Hemingway

We are in the middle of summer and its those pesky days of not much tourist income so the tourist people have spent a good deal of time and bed tax dollars dreaming up whacky weekends to bring people to town. With gas at four and a half dollars a gallon its more of a struggle but the show must go on and this weekend we have not only Mel Fisher days, the man who found the treasure, but coincidentally Hemingway Days when fat old white men with beards will run down Duval Street with wooden bulls in hot pursuit. Either you get it or you don't. I don't. I am one among the last people on the planet who reads paper books, and I alone don't like reading Hemingway. His short sentence structure, terse dialogue and lack of description leave me breathless and hyperventilating. The guide on the tour suggested this style came about from sending telegrams when he was a reporter and had to keep it short. I used to write news copy for the radio but I like a florid, run on sentence or two. He was, as they say, larger than life. He won a Nobel Prize, he made a ton of money, always the sign of an American winner, and he chased women like they were going out of fashion. Hemingway makes me feel like a pansy, he hunted big game- I felt sick the one and only time I shot a deer, he married four times I think and cheated on all of them- I'm a home body, he drank like a fish all hail fellow-well-met- I'm a sober loner, he was a successful war reporter,-I drank like a fish when I reported from the front lines and spent most of my time ready to pee my pants when people shot at me. I guess my disdain for his writing style has deeper roots. But people throng to his home and pay their respects to the man of the written word. I like his house real well and it gives us some taste of what life was like in Key West in the thirties, but I think he would have made an awful neighbor, overrunning his place with cats:Carousing till all hours, even hauling a urinal back to his startled wife from Sloppy Joe's old bar:Arguing with her all the time, on one spectacular occasion about the money she wasted building a saltwater pool: No, no Hemingway and I would never have got along. But there again, who cares? His granddaughter comes to key West and presides over a short story competition, and the city has a favored son to commemorate and we have no threat from Cuba where Hemingway's favorite home was located, Finca Vigia ("Overlook Farm") and the real Old Man and the Sea recently died so we are currently Top Hemingway Dogs. Come one, come all, just keep the economy going, please. And the tour is fun. Our guide looked like he was rode hard and put up wet, no doubt keeping up the Key West image:

He chatted up the pretty girls and the kids as one is supposed to and the tour seemed happy enough, a shy bunch of strangers:The interior seems much as it was though I don't really remember much about my last visit years ago, there is still plenty of open space under the tall ceilings, in a house open to the heat and decorated with the heavy dark Spanish style furniture Hemingway reportedly liked:Which must have made the saltwater pool quite the refuge as air conditioning wasn't then an option:The writing studio seems changed to me, not least because the walkway from the house is gone, and the stairs are still steep:But also they have a manual typewriter on a table with a chair and as far as I know he wrote standing up to relieve back injuries from his excessively athletic youth. I seem to recall a writing stand in the room. Oh, and boxing I think is barbaric, Hemingway loved it, so we definitely would have been at loggerheads:Looking in through the protective bars at the studio, the tourist in front of me made some snide comment about the ease of working only a few hours each morning, and compared to the daily grind for most of us there is some truth in that. On the other hand Hemingway ate his gun rather prematurely which puts me definitely in the 100 years as a Lamb, rather than a day as a Lion as Mussolini put it facing his own unsavory end. Hemingway lived large because he was driven to, and that, not just pushing a pen was his hard work. He got a nice view out of his studio window as he struggled with the English language:Actually he didn't. There is a print of the Asa Tifton house at the time Hemingway owned it (purchased by his father in law because writing a few hours a day wasn't making it, ironically!) and the greenery around the house was sparse, nothing like it is now. Hemingway's taste in tiles is still evident. Fish and parrots. The tour of the house is brief but the beauty of the Hemingway House visit is that one is free to ramble anywhere and everywhere the doors are unlocked. There are no time limits and few restrictions that I could tell. Followers of The Man are free to stand and contemplate all day long if they choose, though the public loos are a little less fancy than the master's, though entirely acceptable. I saw visitors hiding from the sun chatting in one public outhouse. The Hemingway House boasts a rare thing in Key West, a genuine basement which the guide assured us has never flooded. The owners of the property have fenced it off so we the curious can't get in but that black hole in the ground was tantalising I have to say:Especially on a hot sticky day like yesterday:The cats didn't seem to mind the thundery humidity, though the visitors were complaining all the time as though they expected glacier melt to be surrounding the Southernmost City. The cats sit up and looks supercilious as the tours go through and get kibbles for their troubles:This one was preening himself until something startled him though what could startle a Hemingway cat in this oasis of adoration I couldn't say. Footprints in the cement perhaps?As an illustration of close Key West living someone who chose to live near the Hemingway House a while back reported the property to the Department of Food and Agriculture accusing them of running a breeding farm without a permit. The complaint alleged that the stock (cats not cows) were suffering in an urban environment and they should be removed. Well, the shit hit the fan, predictably enough and at vast taxpayer's expense an FDA inspector came to town to investigate the illegal cat farm and the owners howled and everything ended up getting smoothed over which is why there is an impressive cat herding fence on top of the wall around the property:Here's a hint: don't like cats? Don't take up residence near the Hemingway House! The cats look pretty smart by comparison to the humans, even though, in the final analysis another reason Hemingway and I wouldn't have got along- I'm a dog person!

SR4A Ramrod Key

I'm off today so I'm not riding to work but I would be, as usual, were I on tonight. So today is the day for a backroad ramble. Sunny days! I remember them well! I was moved to take a few pictures of State Road 4A along it's Ramrod Key incarnation last week, before the endless summer rains seemed to set in permanently and i got by chance a few sunny outdoor pictures... It happened that I was listening to the radio (that happens a lot in my TV-less home) and I heard there was a dispute going on in Marathon, some 25 miles north of my house over ownership of a stretch of State Road 4A. That caught my attention because I knew SR4A is split between several islands in the Lower Keys, indeed I wrote an essay about the section on Little Torch Key recently, but I had no idea the road also surfaced in Marathon. In Ramrod it has pretentions to pretty leafiness:If it seems weird that Monroe County might give up the right-of-way on a stretch of State Road to a local business, it shouldn't. The majority of our county commissioners are so half witted they don't know how to be corrupt, they're just astonishingly stupid. And I'm not someone who "hates politicians" because I'd rather eats worms than run for public office and in a functioning democracy it takes people with guts to stand for election. So at some level I admire their nerve. But this lot are so dim, it makes me wonder who elected them in a county as eclectic and opinionated at this one. Anyway parts of State Road 4A in Marathon are in private hands (!), but not on Ramrod Key where it is a public street:Change comes slowly around here sometimes and recycling is still an art that is not fully understood. However trash comes in heaps! The Keys recycle less than seven percent of the trash stream, where even mainland Florida gets nearly a quarter recycled.

On Ramrod Key State Road 4A is simply a street that parallels the Overseas Highway for the one mile length of the island. It's the back door to the surprising number of businesses that have sprung up on this, the least remarkable of the Lower Keys islands. The road dead ends into mangroves at each end. At the southernmost the mangroves are a little thinner and one can see water and catch a glimpse of the Torch Keys on the horizon.

At the north end I parked my wife's Vespa underneath the familiar red sign that indicates, on pretty much all the side roads off the Highway, that you've run out of road:

In between there are a number of businesses that are better known than Ramrod key itself. Boondocks, the bar and restaurant has the Keys' only putt putt golf course and not terribly prepossessing is it from the rear:

The same goes for Five Brothers Two, the suburban incarnation of the well known Cuban deli on Southard Street in Key West:

Unlike the original store downtown this one has an enclosed lanai area to eat your food in peace away from the mosquitoes, but being as how its in back of the store it is what it is. Also, unlike the Southard Street place this one was designed with a certain lack of panache, even seen from the front:They are closed during the month of July but otherwise this is the best place to get a To Go meal break between Key West and Miami. And them's fighting words, I guess.

State road 4A is also residential with the usual mix of stilts, CBS and weird mailboxes. Rent around here for a two bedroom might be around $1200-$1600 a month depending on the usual stuff, canal access etc:There is also a surprising amount of light industry on Ramrod Key, a nursery, a vet, a car mechanic or two, construction yards and even a welding shop to my surprise:The Keys are always pitched as this place that more closely resembles paradise than real living but even here there are lots of people pursuing the American dream of self reliance and taking pleasure in running a business doing something they like. It's messy and doesn't quite fit with the image propagated by the "hospitality industry" but these people are tenacious. Leo set up a car detailing business on a spare corner of land:

And I use these storage lockers when hurricanes threaten, to store our powered two wheelers in, if they have any spare lockers I can rent for a quick clean week:Usually they have something available as people tend to accumulate too much stuff even here where houses are small and land is expensive. GFS, Gordon Food Service has a store in Key West and apparently stages its trailers here. When I worked days I saw the truck driver hitching his rig together at four in the morning when I took my pre-dawn bicycle ride. I always wondered where he was going at that hour:There are billboards grandfathered in along the islands and one is unhappily here on Ramrod, in this case advertising a Belgian brand of beer you may have heard of:And then at the south end of Ramrod where the road ends in a red triangle there is a major construction company yard, all industrial and everything but still decorated by the de facto symbol of the Keys:The road runs straight and true of course one does need to be careful as at one point it is sinking:Though most of it isn't:Key West Diary: keeping it real on the backroads.

Staples And Bertha By Night

New Town is not the part of Key West visitors flock to but wasn't I surprised to spot a Conch train last Wednesday taking a handful of tourists up Kennedy Drive in the heart of the Conchs' Key West. I guess I'm not paying attention because I had no idea they cruised the middle of New Town. I know they have their depot, what they call a "roundhouse" in railroad parlance, on Flagler at George Streets, but that's for mechanics and bean counters, not riders:The thing about New Town is that even though it isn't a hundred years old, even though it isn't historic it still manages to exude a Key West air by including odd architectural details or decorative motifs that don't belong in just any American suburb. New Town is where the Conchs fled after they sold their nasty wooden huts near the harbor to a bunch of crazy (gay) outsiders who overpaid badly for those cramped little homes. So, with the advent of cheap air conditioning the old timers built nice modern (soulless?) shopping malls and built themselves some ranchette style American Dream homes nearby and lined them up alongside straight wide streets, similar in all respects to Staples Avenue:And now, fifty years later New Town is old and has its funky corners just like before. Its where one goes to escape the crowding of Duval Street. Staples Avenue Bridge, a footpath and bicycle route only, which crosses the 10th Street Canal, is deserted predictably enough at 3 am, except for my Vespa. The city promised this bridge for years to cyclists who wanted a way over the canal that avoided the heavy traffic of Flagler Avenue. Predictably the city took a long while to get around to it. The best part was some dude who kept writing in to the Citizen's Voice every month sarcastically reminding the city of it's failure to come through. After the bridge was built, the Doubting Thomas was never heard from again, not even aword of thanks, but his place in the newspaper column was taken by the neighbors whining endlessly about the "dangerous" increase in bicycle traffic along Staples Avenue. Predictably enough everyone is used to the bridge and all whining has stopped:

For some reason I was moved to peer over the edge of the bridge at the ghostly mangrove roots waving in the air as they sought an anchor in the mud of the fetid canal waters. It takes a middle of the night lunch break to make bland New Town look creepy?When the creature from the black lagoon failed to materialise I got on the wife's ET4 Vespa, filling in for the bald-tired Triumph this week, and crossed Flagler Avenue for a look at a few places that seem to gain depth, as it were, at night. The Presbyterian Peace Covenant church is another of those vaguely Polynesian looking buildings that seem to have been favored in the 1950s and '60s around here:This place shouldn't be confused with the soup kitchen at Grace Lutheran up the street where they feed the poor who have a regrettable tendency to squabble while supping. The soup kitchen got whacked pretty badly by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and their church collapsed like a wet house of cards after the storm. Which illustrates another thing about New Town. This place used to be uninhabited because the early settlers snagged that part of the island more impervious to what forecasters delight in labelling "weather events." Old sometimes is better, especially when faced with the prospect of a citywide hurricane flood. Across the street is a large billboard that I find rather intrusive on Flagler Avenue, big yellow and in your face every time you ride by:

Is it wrong to giggle at a podiatrist who makes welcome "emergencies and walk-ins" ? Hop-ins should it be perhaps, or limp-ins?

On a less facetious note, the new High School still looks magnificent especially by night fronted by miles of open parking lot. This is home to the Fighting Conchs, which if you've ever seen a Conch laboriously crawling across a sea floor, gives the term "fighting" a whole new, less bellicose meaning. School sports in the Keys are followed with rapt and ferocious attention by parents(who complain all the time about the Citizen's coverage of their events) and the three high schools in the islands take each other on rather in the manner of Sparta versus Athens; To The Death.I know little about school shenanigans but the Auditorium is a great new addition to Key West's list of locales to see concerts and attend performances in winter when Culture rears its head on the island. Personally I find the High School, open and unfenced, to be the perfect symbol of small town Key West. I hear big city schools rejoice in the use of scanning machines and security devices to check admission to campus, procedures sure to instill self respect and trust among the student body. Even in this town people complain (in the Voice!) about kids and their manners all the time but I find Key's kids to be polite and respectful almost universally. Another old fashioned pleasure of living here.

Around the corner I found another Conch statue this time in a rather less, shall I say wholesome locale? The Conch shell is barely visible in the window under the awning. I parked my scooter in the middle of the street for about ten uninterrupted minutes to use it as a stand to take this and a few other pictures. Not a single vehicle came by to interrupt me. Is this a great town or what?

This is where the juvenile wastrels burn their pocket money on candy (not liquor, one hopes) and whatever it is one wastes one's teenage allowance on, in the 21st century. While across the street (this is Bertha Street by the way) residents, tired of the blandness of New Town apartment living livened up their home with colored lights. Palm trees and colored lights, such extravagance this could be Los Angeles! I guess they aren't worried about the six percent fee increase announced by Keys Energy.Very festive. Next to the corner store there is a mysterious building which I have never ever seen open, not even when I had the misfortune to drive a congenitally defective VW Microbus. This building does no business that I know of, yet has never been taken over or altered through the decades of mad development. Spooky, or possibly encouraging:And because the little hand is at 40 and the big hand is heading towards the four its time to get back to the star ship and take up the business of dispatching police once again. Hop on the Vespa, take a left at the green light and a right on Leon Street a few blocks down Flagler:Me and my bad ass ride- I own New Town at three in the morning and don't you forget it.

Harley Davidson Buys MV Agusta

My first motorcycle was an MV Agusta 350B, a fire engine red air cooled parallel twin that I bought used in 1974. "39 Times World Champion" said the sticker on the tank, proclaiming its pedigree racing heritage. I put saddle bags on it and rode it all over Europe, camping by the side of the road and riding all overAustria, France, Germany and England while clutching the tiny little clip on handlebars as I hunched over the long red fuel tank giving my young back a workout. I remember that bike so well I wanted a Thruxton with a similar youthful posture when I went out to buy my Triumph in 2007, but time has passed and i need to sit up straight these days if I want any chance at all in traffic situations that need an alert rider...

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Now I read on the Motociclismo website from Italy that Harley Davidson has spent 109 million dollars buying out the debt riddled MV Agusta, whose production lines had shut down in Vergara Italy (MV= Meccanica Vergara, Agusta, was the name of the Count Agusta who founded the helicopter and motorcycle company) and now HD is planning a new marketing strategy to get MV selling again in Europe and eventually the US.

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MV bought the Italian company Aermacchi (another aircraft/motorcycle company) in the 1970's and eventually gave it up and it became Cagiva. MV went bust and got recreated by a businessman with a passion and Cagiva got bought out a few years ago by...the new MV Agusta! I hate these corporate shenanigans- until the motorcycle company that was my first love gets a shot at a second resurrection.

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MV Agusta motorcycles are impractical fire engine red (still) road racing machines, uncomfortable, fast and horribly awkward to ride. They are lovely but not for me, I could never hang a pair of saddle bags off a Brutale, and yet I love to see them on the road or more likely in the dealers with a price tag that would allow me to buy two or three Bonnevilles. Peak Oil can wait, I have good news. MV- Campione del Mondo- lives again!

Ramblings Of A Worry Wart

I took a few random pictures of the sunset Thursday evening as my wife cooked dinner and I was out on the porch looking west and east and up at the half moon. It was a gorgeous evening, not too hot, not too humid and as my street has no lights I get a clear view of the night sky. I stood outside listening to the sounds of domestic science going on inside and as I did my mind wandered...far from Niles Channel Bridge.

It is shaping up to be a pleasant summer in the Keys, the weather is the usual sunny and warm and the rains are staying away, bad for the plants good for me and my Bonneville. Crowds were down for Fourth of July, according to people in charge of number counting, good for me at work, bad for the shopkeepers on the island. I wonder what the Keys will look like with fewer visitors over a long stretch of time, inevitably smaller incomes, restaurants closing, lighter traffic on the highway...? A lifestyle change for us all perhaps. I know my wife and I are cutting back our travel plans, one can hardly blame others for doing the same. I worry about the future.

I have been a wanderer all my life, with itchy feet, always anxious to get over the horizon. Now that has changed and I am happily settled in my work, my home and my marriage and I find that paradoxically instead of the world around me being stuck in its routine with me buzzing around like a restless bluebottle on a windowpane, I am now settled and the rest of the world seems off kilter and tilting a bit further every day. We live in interesting times, as the old Chinese curse has it, provoked most immediately by the cost of a gallon of gas, between $4.30 and $4.60 depending on the grade. Most people think its some sort of sleight of hand by unnamed speculators and Big Oil and ultimately things will level off. Global Warming doesn't even rate much of a mention anymore these days and Middle East wars past and future seem obscured by the big black blot of the oil slick.

I see a lot of hardship building in the Keys over the coming months. Home values among lower cost homes (especially "dry lots" ie: homes not on canals) have dropped and county and city incomes will thus drop too as Florida has no state income tax and relies on sales taxes and property taxes. Services will degrade. The City of Key West has cut 34 positions and has fired some two dozen people and won't fill the other open positions. Monroe County has laid off dozens of people. The city Police Department is going through a reorganization to get more officers on the road without having to reopen the hiring process. Efficiency is the watchword and that is all to the good. Unfortunately I see a future where efficiency won't be enough. If we lose tourism to the high cost of fuel we lose employment in the "hospitality industry," and we start to tear the fabric of our little community.

I feel like we live on a knife edge, there's a possibility of war with Iran, and the ethanol mandate has simply sent the price of food skyrocketing but our leaders are unable to rescind the mandate and release corn for food instead of fuel. Global Warming hasn't gone away with the recent report about the north polar ice cap probably melting entirely this summer. That and Peak Oil make me wonder what weird shit is coming our collective way in the next few years. I see no reason for oil to drop in price, because demand is increasing and neither wells nor refineries can keep up. Its not speculators, its supply and demand at work and there isn't enough cheap easily available oil to satisfy world demand. Therefore the price will continue to rise until we cut consumption enough to create what economists call "demand destruction" when the high price forces people to stop buying. A gruesome prospect. I always wondered if I would have seen the Great Depression coming, as my grandfather failed signally to do, but I never wondered if I would have known what to do had I did figured it out ahead of time. I've seen this economic downturn coming for several years, and I had no idea what to do. I still don't. So I just keep on keeping on. And I bought a house in 2005! Duh! But it gives me nice views of the night sky!

A lot of people who eagerly anticipate their annual trip to Key West may have to submit to petro-reality and not come on vacation, while people thinking about moving here may have to postpone or cancel. There was a lot of grumbling in Key West during the boom years, but I for one would like them back. Too much construction, too many cruise ships, it seems like a mirage now when we face shrinking funds everywhere in the public and private sectors. I've seen these islands cope with devastating hurricanes and we seem to be endowed with people who are for whatever reason more resilient in tough times, similar I'm sure to outlying communities all round this country. It's hard to ignore the need for self reliance when there is but one road and 42 bridges to the mainland. I think that if we had to go back to the Depression Era diet of "grunts and grits" collectively we would manage. Photographs of me cleaning small fish and frying them will make you, I'm sure, glad not to be sharing my hardship!Hurricane Bertha is wandering the Atlantic as I write, a Category One storm that previously got as high as Category Three, unlikely at the moment to hit land and ruin someones life. Yet this economic outlook is a bit like storm season in that hurricanes manage sometimes to bring out the not-so-great in us. It's unfortunate but when a storm threatens one's first instinct is to wish it would go somewhere else. It's an instinct that grows stronger the closer the hurricane gets. Yet by wishing for a change in direction one is wishing the storm misery on someone else. By the nature of our geography that means wishing storm force winds onto a community in say the Yucatan, Cuba, Jamaica or the Bahamas. All our neighbors are economically weaker than us, yet we essentially wish them harm when faced with catastrophe ourselves. So it is with Peak Oil. I'd rather see China run out of economic steam and their need for oil collapse, than give up riding my Bonneville. I know that the Third World is going to be wrung dry by the oil crisis but I worry about my mortgage! These are times that demand heroes and I don't feel so heroic. They also demand strong thoughtful leaders and I don't see too many of them at any level. We seem singularly ill equipped to face our difficulties.

I've traveled a great deal and I've seen true human misery. I was 12 when I watched medieval ox carts load up dead bodies each dawn, from the sidewalks of Calcutta, their feet stuck out like cords of wood. I have seen war and I've seen refugees and I didn't like any of it one bit. I don't like the prospects of seeing people in this country reduced to the black and white photographs of Frank Capra, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke- White. The dust bowl is best kept in the history books as far as I am concerned. I hope that our resilience and ingenuity, the flexibility of our economy and our collective ability to take on extraordinary technological challenges (A compressed air car in every garage and a grunt on every grill!) will sort out the gremlins. I'd just like to see the odd ray of sunshine at the end of the tunnel. Is that too much to ask?

Meanwhile I plan to keep on taking pictures of these islands, and as I do, please don't think for one minute things are rosier than they are in your neighborhood. Its just easier to put a grin on your face when the sun is shining and the grunts are biting.