Bruce rented a trailer from U Haul in his hometown of Santa Fe, and in an act of holy faith, dragged his motorcycle to the Keys for a few days rest and recreation away from the cold and ice of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. New Mexico is far too dramatic for me, because if everyday I had to look out the kitchen window and remark on the shape of the Blood of Christ mountains I would feel obliged I am sure to ponder the origin name, a reminder of the universal reach of the Church of Rome of my Italian forebears. Bruce enjoys pinon trees and New Mexican cuisine and has given up trying to learn Spanish.
Life is simpler for Bruce who has been retired for 14 years from a life of building secret whatsits for Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor that used to be reviled daily during the Cold War, but which paid Bruce a handsome war dividend in the form of secure employment and a proper, old fashioned pension. What's a retied engineer to do? Why tinker of course so he decided to get a motorcycle, load it up with computers, and then park it in his garage out of the blizzards blowing in off the Sangre de Cristo mountains for the winter.
I suggested he and his wife rent a home in the Lower keys for a few months and do the snowbird thing but he demurred, worrying about driving so far with their dogs. The fact is that after a life spent fiddling with slide rules and micrometers Bruce has lost the drive to plan, so a nice slow road trip followed by a stay short enough to require but one visit to our washer/dryer is sufficient apparently to take the edge off a New Mexico winter. 
It was a pleasant winter afternoon in the Keys, the recent cold front had blown through with some force, leaving us basking in afternoon temperatures above 70 degrees (20C approx) and we took advantage to head out on the back roads of Big Pine Key. We checked for alligators at Blue Hole but finding none we spotted this one, in pink, on a seawall at Port Pine Heights, on the northernmost tip of Big Pine Key, where we took a stroll to admire the architecture and the balmy afternoon air. We weren't alone:
These women peddled past and on turning around asked if the nice dog was ours, we shook our heads though when we strolled by this "nice dog" used a great deal too much energy yakking at us from behind his upstairs bars wherein he felt safe:
Bruce and Celia's lives are dominated by an obscure breed of massive dog called Bernese, which look a bit like the animal in the Canadian comic strip For Better or For Worse (which the Citizen doesn't carry, unfortunately) and like most breeds of big dogs, Bernese are relatively quiet companions. This was not a quiet bucolic neighborhood. Someone was out being industrious with a weed whacker buzzing loudly and someone else parked their over sized pick up truck in their driveway and left the diesel engine rumbling cosily.
When I used to drive a tractor trailer I avoided truck stops like the plague and parked my rig in out of the way places where nothing could be heard for miles around, instead of the endless rumblings of trucks whose drivers couldn't stand to switch the things off and enjoy the thoughts in their heads. Some people though can turn it all off and enjoy the moment and I envied this character:
This is a man who has spent altogether too long fighting snow drifts and fog and knows where he is well off, weed whacker or no. His neighbors were pleased to remind the rest of us where our place was, firmly out on the street:
As though the fence somehow failed to carry the stern warning all on it's own. We strolled past a McMansion that had run out of steam. Bruce the practical engineer was convinced this was a duplex, thanks to the fanciful twin flights of stairs leading to the massive atrium:
I thought he was joking at first but his precise mind couldn't grasp the concept of vastness for the sake of it, and he declined to believe this might be one person's (bankrupt) vision of ideal waterfront retirement:
Carl's design seems to have fallen on hard times, but this isn't the only over sized home sitting on the delightful shores of Big Pine Sound:
Bruce insists he enjoys the seasons, and it's true he is not climatically adapted to life in the Keys. The humidity irritates his skin, just as the desert dryness irritates mine, mosquitoes love his blood as much as they don't go for mine and Bruce loves to worry about the imponderable so hurricanes loom large in his mind as does global warming and sea level rise, things that I view as part of life in the islands. The fact that by his own accounting the mundane risk of getting hit by a drunk driver in Santa Fe is far higher even than in the Keys doesn't rate as a risk to him, as it does to me. Not to mention the need to keep everything under lock and key in a state with high levels of poverty and crime. He gets to ride much more interesting mountain roads than do I, even if summer lasts the bat of an eyelid in the Sangre de Cristos...Oh and we have Key Deer:
Love them or loathe them, and they like to graze the edge of the roads through the Big Pine Key Deer Refuge. Some of them are more relaxed about posing for a picture:
Hitting them while riding might not be so great even if they are half the size of a white tailed deer:
I took a short spin on Bruce's 800GS BMW and he took my Bonneville for a tour of No Name Key:
Of which comparison more later. It was a most satisfying, simple afternoon, for me a day off work for him another in an endless series of days off:
Just messing about on motorcycles.
Looking down I saw Finnegans Wake, the Irish pub enjoying the last of the evening sun along with a couple of cyclists:
And on the other side these evocative, old Key West tin roofs proudly displaying rusty marks of the passage of time:
And then I photographed the sewage plant for the Whalton Lane essay and walked back down to my motorcycle. 
I hardly dare speculate what it might have said.
Working scooters, someone's main transportation, parked ready and waiting to go:
And that other symbol of key West transportation, the working cyclist:
And then there are the visiting land cruisers, huge machines lumbering around town hauling the kitchen sink in their multiplicity of bags and stuff, like this BMW outside the Courthouse Deli on Whitehead Street:
It's a style I've always liked but it seems like overkill in a community a hundred miles from the nearest freeway. Not to mention the purchase cost equivalent to two Triumph Bonnevilles... 
So the dreaded auction is coming to Key West gradually. I have heard of numerous properties headed towards foreclosure but so far house prices are nowhere near collapsing. Home sales have dried up compared to the boom years but I heard a rumor a six million dollar Old Town home was recently snapped up by singer Kenny Chesney who probably isn't short a buck. For others though the prospect of forking over three quarters of a million for a home might seem a bit much these days. I saw these listings for middle Keys homes:
I expect 2009 might bring a few more bargains to the market.
They were a dozen motorcyclists riding in a gaggle of discombobulated idiots, blocking both northbound lanes on Boca Chica and holding traffic down to less than 50 miles per hour in a 55 zone. The white van was fit to be tied trying to persuade them to let him pass but they droned along in a mess of 46 mile per hour weaving bikes holding back a dozen impatient drivers. I hung even further back anticipating a disaster.
They fumbled their way through Big Coppitt and the sewer installation roadworks and popped out in the Saddlebunch Keys where the limit goes all rural and gets back up to a heady 55 miles per hour. Not us. We were stuck behind the morons still weaving and and out amongst themselves, still facing sudden death from the white van caught in their midst. A couple of them dropped out of the pack suddenly slowing and stopping on the shoulder for reasons known only to themselves and their women perched high on inadequate pillions. We passed them by at a funereal pace only to find the extra lame slow pokes suddenly bobbing in our mirrors:
We were moving so slowly I was tempted to ask my wife to get out and stroll alongside and take a few pictures as we rolled through the sunny afternoon... but eventually we got closer to home with me wondering if all this talk of wanting to see more people out on two wheels is really a worthy goal for advocates of motorbikes and motorcycling.
As I turned off the Highway to go down my street the last I saw of them was a slow moving procession dawdling along towards Big Pine Key, and happy to see the last of them. There will be more I'm sure.
It would have been a better conveyance for some people who think they should be out riding motorcycles.
Night night.
Salute (pronounced: Sal-ooh-tay) in its previous incarnation suffered from inconsistency as a friend of mine put it, someone with experience in the table waiting trade. Sometimes food and service were good, and sometimes less so, but prices were always fairly stiff so the expectation was that things should be good. My wife wanted to celebrate her 55th birthday on the beach and so we gave the new management a shot and it worked out quite well. We got three orders of the day's special, yellow tail snapper on salad greens with mango-eggplant salsa:
Which was really quite excellent even though the unpublished price, as it wasn't on the menu was $17:50 which seemed like a lot of money for lunch. Bruce got the roast chicken-pesto salad sandwich off the regular menu for an advertised $10, quite the deal by comparison:
And, being the unsophisticated New Mexican he is, he got his first taste of orzo pasta which got his seal of approval. We all four shared a gazpacho soup and a white bean soup which was better for me on this freezing cold day (65 degrees- 17C) than the cold gazpacho:
The regular menu is quite reasonable and includes some rather bland sounding pasta dishes, primavera, marinara, and something else I can't remember:
Salute currently finds itself in the middle of a modest, by Key West standards, political tug of war. On the one hand Monroe County owns Higgs beach but the Sheriff's department, as a cost cutting measure pulled out the two deputies that were assigned to beach patrol on ATVs. With the departure of the all terrain vehicles, and the deputies with them, the homeless population, especially in winter, has burgeoned at the picnic facilities:
The county had previously suggested handing the park over to the city but the city commission recoiled in horror complaining of the cost of maintenance- cleaning the beach of seaweed, cleaning the park of bums etc...Now the relatively new county administrator, the exotically named Roman Gastesi is suggesting turning the shambles into a first class recreational facility for Monroe County. 
And, as odd as it may seem I think the new management at Salute may have inspired this fresh attitude.
From the outside the restaurant things haven't changed that much, the colors remain the same more or less as does the decor inside the building. And the horribly noisy muzak still blares from the wall doing it's best to hatter the beach ambiance:
The food was excellent and the service cheerful and owing to the chill we were spared the clusters of local subjects lurking on the sand. Understand these aren't working poor or distressed locals, who enjoy the benefits of numerous caring social service agencies. These are people who chose to live at Higgs Beach during the winter and live out their drug induced dramas in a public park and very tedious they are too. The fact the restaurant is thriving, particular in the lunch hour I'm told, may indeed make it a decent "anchor store" for Gastesi's ambitious renovations planned for the beach. The outdoor area filled up as our lunch progressed and on a day of cold north winds it was perfectly comfortable to sit outside:
The inside seating area and bar looked snug too:
There is even a little, colorful, lounging area outside where this dude was reading the Paradise insert from Thursday's paper and sipping a beer:
I hope Salute (pronounced: Sal-ooh-tay) makes it as a vibrant part of Higgs Beach not least because people, including families, have been clamoring to get their picnic and beach front area back. Dog owners get dog park across the street for off leash romps, and parents get their toddlers off leash at Astro City and now we effete wine sippers get to eat pesto off leash at Salute, no longer moribund.
Quite the views of people playing on the Higgs pier and the fishing boats snug at anchor, protected from the biting north wind:
A nice place for lunch.
Island Time: what a concept. There is a select group of people that think that island time is really cool: new arrivals, snowbirds, vacationers. For regular folks it's business as usual in the Keys. Indeed "island time" is a pain in the backside for someone trying to hold down a decent job in the Keys. The problem with "island time" is that it only applies in places where people really don't give a damn whether or not things happen at all, never mind to a schedule. In the Keys "island time"doesn't exist because like it or not this place isn't some Caribbean Island, it's the United States, a place where We Get Things Done.
Snowbirds love to describe life in the Keys as laid back, and that's hardly surprising. The golden years they call them, a time of reflection and ease after a life of working to provide for everyone else in the family...They flock to the Keys to enjoy winters at last snow free and warm. They get up nice and early, a lifelong habit, and take their morning constitutionals exchanging pleasantries as they meet outside my window, waking me from a sound sleep. They clog the aisles in the supermarket remarking on how nice it is to meet again "down here," the vaguely defined area south of Up North. They write passionate letters to the Editor about the homeless clogging the beaches, the lack of parking and bad mannered neighbors and their dogs. Issues they will forget about and leave unresolved for next year, because come April they pack their SUVs and RVs for the trek North.
Tourists love island time. They fly in for a week of sun and fun and immediately adopt the notion that nothing matters, mon. They are in excellent spirits as they cast off their parkas and expose their lily white limbs to the locals' pained gaze. They get into the Caribbean spirit instantly, making lifelong friends of the bartenders, drinking enough to fool themselves into imagining they too could cast off their formal lives and become "beach bums," like all the much admired raggedly dressed locals...Key West- where dreams come true.
Take the ferry out to your week long dream home, cruise Duval on a rented bicycle, no worries. Well, not for a week anyway. The problem is of course that time does matter, especially when something goes a little awry and the dream vacation becomes just one more issue to be dealt with. People who call the police department are rather less on island time when they need to report lost or stolen property, or one more drunken brawl. I can only imagine an island time 9-1-1 conversation: "Key West 9-1-1..."
Frankly I am no fan of island time, I enjoy punctuality, I think it is polite, and my pleasure in living here is measured by yardsticks other than my ability to avoid getting anything done. My least favorite place to encounter island time is on the highway. People with nowhere particular to go love to dawdle and you'd think their mothers would have taught them enough good manners to pull over and let pass the wild eyed locals late for their second or third jobs. On those days when I am dawdling I do just that so I like to think I set a good example...I know the views are fabulous, not least because I never tire of them but there are tons of places to pull over and admire them from Flagler's old bridges which make excellent viewing or fishing platforms. There just aren't that many opportunities to pass (legally) especially if there is lots of oncoming traffic, as happens in winter.
Island time is a fiction, as much as the widely touted notions that Key West is tropical, or located in the Caribbean, but even a curmudgeon like me has to admit that it is a cheerful fiction, perhaps even a desirable one. I don't get too stressed normally if I get stuck behind a chatty cashier in the check out line, or two cars parked in the street with their occupants chatting up a storm. I'm luckier than most in that even though I actually live and work here I enjoy plenty of time off, as evidenced by this blog, and I like to take my island time on my porch enjoying the view across the salt marshes under the ever present sun. I also do appreciate the fact that people come to Key West's sub-tropical climate to throw off their cares for a short while only, though I get to live here year round includingall through hurricane season. I practice "island time" in the privacy of my own 6,000 square feet of Paradise (courtesy of Wells Fargo Bank):
It's an alluring image for many people, coconuts, Conchs and coladas. Too bad the values that make island time impossible to enact, hard work, dedication and persistence, are the very values that earn them enough money to spend time down here at all. A tropical paradox. 