Baker's Lane

I was standing there enjoying a moment of peace and quiet in the sun, taking a moment before plunging into the tree infested alley, when with a rattle and a rumble an Historic Tours of America trolley came charging down Elizabeth Street.

"And that's what we call the Wedding Cake house..." or some such thing the driver announced as they drifted past the pink and white concoction frothing up behind the trees. The rest of the spiel was lost in the strong southerly breezes that have been sweeping the islands for what seems forever. The Conch Train Tour isn't a bad thing to do if you've never done it. It's ninety minutes of talk all over the island for $22 (I think). Locals go free with a visitor, or they did in the age of abundance, so there's your money saving tip for the day. J Wills Burke in his book "Streets of Key West" tells us the home was built as a wedding present to his daughter by the man for whom the lane is named.In 1885 Benjamin P Baker, a contractor and undertaker had his men build the house and they set to with a will. The author suggests in his/her deliciously dry nom-de-plume's voice that the workers were so relieved not to be building yet another coffin they added garlands and garnishes at every opportunity:J Wills Burke also suggests Baker's Lane is an ell-shaped half-street but it did a dead end for me in a straight line. Unlike many of the other 105 lanes in Key West, Baker's is relatively wide under its bower of natural shade:And it even provides off street parking. I could barely make out the tank on this elderly decomposing Harley:I don't doubt someone can identify this old MG down to the chassis number. I've seen it parked on Elizabeth Street for some time, its splendid Triumph Bonneville green color getting a bit faded in the sun:It is a roost for local wildlife and I hope it continues to run, it sounds and looks quite magnificent in motion. Less magnificent as a perch:Incorporation of wildlife seems very much part of the scene for peaceful Baker's Lane. Including guard cats of assorted shapes and ages:And if you have a tree blocking your property line you just deal with it:They used to build quite a fair bit in limestone rock and there are plenty of examples around town. I always like to snag a picture when I'm in the neighborhood:And evocative porches abound on Baker's Lane as they should:And then there is still at least one visible example of Old Florida jalousie windows, the type that open out with a handle you push on:My home has 1980's versions of the same and very slick they are too as you can leave them open at quite a wide angle in the strongest of rains and they keep the water out. Except in summer of course when the central air cools the house a treat. These shutters do the same with intrusive sunlight:You can't stroll Baker's Lane without being asked to think, even by the boring old municipal trash cans:And there was the obligatory stained glass window bearing a message I struggled to interpret. Possibly "Celtic Christian Poofs Rock" ? It seemed a rather mixed message at best, but delightfully bold and cheerful a splash of color, irresistible to my simple minded pocket camera.Further up I saw another slightly odd message suggesting the recipient could be in two places at once:Which was extra confusing to me as I could see at least three ringers...Whoever it was has money to burn, literally, in these tough economic times. Foreclosure does not appear to have struck Baker's Lane and there was a refreshing absence of For Sale signs. Indeed it would he hard to descend to live among mere mortals after a period of residence in what is an Olympian lane:
All green and everything even if the porch light is left on at all hours:Back to the tedium and noise of Conch Trains and people and stuff on Elizabeth Street. Oh but wait! Is that a Bonneville I see parked at the curb and waiting for me...I can tear myself away from Baker's Lane on that.

Rat Bikes

I was back over at Jiri's JK Motorsports on Stock island at the beginning of the week. The Bonneville needed new tires:Yes, I know it's only smooth in the middle but that's because I live in frost-free south Florida where the roads are straight. Did I mention one can ride year round without electric hand warmers? My wife found me a mileage only airline ticket to Italy for late June so I'm off to the land of mountains (Umbria) for ten days and I expect to rent a motorcycle and take in a few mountain curves with my childhood buddy Giovanni, to make up for the flatness and straightness of Florida. Anyway my defensiveness aside, I was shooting the breeze with Jiri and he was working on a rather ratty looking Vulcan cruiser:"I've got to get this thing out of here" he puffed in his Czech-accented English, "it's been here since August." Apparently the owner has other motorcycles but decided this one had to have another go on the road. I started to take pictures as I contemplated the life of a barely loved motorcycle:The front brake doesn't work, and though Jiri got the carbs working there's no more than an oil change for this 25,000 mile old work horse. You can see it's been sitting for a good long while:And there was no oil change allowed for the hardworking drive shaft. Pitted chrome? No problem! You don't need a front lever if the brake doesn't work!I hold a grudging admiration for someone who can ride without really caring what the machine looks like. Personally I'm one of those fussy people who likes things to work, so I tend to change the tires on the less bald side of necessary, and I enjoy seeing all that fat new rubber on my rims:My front rotor is showing some wear, why I'm not sure as I have been keeping up with the need to replace the pads, but I expect a few more months of this rotor and I will have a new one, at the next major service:I find it to be a highly enjoyable luxury to have someone else do the grunt work, especially as I enjoy my own line of work. Jiri has the tools and the patience and I have the time (and income) to let him have his way with the Bonneville:All this got me to pondering the care and feeding of motorcycles. The Vulcan has just 1,000 more miles on the clock than my Triumph:The thing about a machine like this is that at the end of the workday it was parked outside Jiri's shop ready to go, as ready as it will ever be I suppose. But it will get ridden and used as a motorcycle. Captain Outrageous's creations are becoming artworks to hoard but he created paintings on vehicles for the opposite effect.I saw this survivor at Home Depot:Someone asked for an essay on captain Outrageous a while back but it's not something i can do. He died a while back, after switching lives from that of a fast paced northerner to a laid back Key Wester and discovering along the way he had remarkable talents. Whenever I see his scooters/bicycles/cars around town I will photograph them but his story is over, unhappily for him. Luckily for us owners of his mobile artwork still use it. More prosaically owners of rat bikes worry less about their paint and more about getting around. I'm not sure what constitutes a rat bike but I think the essence of it is that the motorcycle is a machine with less regard for the niceties of chrome and paint and that whatever it is it needs to get ridden. I'm not sure this older Harley-chain driven- qualifies exactly but I liked seeing the rag stuffed in the carburettor and the points (points! remember points?) exposed:Or this Sportster with a nicely placed flag flapping in the rider's face to remind him which country he rides in:There's miles of motorcycles outside Jiri's shop waiting for parts or attention. And his young helper Mikey is soon to depart for the Carolinas, following his girlfriend to her studies at Durham. Meanwhile he pushes the scooter in for it's turn on the table:He graduated the Harley and Kawasaki motorcycle school in Arizona and Jiri looked gloomy at his prospects for replacing him.

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Outside, the owner of what appeared to be a Chinese V-twin cruiser had got inventive. I don't suppose there are too many accessories on the market for these relatively new arrivals in our market so he built his own rack out of aluminum:
He went one step further and added a delightfully curved back rest made out of wood, and nicely done:Too bad his tire's going flat, doubtless from waiting for parts, which will be a problem for all lesser supported brands. If there was a decent dealer for Moto Guzzi in South Florida I might have contemplated bringing a California Vintage into my life. I've never heard anything good about support for my favorite Italian brand so it was a no brainer to go with my parallel twin and I am very happy I chose the Bonneville, which is well supported! A lot of people wouldn't think of a 50cc Vespa ET2 as a rat bike but in Key West needs must...And does anyone remember the short lived Pagsta craze, small framed, four speed 100cc choppers? this owner does:A nice Honda Rebel 250 is no passing fad, these bikes have been around for decades unchanged, and a nice air cooled parallel twin is as good as a BMW for some people in these low latitudes:Jiri regarded this next one with reverence, definitely not a rat bike, a Hondapotamus (ref Allen Madding), complete with bra on the front, just like a car, with stereo and all the accessories, including a Butler brand cup holder:To each his own, one has to say philosophically, but if I want cup holders I drive my car. As I wandered off to waste time taking pictures while waiting for my reshod Triumph I saw two youngsters leaving the store. Their intensity, bowed heads and motorcycle lust reminded me of me years ago:Let's face it,all you really need is an engine and two wheels. All the rest is gravy.

A Night At The Armory

Asheville, North Carolina, singer-songwriter David Wilcox was in Key West Tuesday night and my wife and I had no clue. Then Robert and Dolly announced they were back in town from a ski trip to Utah and they had tickets for all four of us. So off we went. It was quite an education for me, as I had never heard of David Wilcox before and even though I had a late night shift scheduled I was delighted for the opportunity to learn.Robert and Dolly had it all planned and they instructed us to meet them for dinner at Mattheessens 4th of July where we had burgers fries and ice cream. Mattheesens on White Street is a replica of a restaurant dear to the heart of post World War Two Conchs who remember the original restaurant in the city and this one apparently does a creditable job of imitating it with a soda fountain and the ice cream and so forth. We heard about Robert's brush with death on a modest ski slope wherein he dislocated his shoulder five minutes after trying to launch himself on his skis, and like any self respecting Key Wester he retired from the fray to self medicate and wish for warmer climes."At least he got to see snow," Dolly said as though that were a good thing. Robert really must love her a lot as she is quite fond of Utah's ski slopes... and they will reappear in their future together.The Armory on White Street is no longer used to drill the home guard or anything like that. The big cream colored building is devoted to Art and is home to a collection of artistic endeavors and actual artists, eleven of them apparently, in a group calling itself The Studios of Key West. I checked their website tskw.org which is irritatingly short of useful information but they have big plans and have all the usual suspects in the high profile/small pond artistic patronage department of the Southernmost City behind them so hopefully they will be around for a while. They probably had a jamboree opening last year and I failed to notice because artistic stuff comes and goes like lightning strikes in an expensive desirable little town like Key West. I'm going back for more next year when the snowbirds are back and demanding Culture, because TSKW, however awkward their acronym, put on a good show. The place was packed by the time we got to kick off at 8pm.According to one of the presenters organizers had blanketed the guest houses around town for the event and people turned out in droves to see this singer of whom I had never heard. This tactic may have looked successful from the stage but it was a disaster for me. Imagine the two loudest most drunk heckler sin the room happened to take the chairs right behind mine. Now I'm pretty sure one of the witches was a big fan of his because she kept caterwauling at the artists to perform a song called "Burgundy" such that before the last song he politely told her it wasn't part of his repertoire and she grunted like a stuck pig. So did I, but heroically, under my breath. I am one of those obnoxious people who will come up to you if you are talking in a movie and will stare in your face and not very politely ask you to shut-the-@#$!-up. That I restrained myself this evening was more good manners towards Dolly and Robert than to the screeching harpy sitting behind me.It was a pity because this Wilcox character is quite the performer. He sings, plays the guitar, tunes it endlessly between songs like a nervous oboe-ist in an orchestra, and packs his songs with imagery and allusions such that one has to really listen to get the most of it. "Did you stay awake?" Stephanie, a friend we happened upon at the performance, asked from the seat in front. I explained I was struggling to listen and she smirked. I think she enjoyed the fact I was sitting right in front of the harridan with the alcohol problem. I took a picture of Stephanie's rather fetching hat:There was another dude with a cool hat outside on the street waiting for the concert to begin, and I snapped his picture before the light went away. Just for something to do you understand:It was a fine concert and I'm sure Wilcox is all over the Internet where he will be seen and heard if like me, you have no idea who he is. One of his songs considered the problem of Jerusalem (!) and he allegorised the issue as three brothers getting a shared inheritance which was very thought provoking.In another song he compared our plunging economy to another opportunity to re-open the frontier, for us all to become pioneers, to open up to risk and adventure which was an image I plan to hold close in the months ahead. He also, in a tour-de-force asked an audience member to speak upon a subject of importance and he would write a song. That notion agitated the drunk behind me, I can tell you, and before she could get her oar in a woman across the room told a brave story about her therapist falling in love with her. Wilcox strummed his guitar (the drunk settled into a loud accompanying burble) and came up with a remarkable image of a man on the banks of a river filled with a log jam and his inappropriate love drowning him in the stream.I hate audience participation, I'd rather castrate myself than participate, but this effort was surprisingly effective. This was part of the auditorium in the intermission. Wilcox sang for more than two hours.I don't doubt a more competent review than mine will appear in Solares Hill this Sunday as it's editor Mark Howell, sat next to me for the first half of the concert. Unhappily he wasn't there for the second half with the participatory composition which was a highlight for me. Howell spoke briefly to me and expounded on his Welsh ancestry (identifying me on the fly as a member of the English oppressor class, as well as a fellow immigrant- all in one!). He scribbled notes frantically in the dark reminding me happily of my former days of journalism as I luxuriated in the music, and the mental images of slow painful deaths I could dream up for the howling dypsomaniac in the row behind me.

Gardening Update

I haven't had a gardening update for a while so here is a view of my Victory Garden, or Obamagarden for those inclined to view this dig for victory thing with some scepticism. I read last week that Michelle Obama got dug in at the White House but we here on Ramrod Key aren't just followers of fashion in these things I've been trying to grow my own vegetables for months.My original attempt located the beds I built underneath my stilt house putting the seeds and plants too far out of the sun, especially in the heart of winter so I relocated the beds into the so-far empty lot next to my house. This has been a Very Good Thing.I was eyeing the cauliflowers wondering about making some cauliflower cheese such as I enjoyed as a child in England. My wife who has not enjoyed the benefits of English boarding school life and grew up in Palo Alto California looked a bit dubious at my suggestion.

"I've been reading about mashed cauliflowers, "my wife said as we peered at the large yellow brain-like structures surrounded by foliage. "You should like that." She said it rather in the way of an accusation because I don't think progressive parents subjected their offspring to cauliflower in the Palo Alto of the 1960's. I was trying to cope with an institutional diet that included canned sardines on toast and pink jello in my English boarding school. Mashed cauliflowers sounded promising to my weird palate. "They should taste like potatoes according to the book," she said. Then we discovered a new problem."When do we pick them?"my wife asked and we peered some more. "Perhaps before they change appearance...?"

The lettuce has been a rip snorting success. We pulled the leaves off the tall one and had several meals garnished by our own leaves. I've been prancing in to work with home grown salads often enough my colleagues are starting to express their boredom at my elation:These canal side lots used to be worth anything up to $400,000 in the recent bubble economy before American International Group reduced us all to medieval serfdom and you can see my neighbors' boat trailers parked amidst the flourishing weedery in the middle of the lot. Elena came over to inspect the vegetables on a recent inspection trip to their canal home and she noted no one has been seen in the lot for years. Each spring I inspect the tax rolls hoping for a default but these people are all richer than God down here, especially when they don't actually live here.I am glad I get to borrow a small sliver of open space to test my growing prowess. My boat spends the winter on it's trailer firmly in my lot. My fruit trees are doing well:I have had impressed upon me the importance of daily waterings so I bought a 25-foot extension hose and now i can water everything without using a watering can as an intermediary. That was a bit biblical, hauling water by hand, but I expect we should get used to it as a useful form of exercise in a post apocalyptic world. We'll be glad to have water then, never mind carrying it around like donkeys. The trees themselves have shown exciting signs of life (exciting if you are into this kind of thing). A large flower on the pomegranate, my birthday gift from Dolly:As well as flowers on the Key Lime and the lemon tree:I find it about as hard to photograph plants as I do to grow them, but here for what it's worth are flowers:

In addition my three strawberry plants have been flowering and producing berries so that they create an inducement to come down, talk to the plants and then eat them from time to time. My next problem is finding and killing the effing iguana that comes down and beats me to it, leaving stupid little "I was here first" messages on the backs of half eaten berries. The berries keep coming:Tomatoes have not been the rip roaring success we had hoped. Most people grow these things almost by accident, in spite of themselves as it were. We don't, so my wife went to the Big Pine Flea market last weekend and bought a couple of plants with specific instructions. Here goes nothing:And when in Miami recently Target yielded this upside down planter which seems like cruelty to dumb friends but supposedly the tomato plant should be delighted to hang upside down. It was a struggle of Mr Bean proportions to get the bag filled with dirt, tomato plant and hanging:My two pineapple cuttings given to me by Lisa seem to enjoy their sunnier surroundings. One is a slug and not actually producing anything, the other one is starting to show signs of potential fruit:We also have a collection of potted herbs and stuff on the deck:(the porch light was on in the background because I was leaving for work and I turn the lights off downstairs so I can turn them on at 6:30 in the morning when I get home. In case you were wondering). My wife also got a lettuce plant at the Flea Market and we stuck that in a pot. It hasn't quite got going yet though I hope it will revive soon:My jack fruit gown from seeds of a a fruit I ate at Fairchild gardens last winter are doing well. This one got a chunk eaten by that thrice damned iguana but apparently it's not to the lizard's taste happily:So there we have it.Not exactly a survival garden if it was ever supposed to be.Lean times would be upon us had we to survive on this lot, though I suppose we would have to find out if iguana meat really does taste like chicken. On the subject of taste's like chicken, it's that time of year, snowbirds are out hiking up and down the street looking very busy:Another month and it will be peace and quiet again (they will have left for Up North) except for the sounds of thudding coconuts:That will probably end up being our survival food, coconuts and grunts, which are fish. Which reminds me, my wife and I have sworn we are going to learn to kill fish for food this summer. That should be hilarious, we've each killed fish before and found nothing to enjoy about it. I prefer mine on Cuban bread at Sandy's Cafe. I like civilization. Damn AIG!