El Rancho, Good Night

It may not be the sterling landmark that graces the front of travel brochures but 830 Truman has been a landmark for decades for people looking for somewhere to stay in Key West without a lot of frills.The light will no longer be left on for travelers at El Rancho Motel and according to The Citizen this state of affairs will continue for the next year while the owners give the place a much needed do-over.Well, let's face it, until it was announced the place was getting torn down we rode by the unassuming motel a million times a day hardly noticing the modest little 1950s decor.But now, now that the wrecker's ball, or local equivalent is on the way, this is when we wax sentimental and everyone wants to get their picture taken in front of the charmingly out-of-date facade.

The El Rancho was relatively cheap and cheerful with all basic amenities in a package that in no way resembled the cute Key West cottage that the upscale Bed and Breakfast's boast as their selling point. Here was a place that offered honest-to-goodness off street parking and a not too long walk to Duval, four blocks away.One can wax sentimental about the old place but the phoenix that promises to rise from these unpromising ashes should be really quite interesting. Again, according to the paper the new El Rancho scheduled to open late next year should be a model of environmental efficiency. The family that owns the place expect to get El Rancho ranked in the embarrassingly short list of environmentally friendly lodgings in the Keys, less than three dozen so far throughout Monroe County.The new El Rancho promises more efficient insulation, extensive recycling of everything including water for toilets and irrigation as well as an innovation the Citizen took time to marvel at. The motel will have... "a high-tech system activated through room key-cards that will turn off lights and turn up air conditioners when visitors leave their rooms." Unhappily this piece of whiz bang modernity has been a staple in European hotels for donkey's years. You'd think the ecologically fragile Florida Keys would be ahead of the curve, but even today basic recycling is a thing of wonder around here, and controversy, still.The swimming pool will be replaced by a salt water model and I am forced to wonder where the salt water will come from as this is anything but waterfront property.Meanwhile fencing, signs and tape are combined in an effort to keep squatters and curiosity seekers like me out of the street front property.

Across the street the full moon was shining down on what we think of as a more traditional Key West accommodation, the classic Victorian home:And forty minutes away by Bonneville is my home nestled in the silent salt flats of the Outer Darkness of the far suburbs of Key West.I have my own salt water pool on all sides of my little house and my off street parking is shaded to boot. It's good to be home after tasting the urban madness of Key West for another night of work.

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And indeed after one more night's work the demolition has begun. Officers on patrol last night were amazed to see El Rancho coming down because much of the buildings photographed above are now gone:

And presumably the pieces left will be gone too before the week is out. The demolition crew turned this essay into history in short order.

A Good Walk

I know nothing about golf so I decided to write an essay about the Key West Golf Course even though the golf course is as much a mystery to me as,say the joy of bungee jumping. For instance, I have no idea what this machine was doing, possibly fertilizing, possibly watering or some other entirely unrelated thing:Whatever it was it took two men to accomplish, not forgetting the dog waiting in the shade of the golf cart: I like riding past the golf course on a sunny day, the greens are bright and accentuate the deep blue sky, and the bourgeois in me is pleased by the orderly nature of the rolling parkland, grass trimmed, sandy holes neatly circular and trees looking fresh and well cared for. There is nothing wild or savage about a gold course. the fact that people need maps to find their way from hole to hole is just par for the course, as it were:And just to give these tees, as I believe they are called, the proper Key West flavor they have painted coconuts to mark the boundaries of the extra-smooth areas:I once worked with a man who was of a left leaning persuasion that made me look like a White Russian and when it became known that he liked to totter off on a weekend and play golf he became profoundly embarrassed. He stuttered, the first time I'd seen him do that, saying that he knew golf courses and all their chemicals are bad for the environment but he loved the game. I never begrudged him or anyone else a round of chasing a little white ball if that made him happy, but I still think it's a weird way to spend a precious portion of one's allotted time on earth.
It looks nice enough, a ride through the palm groves:
And those sandy bunkers are kept clean by eager staff, raking and that kind of thing, according to what I could see:After one takes a little ride in the golf cart, easily avoiding any semblance of a walk or brisk exercise one stands around the balls and takes up a rather peculiar posture, bottom out, shoulders in and hands held forward in supplication. One's companion stands around like a guard overseeing the inmates at work: And then, after 18 holes of similar effort one returns to the club house and drinks and relives the whole tedious experience in greater detail. Motorcyclists do the same thing so I know.When I was a child golf was the sport of wealthy and privileged people,apparently that is no longer the case, at least not in Key West where they are very busy advertising for people to come in, throw down $35 for a cart and if necessary one can rent clubs as well. If I liked the sport it would seem like a bargain. This sign is prominent on the south side of the course along Highway One.I parked my wife's Vespa ET4 alongside the course and wandered into the shrubbery that lines the fence. Looking back I could see the scooter and the all important Dion's fried chicken store behind it. That's because the Key West Golf Course is on Stock Island, but mysteriously enough it is inside the city. That would be because years ago the city annexed north Stock Island to allow the golf course to be built along with some homes in a splendid new gated community. Nowadays the north lane of Highway One and all the land north of it around College Road is in the city.
The Monroe County Sheriff's Office has an agreement with the city to patrol this area and they are responsible for the trees and bushes lining the golf course, a place where people are fond of hanging out and camping. A very pleasant spot it is too. And the golfers continue to beaver away out in the sun:
Across the course one can see the "Key West style" homes built by developer Pritam Singh who is also responsible for similar housing in Truman Annex and he also recreated these style of homes in Tranquility Bay in Marathon. I've seen these places offered for rent for better than $2,000 a month in the newspaper. My wife and I considered buying a few years ago when we were looking, but the strictures of the gated community thing and the lack of salt water access put us off. The short drive to Key West tended to increase the value of the properties and we weren't that interested. And of course we don't play golf...

One could be sitting out on the splendid Key West style porch while watching men hit balls and chase them across the green and pleasant lawns:

I have to wonder about the golfing posture. What is it about the hip thrust out, the way they do? If they behaved like this in mid-Duval Street they'd end up getting propositioned, but here they stand around flaunting their hips like nobody's business:

Though it surprises me when I think about how such a small land mass accommodates a full sized golf course, this place must improve the quality of life for a fair number of people. Golf is quite the passion I'm told for people who take it up.

I'd rather just go for a walk.

Small Town Stuff

It's a short essay this Sunday morning, simply because I couldn't take the time to stop and take pictures the way I like to, so I only caught a smattering of the action on the sports field:I have written previously about Bayview Park, a grassy area off Truman Avenue a block wide to Virginia Street between the Police Station and the Harvey Government Center. Bayview is home to tennis courts, basketball courts and a large grassy area dotted with mature trees and it used to boast several picnic tables which got removed thanks to their permanent habitation by the city's residentially challenged residents. Much to my surprise, en route to an appointment, I spotted a bunch of youngsters organized into football squads in the park:
One tends to forget when dealing with Key West that this is an actual community with people raising families frequently out of sight of the tourist attractions and bars that the city is famous for. Fantasy Fest is a big deal, an adult themed carnival down Duval Street at the end of October, and New Year's Eve involves adult themed parties around town. But in between these well know festivities Key West quietly celebrates it's families with a Christmas Parade. I like seeing this sort of thing going on not least because it's precisely not what Key West is known for.The kids get their audience from their families and when they are playing football the local residents of the park get pushed out. I guess sit takes a football game for the families to reclaim the park! And that was all I had time for. I've wanted to sit in the bleachers all summer long at Wickers Field and watch the junior baseball but the opportunity never arose.So I was determined not to let this brief opportunity slip me by. Small town Key West- I just hope I'm not working the night of Christmas parade.

Harlem, Florida

I wrote elsewhere about my lunch at the Clewiston Inn while riding around the Everglades for to enjoy a hot day outside the Keys.It happened that I wanted to find an alternative to US Highway 27 back to Krome Avenue and Homestead. This trip was planned as an exploration of back roads and I wanted to leave Clewiston on County Road 833 and looking at my useless large scale map I thought I had to back track to a place called Harlem to find my way back south through the cane fields. Sugar cane is a terrible crop for the soil. It leaches all the goodness out of the rich black loam of south Florida and requires huge doses of fertilizer to grow and the fertilizer leaches into Florida Bay and helps cause algae blooms which kill fish and coral in the Florida Keys. The State of Florida has signed an agreement to buy up the cane fields and turn them back into Everglades Wilderness fifty years after developers got the Army Corps of Engineers to dry out the useless swamps. Besides which, I don't find citrus processing plants that architecturally attractive, as necessary as they may be:All of which considerations flew though my head as I turned south and landed in Harlem, Florida. It is worth remembering I suppose that in the past Haarlem, an offshoot of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdaam became the bright shining light of Negro culture in early 20th century America at a time when black America was separate and supposedly equal on the other side of the railroad tracks. According to the US Census 2700 people live here and 95% of them are African American. I assume the name of the town came from a desire to emulate the Harlem that shone it's light from distant New York City, however that cultural beacon fell somewhat short of this little community south of Clewiston.
Churches abound of course, wherever this life seems like an unequal struggle there is the promise of better to come. Housing seems rather below par, though of land there seems to be ample:

I spent about an hour cruising round Harlem looking for the road south and all I encountered were blank walls of green sugarcane fields and blank looks from residents who must have been wondering that this motorcycle was doing, buzzing back and forth through the neighborhoods like a blue bottle in a fly trap.

There were actually people in Harlem, and if there is a percentage of white people here they were either at work, on vacation or indoors.

One cannot help but get the feeling that economic opportunity has passed Harlem by, even in the boom years of the 1990s. I felt no desire whatsoever to get off the Triumph and have a chat with the group of diffident looking men clustered in front of the dilapidated grocery store. I didn't even want to flash my pocket camera for a picture, so I prudently kept riding, looking for w way out south, while hoping not to get a flat.
Eventually, having pushed my luck as far as i was able I gave up the hopeless search and headed east hoping to find at least Highway 27 on the far side of Clewiston.
In the distance US Sugar Corporation's plant loomed over the town, offering a promise of work and air pollution all in one. The weird part is that sugar cane cutting is such gruesome work that the sugar companies import labor from the Caribbean, where the economies are so devastated by agricultural quotas from the US and Europe that Jamaicans will gladly come to the US for moths at a time, far from their families, and wear armor in the blistering Florida heat and cut cane for hours like medieval squires in an endless battle with stalks of cane. To make the work even better the cane is burned before cutting to clear weeds and animals from the fields, thus covering the cutters in a choking cloud of ash. Unemployed? There's work to be had down here.

Harlem's cemetery, showing the usual healthy respect for those who have gone before us:

I found Harlem to be less than inspiring for the 54 minutes I was there, riding around. There are people who think that Key West's black neighborhood is a place to be avoided if you are white, a notion I have always found to be at best uninformed. Harlem had nothing for me and made me feel awkward and out of place. Perhaps I should have stopped at the grocery store and hailed everyone with a cheery grin and admitted to being lost. Who knows what wonders might have been revealed to me, and cast off the air of gloom I felt about the town. As it was I failed to do that and left, glad to be leaving feeling like a heel for not giving the place a chance.
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This was my natural habitat for the day: the open road....
Curiously enough, as soon as I left Harlem I found my lost Highway and turned south. I suppose had I had a GPS I would have found it easily enough. Had I had a GPS I never would have explored Harlem and got another taste of how the other half lives. And I'm not talking about the occupant of the White House.

Frontline Health Reform

I downloaded this program from Netflix to exercise by and I learned a few things from it about health care delivery system in other countries. The reporter visited the UK, Japan,Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland and found in some respects we resemble each of these countries in parts of our health care system. Each country has problems and some dissatisfaction but none of them comes even close to paying as much as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product as the US. What the hour long program does conclude is what the reporter states at the outset: the US "system" needs to be repaired. He does it with an eye on what might or might be acceptable to the average (insured) American.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

As we watch our leaders inch forward in an attempt to debate how to make the needed changes. It's impossible to have a debate when the only people open to change are tghe Democrats. The Republicans for some reason continue to refuse to contribute to the debate. As long as they say there is no need to make changes the Democrats have to form their usual circular firing squad, to the detriment of what's left of the debate. That people without health insurance can support the Republican rhetoric is an ongoing source of amazement to me. My wife and I paid a preventative visit to our family doctor yesterday. Her copay is $20, mine is $25 through our work insurance. She pays $320 a month for insurance, I pay nothing. We still get heaps of paperwork and occasional refusals to pay. However over the years we have learned how to refute refusals to pay but it is painstaking and irritating. I still support Medicare for all and would join medicare now if I were allowed to.