I felt like a couch potato sitting in the house and decided I could use a little ride out into the sunset and enjoy the evening outdoors. Funnily enough I don't often get to watch the sunset because when I'm working I'm...working! When I'm not I'm usually hanging out with my wife making the most of whatever the evening together offers, as we don't get as many evenings together as people who work normal shifts.
So with my wife at a staff meeting and my chores done I thought I'll take a little ride and see what I could picture. It was a beautiful winter's evening, cool air blowing strongly from the east and clear skies and a strong patch of pink and orange to the west. There were lots of motorcyclists, cruisers, rumbling up and down the highway.
I stopped a couple of miles from home and parked the Bonneville next to the new Niles Channel Bridge that arches 40 feet over the water next to the old, flat
Flagler railroad bridge. The old bridge is now a fishing pier essentially, still as it was when it was the old Overseas Highway between 1938, and 1982 when the new road was completed. This evening there wasn't a single solitary angler on the bridge. My camera and I were alone:
Well, I thought, I'd better get the picture taken as the sun was rushing to the horizon.
Nice enough but perhaps one without the intrusion of human ingenuity?
That was more like it. But where did that bloody bush come from? I realised I was running out of time if I was going to catch the golden orb above the mangroves of
Summerland Key. So I ran forward to find a clear placement for this picture:
But between those two images I met this:
And I hit it stoutly with my tennis shoe, propelling me forward onto my hands and knees and forcing me to launch the camera and gorilla pod into a sublime arc across the pavement. The camera, amazingly, still works okay even though it now sports a big scratch across the back. I amazingly, still work okay even though I managed to graze my right palm, my left elbow and my left knee which started to pour blood in imitation of a very active and scarlet volcano:
"Wow!" I thought, "I should have stayed home!" But then immediately I realised that was an unworthy thought. I stood there dripping blood and stinging like a 51 year old version of 18 year old me when I laid my first "real" motorcycle down. I was doing hairpins up a hill in central Italy in 1976 on my 350cc
MV Agusta and I fell into the hairpin as I tried to power out of the turn. I scraped myself up pretty good, thus preserving intact my splendid fire engine red parallel twin, and best of all there was no one around to watch as I picked up the bike, eventually kicked it back to life (no electric starters!) and rode off. My left ankle still twinges from time to time,as a reminder where the foot peg ground into it as I went down...
In this case too no one was around to witness my stupidity so I took a few more pictures before darkness closed in, which happily would also hide my stupidity and then the phone rang. "Great," I thought, "now what? Do I tell her the truth or hide it?" In the event it was my buddy Bruce from Santa Fe. I wondered why he was calling me at that very moment. What a coincidence! Nice to hear a friendly voice through the dripping blood! "Well," he said, "You called me!" We figured my phone must have decided to call him as my parabola ended and I probably landed on the phone which must have felt compelled to call for help.
We shared a laugh at my temporary predicament while I fished around a for a rag in my saddlebag to contain the spreading pool of blood which threatened the top of my sock...by now it was getting dark so I hoped that I could get home with no one being any the wiser. Because you know they'd see a bloody elbow and a bloody knee and start making groaning noise about those dangerous motorcycles....
This whole kerfuffle was actually planned a as a response to the recent essays discussing risks and riding techniques recently posted on Scooter in the Sticks and Musings of an Intrepid Commuter. My point? Walking can be bloody dangerous too, so perhaps we should wear safety gear all the time, not just when riding those nasty dangerous two wheelers.
I felt like a couch potato sitting in the house and decided I could use a little ride out into the sunset and enjoy the evening outdoors. Funnily enough I don't often get to watch the sunset because when I'm working I'm...working! When I'm not I'm usually hanging out with my wife making the most of whatever the evening together offers, as we don't get as many evenings together as people who work normal shifts.
The East Martello Museum, of which I wrote previously, has a wing devoted to local artists, and of those two in particular struck my fancy. Stanley Papio lived in the Upper Keys and settled there after he had a career as a welder. His artwork developed from his passion for found objects and he took a fancy to welding them together to create objects of whimsy:
The story goes that Papio's neighbors were none too excited about his welded junk lining the Highway, but he didn't much care it seems.
And the way these things go, before too long the welder became an icon:
And the East Martello has a number of these "culturally important artworks" in it's collection:
The other artist on permanent display is Mario Sanchez who died in 2005 and who, like Papio came to his art later in life. Sanchez took to making wood carvings, intaglios, of Key West life. Including a picnic at the East Martello Tower:
He carved street scenes from memory, and made three dimensional the Key West of his childhood, remembering the merchants, the buildings and the activities of Key West long ago. These wood blocks are much more vibrant and immediate than the posed stiff black and white photographs of the era:
Funnily enough Sanchez himself springs to life out of a simple black and white photo:
He drew his ideas on old paper bags before committing them to wood:
And then he went to town with all the finely carved details, like this scene from a cigar factory:
I particularly liked the caption on the wall: "...in Spanish English or Bahamian..." The mind boggles, and ponders the life and times of Mario Sanchez.
I have often pondered whether or not I could ever do a wordless essay,
...so I'm guessing this is as close as I'll ever get:
It was a cool evening:
...but this woman was talking loudly about how she was glad to be back in Florida after moving Up North for a spell, as she checked the jewelry on offer:
This woman reminded me of my buddy Giovanni's wife with that school teacher expression on her face of amused disapproval, like when Giovanni and I take off motorcycling: 
Nothing to do with people watching but I like looking at it.
There is a fee to get in, but all I noticed was that with the local's discount I paid five bucks so I'm guessing an out of town visitor might pay $6. It's well worth it, as the museum has been spruced up quite a bit since last I was there a few years ago. Fred the cat patrols the front desk area and gift shop:
The first stop was a diorama of the lighthouse with some of it's history but as I've already written about that delightful point of interest I limited myself to recording this gruesome instrument of torture, which previously I had only ever seen in the movies:
No museum worth it's salt in Key West will skip the desperate love affair that Karl Tanzler enjoyed with a young Cuban woman:
The German X-Ray technician employed at the naval hospital looked paternal enough but he conceived a most vivid love for the young Cuban woman called Elena depicted while alive just above Tanzler's shoulder. He promoted himself to Count Von Cosell and lived in a hut on the beach, whence he repaired with the unfortunate young Elena and played the pipe organ to celebrate their love. The only glitch was she had died of tuberculosis and he had been forced to dig up her body and repair the ravages of the grave as best he could. This ghastly parody of love went on for about seven years and when he was finally busted it was the 1940s and there are people alive today who remember Elena's waxy remains on display in the city:
That story never fails to give me the creeps and Ben Harrison's biography Undying Love spares no gruesome details. East Martello is also host to another of Key west's weirder characters, known simply as Robert the Doll. It is traditional to respectfully ask permission of the doll prior to taking a photograph, and you'd better believe I did.
The story goes that a servant in the Otto family gave the son and heir Gene this doll in 1896, and because the Otto's treated their servants so badly the servant put a voodoo hex on the doll which became Gene's constant companion. The adult Gene set Robert in a room overlooking Eaton Street and such was the doll's reputation people were afraid to walk past it. Even today there is a wall at the Martello Tower dedicated to letters from people thanking the doll and apologizing to the doll asking for their bad luck to be lifted:
In the interests of my own good fortune I have no comment. There are others who had bad luck but of the meteorological kind, namely Cuban rafters. There is one such machine,if it can be called that, in the corridor of the East Martello, dating back to the 1960s. It was basically a collection of saplings bound together, found with three ID cards, and the fate of their owners remains unknown:
The sign behind the raft says, Could the last person to leave Cuba turn out the light... Before the US decided to embargo Cuba there was a long history of exchange, both cultural and economic between Key West and Havana. That exchange was typified by the cigar industry which settled in Key West for a while before moving north to the wide open spaces of Tampa and Ybor City. The Key West era is marked in the museum:
The first international flight left from Key West in 1913, and took two hours to reach Havana 90miles (150 kilometers) to the south. Cuban Domingo Rosillo was at the controls of his featherweight monoplane: 
Augustine Parla, another Cuban aviator was the second person to make the flight a while later. Pan Am started mail flights between the two cities in 1927. 
And aside from all those splendid lawns there is a viewing platform at the top of the central tower, reached by climbing three narrow flights of an iron spiral staircase. From the top one gets a view across the Straits of Florida.
A pleasant afternoon at the Martello Tower.