The Mystery That Is Fishing

People hate me for, among other things, living in the Keys and not enjoying fishing. This is an angler's paradise, I'm told, but to me the thought of standing around and waiting for a fish to commit suicide on my hook is an even worse thought than sitting around at my desk waiting for someone in agony to call in and ask for help. I make money doing that, as weird as that is, but fishing for fun? I'd rather crush my gentleman vegetables in a vice. At least that would be done in short order. Fishing takes forever at vast expense in dollars and humanity.

If you can imagine it people get in their cars in the suburbs of Miami and drive to these spots and spend their precious weekends camping unsalubriously under bridges and behind sea walls living like Bosnian refugees with their wives and children and all their impedimenta. They fail to bring toilets with them so as a result the bushes and trails suddenly sprout toilet paper flowers in the vicinity. All this to catch fish.

There they stand pitting their wits against the wits of the fish. When they catch them they suffocate them slowly as though the suffering will infuse the fish meat with added adrenaline and agony and they feel proud of themselves. Well, I hate to break it to them but fish have brains the size of... some extremely small object. Pit your wits against a really angry mother grizzly bear and try beating her to death with a bamboo rod. That would even the odds out a bit. I have tried fishing and it is about as interesting as watching a piece of plastic line hanging in the water, fancy that! In my world that rates pretty low on the entertainment scale. When you catch one of these half witted fish who think that there really is such a thing as a free lunch without a hook buried in it, your rod tugs and jerks as the poor bastard fish tries to regain the wild water it came from. Pull it out and it starts to suffocate and looks at you with one desperate eye as life starts to drain out of it and it's wild flashing colors fade to gray in its death agony jerks as it fights to breathe. Why not hit it over the head and kill it mercifully? God knows and perhaps when judgement day comes anglers will be suitably chastised. Until then...fish suffer and fishermen crap in the bushes. Oh well.

Yummy fresh this morning! And almost no effort or expense spared to catch it. Give me Horsemeat or give me Death.

Posted with Blogsy

Cloudy Conch Republic

Conch Republic Days are underway and are supposed to culminate this weekend in a sea battle between the Conch Republic navy and the US Coastguard. The US always loses in the water cannon versus Cuban bread artillery duel a d everyone repairs to drink cheap beer at Schooner Wharf Bar. However it seems this year the mandatory budget cuts in Washington are forcing the Coastguard to bow out of this event as the battle has been sequestered to death. Ironically the war is being won in the budget arena, by default.

I took tHis picture of the summer cloud patterns that tend to form over the islands on Tuesday when I was in Key Largo. Driving along with Cheyenne. Snoring in the back of the car, I noticed the clouds lining up over the narrow strip of land that is the Florida Keys. I believe the heated air over the warmed waters of the Gulf Stream has something to do with it, and the creation of warmer daytime air over the land mass. So you know where the Keys are by following the cloud pattern...

Posted with Blogsy

Key West Ramble

The laundry on the top of the hill, Eaton Street at Elizabeth. The cyclist is outbound on Eaton turning north on Elizabeth.

I liked the sun shining through the grass growing out of control in a front yard. It looked like Spring Up North, nothing tropical to see here

Key West boasts lots of these ornate façades. The most well known of these is on Upper Duval and marks the location of the old Cuban Club, a fond memory for club goers a few decades ago. I like this one quite well.

Sometimes when I walk the streets of Key West I find myself drawn to details but other times I see a portrait of  a life. Here I saw a Conch cottage, a human sized home with the old tin roof and the sky lights propped open for ventilation, a proper Key West palm for proportion and a shiny bike out front. Who needs a car in town? Everything in proportion and compact.

And then there's the start of the dumping, inevitable on an open space like this one. This is where developer Pritam Singh, of Truman Annex fame has a 97 room hotel planned. Until the hotel comes through there is a place to rest...

Key West they say has a high proportion of churches to residents of all Christian sects. Lately I discovered, by Google accident, the location of a mosque, new to me; but I've known about the rather better signposted Reading Room for many years. I used to work for the Christian Science Monitor's defunct radio service. I never forgot the day I phoned my editor to go over my story and he was in bed with a broken leg. They don't believe in medicine and he was praying to heal himself. He thought I was an idiot for being so astonished at his predicament and he was amazingly good natured considering how much pain he must have been in. Give me tranquilizers or give me death, frankly. I would make a crap Christian Scientist.

My kind of yard, potted chaos in a play of shadow and light. I always want a tidy yard but I end up with a certain amount of disorder.

Cheyenne almost never peers out of the window. Everybody else's dog seems to love it.

I spotted this traffic jam in Love Lane off Fleming Street.

We are between seasons right now. The cool dry winter season never really hit this year with just two anaemic cold fronts and one big one, and now summer has arrived early. It's not properly humid yet but day time highs are already in the 80s.

While Cheyenne was dawdling over a particularly succulent smell I overheard two tourists on bicycles stopped to talk to a resident cleaning his car. It was the usual stuff, where are you from, how long have you been here and all that stuff. Thirty seven degrees at home in New York the man on the bicycle said. He was glad to be swearing on Packer Street in the sun.

I have difficulty I imagining life in a place where frost strikes this late in the year. It was fifty degrees in Ocracoke last month with howling winds and I froze. Stuff that.

Posted with Blogsy

Joe And The Road King

Key West is a destination by virtue of the fact that it is the end of the road. Frequently I read about riders who come to town, take a picture at the Southernmost Point and call it good. They ride out of town thinking they've "seen" Key West and from there they go off to pick up their next badge destination. Then there's Joe from Fairbanks Alaska.

When I pulled into the parking lot at work I saw my sergeant signing off some papers for rider so I parked the Bonneville and walked over. Having done my own Iron Butt rides I knew what my sergeant was doing, certifying that The Harley Rider with the Alaska plate actually did start his ride in Key West. Sergeant Biskup has his own Road King but he thinks I'm crazy for enjoying my long distance rides on my pansy Bonneville so what he thought of Joe preparing to ride his new-to-him 1996 Road King back to Fairbanks, that I'm not sure. Joe's phone battery was flat some offered to take him upstairs so he could charge it.

We talked for a while as I had arrived at work early and I had some time in had. Joe said he flew to Fort Lauderdale to pick up the bike, and was going to ride it to see his Mom in Connecticut, the head to New Mexico to see a friend and the ride north...He doesn't come to "The States" too often so he wanted to take advantage of this trip to see some people. He hadn't slept in 24 hours and he was operating on adrenaline. I know that feeling so I took advantage of his excitement to let him talk about his life a bit.

30 years in Alaska sounded rugged to me, a cabin on a lake far from any road, snow, wilderness, a wife, a job with an open ended return date -"the trip takes as long as it takes, I told them"- all amounts to stories of the sort of wild frontier life we hear about but don't quite believe when we live in the pantywaist Lower 48. I told Joe I would not like to ride in fifty degrees and rain so it's unlikely I'd ever ride to The Last Frontier and he giggled and said he doubted I'd much like Alaska. I took some comfort from his complaints about how hot Key West was on a pleasant breezy sunny afternoon. Perfect weather I thought to myself.

I gave him the best directions I could to a cheap motel and cheap eats in Big Pine Key. He'd had enough of the big Southernmost City and was itching to be back on the road with his new bike riding the mangrove wilderness. I wished I could have done more but I had some phone calls to take and work called. He phoned his 91 year old mother who is as active and independent as ever he says, and then with his phone charged he disappeared out of my life forever. One more Southernmost encounter.

Posted with Blogsy

Key West Bight And Change

Everyone needs a souvenir of their trip to Key West. We are between tourist ugh seasons right now, with the winter visitors gone and the summer families not here yet, so right now you can hear people with odd foreign accents walking around admiring our fair city. Mostly they're Germans, the only people it seems across the pond who aren't yet facing bankruptcy. When their turn comes I wonder who will visit in the off season.

Key West is an amazing town, always finding a way to sell itself, and after going bankrupt in the Great Depression never forgetting tourism is literally it's life blood.

A bight in nautical language is a loop of room or an indentation in a coastline such that boats might take refuge there. The Key West Bight used to be home to commercial boats, first traders then shrimpers and now tour boats. Fascinating stuff for some little visitors:

In order to draw more visitors there is a plan, outlined in the newspaper to hold a tall ship regatta and the organizers had to go public in order to ask for a reduced docking rate to help it get off the ground. Better that than more cruises ships and sailing boats do actually have something to do with Key West's history.

Schooner Wharf has rebuilt the old bit that got burned and is now open for extra waterfront business.

I cannot say I find the extension attractive or thoughtfully done but I expect it will blend in nicely with the hotel that is to be built on the open space next door. It certainly doesn't look like it belongs to the waterfront funk of "the last little bit of old Key West."

This part of the world is going to undergo refurbishment by the city to please the hotel development so things will look quite different quite soon. Gentrification moves apace!

But no doubt it will draw people and bicycles and money and those who grumble about bike paths and flower beds and turning circles will get used to the changes in time and then grumbling will turn to other changes planned.

Change is exemplified by the waterfront market building, supposedly going to become a pub. All part of change that will improve our quality of life, they say. I'll be back to take more pictures as it goes, then I'll look back at these pictures and remember how it was in the "good old days." Harrumph.

Posted with Blogsy

Key West Oddities

How or why someone's fashion wardrobe ended up hanging off a fence on Eaton Street I don't know. But there it was, waiting for the owner to return.

Fish are a common decorative motif in a city surrounded by water, even though a not inconsiderable number of people here rarely get out on the water.

Some people bring stuff back from distant parts to add color to their lives.

I'm not completely sure what a Chickey Coop should look like but this one is apparently one of the better ones. The plaque on the column is a record of the home's inclusion in one of Key West's house and garden tours.

I'd rather drink snake blood than have a bunch of strangers prancing through my home at will, as part of an organized citywide tour...Which should not come as a surprise as I like my seculsion but apparently it is a highly desireable honor to be part of the homes and gardens tour.

I quite like the new generation of hurricane shutters made of see through plastic materiel. You can leave them up all through hurricane season without suffering the light cut off of the traditional aluminum variety.

I'm not sure its proper hotel etiquette, despite or because this is a seaside town, to dry towels on the balcony. The heat has been ferocious lately, an early summer, so I don't doubt the towels dried quickly.

I don't know what to make of a sign that advises you simply that a dog lives here...Is it a warning? Of what? Or a boast? Or a reminder to an absent minded returning owner?

Seahorses live here except they don't because seahorses are now known by some other name that I can't remember. I can feel an old fogey rant coming on about the nature of useless pointless change.

Is there any doubt that the street address here is 717? I am reminded of that billboard I saw in the Midwest somewhere a few years ago on my last cross country road trip. "If you don't know where you are, don't dial 911." Brilliant. However in Key West we get so many calls from people who don't know where they are (you would be amazed) we employ quite a few techniques to get them to help us figure it out.

These three doorbells cracked me up, because I am amused by simple things. How do you know which one to press when you come knocking? None of them is labeled. Bloody awkward three card monte.

At last I am starting to see a glimmer of light at the end of a very long tunnel of winter "No Vacancy" signs. Hoteliers always seem to complain about beingbhorted during the high winter season but this year the city as been packed and Highway One has been congested to a greater degree than years past. That's just conjecture but it was what I experienced this past writer. No doubt someone somewhere will complain they could have done better and had more guests.

Matching rocking chairs ad matching cat food bowls. Hmm...

I a. Getting a little tired of seeing this tacked up Christmas tree outline. Frankly the tree shape itself is getting very tired. Time for a new season to be rung in I think.

As summer heats up I look forward to finding a quieter city to greet me. Encouragement perhaps to go downtown more often. And by the way the reason Cheyenne does not appear is because she was home in the air conditioning. It's that hot already she prefers pre-dawn walks and isn't at all enthusiastic about stumping around outdoors in the heat of the afternoon.

Posted with Blogsy