The Pre-Dawn Ride

The alarm goes off at 4:45 and I roll quickly out of bed before I have time to think about it. The house is cool, thanks to the air conditioner and the fans swirling in each of our four rooms, moving the air steadily round our little house. We have no street lights on our road and outside its completely dark, at least it is two weeks out of the month. This period is the other half of the month and the moon, waning is doing its best to imitate daylight.

My wife packs my lunch the night before, my man purse is packed and ready to go and the newspaper hasn't yet arrived in the driveway so I'm pretty much ready to go. The scooter lurks in the gloom under the house, wedged between our two cars, and I can do the loading by feel so I prefer not to hit the outside lights and spoil the effect.

My wife's 150 has the same accessories as my 250 so the loading plan is the same, lunchbox in the trunk, man purse under the seat, helmet on my head. The engine's louder on the air-cooled 150 than it is on the water-cooled 250 but I don't think that any neighbors across the canal could be woken by it. The neighbors on either side of my home are separated by empty lots, besides which, neither house is occupied, as my erstwhile neighbors spend millions not to actually occupy the structures. Suits me.

My street is one lane wide and three quarters of a mile long, just enough to warm the engine before pulling out onto Highway One. The air is warm enough that the chill from the air conditioning has long since worn off. Heading south on the Overseas Highway the 150 is decidedly more languid than the 250 which generally hits 60mph by the time we're passing the illuminated sign at Boondocks Bar.

Mangrove bushes line the roadway, barely visible in the headlight beam, until they fall away and cement barricades mark the start of the humpback bridge which rises forty feet above Niles Channel. Tourists love to slow down as they reach the hump and look out over the waterways, little do they know the descent into Summerland Key is a passing lane...I do, and I'm ready!

At 5:15am Summerland Key is just a few street lights shining on the sleeping gas station, my wife's dentist lurking in an ugly mud brown building, my video store flashes by, followed in quick succession by the hardware shop ("small enough to know you, bigger than we look") and the Post Office which marks the end of civilization as I know it.

The Highway gets darker for the most part after we breast the bridge onto Cudjoe Key, the odd illumination followed by long stretches of darkness, the Vespa humming steadily in the night. From time to time I can see pairs of headlights coming up from behind and they are obviously ignoring the 45mph limit. I've time in hand so I'm cruising and I pull aside to let them pass, even in the Saddlebunch Keys which are marked by the cluster of lights at Mile Marker 15, Baby's Coffee:They call themselves the Southernmost Coffee Roasting Company, which I suppose they are, even though they are a lot less southernmost than they used to be. There was a time when they were roasting and grinding and selling in downtown Key West, but then they decided that the call of commerce required them to move 15 miles out of town. Somehow they made it work, turning coffee roasting into a cottage industry selling knick knacks and gee gaws and pastries and chocolates and offering free hot coffee after hurricanes. They aren't open at 5:30am so its a matter of buzzing on by.

Its a few more miles of darkness, humps and vales, wide sweeping turns, a steady 65 mph through the darkness, bumping onto bridges, bumping off and watching the lights of Big Coppitt grow closer. The traffic heading north is thicker too, a car every five minutes, usually with high beams glaring, flashes past, vacation over, getting an early start on the Turnpike 3 hours north.

Well, I'm going to work, its true but in twelve hours my direction will be reversed I'll be heading home in the golden rays of the setting sun, with enough time to cast off from my dock and take a quiet swim in the flat, still waters of the Straits of Florida. I read about the changing of the leaves up north, squalls and cooling days and I dread the day I have to haul my boat onto its trailer, as the ocean drops below eighty degrees and we pack in swimming for another frost-free winter. At least its riding weather year round, if only I had something to ride.

Night Into Day

I have just completed my last night shift at work. Without a break I start working Alpha Day Shift tomorrow morning bright and early at 6am. To say I am bummed barely starts to express my feelings. There was an eruption at work and the way to "solve" the problem was by fiat apparently, no discussion no reflection.

Bravo Night Shift said goodbye and took me by surprise. When Tamie Came by the Communications center with a bottle of plonk, a large bottle of plonk and a card I thought it was for her new boyfriend who shares my same first name... but it was actually for me instead. I really was touched and said so over the police radio, which of course I am sure they have come to expect of me after all these years...

I suppose that's the thing about working for a semi-military organization, great pension and health benefits, a tight working environment and orders be orders. The Captain says jump and we all start hopping like jack rabbits. Some of the younger officers say I should go to the Union, but I've seen what happens to people who file grievances and I guess I'm too middle aged to go tilting at windmills! Its a good job and I am going through an undesired patch. But its just a patch.


In the short term I am going from one shift to another with completely different schedules with no break and that will be tough. I am going to be the senior dispatcher though in deference to my desire to avoid promotion I will not be an acting anybody, just "senior." I will be training a new hire and that will be hard work, especially as I will be struggling to stay awake and alert at a time of day I am usually snoring. I will also have to drop two classes I have just signed up for ( full refunds at least!) at the college. That's the worst of it- I just can't attend and I can't get permission to be absent for a couple of hours to attend.


All this upending of my life with four days notice makes me feel I'm the one getting punished and instead I'm helping out by making the re-shuffle go smoothly for the bosses.


The good news is that I will be able to home nights with my wife. The thing is we have created lots of time to be together while i worked nights and there is just so much less stress at night in the office when all our work is focused on street work not administrative. I have a lot of adjusting to do.

Oh, and no word on my Vespa which for all I know is dead and can never be brought back to life. That's how I feel at any rate. Well, its all grungy but at least I'm not being murdered in Darfur, one needs to keep a perspective. Or flooding in Ohio. That sounds grim.

90 Miles

I have a dream, and it is in its way a modest but exciting dream. It involves Fidel Castro, which may sound surprising, but there are lots of people who spin dreams around the elderly Cuban dictator on this side of the Florida Straits. Their dreams tend to be rather more grandiose than mine. They dream of his death and free access to a capitalist Cuba for North Americans, including Cuban exiles.

Its a Cuban paradox this time but the revolutionary leader who spoke passionately about Cuban freedom in the 19th century until his early death in battle, was the man shown here in marble: Jose Marti.

The paradoxical Marti is venerated by both the Communist Government in Havana and by the freedom loving far right wing capitalists in Miami who "Radio Reloj" From Havana always refers to as the "Miami Mafia" in their propaganda headlines on 950AM, perfectly audible in Cayo Hueso, which is the Spanish speaker's name for Key West.

I mean who doesn't love a revolutionary, right? He strikes quite the posture in the pre-dawn, a man with a mission: freedom!
The Cuban exile community in Florida gained steam after the revolutionary attempt in the 187o's, when their exiled socialist leader Jose Marti landed in Key West to lead the fight from this flowered isle that stood side by side with the struggle for a new Cuba, as mentioned in more or less poetic, incomprehensible Spanish at the Jose Marti monument in Key West's Bayview Park:Key West being a Paradoxical Paradise, Bayview Park is a park that has no view of any Bay; its all blocked by 21st century capitalist development, in all its cement glory. Jose Marti shares his corner with dozens of less fortunate "residentially challenged" local residents who huddle and drink and squabble behind his roccoco home in the corner. It has the flavor of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but he is silent on that and they are more like chickens than revolutionaries, as they scrabble in the sun for alcohol and oblivion, not redemption and freedom.

I dream of the same thing writ small: freedom. My dream is of me boarding a high speed ferry with my Vespa, similar to the one currently in servce between Italy and Croatia, just four hours across the Adriatic Sea...

...and landing at Mariel three hours later with a weekend of riding Cuban mountain roads ahead...winding roads, leafy forests, empty extended beaches, cold beer and hot pork. Modest stuff I say but enticing, tropical twisties a short hop from my Florida home.

The winds of change are blowing through the Cuban exile community as the older, stronger memories of the exiles are fading and the younger generation settles into a migrant's view of the "home country," a place to be enjoyed on vacation, to be marveled at as the locus of a life spent away from but always tied to it by history. That locus, or focal point is no longer the center of one's daily life, for the younger generation of Cuban exile/emigrant. Unhappily Castro has to die before relations can be normalized because feelings in US political circles run high, and Cuba's exiles vote early and often. So we are stuck with this iron curtain between us and the delights of the other flowered isle.

And then there is the unfortunate violent history of the "Miami Mafia," a long bloody history of terroistic violence against anyone who supported dialogue with the Bearded One. And those of us Anglos, even immigrant Anglos who are puzzled by the need to focus on Cuba while enjoying the American Dream in gorgeous South Florida, we earn the withering scorn of oppressed middle class suburbanites in Spanish accents who would yes, go and take up arms in the Sierra Maestra, but you know they have careers and dental appointments and payments on home and Mercedes Benz, and the next best thing to the revolutionary struggle is to pretend Cuba doesn't exist. Truly a miracle of Latin American magical realism in the style of the Communist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Strange bedfellows all. The paper reports today that a big voice in the exile community was in Key West yesterday to sing some songs about this political paradox, to sing these songs for the first time ever in public. The new album is called Noventa Millas, and anytime you mention ninety miles in Key West you are talking about the gap, the chasm perhaps between the Keys and Havana. Gloria Estefan sang for free for Key Westers on the waterfront of this multicultural little town. One day she will perhaps do the same in Havana.

I was put in mind of all these thoughts yesterday when a rumor blazed through Key West's Cuban community, and the word was that Castro was dead. Unlike 1959 when he came to power its easy enough to confirm such a rumor today. I for one wouldn't call the Key West Police Department for confirmation, because all the dispatchers will do is Google their favorite news websites. No word there of the Bearded One's passing.

In my uncomplicated world I look forward to varied Vespa rides, that will come with the re-opening of this unnecessarily closed border. Even on my wife's 150cc ET4 if my 250 isn't working!

Two generations is quite long enough, for Cuban exiles to martyr themselves, and limit my weekend rides.

Smoke and Mirrors

The good part about living in the Keys is the bit where you wake up each day remembering you live in small town America. This is the place where you enjoy the benefits of life as rhapsodised in places like North Dakota, places where front doors are never locked, here that attitude is allied with the best possible weather and warm ocean water and a certain savoir faire that is hard to describe but easy to enjoy. For instance I have no idea what my neighborhood crime watch is or does, but there are signs in my suburb proving that it exists:It occurs to me to think about the possibility of worrying about the reasons for the existence of the sign, but then I relax, I live in the keys after all! What you might call a place that offers savoir faire combined with lassitude, that translates into a quality that outsiders call laid-back, a concept that belongers make fun of as they trudge daily through three jobs that between them barely pay for rent and beer. In Kansas one lives in a small town and doesn't lock one's front door, true, but one frowns and suffers anxiety if a person of strange demeanor enters the city limits. In Key West one possibly locks the door to keep chickens and drunks at arms length, but one hardly notices men dressed as women, people speaking foreign languages on the street or coming to the office in shorts and floral shirts. We,as far as I know, have no children on our street, despite the signs of awful warning. Just another of life's little paradoxes in paradise.

Undoubtedly it helps not to have children in paradise, unless you are a millionaire, in which case you have all the help you need. It also helps to be connected. There is, it has to be said, an unusually healthy portion of the inexplicable in Paradise; inexplicable that is, were it not for the fact that there is always a money trail. Take sewers for example. The State government has oversight over Monroe County and has been asking the Keys for the past twenty years to please put a sewer system into the islands and replace all those leaky sewage pits. Well, the good leaders of Monroe County have been temporising for twenty years and the State has now decided that if all the islands aren't sewered by 2010 heads will roll and people will be fined. So now we face the prospect of getting sewers, and I might add saving the coral reef. A recent study showed conclusively that human sewage leaking into the nearshore waters is poisoning the coral. 'Nuff sed.

The city of Key West got done with their tertiary (three stage) sewage system a while ago, and very painful it was too tearing up city streets apparently at random. But now all that waste gets made clean enough to drink before it is ejected back to the ocean. I live with a septic tank, underneath a lid like the one shown above, and the county is mulling over how to put me on a central sewer system, at a cost to me of somewhere around $7,000.

Residents of Stock Island have been through the process and the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) voted to give the job to a private company called Key West Resort Utilities. This despite the fact that the publicly owned and run Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority (FKAA) did an excellent job of sewering the city with no cost overruns. Key West Resort Utilities is run by a man who is close friends with a long time member of the BOCC, and that's why they got the contract, despite building a system that did not meet specifications, that cost more than bid and that repeatedly backed up raw sewerage into people's homes. I'm not kidding- you'd come home from work to find a brown lake in your bathroom.


So, if you were the BOCC you would rather crucify yourself than risk giving another contract to Key West Resort Utilities, right? Especially with people on Rockland and Big Coppitt and Geiger Keys screaming "No!" Right? You or I would ask FKAA to do the central sewer system. Not the BOCC, they are thinking about awarding the contract to their buddies at Key West Resort Utilities.


And thats the flip side of living in Paradise, daily, public corruption masked as incompetence! You'd think the voters would be over it by now! Instead we open the paper and read another disturbing headline. The county is preparing next year's budget at a difficult time, especially as the state has mandated budget cuts in all 68 Florida counties. So this is the time the County Administrator, a public clown, decides to fire the Budget Director. On the face of it the Budget Director has been rude and unprofessional to co-workers, including the County Engineer (think sewers) but the BOCC, the Administrator's bosses have split down predictable lines. The majority of three, known as the Gang of Three for their Maoist devotion to cronyism, support the County Clown and the minority of Two, the sensible Republicans (another paradox in paradise!) wonder why the Budget Director is under threat by the Administrator, the jester of the Gang of Three. Which leads me to wonder what is really going on. Is the Budget Director an abrasive yet competent public official, duly worried by the Administrator's ability to run up a huge public deficit- currently $8 million and counting. Or is the Budget Director just another incompetent bubba wallowing in his job, and now facing getting fired because he has fallen out of favor with the rest of the gang?

So much for living in Paradise, this place sometimes is just ankle deep in shit- literally.

Failing to Yield

The Vespa is in Victor's tender care in Miami, after I made a third trip up to the city towing my still broken Vespa. We tore out the anti pollution canister, and replaced it with a simple piece of tubing. That's a fix that is supposed to solve stuttering and hesitation problems- but I got nothing good out of the surgery. An appendectomy that solved a misdiagnosis of appendicitis! Bummer. Victor called for help and apparently my Vespa, still under warranty will go under the diagnostic computer at the main, Fort Lauderdale store. That's my sad story of woe, and I am bummed as I lose confidence in the Vespa's daily rider reliability. I am scooter cursed I think.

So, my thoughts turn to a return to a full-blown motorcycle, a machine of traditional proportions, scant weather protection and a hodgepodge solution to carry luggage. I am fed to the teeth with all these fruitless trips to Miami, this long distance problem solving sucks, so I took a trip by the new Scoot Boots motorcycle shop in Key West. The idea was to see if this seemed like it might be the kind of place that I could rely on to look after a new and different motorcycle, without having to run up to the mainland every time something breaks...It was good idea, I think.

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I am no great fan of motorcycle shops, they are filled with broken, sad motorcycles, and the people who repair them who all too often prefer the machines by far, to their poky, annoying, incompetent riders. Relations between expert and supplicant are generally not of the best.

My introduction to the new store was through a 27-year-old lanky native of Wisconsin, lamenting the heat (In Florida! In summer! What did he expect?) so I knew he wasn't too bright. As though to confirm my initial impression of him he proudly pointed out his Hardly Davidson, a machine with 1960's ape hanger handlebars and scissor suspension front forks, a 1930's technology designed to guarantee a rough ride; I made appreciative noises and retired behind a motorcycle magazine to wait for Kenny, the "oddball brand" specialist to come back from lunch. Mr Wisconsin, in his all knowing Harley Davidson-ness, classified any other motorcycle brand as "oddball," a marketing technique not popular in most stores, but in the world of motorcycling elitism its a surefire way to run a business into the ground. Scoots Boots future is not assured.

'

While I waited for the mythical, "oddball brand" Kenny to show up I listened to Wisconsin and a customer discuss life. The customer was on a long distance ride from Seattle, on a Harley, and he and Wisconsin fell into an arcane discussion about their idiosyncratic machines.

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It appeared that Mr Tourer had broken down in Paradise and Peterson's Harley Davidson of Miami were falling down on the job of sending parts. Mr Tourer was red faced, sweaty and not in a good mood. He and Wisconsin were discussing traveling as the young man had, to his credit, ridden his uncomfortable machine down from his home town up north. Mr Tourer in his middle aged myopia was insisting Wisconsin would do better with a windshield and the young man was adamantly (to a customer!) insisting he didn't want a windshield, nor a helmet for that matter. I turned to Mr Tourer and said something to the effect that he's young, and Mr Tourer looked at me like I was stupid and said "The wind's still just as strong when you're young!" I bowed out of his incomprehension.

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Then they turned to discussing the missing parts.Mr Tourer had been waiting two days and he was pissed. Wisconsin assured him Peterson had the parts and it was just the parts clerks screwing everything up, which was little consolation to Mr Tourer. I, silly me, intervened and suggested renting a car- Peterson's is just three hours away and highly visible from the Turnpike. Mr Tourer, red and sweaty turned his blazing piggy eyes on me and hissed coldly: "I am not driving up to Miami in a rental to save their asses!" he nodded at Wisconsin as he muttered the words. I shrugged.

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Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but one has to have a mind to broaden to start with. Lots of people, thousands, perhaps millions, would give an arm for an unexpected vacation in Key West, but all Mr Tourer knew what to do, was sit in the stuffy, weakly air conditioned room, and fume. The traveling thing was not, I think, going so well for him. The notion that not all problems are of the same severity was not a lesson he was prepared to learn or understand. I keep having to remind myself of the same thing as I wonder why my Vespa continues to be broken and I am driving not riding. And I'm not even on vacation.

Dean And My Depression

Its been a hell of a few days off, and when I measure my issues against those of people further south it doesn't as the saying goes, amount to a hill of beans. St Lucia and Martinique are recovering from Dean which was a Category Two at the time and bad enough. Jamaicans are talking on their talk radio as though the passage of the Category Three was no big thing. It seems the south coast got battered a bit but there are mountains there which protect the north coast. We drove the northern edges of the Maroon region of central Jamaica and I wish the people were as beautiful as their countryside.

The cane fields of Jamaica have a fabulous backdrop with those mountains but the people we found exuded an air of desperation and hopelessness. It was a brief impression but a very negative one. I can only wonder how they are doing with all this extra rain and wind.

Music is playing on Cayman Island Radio advising people on Grand Cayman the curfew is still in effect but not on Cayman Brac, so I guess, thanks to streaming I know things could have been worse. The south road in Grand Cayman is a slow winding drive with not a lot to see if you are familiar with flat, rocky tropical islands. We rented and drove when our cruise ship stopped there and the impression I got was of a dusty, small and culturally barren island about as large and as interesting as the Lower Keys lacking not only the ambiance of Key West but also the Highway to the mainland. Mexico is next and the Yucatan gets raked by a Category 5 Dean with winds over 140 knots (170 mph) sustained. Really, God doesn't much like Mexicans, I'm almost sure. Though what they have done to deserve this shit I have no idea. I always like visiting Mexico and on our trip by cruise ship we still managed to enjoy some roadside good eats on our rental car drive all round the island of Cancun.

Its been windy around here the past few days, and my wife insisted early on the windiness was a by-product of Dean's passing, and she was right. She remembered when we were anchored off Panama's Caribbean coast in 2000 and our sailboat was buffeted by strong winds produced by a major hurricane, Lenny, some 500 miles away. Today its like a winter storm front passing all bright and crisp through the Keys bringing 30 miles an hour of breeze and cool temperatures around the mid 80's. Very invigorating.

And just to keep us on our toes tropical wave 92 is buggering about in the Atlantic, 1200 miles from Melbourne Florida and quite likely to become a depression and then a tropical storm and god knows what by the time it may possibly threaten the eastern US coast. What a depression.

I should be depressed- my Vespa still doesn't work properly and I'm facing a third trip up to Miami. This time they will take it and keep it till it runs smoothly at all rpm's and doesn't stall whenever it feels like it. Once they have it running I don't know what I'll do but this Vespa has to go. Reliability is what I crave. We both, my wife and I, as always talk a lot when we have to make a decision, and we are talking more about motorcycles and scooters than I'd care to frankly. I'd rather be riding.

Meanwhile another depression is forming in the Atlantic east of the Bahamas which should put it too far north to whack the Keys by the time it gets to the US east coast, but now the speculation is whether this will become an organized depression (its currently a messy wave), or even a storm and who will it whack. Your choice from Miami to Charleston.

These rumblings lead one to expect a busy hurricane season.