Living The Dream

This is the time of year that a person's thoughts turn to Key West, especially if they live Up North. The leaves are turning in the mountains of Appalachia and the yellows and reds that look so spectacular will soon fall away and be replaced by brown spiky branches and trunks and wind will blow the remains of the leaves away and cold and snow will replace the memories of summer. Love those change of seasons. But if you don't, and I don't, Key West is the place to be. This picture of Key West Bight between Turtle Kraals and the Half Shell Raw Bar could be taken any month of the year. It rains a bit more in summer and sometimes it gets cold enough in winter to require a sweater, but things don't change that much around here.

Florida is known as Flatistan to motorcycle riders, the place where roads vary almost not at all in elevation or in turns, where views are limited by the lack of that third dimension, where water not land is the attraction. Florida isn't known as the fountain of youth, even though young people do live here according to rumors I have heard. Florida is God's waiting room, the place people come to retire and die far from family friends and the lives they knew Up North. Florida is the land of the con, the quick buck, swamps sold as homesteads, the refuge of two bit South American dictators and their henchmen, a place to retire in the sun. And then there are the Fabulous Florida Keys.

Young people do come to Key West, even though there is no institute of upper learning outside of the community college. They come to live the Bohemian 21st century life, to work a job not a career, to be eccentric or artistic or to drop out for a while. They give Key West the feel of a town not of Florida. There are youthful cities in the Sunshine State but Gainesville or Deland have universities that give them the feel of centers of learning just like any other across the nation. But Key West is a different kind of small town at the end of the road, filled with high prices, low paid jobs and in every respect ends up a career dead end for most settlers. In a town of 23,000 there are plenty of people already here already working the best jobs. In a declining economy the musical chairs have stopped rotating.

I wonder why we live here in these islands. Deprived of all that makes the American dream a possibility- a job, a mall, chain shopping and a variety of outdoor excitements, yet we don't move away or seek out cheap dirt on which to make a home and build a career. Can it just be because the weather is so pleasant this time of year? Surely we seek more than just a mild winter climate? I like riding my motorcycle year round but that's not a reason to live in the Keys. Check this idiot out, idling across my single lane street blocking the roadway while he waits for whatever it is to release him to ride ... I sat in my car waiting, with my impateint dog on the back seat, both of us for him to figure out he was being a dick - but hey! This is Florida and no one's mother raised them to have good manners... And that is an issue in a state where people come and go on a whim. Why be considerate when they may not be your neighbors in a few weeks or months? Blocking the street mindlessly is not  a  big deal really. Especially when your neighbor is a stranger. 

The Florida Keys enjoy a reputation for eccentricity and apartness which sounds awesome and special. But that is mitigated by the painfully conventional approach to life in the other 67 counties in Florida. My wife went on a course a few years ago and ended up in an auditorium with hundreds of people and of them all only two were wearing bright colored Hawaiian style shirts, everyone else had on severe business attire. "You must be the two from Key West," the trainer announced. That's how Key West works it's magic on you. You live here and you are allowed to be odd. Consider this, on Trip Advisor I am told the restaurant pictured below called Garbo's is the number one best eatery in Key West. Really? Well okay then. I guess one could argue a case of wild ballot stuffing on Trip Advisor or possibly a stationary food truck could be considered the ne plus ultra of places to eat out in this peculiar town. You choose.

 

When friends in California heard I was moving to Florida their first reaction was why would I leave the Golden State and secondly what about the humidity and the insects? I countered that I was saying goodbye to fog, cold, earthquakes and traffic jams. Besides, I wasn't moving to Florida, I had gone sailing and had washed up accidentally in Key West. Big difference. I don't live in a land of strip malls and early bird specials but I do collect coconuts from my yard and my winter wardrobe consists of a sweat shirt and two light cardigans. With a sleeveless vest for inbetween days not quite considered cold. And there we are, weather matters, even though my teeth were chattering last night on the ride home in 65 degrees at 6am. It matters to me at any rate and in th weeks to come this page will be filled with pictures of greenery and sunshine and the same old shit. When the view outside your window is gray and snowy and cold you'll probably quite like my stupid pictures. It is all the weather isn't it.

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Jack Riepe, Hurricane Sandy, And Canned Electricity

Jack Riepe has not had a chocolate cup cake since last May and he would kill for one now if you could slip him one amidst the devastation of Tom's River, New Jersey. It gets worse, members of the premier Motorcycle and Wrenching Chartered BMW club of Pennsylvania (its called some shit like that) have threatened to show up to help and he is desperate because they are holding out on bringing the chocolate cup cakes. Other than that the premier motorcycle scribe of New Jersey is doing fine. He has received mail, he has hot showers and he has a half gallon of rum he is keeping safe for a real emergency, he says.

The lights flickered around ten pm the night of the storm, the transformers in his neighborhood blew one by one and he knew things weren't going back to normal for a while. "A while" is the bare minimum and the stories of devastation from around the Garden State tell Jack he is doing better than most. His sister moved to the Big Apple for a taste of the Manhattan lifestyle and she is now living in a 27th floor walk up surviving off emergency rations she managed to buy at the last minute from her neighborhood grocery store. As she stood inline for two hours to buy her "supplies" one can hardly imagine the level of discomfort. No running water, no electricity and no way to move around in a city of eight million?

Jack's new book Conversations with a Motorcycle was supposed to be shipping wildly this week, with 25 orders a day coming in but his publishers are underwater in Manhattan and offices are without electricity across the southern half of the island and no one has a clue when power might be restored. Two million people across New Jersey are without electricity. It gets dark at six, and today, Thursday afternoon it's starting to rain once again on the devastation and temperatures are dropping. Jack wraps himself in a sleeping bag, writes long hand by the light of a lantern and goes to sleep in the early evening in a house that is fortunately dry if not warm. It sounds utterly horrible. And he notes wryly he is the youngest resident on his street, and the most spry.

 

We've all read Jacks stories of riding and wrenching and wrenching across improbably named communities that for a California raised immigrant like me are just names, but for Jack his childhood and adolescence and perhaps most important the scenes of his varied (and quite possibly mythical) sexual conquests have washed away. The town he liked to called the Painted Whore of the Jersey Shore, Seaside Heights is no more and he waxed nostalgic at some length on the phone about the likelihood he will ever get to have a drink there again and look at pretty young women parading.

I've heard of Hoboken as a gritty urban community rather resembling On The Waterfront but Jack says recently the place was refurbished and it's most upscale streets are now lined with million dollar homes filled with four feet of sewage from backed up and ruined sewage lines. A river of shit was how he put it. Trees are down everywhere and salt water has invaded the infrastructure all round him. So far he says no one talks of looting and people are "taking it in stride." Personally I'd rather be in the Florida Keys in a disaster where people at least try to be prepared and the weather is far more comfortable when services fail. But I am not as hardy as residents of Up North.

 

I was never in any doubt he would survive this mess and he will survive into the future as things continue to be a mess, for hurricane clean up in my experience is far more sapping and dreary than the major event itself. He did have one other big item on his wish list even as he lamented the absence of chocolate in his life. "Boy," he moaned, " I sure wish they had electricity in a can. I'd buy a case right now."

 

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A Day Off In Key West

Take Tuesday for instance. I had the day off because I swapped with Keith who wanted Wednesday off because he had a couple of high school buddies flying down from New York for a visit. Well, that didn't happen; the last he heard they we're doing that which we are expected to do- cope with the after effects of a hurricane. Still our swap had been planned a couple of weeks ago so there I was with Tuesday off, and it was a lovely day to take Cheyenne for a walk on No Name Key to look at the new power lines (essay to follow next week) and I came across a lovely bunch of worn out dried up coconuts. I should get creative I suppose and offer my garden castoffs at twenty five cents apiece. The sign said they make excellent gifts for grandchildren about which subject I know nothing. So I eat and drink mine, as many as I can (coconuts not grandchildren) and put the rest out with the garden waste.

The Big Pine Key Department of Motor Vehicles office is open midweek so I stopped by with my Iowa paperwork for my new-to-me 33 year old Vespa and $360 later I walked out with a blue license plate for my scooter which is still in Iowa getting a new cylinder installed. I am ready to get it shipped here from Green Tree Scooters who told me last week highs were in the 40s. Which is far too cold to be riding a motorcycle of any kind when they finish fixing it which should be soon. Riding it home is now out of the question, as my original purchase plan called for, so when it gets here the license plate will be ready, and very cool it is too in sky blue.

I was on a roll getting things done so I went by the garden center and paid for the recent tree planting I had done and that was $460 which was well below what I had expected so I was doubly pleased. Plus I got some ideas for future plantings. Well, this was my day for getting things done so I knuckled down and went to the Big Pine library to face a four page, doubled-sided ballot. I guess when President Obama wins a second term by one measly vote in Florida you can blame me. I cast my vote in protest more than anything, as I can't stand the idea of a President who Believes In Magic Underwear. President Obama has been a major disappointment but he has the backing of the one percent so how could be anything else? On the social issues at least he has some slight grasp of daily reality so better him than Romney, who seems to have the sort of attitude toward women that led him to take his dog on vacation strapped to the roof of his car. Anyone who suggests I treat Cheyenne that way won't get my vote. On local issues I struggled through reams of amendments and propositions as best I could, wishing lawmakers could remember how to make laws instead of asking me to help them. After all, no one lobbies/bribes me for my vote, so clearly I don't rate in the world of political wrangling. The funny thing was there was quite the line at the library so voters are involved this year, I guess. I'm an immigrant so I vote every chance I get just because I can.

And that pretty much is an average day in the Fabulous Florida Keys for me. It's funny sometimes to think that people imagine every day is a vacation for regular people here. When I was a child I used to spend vacations in Italy playing all summer with my buddies and then I went back to boarding school in England in September. As I left I envied my friends and their endless summer, but it wasn't until I was almost an adult and I spent winters in Italy as well, that I discovered that the endless summer ended abruptly for everyone as cold weather and school work struck all Europe at once. It's the same thing in Key West I find. Many people come on vacation, have a great time and bugger off home wishing they could stay on and find a job. The reality is daily living is as routine here as it is where you live, except it doesn't snow or get frosty. Plus you do have to navigate around a lot of people who are on vacation and they expect you to feel their joy all the time. So on that note this is an excellent time to go downtown when not too many people are crowding the streets. As my wife got off work early down I went to Duval Street yesterday.

The first thing I noticed was the roof of the former bank building at Front and Duval which has lost some tiles to the winds. I have long said that Mediterranean architecture, and particularly roofs with tiles are a bad idea in the Keys. I grew up with the tile roofing popular in Italy and it was a pain as every spring we had to walk the roof and check for frost cracked tiles. Down here tiles fly in hurricanes and a metal roof properly anchored is what you want on your home. The photo above backs my argument I think.

So I was in town after a night off, to meet my wife for lunch and as it actually was my birthday I got to choose where we ate, so I chose Alonzo's as I had a hankering for fish. We usually eat at Alonzo's for an early dinner when appetizers are half price but I wanted to enjoy fish on the water yesterday so we did. The tourists above were peering into the depths from the boardwalk and I suppose they were looking for live fish swimming about. We had a quick look and all we could see was what appeared to be a grayish snapper type of fish and a lot of aquamarine colored saltwater. I was far more interested in my cold glass of Key West Amber (brewed in Tampa).

The funny thing was we both ordered exactly the same thing so my review of the lunch time menu at Alonzo's is necessarily restricted in scope. I wasn't interested in sandwiches or salads so I skipped those and went straight to the meals and the "Snapper New Orleans" looked good to both of us, fish in a cream sauce, as I wasn't in the mood for tomato based sauces either. I was feeling particular yesterday for some reason. Anyway the plate came with enough food for two so we could have cut the final bill, $48 with tax and tip, by quite a bit had we thought ahead. What you are seeing is a pile of mashed potatoes with carrots and beans scattered throughout, lots of fish and onion rings on top. No wonder obesity is a national issue with these sized portions. It was delicious.

And still people stopped to peer over the side looking for ...tarpon? As a general rule I don't find the antics of fish particularly fascinating but there again I am not especially interested in birds either. I am decidedly owned by my Labrador who was at home snoring massively the last I saw of her before I came to town. And let's face it, she's not that interesting either, because when she's not snoring she's walking or eating or eyeing me speculatively. She rarely talks politics, I have no idea if she believes there is a Dog, and she has never betrayed an interest in sports. So at some level my Labrador is as interesting as a tarpon as far as her stimulating company goes.

To prove my point that this is a good time of year to be downtown check out the motorcycle and scooter parking lot at the end of Front Street. In winter this vehicle lot is guarded by a man as vicious as Cerberus the three headed dog that guarded Hades in mythology. He steps out of the hut a d demands to know your business and sets a time limit on how long cars of motorcycles can park. This time of year no one challenged us as we rode in on the Bonneville and sauntered across the boardwalk to lunch.

Key West in November, an excellent time to ride a motorcycle in shirt sleeves, eat lunch downtown, and enjoy pretending to be on vacation for a day.

 

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All Hallows

It's not surprising Key West worships the holiday of Halloween, with it's mask and costumes and the mere pretense of danger and risk. One can dress up and abandon the daily dreary self and become a "wench" with sexuality to spare, whether or not one actually has that randy gene in one's make up, or a witch with the promise of evil thoughts and deeds to animate the socially proper weeks ahead. That this day precedes the Christian holiday celebrating the Saints, the favored interlocutors with God, has absolutely no bearing at all on the need to get dressed up and look absurd. Offices, banks and even my dispatch center permit or encourage employees to wear whatever employees want and one isn't supposed to bat an eyelid if the bank teller looks like this:

Personally I don't think Kermit's key lime stuff is enhanced by the statuary but it would be churlish to reject the modern concept of Halloween simply on the grounds it's childish. Growing up in Europe the notion that Saturnalia could be indulged by adults seemed preposterous. The Roman Festival of Saturn was created at a time when the empire had slaves and Saturn was the god of abundance and a mythical era equivalent to our Garden of Eden. The holiday saw roles reversed throughout Roman society with owners waiting on slaves and street parties and so forth. It was celebrated around the winter Solstice and came to be adapted apparently as Christmas. However the Pagan Samhain -summer's end - festival became supposedly Halloween, the night before All Saints Day. And this somehow devolved into a kind of modern Saturnalia where adults take on the role of children and prance around looking silly.

I take this stuff too personally I guess. It annoys me that I was born on Halloween and it becomes one of those socially awkward occasions when people ask me what am I going to go as, as though I were going anywhere dressed as anyone other than myself. Happily this year Keith needed Wednesday night off and I made the supreme sacrifice and agreed to work my birthday so he will owe me big time at some future date. So I will go to work in street clothes heavily disguised as a Key West Tourist. That I may be required to answer 911 calls alongside witches and goblins is just one of the trials of the day for me.

In Key West, a town with run of the mill radio stations heard anywhere in the US, a town where Caribbean music, old fashioned ska or soca or modern reggae which trips up on the doorstep of rap (unfortunately) is almost never heard unless it is socially acceptable Marley "revolutionary anthems" of decades ago, this is the town that throws winter decorations on a tropical tree and calls it good. The need to disguise oneself spills over into the need to disguise one's life as well. The fact that we live far south of the cold north that lent us these wintry traditions seems to encourage people to go over the top in celebrating the Nordic Pagan holiday.

Me? I celebrate living well away from the Nordic climate that gave us Christmas trees and snowflakes and burning Yule tide logs and all the other Victorian nonsense of a season of frigid cold and gorgeous hymns made crappy by modern "interpretation" and electronic organs. The worst of Halloween is that it unleashes another frenzied season of compulsive shopping, and even though shoppers across the Keys lament the absence of choice in stores in these islands, the need to spend money on gifts neither asked for nor sought makes itself felt. It used to be we held off marketing Christmas until Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday for which I am off work this year and plan to keep it that way. Now my birthday marks the end of summer and the beginning of frenzy and were it possible I would have it some other way. The good news is I can manage to avoid it all and so can you, if you choose. I'm 55 today and the world around me makes less sense than ever, and I wonder what my late mother was thinking to herself as midnight approached all those decades ago and I failed to appear. Had she held on another ten minutes I'd have been born November 1st, a delightfully inconspicuous day, but Fate decreed otherwise and here I am, a grumpy child of Halloween, still kicking and moaning pointlessly against my fated day, living the dream in a town that just happens to think Halloween is the most precious dress-up day in the calendar. Tell me the gods don't have a sense of humor.

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Watching Hurricane Sandy

Last night I took this picture on the way home from a fund raising dinner on Stock Island. It was just after seven o'clock and the sky was a blue and pink and purple mess, just one more breezy, cool, yet essentially serene Florida Keys sunset.

It was seventy degrees and the north wind has been blowing cool dry air for days so I have taken to wearing my windproof vest in these Autumnal conditions. I know it sounds silly but when your blood is used to eighty or more degrees day and night, seventy degrees (known locally as 'zero degrees') feels cold on the skin. The air conditioner was off in the car for the first time since April. It wasn't the cold that forced me to take the car, rather it was because I had a frisky Cheyenne now unwilling to be left at home when she could be out walking. My Labrador loves these cool winter days and her summer hibernation in air conditioning is over for a few months. This next picture is of the south side of Big Coppitt which was protected from the breeze and the waters of the bay looked as smooth and glassy as a pond in the dying light of day.

And then as we sit here in peace and serenity in the fabulous Florida Keys enjoying a refreshing end of October, a break at last from the heat and humidity of summer, we hear that Hurricane Sandy is wrecking New Jersey and New York. And on top of that a massive winter storm is preparing to blanket parts of the northeast with snow. I mean, how weird is that? A hurricane and snow at the same time. The young Conchs I work with have never seen snow, except on the screen, and the idea of the two mixed up all together is fascinating and as unimaginable as meeting a Yeti on the street. Down here, in the land where a Category One hurricane is a matter of no great moment, the levels of panic seen Up North are every bit as startling as the notion of a snowy hurricane landing on your house. All I could think was that a snowdrift would put a serious damper on the hurricane parties traditionally held in the Keys.

But then when we look at Hurricane Sandy's impact on New Jersey and New York we know that self important reporters will call this a "killer" storm, not because brown people in tropical Haïti or the Bahamas died as it made its way north, but because Americans actually died when it rolled across our coast. These aren't people living in shanties or on low lying islands in some foreign land. These are our neighbors whose subways have flooded whose Amtrak trains have stopped running and whose planes are grounded. Electricity is cut off and by Key West standards unheated homes now without power face the prospect of becoming ice boxes. I mean, seriously, who wants to live through a hurricane that brings frigid temperatures in it's wake? In our islands a hurricane, even one that leaves behind devastation also leaves us sweating and buggy and uncomfortable but not hypothermic ferchrissakes!

 

Down here waterside dining is still a peaceful and enjoyable activity, the cool temperatures revealed by the long sleeves on the shirts in the photograph above. I find it remarkable when we are busy getting ready for a storm and the rest of the country barely seems to notice. After Wilma it was surreal dealing with the flooding that went almost unnoticed, overshadowed by the vaster more fearsome destruction caused just weeks earlier by Katrina, while the rest of the country went about its business as usual. And this summer I never noticed the appalling drought until I flew to Iowa and saw the entire state reduced to a brown crisp. It's only when it's in your home is the disaster real. And in this case I hardly know the affected areas at all. This is what I know:

I listened to NPR yesterday (91.5 from Miami) and it was astonishing how parochial, how community-radio-like the national network sounded. They were all excited and aroused by the storm in their own backyard. Similar winds and floods down here produce a yawn from the hardened newscasters in the nation's capital. Sods. Still I suppose there is a reason people still ask how we poor convicts manage hurricanes on our tiny lumps of rock cast into the middle of this big warm ocean like errant hurricane bait chumming for wind. It seems to me, considering the recent major quake in British Columbia, fires and drought across the US and now snow to blanket West Virginia while frigid winter is already shriveling testicles in Alaska, these funny little islands are doing quite well so far in the awful weather stakes. My wife goes back to California next week for a wedding and more than anything she will bitch about how cold and damp beautiful San Francisco is. Lucky her, she gets real Mexican food and superb Indian and Chinese cuisine while I'm stuck here with Cuban bread and palomilla steak if I want to go "ethnic". I just hope an earthquake or a mudslide or a forest fire don't get her while she's away from the safety of the Florida Keys where eighty five degrees is the forecast high all next week.

 

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The Railway Condos And Noblesse Oblige

To look at them these condos look pretty much standard mass produced housing for the masses.

They are actually the product of Historic Tours of America's housing for workers worries. It's been clear to Ed Swift principal (or "principle" if you read their grammatically wobbly website) of Workforce Housing along with his two sidekicks that to get people to work in Key West they will need housing (not pay apparently) that meets their needs. So various corporate-socialistic worker housing complexes have started appearing, and very nice they are too. Meridien West on Stock Island is a massive, well thought out example supposedly to be joined by Meridien East at some future date.

"Affordable" in Key West is a bizarre concept whe you consider an affordable home would be priced between $175,000 (very low) to a quarter million dollars for a two bedroom free standing rabbit hutch in a complex somewhere. Move Up North and that sort of money will get you a nice home in a nice neighborhood unless you're in the Hamptons or Mill Valley.

These condos are nicely located close to down town attractions and they are well landscaped. I like them a lot, and I have two friends who rent here and they tell me they are very happy in their unit.

It isn't pure altruism that got these condos built because they are an affordable "offset" for the massively expensive Steam Plant condos across the landscaping. The thing about Ed Swift and he has tons of detractors as all succesfull people do, is that he has an interest in the history of his home town and to some extent the future of his town. Te other it developers, the Spottswoods do not exhibit any interest in either. The obligations of nobility stop with Ed Swift unfortunately.

The steam plant was the power generating station for the city that shut down a few decades ago and sat silent and useless on this spot until Swift and his "principles" decided to have a go at making luxury condos with private garages and private elevators, roof top swimming pools and expensive views. All for three point two mill. Except the crash of 2008 intervened. These are now bargain priced for those workers with more than average capital to throw into their housing. These aren't apartments, they are "residences."

Aside from bragging rights and snob value on the scale of value for money I think the Railway condos are a great deal to rent or buy, though I have no idea if any of these units are available. You might have to make do with one of the millionaire "residences" across the way.

There is parking for two cars plus scooters under each apartment. There is landscaping and even though the views aren't the greatest, unless you like the back of the Keys Energy offices, this complex would constitute decent housing in Key West, or anywhere in the country in my opinion. They call them Railway because the terminus for Flagler's East Coast Extension Railroad was in the neighborhood and Ed Swift remembers Key West history when he builds.

I see Key West sliding inevitably into a gentrified future where true eccentrics and marginal people are long gone, most have left already leaving the willfully eccentric poseurs to fly the Conch Republic flag a little while longer. There will always be a need for servants and workers of course and as in any gated community we get a laissez passer to live and work on millionaire row. This future isn't here yet but the building blocks are in place anytime the leaders of this community choose to enact it. As far as I can tell all that's stopping them is the inability to let go of the old paradigm of quick cheap tourist cash, in exchange for a long dry spell as they build the new Monte Carlo of North America.

Workforce housing will always be an issue on this small speck of dirt far out into the ocean and whether the town will struggle on with it's current apparently successful formula of cheap tourism en masse versus that different vision that remains tantalizing but out of reach which consists of fewer people with more money and less, a lot less prurient appeal. Either way I have no preference. To me these are the good old days, a few artists hanging on, a few eccentrics left over, a few bums for gross local color and a few people like me on the sidelines, unwilling to seek oblivion through public intoxication yet glad to live in a town where name brands and status symbols matter less and the ability to buck trends and think for oneself still has its place, albeit in an ever diminishing circle. The big issues I'll leave to the Conchs and the monied developer types who will do what they will and ask no one permission before they do. The "obligation of nobility" for them will still be limited to making sure there will be workers around to keep the wheels of the tropical paradise turning smoothly. So far, so good.

 

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