you think, I ask the Lumix FZ1000..? It opens the electronic shutter as silently as Rusty or myself. We walk on silently together.

I drove back to Summerland Key to meet my wife and a friend of 15 years for an al fresco, distanced breakfast at the Galley Grill. I ate chopped up vegetables and eggs, Layne had shrimp and grits, her breakfast treat, and Carol had a selection of sides because she's even more high maintenance than Layne.  Carol retired from the school district and fortunately did a lot of traveling before Covid, by flitting to South America and Africa and adding to her long list of islands she has visited.

They went to Easter Island a few years ago to celebrate a birthday in their women's group and for a while the house was filled with replicas of granite heads and moai tea cloths and things. I busied myself learning about how the islanders screwed up their island with war and ecological destruction until the lesson seemed rather too apparent and uncomfortable to continue to read about.  I prefer to think about how that group of women exploring Rapa Nui and coming home with so many stories, are peeling off now and retiring and waiting for the world to welcome them back, far from their former classrooms.

I got a call from a person with a parking issue while I was at work. Its a routine 30 second call is a parking violation, where I get the address, the nature of the violation and a brief description of the vehicle so parking control knows what to look for on the street. Usually there is a long rigmarole where the caller wants to justify calling out a parked car so I let them rant if there aren't other calls waiting. The issue of parking in Key West is always anger provoking as too many people expect not to have to walk to a parked car even if they don't have off street parking or if they converted their garage into another bedroom depriving themselves of a private spot. I sit back and dream of my vast parking area at my suburban home in Cudjoe which easily accommodates my big-ass van.

This guy said there was a car parked in residential in front of his house. Fair enough: "residential no sticker" is my abbreviation for the notes...except this one did have a residential sticker. So... er... I asked what's the violation? No violation he said. I want to give you the license plate so you can find the owners name and phone and I can call him and ask him to move the car as I have just moved down to Key West and I have a truck coming with my furniture from the mainland.  Great idea! Except...

I am not allowed to give out private personal information to the public. I have access to a mass of private information, social security numbers, addresses, driving history and on and on and on for anyone with a  Florida residence. If I mess with this stuff I not only get fired but get criminally prosecuted. I am a civilian and only allowed to give it out to a sworn police officer and they decide how to use the information.  When I leave work I forget what I saw and I never talk about it. Do you want me discussing your criminal history at a cocktail party (if we ever have one again)? Or your emergency contact numbers? Of course not.

I tried to explain that what I could do was send him an officer who could assess the situation and perhaps make the call using information I could provide. Often we have names and phone numbers from previous encounters and the officer can authorize me to make the call to prevent a vehicle getting towed, say, or to ask someone to reassure an anxious relative Up North with a phone call. I like being able to help people where I can as an antidote to hearing about how screwed up the world is. The irate newcomer to Key West was thoroughly unpleasant and when I tried to explain the possibility of reserving the spot for unloading by getting advanced permission all I did was start another rant. I used to think new arrivals with this mindset wouldn't last very long in laid back Key West. Nowadays I fear they are the majority.

I think this bird is a long tailed swallow and you can see them soaring about looking like they are having a  thoroughly enjoyable life up there riding the drafts. They don't live as long as we do and I don't see them reading many books so I shouldn't envy them at all and I don't. But I do miss them when I am closeted up in that room listening to people whose circumstances prevent them enjoying life at all costs. Sometimes life really does suck, no blame or fault is necessary and its good to have someone to call about it, but I can't wait for it not to be me anymore.