Time Passes

I was up early, before the dawn made itself felt. Rusty wanted a very short walk, shorter than I would have liked, but the air is thick and muggy in Key West when you have been away enjoying the fresh open spaces across the fruited plain. 

We had Waste Management for company pumping out the many and various porta potties  at all the many construction sites where winter homes are getting their annual face lifts for their few weeks of winter occupancy. 

I sent Webb a note pondering my new status as Keys outsider and he replied with a very warm and kind reply congratulating me on my 65th birthday. I had completely forgotten it was October 31st. 

My sister called me later from Italy to congratulate me on making another birthday but she had forgotten how old I was. Ten years and one week younger than she, is the answer. I also had to update her on my whereabouts as things have got complicated since I took to a roaming old age. I pointed out to her I was back where I started when I used to ride my motorcycle to improbable places and send her a postcard just to annoy her.

Elizabeth (on the left) became the family matriarch after our mother got cancer and died at the absurdly young age of 49 (spoken as a 65 year old) and she has lived in the same house married to the same man for half a century. I have not. 

Giving rides to friends on horses, cultivating fields, becoming a grandmother and managing her unruly twin sister was her life and she gave up on me when I walked away from my responsibilities to our 300 year old family farm. Mind you  I was terrible at it, untrained, unprepared and not at all interested in being an heir. After a decade locked up in an English boarding school with no training on how to be an Italian farmer I wanted to see the world and be someone other than the life that had been planned for me.  It took 25 years of isolation in the New World  for the family to come to terms with the fact I was never going to change and here I am, happy as a clam in a tin box having divested myself of almost everything I own to be free to take off again. This leopard has not changed his spots.

I now find myself traveling not by motorcycle but with the same spirit of curiosity I had when my family expected me to settle down. Now they have no expectations and the fact that I am a 65 year old nomad of no fixed abode causes them no surprise. 

My friends in Key West do the same shoulder shrug. They have had time to get used to the plan. GANNET2 appeared. We took vacations aboard. We packed up our home. We drove away. We left no room for doubt. 

Key West is an orange I have squeezed dry. Unlike most other places I have lived I have no regrets, and feel I left nothing undone. I’ve explored the Sunshine State top to bottom.  I’ve sailed and swim to my hearts content. I remember Key West from before the Internet, when the Citizen and Solares Hill were the publications that glued the community together. I remember the news of the weird column in the paper, grotesque failures of Florida Man in Key West before the internet invented that meme. I remember the Citizens’ Voice when anonymous locals could criticize the great and the good with impunity and hopefully some humor!  All gone. 

That’s the Key West I miss. The cranky, funky, annoying and slightly down at heel town. Cli ate change is making itself felt and a town filled with elderly millionaires struggling to express their inner bohemian isn’t for me.

Some people have asked if we have a satellite SOS machine to send calls for help if we stuck off the grid in South America. I dislike asking for help at the best of times but I was delighted to realize, as I thought about it, I have no one I’d like to send an SOS to…I don’t think most of my acquaintances would find their quality of life improved by a plea for help from somewhere on Bolivia’s Road of Death from an idiot who chose to drive himself into trouble. 

Stock Island at eight in the morning ing is a long line of commuters forced out of the city by impossible house prices begging for admission to serve their betters.  It’s just part of the new reality of life in Key West. The city has no room for the workers needed to make it function. 

November is the month of high, high tides when the sun and moon align and their combined gravitational pull creates what are known as “king tides.” A friend told me the Key Plaza parking lot regularly floods with the tides. And one just adapts. 

I like to joke that only Layne and I went to Key West to get serious jobs and yet here we are completely free to do as we wish thanks to the Florida Keys. It’s a pity the only place I’ve ever considered to be my home is so unlivable for the youngsters to come who might like to do as I did. Or just to live here for a while and make those memories that feed the many years ahead of conformity and duty. Key West shouldn’t be the preserve of the wrinkled and rich. 

Bahia Honda

After almost exactly a year on the road we are back where we started. 

The first thing I noticed was how burned the greenery was and how wind ravaged was the shoreline. Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022 have not been kind to my favorite beach. Rusty didn’t seem to mind. 

He used to ignore the heat but I couldn’t help but feel he might perhaps be missing the cool pine forests of western Montana or the damp summer chill of northern Maine. He dropped into puddles of water repeatedly to cool off. 

We arrived Saturday afternoon a little ahead of schedule and we decided to drop out of the traffic flow heading to Fantasy Fest to spend the night by the water.  Once upon a time we used to come here just twenty minutes from home to test our van and ponder the wisdom of our notion that we should retire and take to the road in a tiny home. Best choice ever. 

“I miss this,” Layne said as we discussed what we missed from our life in the Florida Keys. We don’t miss the Overseas Highway traffic which is considerably less tedious when you are retired with an open schedule. 

We rolled through scenery familiar and enjoyed noting changes as though we had been gone a generation not just a year. 

To return from where you started is bound to cause you to think about the intervening time in a different way. What if we had stayed? 

Key West was a great place to have a job and to earn a pension and we fell into it at the right time for us. I doubt I ever could have held down a job that long anywhere else. So it is right to be grateful to the Keys for the freedom from obligation I now have but I don’t want to go back. I want to spend time with some people and then get back to the business at hand: overlanding. 

We weren’t alone on the beach. Two Cuban couples set up a tent and were fishing nearby.  A greeting in English got a blank stare so we reverted to Mexican travel mode to get a response and later as we prepared for bed the music cranked up. Ah yes, just like any Saturday night on a Mexican beach. They were rank amateurs though as they soon packed it in where Mexicans would have kept going till four in the morning at least. We slept. 

It was a good wild camp spot and ideal to decompress before we dived into the Lower Keys. Breakfast for dinner with a side order of blood sucking mosquitoes so we buttoned up and turned on the air conditioning.