Cedar Key Streets

Cedar Key has a population of a thousand people, which is rather fewer than the 25,000 permanent inhabitants of Key West. The city is two square miles, where Key West is twelve. And yet the proportions offer similar variations on mainland living. Here one is asked to share the road with golf carts:The homes remind me of the wooden cabins of the Pacific Northwest, under the arching oak trees:

It's hard to say what this town would be like in winter, busier no doubt, but on an August Sunday morning Cedar Key was as quiet as the grave and quite delightful. These streets are set on a small rise, this is a hilly town by Florida standards, and covered in greenery:

On the waterfront the stilt homes sprout and they are quite tall, even by keys standards. Cedar Key has had some notable hurricane strikes over the years, battered in 1950 by the misnamed Hurricane Easy that wouldn't make up it's mind to make landfall. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico get pretty hot in summer and this coastline is a hurricane magnet.

A lot of people think the Keys are vulnerable, and so they are, but the Gulf Coast is like the bottom of a bag to me, the place where storms land when they are at their strongest. In the end of course it just takes one storm to ruin your life. But there are some hardy survivors around:And Cedar Key is not apparently immune to the heady developments of the boom years, with it's own share of McMansions:

There is no getting away from the water even if one wanted to on this sized island:"Look!" my wife said, "there's a monster." And so there was:

In Key West rental bicycles and scooters are identified by the placards they carry on their baskets. In Cedar Key rental golf carts have signs on their roofs:And they can be seen all over the island:We drove from one end to the other, which is a about two miles. In the middle there is a bridge off to the south...
...which leads through the sandy pine trees......to the George T Lewis Airport. Which looked pretty much like the Sugarloaf Key runway to me. I suppose it was too much to hope for a terminal and a control tower:
I expect it's a great convenience for snowbirds and their private planes:This Key West mansion is for sale, stilts and all, for nearly $700,000 with an open water view:

And a neighbor who is clearly not someone who has read the sixth verse of the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew.Thus it is that Cedar Key's downtown is the last piece of the island to reveal itself... next.

Tropical Storm Ana

It's been a few days that stuff has been churning in the Atlantic basin, though finally this morning I noticed the National Hurricane Center has upgraded an on-again, off-again depression and called it a tropical storm. The yellow blob to the left of the map is an "area of disorganized cloudiness" according to the National Hurricane Center, but from where I'm sitting it looks organized enough and very wet:

Of course this is my weekend off work, in my alternating life style, so we shall be staying indoors, not melting and wondering why it's so dark inside our little house. In fact the little red cross marked "THREE" is much more interesting on the hurricane tracking chart. Checking my link "Hurricane Center" on the left hand side of the page, Low Number 3 shows potential to wreak much more havoc on Florida than does little Tropical Storm Ana at this stage. Even though, if disorganized weather can bring wind, thunder and copious rain, enough to wash the car...

...then a Tropical storm has the capacity to inflict damage. I find people often get too hung up on the diagrams and the projected paths and all the science of hurricane prognostication. Anyway it's all too early to tell, but this is a reminder that this really is hurricane season and even though the Pacific Basin is up to the letter G (Guillermo) we are still only looking at Ana. As my buddy Robert says, this year, so far it's the Pacific Basin's turn to be Nature's kicking boy. Personally I like the respite from watering...

...even though this is the time of year the garden is fallow. Hurricanes or not we are humans and we have made plans, my wife and I and we have five Earth Boxes ready for planting, after Hurricane Season. From her lips to God's ear.

Marshlands

Florida Highway 24 runs straight as a die for twenty eight miles (42 kilometers) from the hamlet of Otter Creek on US Highway 19. The road runs between massive forests and looks far more lonely and isolated than US Highway One. This sense of isolation makes Cedar Key seems like more of an island than any of the island sin the Florida Keys, and even though the distance run isn't that far, for some reason it feels much further as the car purrs along well over the 55mph (90km/h) speed limit.
The sense of isolation here is accentuated when you learn the story of the Rosewood massacre, a story that was fictionalized in a film titled Rosewood, based on the story that took place in the early 20th century. There is no sign of the African American town destroyed by rioting whites who razed the community in response to an alleged rape of a local white woman by a black man. Google maps shows Rosewood and Sumner, the location of the sawmill that was a base for the attacks, but neither place appears along the Highway. A colleague of mine from Gainesville reminded me this was the location of the incident and he says there is a plaque marking the incident. At the time I drove by I had no clue. Cedar Key is actually a group of islands apparently, and the whole place is on the end of a short causeway from the mainland. The city is 2 square miles in size (5 sq/km) of which half is apparently water,the other half is a grouping of sandy hummocks. That half the city is water is easy to believe as you approach the town.
Clamming is the fishery around here and there is lots of real, commercial fishing underway. The local boats, designed to navigate the shallow, reed filled estuaries around cedar key look very unusual to my eye. They have steep pointed bows where the helmsman stands, and right behind him is the large outboard motor which drives these contraptions through the water. The back of the boat is dedicated to fishing equipment:

The view across the waters surrounding cedar Key is completely different to what I am used to in the Keys, the waters are protected by all the outcroppings of land and marsh, and on a sunny day the view is quite delightful:There is one road onto main island and from there one can take a turn into downtown or a right turn into the hinterland of the island. The streets are definitely not tropical looking:

The highest point in the city is 28-feet (9 meters) and once included a prehistoric burial ground. Nowadays the city cemetery is a charming, oak and pine covered hill:The view from the cemetery is worth a stop as from here one can look back across the water at the houses of the little city:

They make viewing the inland waters around the city easy with a massive new boardwalk across the marshes:It was hot as blazes out there, and no trees grow in the water so we found relief at the far end where a few scrub palms were growing out of the sand. I can only imagine how popular this place must be in the winter months: My wife's shoulder was in the early stages of recovery from her surgery and she was walking around with a big furry sling which didn't help keep her at all cool. One of the least appealing parts of Cedar key for me is the color of the water. It looks pretty enough in pictures but the water is actually a dark muddy color form all the tannin and if, like me, swimming in the relatively clear Keys waters is appealing, this estuarine Gulf water color is off putting.

It's nice to see that the magnificent views around here carry their own blight, just like at home. I've heard people wonder why abandoned boats don't get removed and the problem is one of cost. Its expensive to remove them because then they have to get cut up and put in a landfill. Then some other dork abandons a boat and the never-ending cycle continues. It's also time consuming because the authorities can't just grab the boats, they are private property and there is a long and involved process to have them declared abandoned. So there they sit:Not all boats are dumped though:

I quite liked the look of this round house especially as lawn care seems likely to be at a minimum:

For a town of a thousand inhabitants cedar key must have some pretty capable grant writers volunteering with the city.The level of public works infrastructure is quite surprising. There was some label about death and destruction and hazardous behavior to do with this structure. We ignored them.

We took a quick gallop back to the car, cranked the air conditioning and cooled off with a quick tour through the cemetery.And from here we headed into the bright lights of the City of Cedar Key.

A Strange Coincidence

So I'm sitting in dispatch settling in for another 12-hour night with Paula when she gets a call from a hotel receptionist on the island. She has some tourists with a problem, they don't speak English and she thinks they may be Germans. We put in a call for police assistance at the hotel and wait for officers to clear briefing so we can dispatch them to find out what's happening.

.

As I sit there I start to wonder about this call, after all whoever heard of a German tourist who couldn't speak at least some English? So, with time on my hands I called the hotel back and asked to speak to the tourists. I was wondering if maybe they have an urgent problem that can't wait for briefing to clear...Perhaps they are Slavs, but lots of hotel employees in Key West are Russians or Ukrainians or Lithuanians so it would seem likely someone on scene could speak to these mysterious callers.

.

"No English" The voice says immediately.

"What language do you speak?" I asked. "Huh?" she says back.

"Language?" I said, waiting for the penny to drop. "Idioma?"

She paused and said uncertainly, "...Spagnolo?" which is the Italian word for Spanish. Then the penny quickly dropped for me. Her uncertainty turned to stunned amazement and she passed the phone to another Italian woman who got over her amazement in short order and started firing off questions to me. By the time I got her reined in I had the story pretty much figured out. They had missed their tour bus, all their belongings had gone to Miami where they were staying and they were stranded and destitute in Key West. The story ends well, as evidence here by a shared lunch at Shrimp Shack the next day but it was an arduous road. Francesca is sucking on an ice cold glass of water, Lucia is hunting grouper on her plate.

They were a mess the prior evening. I called on Officer Young for help. I explained the situation and I told him the truth, this call needed someone armed with patience and persistence and he was the best officer for the job. I could interpret for him over the phone. He put down his paperwork and got ready to get on the road. His preparations consisted of rounding up Officer Wood, trained in dispatch, to take over my radio duties and stuff me in his police car for a ride to the Days Inn. "It's good to get out of the office occasionally," he said tersely. Good for him maybe but I'm a dispatcher, I like my office. The third member of the bedraggled trio lives in Milan. Rita works for the fashion house of Dolce and Gabbana. She looks rather severe in this picture:

Boy, these women were in a pickle, standing in the parking lot of the hotel with nothing but the clothes they stood up in, which included swimsuits in the place of underwear as they had been out snorkeling for the day. They misunderstood their rendezvous time, and the bus, with their cards ID and money were all on the road to Miami. They didn't know the name of the tour company or the phone number or anything useful at all. Except that it was on Collins Avenue in South Beach. Officer Young got to work figuring out who was what and where.While Officer Young was trying to put the pieces together with help from a colleague Up North a Key West man approached and said:

"I couldn't help but overhear that you are looking for a driver called Peter. My boat works sometimes with a guy called Peter. Do you need his number?" That was the breakthrough and somehow we got Peter to call another hotel where he read off one of their credit card numbers and the Radisson kindly put them up for the night and got them dinner at the restaurant. After better than two hours struggling with this intractable issue I got back to my desk and my headset. "Well" I told Paula, "that was exhausting. Who wants to be a cop?"

Officer Keohane likes being a cop and she volunteered to pose with the tourists on their visit to the Police Station next day. I dutifully lined them up and clicked once each with their three camera. Rita from Milan on the left, then Francesca and Lucia who live in Rome.

.

They called and offered me lunch next day so I drove in early, picked them up and gave them a quick tour of Key West which they had never seen in all the hassle of the snorkeling and losing their ride. The reef? Well, it wasn't worth all that trouble for sure. these women are travelers and our modest little reef doesn't measure up to those they've seen in the Maldive Islands of the Indian Ocean (a favorite Italian destination for vacations) or the reefs of Mexico. But I could have told them that.They talked to me about life in modern Italy, increasing violence they said, few options and they'd rather be living in America. Which surprised me as Italians tend to be stay-at-home kinds of people. Francesca, the youngest of the three at 37, wanted her picture taken next to the police motorcycles. She rides to work every day of the year, 20 miles each way on her scooter. I promised her a ride on the Bonneville when she comes back but I think she's a Harley kind of girl...
.
None of them is married, none of them particularly wants to be. They like their independence and they enjoy their jobs working in the fashion trade. Times are a little tougher they said but no major changes have happened in their lives. They shrugged. "The government will take care of us," they said, uttering the sort of blasphemy that sends shivers down American spines. But there again the Italian unemployed don't end up living in tents without medical care...You pays your money... as the saying goes.Francesca lives at home with her parents and her German Shepherd. Not an ideal situation she said but she's at work most of the day. The other two are closer to 50 and they live in their own apartments. They were horrified to learn I get a whole three weeks vacation a year. "That's all?" They looked at me as though I were admitting to some horrid character defect. We stopped at Harpoon Harry's for cold drinks as we waited for the tour bus to show up across the street, back in Key West with another load of visitors and ready this time to take these theree back to their hotel in Miami Beach. Eventually the bus showed up and they didn't walk, they ran across Caroline Street. I opened a small window on Key West for them and though they hadn't much liked getting stranded they discovered that there is a good side to having a real adventure.

It was time to say good bye and they were profuse in their thanks for what, it had seemed to me, was just what one does. I've traveled enough and got into jams often enough to know what it's like. I lost my wallet just last June when I was in Italy and I depended on Giovanni to get me out of that pickle.

"If you hadn't been on duty," they speculated as I explained to them that there had been an excellent chance I wouldn't have been working had they pulled the same stunt last week, my short work week. The chance encounter of getting lost on the evening the only Italian speaking member of the Key West Police department happened to be working set their rational minds into gear. "It could have been really hard," they said. Reason enough I guess for one of them to learn some English before their next visit! What do I know, it's not often I've found myself in a country where none of my languages are any good at all.I should get out of the office more often.