Turning The Corner

A few evenings ago I came out of the police station dragging my man purse and my lunchbox along behind me, like Christopher Robin hauling Winnie-The-Pooh, and I knew I had turned the corner on winter. I could clearly see my motorcycle across the parking lot sitting there bathed in the glow of the sunset. The shortest day of winter has just passed and the effects are immediate. When I come to work in the morning I leave the house a few minutes after five and its still pitch black at that point.But to step out of work a few minutes before six in the evening and still be riding out of the parking lot in daylight, why that's the first sign of summer around here. In Key West the seasons aren't entirely measured by ambient temperature. Its true we do get cold fronts and temperatures drop as the clouds cover the skies and the winds pick up. But, the big deal really is the level of the humidity. Summer time is warm day and night and the moisture in the air is like a muslin cloth over one's face. In winter the cloth is whipped away and one's skin dries up and long work pants no longer seem a burden. In between fronts temperatures rise, the sun comes out and the coastal waters glow their usual shades of turquoise, all along Highway One.For the anxious tourist crossing yet another highway bridge on the way down the yellow brick road to Key West, that green marker shows its just 28 more miles to the corner of Whitehead and Fleming Streets. And if they're lucky they arrive as the cold blows away and the sun comes out.

I'm sure we'll have a few more cold blasts before I launch the skiff and go swimming next April but when the days are perceptibly longer than the nights I'm a happy camper. I've had enough 60 degree days to be going on with, but as I look out the dispatch center window at the sunny placid waters of Garrison Bight Marina I'm feeling like winter's over and its springtime in the Keys. Which means its time for an unrelated motorcycle picture. I took this earlier in the week at Fort Zachary State Park.

I've been reading about all the gross weather the rest of the country is suffering and it looks terrible. Our commuting madman, the Intrepid Commuter, is riding his motorcycle in marginal conditions which make me feel pretty unmanly when my wife asks if I'm riding in this "terrible " weather as temperatures drop to near 60 degrees. People are dying in rain storms, floods, mudslides and all the rest of it. And here we are waiting for our next dice-with-death hurricane season, meanwhile the skies are blue and the temperature is close to 80. Like I always say, when hurricanes hit there's enough warning that we can evacuate and after the storm we may have too many mosquitoes and not enough power but at least we don't get hypothermia.

This is a cloudy gray threatening day along Highway One at Big Coppitt, around Mile Marker 11. Compare that to scenes of devastation and electric mittens in the dismal reports from elsewhere around the US. At least I know how well off I am, its hard to take this place for granted. And no, I still don't miss snow.

Going Topless

After a year spent badgering the Woman I finally got my wife to buy a convertible yesterday.

It was a good day for it as we were in Miami for her to get a new cast on her arm. The wrist is healing well and what with the swelling going down the old purple cast was loose so she got a new one, in dayglo yellow. The salesman Jose, at the car shop was brilliant; he never referred to her injured arm, he just listened to what she wanted and responded, then he gave my wife the keys and let her play with the vehicle, and let her cogitate. He was her embodiment of an ideal car salesman. She bought the Sebring after a short test drive.
I know where I'm going to get my next vehicle. Carmax had us out the door in the Chrysler with a proper tag within an hour of deciding to buy. The price was fixed at $13,000 and due to her extensive research my wife knew that was a decent price for a 2004 with 36,000 miles on it so she was happy. The dealer lets you know ahead of time their fee is $149 so there are no hidden dealer prep fees and all that other rubbish plus they have an in house DMV office so the tag application was processed right there and they stuck it on the car for us. Plus we got our loan online in 5 minutes without having to haggle with a finance specialist and fill out reams of paperwork. At 7.45 percent they were 1.5 points lower than the interest for a new car at Potamkin across the street. The whole transaction was amazingly simple and above board. I had never heard of CarMax before. In my defense I hate buying and selling vehicles and they make it too easy. And they had a rather toothsome white Thunderbird on the lot at $21,000...On the way home I enjoyed a private treat when a Moto Guzzi V11 Sport in the Coppa Italia red white and green livery worked its way through the traffic jam on the Dolphin Expressway. I got a surprise when he pulled alongside and I discovered a real motorcycle not just another boring crotch rocket. Naturally as I readied the camera he changed lanes and all I got was a quick shot in the Nissan's mirror. That set me to drooling almost as badly as my wife who was grinning madly while driving under the clear blue sky in her own car. The other rearview picture of the day was of my wife enjoying a sunny 75 degree Miami evening as she followed me home.In fact she came home very happy after three hours cruising with the top down. I knew she'd missed her last convertible, a Camaro we'd had in California,and it was past time for her to get another. And I wasn't wrong; there's a change.

New Classic Rides

In Key West when a rider pulls into a motorcycle parking spot he finds himself shoving his machine alongside a row of multi colored cheap Chinese scooters such as locals own and use primarily to get from work to a bar. Scooter riding isn't a chic hobby in Key West, its as utilitarian as it can get, and the rides follow their function, appearing on our streets as hordes of primary colors, yellows reds blues and blacks, and with all the character of mass stamped, mass produced plastic toys from that great production line in the East. Snowbird season is the time for surprises, when people from Up North wheel out their abandoned rides from sheds and garages and press them into service as a way to get around a town clogged with cars and nowhere to park. The other day I was in New Town on a mission of some sort and when I came out of the store look what had pulled up alongside me. I snapped a picture, from instinct not really sure why this classic unloved Honda appealed to me. It just did in some subliminal way. And it was only yesterday during my lunch break at Fort Zachary Taylor Park that the answer hit me. This is the Era Of The Classics. I reached for my blog...

When I was hunting for a replacement for my beloved neo-classic scooter, the Vespa GTS 250, I couldn't find a motorcycle that really spoke to me. I don't like crotch rockets, I dislike riding with my feet stuck forward, I can't see riding a pseudo off-road motorcycle in the Keys and giant sport tourers make no sense either. "Supermotards" are the new fashion and to me they are absurd and as useless as high heels or strapless dresses and other fashion fripperies. If I can't commute on my motorcycle I would hardly get to ride at all around here. The Bonneville, an imitation classic of the highest order was the obvious answer to my dilemma, yet I couldn't see it at first, even though its been in production almost a decade.

It's as modern as any motorcycle but its looks are as classic as the square rigger masts or the 19th century Fort walls in the background. As I whiled away my hour outside the dispatch center I put down my book and refreshed myself flipping through the pages of a youthful motorcycling magazine. Cycle World isn't really my cup of tea, it's devoted to the pursuit of horsepower and racing statistics and quarter mile tenths-of-a-second stuff which just seems puerile to me, BUT there were a couple of pictures in its pages that reminded me of the corroded old Honda in the second picture.

This Honda 1100 is supposed to recreate the classic image of the original range of Honda four cylinders that revolutionized motorcycling in the 1970's. Readers of the magazine were raving about it hoping that the Japanese will actually put it into production. The motorcycle that stole my heart is a proposed reproduction of the machine I have always wanted and never owned:

Cycle was dismissive of this 750cc recreation of the classic Italian sportbike of 40 years ago thanks to its "modest" 750cc capacity which proves they know how to completely miss the point. But I doubt I will ever buy a Moto Guzzi in the US thanks to their lackadaisical "network" of dealers which is a terrible shame. But this is motorcycling as I remember it, and I'm glad Triumph is led by a motorcycle loving businessman who knows how to stay solvent.

It feels weird to be part of an international cabal of elderly men who all want to find their youth in fake bikes from long ago, that by objective standards weren't that mechanically great but whose designs speak to us wherever we live and ride. They just twang the heartstrings, in a reminder that being human is irrational at best. Its a thin line separating the stupid from the merely nostalgic.

Santo Domingo

Its been a long weekend at work, and as this is my fourth day in a row of taking phone calls from the distressed I feel like a photo tour of last weekend's walk around the capital of the Dominican Republic. Christopher Columbus founded the capital city of the country he called Hispaniola, which island he so named because he thought that its verdant coastal plains looked like the homeland of his sponsors in Spain. He called the city Santo Domingo, and domingo means Sunday in Spanish. In Columbus' native Italian domenica also means Sunday, so for whatever reason this Dominican Republic is tied into one particular day of the week. I had thought it was related to Easter Sunday, but Columbus landed here in December. We took our self-guided tour on a Saturday, because that was when we were there. Here's Columbus hailing a taxi while a pigeon rests on his head:
This picture of people, live ones, enjoying the 85 degree day in Columbus Park, fulfills the stereotype industrious northeners like to make of more relaxed residents of the tropics. I say, at least they weren't locked up indoors oogling Saturday morning cartoons and other inanities on television.Downtown Santa Domingo is a wild and crazy place as we shall see, but the heart of the city hidden behind medieval walls is a taste of old world charm. Its perched on the corner of the cliff overlooking the mouth of the river pouring out into the Caribbean Sea, a place where the streets are narrow and clogged with cars, lined with tourist knick-knack shops and assorted attractions. There is even a long straight street called "The Count", El Conde, that has been transformed into a splendid pedestrian mall.We used the Lonely Planet guide Of course the further you get from these delights the tougher the scene gets. Suburban Santo Domingo, alongside the four lane highway leaving town looks like this:So, in my opinion one wants to be wealthy in the DR, and live in an apartment somewhere around here, serene at night, lovely without neon, littered with top rate restaurants offering stewed crab which my wife enjoyed, and stewed goat which went down a treat for me with a pile of mashed potatoes, and an ice cold Brahma beer:The guide book also gave us the location of a fine breakfast hole-in-the-wall on El Conde, the Cafetera Colonial which served up omelettes and cafe con leche in the same location that comforted the Socialist refugees from Franco's Spain after he defeated the Republic in 1939. That historic plaque on the wall outside the cafe was a piquant extra on my wife's breakfast omelette. After breakfast we strolled El Conde enjoying the cool morning air and the bustle of Saturday morning in the city. We enjoy bringing home a little something from our trips to stick on our walls and my wife likes bargaining so she checked out the Taino-style art on the street.Our stroll led us past churches and museums, shops selling Amber (yellow) and Larimar (sky blue) jewelery and inevitably to the Square of Hispanic-ness (Plaza de la Hispanidad) above the old city walls overlooking the cruise ship dock on the river.It was being tarted up for the New Year's celebrations to come but it struck me as rather sterile and unappealing. Compared for instance to the hustle and bustle of Avenida Mella where all the action was loud and brash. I have no idea what this dude was offering to his enraptured audience, but everyone could hear him:Street vendors were setting up food to go, including delicious fried chicken, fried slices of spam, remarkable Dominican sausages and the ubiquitous tostones, slices of savory fried plantains:Sidewalk vendors are an inevitable part of life in a country with high rates of unemployment, but we found a simple "No thanks," cleared the way.We made our way to the covered mercado where the guidebook bless its little heart, advised us that bargaining was the order of the day. My wife loves to bargain so I knew we were in for some tough times ahead. The market was absolutely packed with stalls tightly squeezed in, and we had to shuffle down these narrow alleys surrounded by impatient shop keepers. There weren't any other gringos, and not many customers generally at that hour, as far as I could tell, so we were prized bait. My wife bargained valiantly, a practice I find distasteful (much to her scorn), especially in a hard up Third World market. Noblesse oblige, she says and blames my well-to-do upbringing!And if you needed to spruce up your home there were aerosols aplenty with all the necessary variations. The pink one caught my eye as it's supposed to be a love potion. I didn't have the nerve to ask how it might be applied. I imagined a bunch of friends coming over for dinner, exhibiting my aerosol and who knew what the results might be? Divorce? Suicide? Another love potion...?To think the ancient art of Santeria has been reduced to an aerosol. Whatever will they think of next? Why, a wooden fighting cock of course.I think Key West and its chickens could use some of these as public art works scattered in the ruined flowerbeds around town.

Its tiring work going shopping and refreshment is always to hand, I think the overflowing white stuff is coleslaw, or possibly white cheese, but I didn't look too closely.. We tried some of the fried chicken shown earlier, I like to eat locally and though baseball and hot dogs are big news in the Dominican Republic local chicken and sausage seems somehow more appropriate.

It was just a curiosity but we flashed past this reminder that the Chinese are everywhere and in some places in large numbers. This was to me, a reminder of San Francisco in a most unexpected place.

After we finished shopping and walking around downtown I was dreaming of our five star room and soft bed at the Hotel Intercontinental on our splendid fifth-floor overlooking the south coast.Instead my indefatigable wife found a bus stop where the gua-guas (minibuses) gathered and we ended up taking a half-dollar (15 peso) ride that lasted about ten minutes in wild traffic across the river to the Faro a Colon, Columbus' Lighthouse.The huge white block on a hill is Columbus's reputed grave site (disputed by Spain and Italy) inside a massive monument built to celebrate 500 years of Europeans in the Americas. Fascinating stuff but that is a story for another day.

Friendly Reassurance

Locals go to Miami Subs for cheap and speedy food. There used to be a place on Caroline Street called PT's, named for Paul Tripp, whose slogan was "where locals go to eat" as though trailing after residents is what visitors should aspire to when considering eating out. If you follow me to Miami Subs you'll eat okay but you probably won't get lucky, unless your date is into stark formica, severe lighting and plastic cutlery.The wife and I met Robert for dinner a couple of nights ago at Miami Subs, on the Boulevard across from Garrison Bight Marina. The founder of the chain was the son of Greek immigrant who settled in Miami, thus the chain offers foods that include the proper ethnic touches- gyro lamb with yoghurt/dill sauce alongside the burgers, fries and ice cream. His business ethic was a bit shady and he ended up gunned down a couple of years ago in splendidly scandalous style in the streets of Miami. His ethnic chain lives on, and in Key West its somewhere I like to park the Bonneville from time to time for a gyro platter or two.

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Robert moved to the Keys in 1976, in time for the bicentennial, and he came as many did (and still do) seeking a nautically based change. He lived on the water and knew many early characters who did the same, and his stories of living in the Keys in the 70's are the stuff of history. His stories have also reinforced my conviction that i was right not to settle in Key West when first I visited in 1981. This was not a genteel resort in transition, it was a dusty, fishing village comatose eight months of the year and raucous for the other four leavened by a heavy military presence and a great many people who could barely function on the level of simple daily living. Boredom writ large in my jaundiced opinion. But the stories make an excellent accompaniment to a meal.Robert himself has lived a few lives, working at lots of jobs, making the life in the Keys one reads of and dreams of to while away a cold Midwest winter. He worked for years as a commercial fisherman, he captained tourist boats, he opposed the creation of the National Marine Sanctuary and then realising his error championed it, and now works full time for NOAA promoting their conservation rules out on the water. "I get paid to be out boating!" he laughs, setting aside the years of scrounging his way to his current eminence, a canal-front trailer, a couple of spare lots and boats on his seawall. A successful self-sufficient life navigated through the treacherous waters of drink drugs and bankruptcy that trip up so many dreamers in the Keys. He was in a reminiscent sort of mood the other night, after packing away his grilled chicken salad and settling in with a bottomless diet Pepsi.

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"I remember Jimmy, when I first got here. He was anchored out in Boca Chica Bay and he lived aboard kind of sparsely. He was living on a Hobie cat." I tried to picture someone living through the current cold snap on the tramp of a beach cat anchored out. Then i thought of summer rain and mosquitoes and windy, sloppy waves, and all my middle class mediocrity rose up in me.

"He lived on a Hobie cat? How?" I asked, and Robert shrugged, his blue eyes twinkling.

"I guess he needed a place and the cat was just where he slept and no one bothered him." And that was the payoff back in those days. No one bothered you, which is a philosophy that one tries to keep alive in a time of encircling condos.

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Those were the days they came up with Fantasy Fest as a response to a major domestic disruption downtown where a business couple took their knock down drag out fight onto Duval in mid October after a particularly empty summer. Sheer boredom convinced Tony Falcone of Fast Buck Freddie's to start a parade. Or so he told me.

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Robert's Key West was a different one, plugged in not to tourist season or hip bars, but to water temperatures and fish spawns and all the rigging and paraphenalia of a waterbourne life. He toured the country, found Key West and determined never to live north of the Seven Mile Bridge. In a town that promotes water activities and teems with residents who never dip their toes into the bowels of a boat, Robert has set his own clock to the time of the tides and the state of the breeze.

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I remember anchoring next to a couple off Rat Key, he I had known since we had met anchored off St Petersburg a few years before, she was his new interest and he set her up with her birds and her dog in an old wooden motor cruiser (sans motor). The Chris Craft's previous owner, a water rat, had thought to preserve the aging hull with an unconventional choice of bottom paint which was actually roofing tar. This gave the home afloat a rather menacing air, a matt black finish lightly disguised with curtains and a parrot cage dangling in the shade of the cockpit. Unfortunately the tar, owing perhaps to a faulty compound that may have made it cheap enough to buy, failed to set and anyone approaching the boat in a nice white dinghy had to fend off madly and was lucky if they came away only with a couple of fists full of oily tar. Dinging the hull left long dark streaks on anything it butted up against. This was her home for a couple of years afloat and perhaps the execrable state of her vessel led the woman to a new and more stimulating life ashore. Salt water will do that.

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Robert and I go back almost twenty years when we met sailing in the Bahamas, we remember the meerting differently but it was somewhere in the Exumas and we kept meeting along the way. We talked about the old sailing days and what a pain it is to get from here to there under sail, the lack of wind, the wrong wind, big seas, crap waves and all the rest. I expressed relief that I don't have to deal with it anymore, or at least until I want to again, if ever.

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"We can grow old ashore," Robert said, " and we can afford to settle down without regrets. We've done lots of things lots of people only ever dream of doing. This is our life," and I was startled by his philosphy spilling out as we tramped across the parking lot, "and its okay." Sometimes I need reasurance thatenjoying falling into the work-commute-weekend trap is acceptable, when much of the first world treats work and routine as four-letter words.

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I guess it is, when someone as Conchy as Robert says it is.

Cold Night Ride

Irony anyone? I rolled out of bed at eleven minutes to five and scampered to check the thermostat in the hall. 62 degrees. This sucks! It was supposed to be warming up. This place is supposed to be the warmest in the Continental US, not as warm as Hawaii or Puerto Rico but warm nonetheless. I hit the "heat" button and the reverse cycle kicked in. This makes two days in a row we've had the heat on. The good news is the house hasn't been smelling like singed cat and that is because I had the presence of mind to get the a/c unit serviced. Usually when the heat hasn't been run in months, or years, dust accumulates on the heater elements in the ceiling and the smell of burning fur fills the house.

We generally keep the water heater on the "warm" setting but this morning it was totally inadequate and the shower felt cold to the touch. Things were just getting better and better. I was reduced to blowing my wife's hair dryer all over to try to restore circulation.

I call my home a treehouse because the downstairs area is open on all sides between the stilts that support my 770 square-foot home above the flood plain (I hope). This morning the lights illuminated a scene of desolation, dead leaves blowing in the wintry north wind, no newspaper in the driveway yet, and the Bonneville shining coldly in the bright white light. "I have to rest myself there?" I thought to myself, eyeing the cold metal fuel tank butting up to the hard frigid vinyl seat...It just got worse. I was swathed in my gray furry jacket, that and a sweat shirt are my only winter clothing, and on top of that my mesh motorcycle jacket with its shiny padded liner. The outlook for my head wasn't so great as my open face helmet was downstairs with the Bonneville and I couldn't be bothered to clamber back upstairs to find my full-face helmet. I dragged my thick elk skin gloves on and clipped the helmet on my head while the air-cooled parallel twin warmed up.

I've become snug on my Triumph over the past 4300 hundred miles. My hands fall naturally to the grips and my feet go straight to the pegs and my eyeballs line up right above the top of the Parabellum windshield. Its a nice piece of plastic, that windshield, and it does a fine job of keeping the wind off me without producing unwanted wobbles in the track of the motorcycle. The trouble today was that the north wind was cutting diagonally across the Highway and the wind, all 25 miles-an-hour of it, was clinging to my beard and my nose and my eyes, making them stream water down my cheeks.

The wind, sliding round the shield pressed up against my chest and sought out the cracks in my clothing, spreading cold tentacles across my chest and around my neck. My feet were warm inside my boots, and my heavy yellow gloves kept the digits snug but my knees out in the breeze were soon blocks of ice. Its been a long time since my teeth chattered but fifteen minutes from home I was in agony. It was actually a beautiful night. The cold winds had long since blown the cloud cover away and the skies were clear. There wasn't much traffic on the road and i was following the cone of white light through a dark canyon between the mangroves. The temperature gauge showed something around 58 degrees ambient temperature and I was feeling every bit of it.

Halfway into my 40 minute commute I was crying uncle. I was cold, my teeth were chattering and I couldn't feel my knees. The ride, even at a steady 55mph seemed endless. Most mornings I wish the commute could last another twenty or more minutes, I'd like to have left the house early to take in a side road or two, but today, under the constant onslaught of cold air I would gladly fold and stop and suck up coffee, hot and lots of it. Instead the long endless black ribbon of Highway One keeps inexorably unrolling in front of me.

"You could always take the car," my wife said last night with the none too subtle inference that I must be mad as a march hare to ride through the Keys equivalent of a blizzard. "People Up North are snowed in," I said in defence of my madness. "A sixty degree morning would be cause for rejoicing across much of the motorcycling land," I insisted. Maybe so, but I was totally frozen and down to 50mph by the time the street lights of Stock Island hove into view across the Boca Chica bridge. Every traffic light was red, but instead of mumbling, this morning I took advantage and pressed the side of my knees into the cylinder heads one at a time to generate warmth though my uniform trousers.I arrived in the parking lot at the police station like a mobile popsicle and Diggy pulled in right behind me on his Honda 750 Aero. He had a tight woolen cap held on his head by a pair of goggles, his jacket was bulky with stuffing and his 25 year-old face with suffused with excitement. "What a great ride!" he said. I couldn't see his breath on the cold night air but he was radiating pleasure in the cold. "Yeah," I grumbled. "You only rode from Bahama Village," which I didn't need to point out was seven minutes away.

There's supposed to be a warming trend floating in over the weekend, while I'm busy working. Highs are predicted to be around 75 degrees. Neither soon enough, nor warm enough, in my jaundiced opinion.