Stock Island Walk

Perhaps by the time I get back from vacation the old fire station, as crumbling and picturesque as it may be, will have been replaced. The new fire station has been in the throes of construction for a while and is still only an empty cement shell behind this inadequate building.

Stock Island has been threatened with major revamping for along time. Before the economic crash of 2008 developers were trying to up the whole island a d the future of its numerous low income housing solutions was in limbo. Small businesses and light industry have flocked to Stock Island so they can be close to Key West, the city with the greatest demand, but at the same time pay less rent or smaller mortgages.

There is land to spare on Stock Island and all you need to get to a job in Old Town Key West, five miles away, is a scooter and fifteen minutes of your time, depending on traffic conditions.

Before the Crash housing on Stock Island had its own boom and modest houses set in the avenues, a dozen streets devoted to housing, could set you back more than six hundred thousand for a really nice home. This at a time when a cottage in tourist Key West needed a million to buy. Here as elsewhere the banks have kicked out the bankrupt owners and perfectly good housing is left to rot.

Villa Patricia they call this collection of 1960s style units. I doubt you could rent one and get change out of a grand, and they look nicely kept.

For Cheyenne abandoned flower beds are treasure troves of abandoned food, and they make her happy.

She also foundation bag of home made tamales, wrapped in leaves and tied with string. I would have fought her for them has they not been marinating in a ditch. I can only imagine some drunk spent their hangover wondering there they put their lunch and dinner on their way home. Cheyenne found more than she could eat.

I was admiring the long range planning going into this hull of a formerly glorious cabin cruiser when finally I too noticed the fearful cat. Cheyenne looked up once and move on.

A typical selection of Stock Island small businesses.

This collection of apartments seems like it should have passed its sell by date, but I do believe people live here.

It's not Old Town by any means but Key West wouldn't function without it. you can check it out as you zip in to the waterside Hogfish Restaurant in Safe Harbor.

These are the places where Cubans and Haitians make their homes so they'd an commute to all those jobs that make the tourist industry in Key West work, it's the unglamourous side of Paradise.

There's an earthy authenticity to Stock Island and when I'm walking here in the land of chained dogs and security fences and dusty weed strewn lots I think of Hemingway's descriptions of early 20th century Key West in To Have And To Have Not.

I don't feel at home here but I am glad it is still available to those hardy souls who can live here and wash your bed sheets for you and send some money home to keep the family in food. My hat's off to them.

 

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Early Morning On Whitehead

The Southernmost point in the United States, recently referred to in less than flattering terms recently by a reader who views the cement re-creation of a sea buoy as a blight. You decide.

It is though a popular symbol representing the city to the world. On trash cans even.

And wasn't I surprised when I discovered, thanks to my curiosity gene that peop,e really do throw coconuts into a "coconut disposal" can. I put mine out for yard waste collection.

There are valid reasons to avoid the area of the Southernmost Point, especially if may actually be trying to get somewhere. Traffic can get intense here when there are people in town, and the prospect of driving behind a happy pair of cyclists unfamiliar with their machines and the street fills me with disproportionate dread.

It happened a while back that I took some time to photograph the other end of Whitehead which produced a request to do this end, so I did.

Cheyenne was happy, some hopeless human threw trash onto the sidewalk and included half a hamburger with a generous helping of fries, so she was set.

She set off at a fast pace and I was in tow, hanging on to the leash as best I could. I wanted to take a picture of the characteristic cottages and she barely gave me time to frame the shot.

I am always appreciative of nice hand made signs.

The Order of Elks is showing a nice fresh coat of paint which kind of surprised me as I thought this kinds of social clubs are on the wane. Not this one apparently.

This place is called The Cedar House. I wonder why?

Buddy came by all interested in Cheyenne who ignored the small black pest. She missed out on a sweet encounter I think as the dog was a happy creature.

Walking past the Lighthouse Museum I saw another of those Seward Johnson statues sitting out front. I've been trying to notice them more around twin since I photographed the collection at the Customs House.

This lot on the Lighthouse lawn were hard to miss. La Belle Époque.

I struggled to take a frontal picture of the Hemingway House but cheyenne was still on a tear, and I could only get something resembling a picture when she stopped to smell something.

There it is, the other end of Whitehead Street. Worth walking to from the bars on Duval.

Key West on Dwellable

 

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1116 Stump Lane

This essay is the second in a series I plan to write about authors' homes in Key West. What got me thinking about this was the reverence I saw at Rowan Oak in Oxford Mississippi for the former resident William Faulkner. In Key West it seems as though outside the Hemingway House, which is in itself a bit of a three ring circus in search of income, the homes of authors are at best known about and mostly just ignored. A case in point: 1116 Stump Lane.

Let it also be noted that until an anonymous reader brought this address up it wasn't on my list of notable homes in Key West, so thank you for that. Who was Alison Lurie, who used to reside there? It turns out she is alive and well, born in Chicago in 1926 on this date and was raised in New York State. This picture from the Internet:

Lurie won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and has a string of novels to her name apparently, as well as non fiction works and also has published on the semiotics of dress, so Thank God for Wikipedia which describes it thus: "The semiotics of dress is a term used to refer to the design and customs associated with dress (clothing), as patterned to a kind ofsymbolism that has rules and norms (cf. semiotics)." So it turns out I know absolutely nothing about botany and foliage and I can add semiotics, of clothing in particular, to the list of things of which I know nothing. And Alison Lurie as well, but I intend to change that, for she sounds quite intriguing.

Her former home is listed as a rather unique bird in Key West in that the current owners claim they have a transient rental license, much sought after in these well regulated times. The transient license allows the owners to rent their homes in the city for less than 28 days which is the length of the shortest month of the year. If you don't have a transient license you can only rent by the month. Outside Key West, Monroe County allows no short term rentals at all and so far proposals to permit them have been shot down by residents. Which is not to say my neighbors in these straitened times don't do it illegally....

Again according to Wikipedia Lurie still visits Key West which has been part of her life and both her marriages apparently. Frankly, winning the Pulitzer Prize seems to be rather small reward for having your life splattered over the Internet where anonymous gets to critique your work too. Handy for me as I am learning about this writer but you can take what is said with all the salt you think it deserves. This on her first novel:

• Love and Friendship (1962). Emmy Stockwell Turner and Miranda Fenn, two faculty wives at the all-male elite and isolated Convers College, juggle their love and friendship for their husbands and for a womanizing composer.

  Alison Lurie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Lurie’s novels, with their light touch and focus on portraying the emotions of well-educated adulterers, bear more resemblance to some 20th-century British authors, (e.g. Kingsley Amis, David Lodge) than to the big American authors of her generation. Her titles and the saga-like intertwining of her characters suggest high ambitions. Love and Friendship, the title of her first published novel, is shared with an early novel by Jane Austen; it takes on the problem of the American college as initiation rite into manhood, and the awkwardness of the role therein assigned to women. The next title, The Nowhere City, evokes both Thomas More’s Utopia (Greek for “nowhere”) and Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, California, “There is no there there.” Utopias are the subject of Imaginary Friends and Real People: the small group of spiritualists examined by a sociologist and the small group of artists examined by a writer. The War between the Tates and Foreign Affairs imply by their titles parallels between academic adulteries and political upheavals. The Truth about Lorin Jones and Truth and Consequences take us back to the problem of truth-telling, both in life and in art.

A number of Lurie's characters are, like her, born in 1926, give or take a few years: Lorin Jones and Mary Ann/Miranda Fenn,Janet Belle Smith (42 in Real People, 1969), Erica Tate (40 in 1969 and like Lurie a Radcliffe B.A.), Vinnie Miner (54 in Foreign Affairs, 1978, and like Lurie a professor of children’s literature), and Wilkie Walker (70 in Last Resort, 1998). Since these characters have also followed Lurie from Amherst/Convers to Los Angeles to Cornell/Corinth and to London and Key West, inevitably one considers the possibility that some at least of these characters represent the author herself. Janet Belle Smith (Real People) and Delia Delaney (Truth and Consequences) are rather pretentious writers of whom Lurie makes fun some of the time, but they also reflect aspects of her experience as a writer."

Of course her former home is as anonymous as any of the writers' homes in Key West. I'm not sure why but outside this island great stock is placed by most communities on figures in the Arts who have resided within them. Key West apparently cares not one jot, so perhaps that is part of the devil-may-care self image perpetuated by the bars and trinket shops or perhaps the transient population doesn't know about the history of literature here, and the resident population only notices best sellers in the world of writing. I don't think the Chamber of Commerce can see past the illusions and stereotypes of "tropical vacation wonderland."

Author Alison Lurie's Website

Amazon.com: Alison Lurie: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

I am not sure how to wish happy birthday to a stranger but I am very grateful to anonymous for giving me the chance to discover a new author. Happy reading everybody.

 

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Diana Nyad Swims From Cuba

I am astonished but the story of swimming the as Straits of Florida is rated a top story on the BBC News page. I had no idea it was such a big deal. I was going to take a lunch break to watch Diana Nyad land but it is a zoo and I am not interested in spending my precious minutes outside the office being squished in a crowd on Smathers Beach.

BBC News - US swimmer Diana Nyad, 64, makes historic Cuba-Florida crossing

Well now, the fifth time is the charm and all our lives are made better by this unbearable feat of swimming 103 miles all in one go. By a 64 year old woman no less. May her biceps never grow less.

 

Photos from the Internet.

 

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Paradise Deferred

Walking Bahama Village early in the morning excited Cheyenne enough that she was ready for a break. So we paused she and I. She liked the cool tiles at the entrance to the restaurant and anxious staff came running for Her Majesty to bring her a bowl of fresh water, which she lapped up as though it were her due. Refreshed she paused to watch the world o by.

I'm off today I told the black man in the white apron, a way to establish one's bonafides as not-a-tourist. I'm off for three weeks Wilson said, rolling his soft R's as only Caribbean Francophones can, the restaurant closes and I'm going home. Home? I asked. Haïti he replied with a grin. I've always wanted to go I said, not telling him of my dream of circumnavigating the Caribbean on my old Vespa. Ah its beautiful he said, when I blamed my wife for being nervous about going to the poorest country in the hemisphere. Ah! he sighed and grinned. The waters are palest blue, the sands on the beaches are endless and the people are so friendly...

But the women he went on, just as I was starting to think he was a walking tourist bureau. Umm, I said, and he went on, yes I too am married but their skin is so soft, smooth café au lait, his eyes rolled, really, in the ecstasy of memory. There are none like them he said giving me the thousand mile stare of a man with memories. Suddenly Haïti for me was no longer pictures of crumbling post earthquake buildings or the vine covered walls of Sans Souci. Suddenly Haïti became an exotic land of poster perfect beaches and gin clear waters populated by gorgeous mermaids desperately interested in meeting fat old white guys. Oh he shrugged getting practical, it's for the money he said rubbing his forefinger and thumb in the universal symbol for moolah as though the prospect of sex for cash should entice me.

Oh he said again, another punctuation, glancing over his shoulder, I have to get back to work. And he shuttled off, dreams of paradise found - in Haïti, not Key West - deferred by the intrusion of reality. Paradise is where you aren't.

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Card Sound

On my return from the trip Up North Cheyenne displayed symptoms of restlessness, getting up on her back seat bed and turning around before laying back down, so I took the hint and we stopped after we had paid the dollar toll to enter the Keys at the county line at Alabama Jack's restaurant.

The toll is actually to pay for the long since paid-for bridge that connects Key Largo to the mainland on this back road, the only alternative to the 18 Mile Stretch. Key West Diary: Alabama Jacks.

The weather has been cool and wet, surprisingly cool for August in the Keys. One usually bursts spontaneously into copious sweating in the heat and humidity of August, but not so this year. Most days it's been cool and breezy and frequently overcast. By cool I mean temperatures between 79 and 85 with minimal humidity which is winter weather around here.

One thing that always reminds me I'm home are the endless roadside stops along the main roads in Monroe County. Mostly they're just gravel lots equipped with trash cans, emptied regularly by lowly government workers. It's easy to make a list of what they don't supply, picnic tables, vending machines or toilets, but they do offer travelers an endless supply of vistas the hundred mile length of these islands. You can stop, get out of your cage and walk almost anywhere along the rocky shores of the Fabulous Florida Keys. If you need kerbs, landscaping and facilities to achieve your comfort level this driving experience may not be for you. We live in such an overdeveloped world, some people do find this back to nature crudity not to their taste.

Cheyenne naturally was perfectly at home.

All to ourselves this small piece of Florida. The homemade community of Card Sound in southernmost Dade county across the Bridge has been swept away in the name of improvement. I wrote this essay on it before it was gone: Key West Diary: Card Sound

The Keys in August. Lovely being alone.

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