Arm Wrestling Stuff

 Alligator Alley at dawn.

Layne is sleeping, Rusty is walked and Gannet 2 is covered in dew. It is hot sticky and humid and weirdly enough this is a place we have stopped before, it is familiar and known and at the same time the circumstances make it as strange as the proverbial dark side of the moon.

The background is a symphony of truck engines and swooshing vehicles on the freeway, the light is flat and gray and my choices are a small plastic toilet in a broom closet or shared institutional facilities, clean but reminiscent of a prison or my English boarding school of fond memory. Life on the road, why did we do this?

Were we being sensible in our former home on the canal on Cudjoe Key we'd be shuffling around our own spaces, planning a day which in this age of plague was not quite the retirement one might have hoped for. Ironically enough it was easier to deal with coronavirus at work, head down, routines, no expectations for shared entertainment or intimate gatherings. On a day off one expects to gather and share and be together. As a houseless nomad on the road one is glad to be able to be isolated.

I got the last load of stuff dropped off last night near the Miami airport.  I hate stuff more passionately than ever especially after humping tons of crap everywhere. I've put it in strangers' cars (after they gave me money for it!), I've watched my wife press it on friends embarrassed by their desire, I've offloaded a ton of it at the smelly slimy dump, I've made repeated trips up the Accursed Highway to Miami to drop piles of it off. But stuff got its revenge. I arrived at the storage locker to a cheerful greeting.

How's it going the clerk asked as I stopped by to get a key for the carts they keep locked to the walls. Great I said, in Spanish and English. How I didn't get lost I don't know but I piled the last load on their cart, hauled it for miles through creepy dark corridors of lockers and got back to Rusty snoring under the air conditioning vent, with myself in a lather of sweat. No more stuff I swore to myself as I wrung out my sweat soaked shirt.

We ate ribs for dinner and watched an episode, the last available until they release the next episode, of the Great British Bake Off wherein Giuseppe the Italian beat his good buddy Jürgen the German and got Star Baker on German Week. Excellent. My Italian half brushed his teeth with extra vigor. Rusty snored from his bed in a dark recess of the van.

I slept long and hard from 10 till 5 hence my ability to put this page together with I think reasonable coherence. Honestly it was a day like yours, chores and duties and obligations, the passing of time all followed by unconsciousness. I will say I look forward to breaking away after we say goodbyes to friends and the familiar places to being alone and discovering roads and towns not before seen. But all in all what we did in 72 square feet you did in a proper space. We are just like you.

Except it turns out we accidentally threw out Layne's coffee with all the unwanted stuff, so that was another case of stuff having the last laugh. Layne's not laughing but I'm pretty sure Rusty is.

Don't Forget Your Keys

——This was my final post as a Keys resident. Click the title at the top of the page for my latest entry. I’ve posted here since 2007 and still post here most days from my life on the road. Cheers Michael ————

Monday 25th October 8:00pm 

Rest Area in Alligator Alley I-75

As you read this I have left the Florida Keys and Van Life begins. I am happy about this change in my life, this page therefore is no longer a diary about a place or fulfilling other people's fantasies but a true record of where we go and when and how we make the journey. I used to laugh as I slipped under the toll booth awning at Alabama Jack's, in the days before they automated the Sunpass toll into the Keys.  The Keys I shouldn't forget! It will be difficult to do that.

I prefer Card Sound Road to the idiocy of the two lane Stretch between Homestead and Key Largo. The state decided to keep The Stretch down to two lanes in order to lengthen potential hurricane evacuation times. This would supposedly hold back development as the Keys have to able to be evacuated in 36 hours  under threat of hurricanes. By creating a no passing two lane road the idea was evacuation times would take longer and fewer homes could be built.  The net effect is road rage, illegal passing and tail gating as cars hurry to get to the next passing zone as quickly as possible. My last piece of Keys advice? Take Card Sound Road and pay the Sunpass Toll around a buck and enjoy a laid back drive.

The Seven Mile Bridge, my wife's commute for many years, is the goal of anyone who drives the Keys, and you can wave at Fred the wild tree still flourishing on the old bridge. I shan't see the Christmas decorations this year but I am fairly certain a boatload of pirates will sail to Fred and light the lights.

I hate to say it but at this point it can be said: Highway One has become over trafficked and is struggling to handle too much traffic. The new road has served since 1982 but the Internet allows anyone to work from home, to live where they want and everyone with money wants a slice of the safe tropics. That means too many people which means slower travel times which is okay if you are new because your expectations are what you find. Year round tourism is new and tiring.

Our escape pod is a slow moving box that will take the right lane and pull over for following cars. No schedule, destination uncertain, speed not fast, 60 miles per hour to save gas and wear and tear.  Frequent stops, so we step aside to allow those with deadlines to get where they are going. In Michigan this had the unfortunate effect of nice people pulling alongside instead of passing and asking us if we were okay! Dirt roads are in our future, lots of exploration, wild camping, street parking, boondocking in the manner of 21st century nomads.

Young Rusty has new horizons and a familiar home. I can't wait to share it all with him and with you, if horizons beyond the Keys hold any interest. Many of you have said they do! I promise frequent updates, lots of pictures and places you've never heard of. I told you of my former neighbor who wrinkled his nose when he asked where we were going and I said Patagonia. Where's that? he said. I've never heard of it. He'll see it in glorious technicolor if he stumbles across this page. Fingers crossed and off we go. First stop: unglamorous St Petersburg  for the first of some non Keys goodbyes (Webb will be next).  Rusty is enjoying van life, new smells on new horizons.

I stopped this Monday afternoon briefly to take a couple of pictures, my last in the Keys. Layne was driving the Fiat 500 to it's new owner in St Petersburg so Rusty and I were alone, and he took the co-pilot's seat.

"Thanks for Visiting the Florida Keys" the sign says nowadays but still I promise not to forget my Keys. They were a good time, a special time filled with friends and things to see and photograph. Like one reader said this stage of my life resembles the last frame in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips of very fond memory. This is cheerio, not goodbye for ever. Lots to see in the meantime.

I hope one day to see the Registan of Samarkand too but that will be a much later story. 

We travel not for trade alone

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned

For lust of knowing what ought not be known

We take the Golden Road to Samarkand

James Flecker

The End Of The Journey, Key West 2000

Leaving Cuba after the storm cleared and we had finished exploring Punta Jutia we sailed once again for Key West and the next evening we dropped anchor behind Christmas Tree Island. The dogs got their walks immediately of course  and we slept secure ion the knowledge we had arrived, almost penniless, back in the US of A.  The next morning after another island walk we pulled up at the fuel dock at the city marina and called Customs to check us in.

It was good to be back but we were still thinking about our crazy illegal time anchored off Cuba's north shore, as in this photo taken from the upper deck of a friendly Cuban boat anchored nearby avoiding the same storm.

We walked around Key West at this stage pretty sure we were going back to our house in California. We missed our friends in Santa Cruz but I had no desire to go back to the great pay of truck driving 18 wheelers through San Francisco, and Layne had no desire to go back to lawyering. We walked and pondered our future.  

The thing I notice about our pictures of Key West was how little so much of it has changed in the past twenty years. We checked out houses and found a crappy upstairs studio for $185,000 making us think our boat might be best. We weren't even thinking of hurricane damage possible every summer at that point.

Curtis, Robert and his wife Nola greeted us and made us feel at home. I knew them from previous efforts to settle in Florida and at some point we figured we might want to join them. What happened was that Layne found her arthritis hurt much less in the tropical heat than in the cold damp of coastal California. The plan slowly formed that perhaps we should stay and settle in Key West.

I still liked living on the water, photographed here rowing into Garrison Bight from the mooring Curt loaned us out by Rat Island. We surprised our friends by applying for work. Layne got hired as aJuvenile probation officer much to her surprise. In those days regular office jobs were easy to come by as work in bars and hotels paid a lot more but Layne wanted a pension. She was determined on that point. I got hired as about captain thanks to my license, earned in a. moment of madness and I turned my hobby into my job. That pension thing kept nagging which is how I ended up at the police department. We sold our California home and bought a house on Ramrod Key and there we were. A new life done and dusted.

The dogs continued traveling with us as we moved between our old life in California and our new life in Florida. It took us a while to move what stuff we needed, to sell the boat and to move into a new life.

I took this picture on Grinnell near Five Brothers and I remember it well. I used to commute in this car to my job in San Jose and a friend kept it for us while we went sailing. It had no air conditioning but we drove it back and forth between Santa Cruz and Key West.

With two large dogs, alternating between the front and back seats. We humans shared the driving and the dogs switched between the back seat as one of us rested and the front seat keeping the driver company. We surprised a few people at our stops as the four of uncoiled from inside the little clown car. That Geo Metro 5 speed was a brilliant little machine.

Back in the US the stops along I-10 were rather less scenic than the places we had explored from the boat. But we went back to walking and exploring as we could.

I am not looking forward to droning I-10 even now so I am planning a zig zag route to see friends in Arizona next month. We saw a lot of desert in those years.

Debs stopped eating suddenly while we were in Santa Cruz. He had inoperable liver cancer and died suddenly just like that, to general family devastation. Emma mourned him for the rest of her life but she lived on for a few more years dying eventually in our Ramrod Key house with Dr Edie in attendance, the same vet who just gave Rusty his travel documents for our next journey. It's been a long life earning our pensions. I am ready for another go.

The buddies running through their favorite Santa Cruz walk, the open space at Porter Sesnon in Aptos.

Caroline and Duval

This used to be the Cypress House but this hotel chain has bought up a bunch of places around town and calls them Klimpton. Clean tidy and freshly painted. 

Not everyone is ready for the well heeled masses. This is the sort of repair of which I approve:

The Curry Mansion soldiers on unperturbed by change overlooking Caroline Street:

They are tearing up and repairing Whitehead Street, which in the ordinary course of things would be a good thing during low tourist season. This year there is no end to the stream of visitors and I have no doubt next month when Canadians are allowed back half of Quebec will decamp to the warmer South, including Higgs Beach in their Volkswagens. Bloody van dwellers!

I liked photographing the working classes doing their thing on Duval Street. At work I used to get endless complaints from a few irritated shop owners rendered apoplectic by bad parking and endless unloading.

Cruise ship stores aren't recovering because cruise ships aren't coming back for the foreseeable. City residents voted against the former flow of 800 large ships a year and the state is fighting back and I've heard it said sip operators aren't keen to visit a town that doesn't want them.

There were lots of people forecasting doom and economic gloom without cruise ships and their money. Obviously pilots and ships agents must feel the shortfall but neither the city nor the budget seem deeply impacted. Maybe that will change over time.

I don't think the argument that cruise ships show prospective long term tourists a good time is holding water. Thousands of people are finding their way here every single week it seems. The recent mercy stop to unload a sick passenger gave a graphic aerial illustration of the pollution thrown up by the ship as it docked in the formerly pristine teal colored waters. The Citizen newspaper shows a lovely brown smear all round the ship as it docked. 

I saw a powerful off-road Jeep parked on Rose Lane. This is what I should have bought to drive the sand pits of Central Florida...

Finally I caught. glimpse inside the Casa Antigua without actually paying for a tour. Enjoy.

And indeed poor old Hemingway, that Key West symbol, stayed here when stuck by travel plans gone awry, in 1928 I think it was. He learned to like Key West but stayed half the time I did. He didn't need a pension though so he had that excuse for decamping to his favorite home - in Cuba. 2009 Finca Vigia Link.

The Sally Army

My wife got a call this morning from some hopeful who had noticed a previous posting for a piece of furniture for sale. Too late, you'll find it at the Big Pine Salvation Army store on the Overseas Highway.

It was a still, hot sweaty day but they worked like...I was going to say dogs but as we'll see Rusty did nothing to help. He slept in the back of the van that I had moved out of the way to get the furniture truck backed up to the stairs.

They said the weather was good for them, no sun blasting death rays on them out of a clear blue sky, reducing them to pools of sweat. They liked the gray still overcast with a slight breeze to help them climb the stairs up and down. I've done it a good few times in the process of moving stuff out. There are seventeen steps and they get tiring by the end of a long day.

They swept up the house leaving us sitting on garden furniture with a rater startled dog sleeping on his usual beds no longer surrounded by the furniture he was used to. I felt bad for him as he stared puzzled at the empty space where his couch used to be.

He's starting to get a bit anxious so I have the pleasure of reassuring him when his nerves get the better of him. I never leave him at home these days and he comes everywhere I go tying up loose ends.

We have until the end of the month to leave but Monday is our target day to leave. The funny thing is we can't move aboard Gannet 2 at the moment because our mobile home is also our garbage scow! The few odds and ends left by the Sally Army sweep will be rolled up and loaded onto our bed and hauled three miles to the dump on the other side of Cudjoe.

Small stuff goes in the trash cans but large stuff will get hauled to the dump Monday morning and with the van restored to its proper function, the journey will begin. We signed off on the removal, slipped them some cash for there work and stood on the deck to say goodbye. My mind started wandering as I looked out across the expanse of sheet metal that constituted the one piece roof of the furniture van. Hmm, I said to Layne, we could make a pretty comfortable cottage in there when we get tired of driving foreign dirt. Lots of room for solar panels and we could have a fixed bed and a couch on there. I started speculating idly on the McMansion possibilities. Layne liked the idea of the tailgate as a folding sunset deck. The delivery guys laughed at us, with us perhaps as we turned their tool into a vacation home in our minds.

I jest, and at this point Rusty is starting to treat the van as his home so we are all set. Offload the leftovers, fill up the tank and off to the Great Unknown. 

Rusty practicing for life on the road as a houseless van dweller.

 

Last Saturday

It's my wife's fault, all of it. She planned our path to retirement and she played the ant to my grasshopper. I was a willing participant and I approved the plan. It has worked perfectly. Not without the occasional shudder and debate, but here we are, our last weekend in the Keys.

I read an interview last week with noted Scottish comedian Billy Connolly who has moved next to his daughter in Key West in what the interview said is the final stages of Parkinson's disease. Yes, I thought to myself, the perfect climate in which to grow old and die. He even likes to fish when he is well enough and I only like to fish at Publix. Nothing in common, time to move on. He has enough money to live easily in this tropical pearl, a not inconsiderable consideration.

How odd the human brain is, seeking logic and justification to explain and reassure itself. I'm doing the right thing!  Change is good! And yet the sadness of good byes is always there. Because they are good friends they reassure me that we will meet again, next year same place, that we are doing the right thing and so forth.

My rational brain is clear on the motive and the desire, but then I look at Rusty, because I am irrational and I wonder how he will enjoy the change.  My wife, the smart member of the team as I said, points out he likes anything as long as he is with us. Of course he does. He even hops into the van of his own accord these days and he'll push Layne off the passenger seat if she gives him half a chance. 

The thing about leaving the Keys is that so many people want to live here. It's perverse, so I tell myself I am making room for someone else. We sold our house five years ago and took a rental as the first step in our five year plan to depart and now the landlord has hired a realtor and the house will be tarted up and put for sale. Probably not to a working class slob in these overpriced islands. 

Those days of bright skies and dark mangroves alone with my dog and my camera are the best of times for me. I've done the boating, the camping at Fort Jefferson, the alcohol at water's edge and under tiki huts, the usual tropical stuff. It's been fun and we have met the kindest most thoughtful people in these island suburbs. We've also seen people leave for one reason or another. We are at an age where aches pains, accidents or even death are not unfamiliar. Every day has to count.

Rusty has come alive with us, a foundling surviving by his wits after being dumped on the edge of the Everglades. He lived where other strays died according to the rescuers who watched him living by his lonesome for months. Dr Edie, the mobile vet, came by and gave him all his shots and inspected him and declared him fit as a fiddle. I declare him mentally sound and ready to go. I like to think I am right.

It takes a lot to make friends in the Keys, a community that sees all too many incomers leave rapidly when they discover the pitfalls of making a life in an expensive community with limited opportunities. You have to stick it out, accept the rejection, wait patiently for friendships to mature and then find yourself on the other side of the weird Keys friendship equation. You find yourself passing judgement on other incomers, you calculate the distance to be traveled and whether you can be bothered. Drive across town for... what? Some people won't cross town, some won't drive further than Stock Island, others see Sugarloaf Key as the dark side of the moon and unattainable.

Then your time comes. Some friends die, it happens, some get sick and leave to live with caretaker family members. Some get tired of the money struggle. Some marry and leave, some marry and become themselves part time residents, snowbirds, the invisible residents. Snowbirds are those people who live a few months a year in Paradise and  then claim to live here because everyone wants that privilege.  Then your turn comes and off you slide into invisible former residency status. You tried, you failed you gave up and those still hanging in try to remember you. Or not.

Some people who turn up here think they become "fresh water Conchs" pale imitations of the people born in, and raised with and imbued with Key West. Some incomers resent Conchs for their exclusionary lives but that special status comes at a price. We have all been Conchs to some degree in other worlds, places perhaps less desirable and less beautiful but they were your home base, your security, your place of acceptance. The place where you knew you belonged come what may, where you had memories and achievements with others obliged to accept you for your history. To be a Conch is to have special privilege in Key West but it also requires total dedication to the family and place. Total commitment that fresh water Conchs can never achieve. They are just incomers of long standing, useful, appreciated and even liked but they are not the ruling council members, those who lived here "back in the day."

I feel lucky and privileged to have had 21 years in Key West, serving at the pleasure of the Conch community and being rewarded with the tools to move on and live a better life by my eccentric standards. I'm always envious in some small measure of those who live settled lives but when I try it, and I have repeatedly, I get itchy irrational feet. Just so now. I want to move and thank heavens my wife does too.

Ask me where I'm from and I have no idea, too many places to list. But now I do at last know where I have been happiest and where I wish I were from. From here on I shall claim Key West as my home and certainly the place where I have lived longest, and from where my pension checks originate. Good enough for a nomad, good enough for me. Thank you Key West.