Hazy Walk

It's high anxiety time for the abundant numbers of visitors to Key West who feel an obligation to worry all winter long about parking in Old Town. Signs like these don't help allay their fears..."ticketed booted or towed....expense and risk." Gee whiz, it sounds like the city means business. Actually the signs that look so severe are left over from one the innumerable previous attempts to get the parking "situation under control." They are mulling over a new and innovative plan even as I write but I doubt much will come of it. At the moment you can park in a residential only spot if you have a Monroe County tag or if you buy a sticker at city hall. Other than that of permits there are none.Parking is one of those things that will never go away as long as people drive and Key West streets remain narrow and picturesque. Like this:Narrow and picturesque and fecund. Damned if I know what this magnificent piece of native flora is but it looked as if it deserved to be photographed. So I did.This place looked like student housing, or a surfer hang out or something. However there is no four year college around here and the reefs around Key West kill the waves, thank you very much, so surfing is a waste of time.We have been having quite a bit of fog this winter, warm air getting lost and descending on the Keys at the wrong time of year produces fog, and fog produces diffused light which can be quite pretty."Sell it and buy a modern Bonneville!" I wanted to yell at the hapless shade tree mechanic but I doubt that was what he wanted to hear. Cheyenne was too busy to worry about much.Cheyenne was under observation, though she paid no attention to her admirer. I have seen cars with packages stored inside but scooters...? It was a lovely evening, warm and still and the sun was setting in a golden glow. Everything looked prettier than usual.The house with all the Asian statuary had a for sale sign in the yard. I preferred this image:On William near Windsor I came across this brilliant, if slightly messy solution to a particular problem. In my mind it's a brilliant example of lateral thinking; using fiberglass resin to fix a broken window frame in a car. Ugly but effective I'll bet."Do not let your dog shit in our driveway."Nothing to see there so we kept moving along. In the picture below I came across a well decorated bicycle outside Charlie's Grocery.I found this relic of a payphone up the street. It looked pretty sad to me to see it so badly abused.Walking past the cemetery Cheyenne pointed out this car among the graves. It's a funny thing but mopeds and motorcycles aren't allowed in the cemetery, cyclists have had the Frances Street gate closed to them and dogs are never allowed inside. But cars- no problem. I took the banner picture of my Vespa in the cemetery the day before scooters and motorcycles were banned by the city commission. It's the usual story of a few bad apples screwing things up for everybody and some people don't know how to behave in a cemetery.It was a fine evening to go for a bike ride with a friend.We ended up at the old Harris School as the sun sank to the west. This is my dog and I trespassing on the corner of the open space surrounding the old building on Southard Street. She didn't shit in the other guy's driveway and she is too well mannered to do the same here. We are a very reserved and mannered couple, my dog and I.

Coastal Living

A colleague of mine went to lunch with her friend from Guam and they talked about things other than the weather. As Guam is truly tropical I don't doubt these sunny winter days seem quite cold. But they still look good.We were out boating with Wayne,,,,and Chuck......and as we returned to their home we caught a few glimpses of Sugarloaf Key's outline.The islands have sprouted lots of large homes on large lots and here, 20 miles outside Key West there is room enough for such sprawl.On the other hand this isn't sprawl in the traditional sense. It's just that for the longest time the appeal of owning a winter home in the Keys drove lots of people to seek out their place in the sun. This Buckminster Fuller dome is for sale, and the speculation was they are asking 550,000 dollars which seems a bit steep to me. In 2005 this place might have commanded three quarters of a million, but those days are long past.The waters may be tidal but they are generally very shallow close inshore.You could take a long walk off a short pier.Older homes tend to be CBS- concrete block structure homes that have the typical 1960s Florida look to them. They aren't on stilts and as a result federal flood insurance can be twice as expensive as that for a comparable stilt house. Hurricane Wilma in 2005 flooded a great many homes built like this on the ground floor.Thus houses on stilts are much preferred. When we were house hunting in 2004, after we got off the sailboat, I was rather reluctant to live in a stilt house, what with all those stairs and everything.However I got used pretty quickly to living in our "tree house" so named thanks to the mature trees growing around it. Having a canal is a good thing too as it makes going out in your boat ridiculously easy.
With all the coconuts and West Indian almonds and mature gumbo limbo and mangroves my house feels surrounded by trees and because it's on stilts we get to see more of the crowns of the trees than the trunks. These homes allow residents to indulge certain among their whims; in this case flying.Coconut palms aren't native and they produce huge amounts of fronds and fruit to be cleaned up, but for most people they represent the "local" flora that people want to see.You can imagine sitting on the lanai or even on the lawn where you could enjoy getting a slight winter tan under January's weak sun.
Cocktails overlooking the water? The views may not include mountains but they aren't bad.That little two seater seaplane belongs to neighbors of Chuck and Wayne.And the plane itself must have a story to tell. "Italian Flying School?" How did that get here?
And after the arduous boat trip this is what life ashore looks like.Cheyenne was ready for her nap. Tootie and Zuzu were busy looking regal.Like I said it's nice having your own dock, ours is much less organized than the boys' but we like it's woody, mangrove shrouded seclusion. Waterside living is as great as you would expect it to be. Especially in summer when the water is warm enough to swim- 71 degree water is too cold for us.

The Prince of Denmark’s Ride

Work a few hours dispatching police officers and feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. The possibility then of a half hour ride home at two in the morning, flying through the night, rising above the Earth across the narrow bridges, floating by motorcycle, carving a path like Moses between the silvery waters of the Saddlebunch Keys, is exciting enough to wake a dead man, never mind one merely exhausted by a too demanding routine. I pity my colleagues, who live within minutes of work, or worse, the ones who live their commutes boxed in their cars, delivered back and forth like endless re-gifts, between home and work all year long. “Too dangerous” they say as they watch me dress up in the police station parking lot. What they don’t see is the blood fizzling, the possibilities lined up endlessly down the highway, a few cars to pass, a couple of somewhat deep turns to make, rain, wind and moonlight: what will the highway offer this morning?

The ride through the urban mess that is Key West’s northern approaches is just a warm up. The repetitive traffic lights, stopping and starting all night, the mindless cab drivers changing lanes on a whim, the angry SUV drivers that even at two in the morning deluded by drink no doubt, still hold the belief that because they drive large insulated boxes they should own the road. Not when I am in the mood they don’t. Even at two in the morning I cut and carve my way to a quiet, empty spot on North Roosevelt, leaving the slow pokes lumbering behind, while I streak for Stock Island past Sears and MacDonald's and the Welcome Center.

The sharp curve at The Triangle is the best chance I have to scrape the toe of my boot on pavement on the ride home, and if the gods are feeling benign I can hit the light on a green and take the tight left hander just so, apex at the corner of the median, straighten up, and I’m over the hump of the Cow Key Bridge before the self important SUV has even turned the corner. Past Stock Island, past Boca Chica, past Big Coppitt, past the last damned street light, the last human illumination, the last promise of all night gas, and the Bonneville leaps forward into the night. Antoine de Saint-Exupery never had it so good on his Night Flight. At last I’ve broken free of Earth’s restraints, and with a little judicious spotting I should be able to cross the vasty depths of this dark space without conjuring up Glendower’s devils dressed in green, riding gold striped chariots armed with radar guns. The Bonneville purrs at seventy miles an hour, it flattens the bumps in the always wrecked surface of the Highway, the headlight offers a cone of protection illuminating asphalt, grass, lime stone and mangrove as we fly between the tiny islands attached by the merest thread of pavement.

There are those nights of call taking and dispatching that somehow overwhelm me and my romantic inclinations toward motorcycling immortality and leave me feeling exhausted despite possibility of a ride. Those are the nights I secretly wish I had the car and the stereo and the sounds of Miami’s overnight Caribbean beat and the soft Caribbean vowels of Jeanette Drew in my ears and in my heart instead of the sibilant shriek of the wind. Once I stopped at the park behind Baby’s Coffee and stretched out on a picnic table, fully armored, and snored into my helmet for a few refreshing minutes. Another time when the ride was unable to revive me I stopped at… well, suffice it to say I have lots of stopping places along my way, places to sleep, perchance to dream, and once I even fell asleep while riding, a momentary blink, “to die, to sleep- no more!” I learned to stop and rest on those most awful nights.

Sometimes I stop for fun. Those are the nights every cell is alive, usually in summer riding in my shirt sleeves, and as annoying as the cliché may be, the tropical night really is soft on the skin and seductive with it. I want, on those nights to prolong the contact, to feel the night air and see the stars a few minutes more. To stop and lay down on the shoulder when wide awake is to enjoy the greatest show on Earth, infinity laid out above you, horizon to horizon, pin pricks of light hinting at what’s to come when we ride to the bourne from which no traveler returns.

That night I was tired, no gainsaying it, six hours of work and I was wiped out. That night I was riding to get home, to turn my back on the immensity of creation and the hogwash that exuberance can bring and all I wanted was my bed. By the time I had reached Summerland Key it started to feel as though suicide by motorcycle was once again on the cards, and like Hamlet I worry that perhaps the grave is not the quiet and restful place fondly imagined.

To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

Clearly it was time to stop and pause and take a breath. The coke machine at the Mobil gas station sounded like the ideal spot to refresh my thoughts and get back in gear for the last few miles home.

The lights were on illuminating the bright white building as though it were day. The silence of the stillness after the engine went to sleep deafened my ears. Mine is a factory muffled motorcycle but the effect of wind and engine combine to produce a strange cocoon within which the rider rides, a cloud of noise made empty by the absence of movement. Stationary and silent the night rushed back in to fill the void. The coins chinked in the machine, noisily the can rattled through the bowels and landed in my hand. It was only then I noticed I was not alone when silence returned after all the sudden dispensing activity.
“Please,” she said motioning to the bench next to her, “don’t mind me.”
I took my seat and fizzed the can open. “I have more coins,” I said motioning the silver bullet towards her. She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t drink soda,” she said.
“Neither do I as a general rule but sometimes caffeine is the only power that will get me home safely.” The cold caramel carbon tasted like nectar, the promise of strength and vitality sold under a label that delivers gas and fat and tooth decay. I sucked it down.

“Going far?”
“Not really, I’m almost at the end of my commute. I just got hit by a wave of sleep.”
“Good idea to stop,” she said and I expected to hear the lecture on the dangerous nature inherent to two wheels.
“It’s been a long night, “I said casting the empty can to the ground at my feet. “Aren’t you going to tell me motorcycles are dangerous?”
“I am sure you know that as well as I do, else you’d not have stopped to rest and gather yourself.”
“Riding is the only way I make sense of the commute,” I said. She was not dressed for riding, long blond hair laying loose across her shoulders, what looked to me to be a rather old fashioned summer frock, tight in the white bodice and full and splayed around her legs. She was a picture.

“I’d give you a ride home but you aren’t really dressed,” I said, for I could see no car nor bicycle around to explain her presence. She laughed and looked at me, gray piercing eyes measuring me up. “Are you going far?” No, she said not far; but she said no more and we sat for a while looking out at the empty highway.
“I used to ride a Bonneville once,” she broke the companionable silence with a sentence that startled me. Many times old men come up and spontaneously reminisce about their youth and their Triumphs of yesteryear; rarely does a nymph of thirty start the same conversation.
“Really?” I said, stumped for a reply to this intelligence.

“Well,” she paused, “it was my boyfriend’s in point of fact. He went everywhere on it, a sky blue flash of sound and fury up and down and around the Keys. It was an old ride even when we rode it together, an anachronism of noise and oil. He loved it and would have no car.”
“I never had one of the old ones,” I said. “I was waiting for them to build me a boring reliable one like this.”
“He wasn’t boring, though he was reliable enough that we got engaged,” she said and I wasn’t at all sure she remembered I was there. Her words came through a curtain of introspection, so much that I feared to intrude by speaking. “We spent hours of our lives riding, we went up the Highway to Miami for the day or Big Pine for lunch, we circled Key West and circled the state; and it feels as though we spent more time in the saddle than we did in the rest of our lives combined.” She spoke like an old woman reminiscing which was disconcerting when I looked at her, young and lovely even under the harsh white lights. “The old highway was much more of a challenge than you find this new one to be, I’m sure.”
“New is a relative term, considering this one’s almost thirty years old and has the potholes to prove it.”
“True enough- but us old timers still think of this one as new.” Plastic surgery is a wonderful thing I thought as I looked at her, and made a mental note to consider it for myself on growing older.

“Had we been riding the new road perhaps we would still be alive,” she said, or I thought she said. That got my attention as it was supposed to; her timing was impeccable as she dropped heavy weights of conversation between us. She sat composed, her skirts spread out around her crossed knees like a flower in white, a summer wedding dress. She held her hands folded in her lap one squeezing the other like a reflexive massage but she waved them suddenly at me, her long slim fingers devoid of jewelry I noticed and, feeling required to I obeyed their implicit command. I returned my weight to my feet and settled back down to wait for the rest of the story.

“Not much to tell,” she went on as though reading my thoughts. “It was a hot summer night like this and we lived in Big Pine in a unit behind his parent’s house. We came and went as we pleased and that night we were returning from an evening in Key West. The road was empty, like this, and we made good time on the narrow strip of road that carried all traffic through the islands. We wore street clothes and I had my arms wrapped tight around his waist, my head on his shoulder and we talked, or rather shouted, as we flew through the night. It was here, at about this time, that the car, the only car of the night that I can recall, met us on the bridge, the old bridge where these days they fish. He came toward us across the line, not by a little but by a lot as though we were two magnets attracted to each other. We could see it coming, we stopped and hugged the side of the bridge, leaning the motorcycle out of the lane as though willing the drunk to squeeze by but there was no room, and I remember nothing else.”
She told the story matter of factly as though told many times and this was one more repetition of known facts for one more audience.
“He was dead, the bike was dead and I was dead and thus it was my life ended. I have no desire any more to ride a Bonneville, as you can see.”
“I’m glad you had the courage to come back from such a thing,” I said casting around for some bromide in the face of disaster.
“I never did. It was the death of me that ride.”

We sat there for a while longer. I was unwilling to leave her there out of some obscure sense of propriety, a woman alone carrying an immense burden, as though I could do anything at all to alleviate the ache simply by sitting next to her.
“You should go,” she once again read my mind. “You have people at home expecting you. They’ll be worried if you’re overdue.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve been carrying this weight an eternity. There is no relief for me.” She smiled as she said it, as though to ease the unease of my conscience. “Be careful though won’t you? They annoy you those who say that all the time, but from me you can take the words at face value, knowing what I know.”
I nodded. She went on: “Sometimes you just have to live your fate and that was mine. Yours may be the same, who knows, but you can still weigh the odds in your favor. Take care.”

The words were a dismissal and I rose. I hadn’t been going to put my helmet and gloves back on but after this conversation I thought twice and did right by myself. Usually chance meetings in the Keys produce conversations that center on the weather- how nice it is, how pleasant not to be shoveling snow- the boring bromides of a strange encounter and produced by a dreary fear of causing offense. I couldn’t say the same about this conversation and I turned to tell her so but I was alone again. The coke can was there on the floor next to the bench, I picked it up and dropped it in the trash, and lost to sight the last piece of evidence, if that was what it was, of the brief encounter.

Perhaps, I speculated she lived behind the gas station and I had interrupted her nocturnal walk. Perhaps she had been a dream, but if she was a dream the conversation we wraiths had had, did not leave me, much as upon wakening from a dream the emotions dreamed still live on in our heads.

I looked both ways twice as I paused before re-entering the highway. All was dark, I turned east and changed gears picking up speed, passing briefly under one last street light before launching into the darkness of the Niles Channel bridge rising up like a launch ramp before me.
The wind caught my helmet and whirled around inside my head in a cacophony of sound, a squealing as of brakes, screeching as of tires, a loud hollow thunk and momentary silence before the speed of the cycle restored the wind to its customary pitch in my ears.

All that live must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

Better this way than many another, I thought as I turned off onto my street, glad for once to be home and not still out there on the highway that is so straight and boring and yet so full of surprises.

Rusty Anchor Stone Crabs

This is the last of my three essays on the recent visit of Kirk and Jay from Seattle. My wife's cousin Kirk and his long time buddy Jay were in town for one brief night to check out family vacation possibilities for wives and offspring later in the year, and they neither of them knew anything about Key west. Only that Kirk's "cuz" lived around here. Kirk wanted stone crabs, so I sent a text to my colleague Keith who knows this sort of thing and this is what he recommended. Kirk loved it.When they drove into town Kirk and Jay stopped by our house at Mile Marker 27 and we then had lunch at Square Grouper on Cudjoe Key. That was a success, not only because the food is uniformly excellent and the service is efficient, but also because that restaurant is located in an unprepossessing barn more clearly labeled as a beauty salon (upstairs) than an excellent restaurant (downstairs). "We'd never have found this on our own," Kirk marveled as he wiped off the last crumb of fish on his plate. The Rusty Anchor in the boonies of Stock Island, a noted Conch hang out, gave off the same "off the beaten track" aura that Kirk loved. He didn't mind the stone crabs either. He was entranced by the "squid" rings- "No pretentious calamari here" he laughed. "Forget your Italian heritage, cuz!" he said to me as he scarfed his "squid" rings. They were delicious.Jay and i had fish, mine was mutton snapper rice and beans. No frills just an honest helping of fresh fish and proper Cuban sides, which I preferred over the potato and salad options.My wife joined Kirk in the stone crab dish. On the advice of the waitress they ordered the large as opposed to the jumbo on the grounds the flavor is better and there is less shell in the weight.It was a quiet night in the restaurant, not quite as quiet as I show here but I felt rather self conscious pointing a camera round the room so I aimed for the quietest corner.Jay and Kirk both thought the Rusty Anchor was the bee's knees.Our waitress was divine, a woman full of humor and chatter and she told an astonishing story of a life as a single mother moving from Cudjoe to Key Haven to be near her multiple jobs and raise her multiple children. Her children are almost all grown and scattered across the country following her footsteps on the college route from California to Key West. Kirk has this ability to draw people out and I watched, fascinated as he found shared experiences and drew the conversation along.Her son-in-law had invented an iPhone application and they were busy looking it up. She told of her other son laid off from his construction job, making unemployment and going fishing with his sister as his mate. She was immobilized after breaking both ankles in two freak accidents but she was out there in her wheelchair on the boat baiting for her brother. And so it went laughing all the time at these most unfortunate of stories. I hope Kirk tipped her enormously because she gave the meal a Key West flavor I could never have replicated.The stone crabs were the draw but the evening was quite a success for a totally different reason.How much we spent I have no idea (thank you cousin Kirk!) but he said the meal was exceptionally reasonable and included coffee and Key Lime Pie (not tart enough...the search continues for the best). Now I need some more out of town guests to justify a return visit. If you want to check out their website you can't because the Rusty Anchor doesn't bother with electronic folderol. You can find them on 5th Avenue on Stock Island and read the reviews on Trip Advisor, which are a mixed bunch. It was good for us, though this is the first time I have been there in ages. Silly me.