My Dog

I read a blog about buying a puppy after deciding to skip the pound as the dogs were too old.

 

The same sort of consumerist mentality that landed Cheyenne in the pound in the first place.

Lucky me. Three of the best years of my dog owning life.

Good for her too, at last, after a life devoted to people who didn't give a shit about her. Along with all our other problems a world filled with abandoned dogs seems likely to get worse as the economy does too.

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One More Pharmacy For Total Happiness

It's funny how incomers like to boast that Key West is closer to Havana than to the nearest Walmart store, while at the same time Conchs (native Key Westers) moan about the lack of big box stores to feed shopping desires in these small islands. Developers never sleep, it seems and they have been burning the midnight oil trying to figure how to make these islands more shopper friendly. Marina developments are planned for Truman Waterfront and Stock Island and more homes are announced on Key Haven across from the Shell gas station. Gentrification? Bring it on! And even if it doesn't really count as gentrification development is always welcome in the Keys, apparently. The county commission has approved in principle the permitting of almost 3500 new houses over the next decade as part of the controlled growth plan for the county, where the "controlled" part of the equation is a euphemism for anything goes.

It's been on the rumor circuit for some time but originally they said a new strip mall was coming to Stock Island next to Burger King bringing a new chain pharmacy with it. The most recent planning notice was stuck on an obscure corner of the other empty lot on Stock Island, closer to Key Haven. Considering Key West already has three CVS pharmacies and two Walgreens, not to mention one of each on Big Pine at Mile Marker 30... What a sickly crowd we must be in these healthful islands.

The newspaper has also reported contefforts to build a big box store on Boca Chica, Mile Marker Ni to the Naval Air Station. The nature of that store is not disclosed but the rumor mill is betting on Walmart coming to town. I don't shop a Walmart when on the mainland because I don't think the Walton family has done small business in this country any favors but I know a lot of people are on their knees praying novenas to get such a store down here. Two sides to every issue and two sides to every discussion. At least two in the Fabulous Florida Keys, where progress is as old fashioned as cookie cutter strip malls.

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Pedaling Home

I saw this guy on Stock Island last week. He was pedaling smoothly and silently, such that I only noticed him at the last minute as I sensed rather than heard his imminent presence, clearly a cyclist with a sense of the need for chain oil. Most amateur cyclists around Key West seem to prefer the protesting squeaking cycle chains produced by rusty links protesting noisily every stroke of the equally lubrication-free pedals. I snatched the picture at the last possible minute and indeed I never did see his features, he was more a faceless fleeting suggestion than an actual person, as he sped efficiently by.

As I read about Fall fast approaching Up North, with suggestions for leaf viewing and the first Minnesota snow flurries and sudden plunging midwest temperatures in October, my mind went back to the brief encounter with this marginally equipped resident. I saw him later pedaling alongside Highway One, possibly a resident of distant Big Coppitt five miles away or perhaps the owner of a nearby dinghy tucked away in the mangroves lining Boca Chica Bay with a boat that he calls home anchored between Stock Island and the Naval Air Station. Whatever his living situation his bicycle with its ample baskets and his helpful coffee carrying arrangement will serve him well through the winter. Be the weather ever so cool a bicycle works year round in Key West, the frost free zone at twenty four degrees north latitude.

 

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WPA Watercolors

This is the last in my series of essays from the Art and History Museum on Front Street. The title is self explanatory but there is quite a bit of background to fill in for those who don't know about Key West's peculiar place in the period of national reconstruction during the Great Depression.

It is fashionable among the one percent and their acolytes to dismiss President Roosevelt's efforts to cope with the Great Depression by spending money on public works. Nowadays we see money spent on propping up international banks to no visible public purpose, with no legacy in mind other than power sharing and private profit.

Time has not been generous to the artwork produced during the period of the Works Progress Administration but through the faded colors you can still see the vibrant tropical town Key West was and is. Though I have to confess that as hard as I looked I saw no sign of the fabled depression era Cuban chickens roaming the streets...

In 1934 Key West went bust to the tune of five million dollars of debt. Fully eighty percent of city residents were on welfare and all island industries had abandoned the city for the mainland. Cigar making, pineapple canning, all military bases and steamship stops had abandoned Key West. The fishing industry had collapsed under the weight of lack of money and markets and city employees were not getting paid.

Julius Stone was sent to Key West by President Roosevelt to see what should be done with the little town at the end of the railroad.

There were plans to evacuate the Keys permanently but Stone who was known for walking around town in shorts, scandalous attire in public for a grown man in modest Key West, figured he could remake the town's image into an American Bermuda, a vacation destination.

While President Roosevelt was fending off a fascist putsch planned by business interests who wanted General Smedley Butler of the Marine Corps at their head, Stone was busy convincing the city he could bring them back to economic life.

General Butler remained a patriot and rejected the coup plotters while in Key West the Federal Emergency Relief Administration had two million dollars to do something. He hired people to work to clean the town up and with his dictatorial powers Stone contemplated the evacuation plan but decided "Latina and Negroes" would do no better in Tampa than Key West so he just ploughed on and rebuilt the town.

The radical Socialist plan worked and Key West was preserved, what with the road coming to town in 1938, another Government benefit which no one begrudged the city, tourism slowly picked up and the economy revived.

Artists too were part of the public sending bonanza and without government largesse these extraordinary pictures would never have been created. Above the still recognizable southernmost house and below a completely unrecognizable Simonton Beach canning operation fallen on hard times.

It's worth thinking about the legacy we see today from that period of crushing poverty and the collapse of society. The path FDR took is diametrically opposed to that chosen today. The naysayers will say it didn't work. Art and History show it did.

I don't see the bankers who today swallow billions of public funds doing anything as useful for society at large. Call me sentimental.

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Pink Truck

I saw this truck on a street near my house. I wondered about the bird and crown motif and  figured it would be a nice  complement to my Crocs (or compliment if you are so inclined).

Flying And The Keys

Modern commercial flight confuses my brain. Two thousand miles, a time change and half a day, and I'm gone from the corn fields of Iowa and back over the salt ponds and mangroves of Key West. If I flew for business as pilot or passenger my head would explode from trying to cope with all the changes at once. Breakfast in a Des Moines hotel and dinner at Santiago's Bodega. Phew! Pass the bottle...

As I stepped out out of the flying cigar into the moist warm air of South Florida I could feel my skin breathe a sigh of relief after all the dry cold air Up North. The lovely warm salty air washed over me like a wave as I stepped out of the plane and off the old fashioned ladder onto the tarmac for the short walk to the terminal.

It's a landing that reminds me of the glamor photography of the sixties when starlets posed in front of those commercial airliners ordinary folk aspired to ride. Flight was expensive and exclusive, reserved for the wealthy and the famous who stood at the top of the steps posing in absurd hats and handbags. Then they made it cheap and accesible when oil was cheap and now that Peak Oil is pushing up the price of oil we still demand cheap flights which leaves airlines going broke and passengers squished in steerage as helpless as cattle in a slaughterhouse. Nowadays anyone with money or time finds a better way to travel, TSA-free charters, trains or the unbeatable classic road trip. Next time, I promised myself as I stood in line in the minuscule loo in the terminal waiting for a smelly turn for relief, next time I will be the captain of my own ship navigating the crumbling roadways of America.

She was glad to see me, her big fat yellow tail swinging wildly as she hopped around unable to believe reality. I hate seeing dogs ignored when they express that sort of excitement so Cheyenne got her full fifteen minutes. It was barely enough.

I got the six am wake up call, a wet nuzzle because Cheyenne knew that me being home meant only one thing, a pre-dawn walk was unavoidable. I temporized trying to delay the inevitable so by the time we got on the road the sun was already well over the horizon and it was a good one, the sunrise we had missed. So good I snapped a quickie as we drove through Big Pine Key. I was still thinking about the miracle of flight. I took another picture closer to our destination, West Summerland Key. 15 minutes in a car transported me across two islands, while a quarter of an hour in a plane would have got me across two small sized states.

The thing about flying is that it's fast and convenient if you need to get there then, but overall it's a dire experience, filled with absurdity. It's not like a train where you walk to the station and get on and leave. Flying involves lots of hurrying up and waiting. I am late to the party when it comes to the nuances of 21st century flight, but nowadays I have discovered you have to check yourself in, pay extra to check a bag via contact with an impatient human being and then go through the absurd rituals of the Richard Reed Memorial security check. It's all about safety they tell us as we remove our shoes and lay out potions and lotions for examination by inexpert members of the formerly unemployed. But they do get us where we want to be.

The thing is they also tell us to not under any circumstances turn on our electronic 'devices' while the plane is struggling to leave terra firma because if we do, it will crash. So it occurs to me that were I a terrorist I'd get a group of my friends together, leave the box cutters and bottles of shampoo at home and board the plane with a perfectly legal bundle of 'devices.' Turn them all on at once and poof, there goes your plane. Of course they could no more force people to check their 'devices' than they can stop themselves from demanding we take off our shoes in that ridiculous safety dance we put on for the sake of social security. We want to be safe but God knows we don't want to be separated from our accursed devices. If we think how unsafe they make us, our consumerist heads explode. Of course riding a motorcycle is as unsafe and pointless as anything and far more absurd a way to travel then actually leaving the ground with the firm conviction that we shall return to it in perfect safety.

I'm no anarchist, I like order and detest chaos so I shuffle along in all appropriate lines and remove my shoes and belt and pack my penknives in my checked luggage ($25extra) and I never ever turn on my Kindle-in-an-iPad until the captain says so. I find it reassuring he remembers to care enough to let me read while he works.

On the whole, if I have to fly I'd rather be a bird like cormorants sitting on a power line perhaps, or an eagle soaring free, not a lesser spotted consumer taking off his shoes before passing through a nudie photo explosives detecting machine.

If I play my cards right I get to stay in the Keys for a good long while and the closest I'll have to get to a commercial plane is watching one fly low over the roofs of Old Town making a great deal of noise. Me safe down here on my properly muffled motorbike, and them Up There in the thin air teetering on the edge of annihilation with their 'devices' in their laps. Good luck brave fliers.

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