Fall On Duval

It's that time of year when people Up North look to the leaves to indicate a change of season. Nights are getting cooler, cold even, and the leaves change color and there may be a hint of first on the air.

In Key West Fall is the height of hurricane season, right now, and this year we are doing well thanks to El Niño in the Pacific Ocean which sucks the strength out of Atlantic Hurricane season. October also means Fantasy Fest in Key West, these days fashionably dissed by locals who don't depend on it for money and who feel violated by visitors taking their clothes off in public. As of today I am back on night shift and I will be working the night of the parade so I will miss the few local floats worth seeing as they parade down here.

Fall in Key West also means the end of rainy season, this after one of the wettest summers on record (no climate change folks, nothing to see here, move along) and one looks aloft for the first cold front of winter to come along to start the process of killing off muggy summer air. Some tourists check their phones instead of looking aloft.

Winter will bring cooler days and nights with lots of warm sunny days. Last winter we barely had any cold weather at all. Cold in Key West has its own definitions, essentially anything under seventy degrees. Visitors are surprised sometimes by how cold 60 degrees feels in the breezy damp salt air of the Florida Keys, but it does get cold. It's hard to imagine as you stand on Duval spontaneously sweating but the season will change.

Cheyenne will come to life too as the days cool off and short walks will get longer. Right now I'm enjoy ing smaller crowds in town and open sidewalks.

You'll hear people tell you cycling on sidewalks is illegal but actually it's not in Florida. Bicycles yield to pedestrians and have to announce their approach audibly but cycling on the sidewalk is legal. Interestingly Key West outlaws skateboarding on Duval Street.

Shopping is very legal an dust catchers are available up and down the street from shops and licensed trinket stands.

It will still all look good in January.

Endless summer.

Key West on Dwellable

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More Whitehead

It's the big old church that defines the middle of Whitehead Street much in the way St Paul's towers over Duval and St Mary's towers over Truman Avenue. This church was established in 1864 and was recently refurbished.

It's name for Sandy Cornish a freed slave, who was born in Maryland around 1793 and c,e to Florida in 1839 where he bought his freedom with his wife Lillah. His papers were burned in a fire a year later so bounty hunters wanted to re-enslave Cornish. In order to escape that fate he cut his ankle joint to give himself a limp, stuck a knife in his hip joint and cut off the fingers of his left hand to make himself valueless as a slave.

He came to Key West shortly thereafter and ran a farm near Truman and Simonton. In those days Key West was focused on the Mallory Square end of the island, while the rest of it was farmland, right up to the mid 20th century. Indeed Truman Avenue was known as Division Street because it divided the town from the farmland.

I don't suppose too many people think about these night sweat horrors on Whitehead Street though to me they are a reminder that even though it often doesn't seem so things are getting batter. At least so far!

Beware indeed! Don't come between the pooch and her scraps. I just get dragged along behind.

Cheyenne doesn't get to come with me to work which is probably just as we'll else I'd get nothing done. Cheyenne would love this view on the world though, she loves to people watch and my greatest regret not living in the city is that she can't do this. Watching the canal behind my house seems much less fun to me.

Like I said, don't come between Cheyenne and her scraps. The worst of it is if she smells something good in the middle f the street she will dart out. As much as she darts anywhere, so keeping an eye on the four legged vacuum cleaner is necessary. Which is why sometimes my pictures are just too blurred to be useable.

And so writes in summer one can have the street to oneself.

People who make a living from tourism look forward to Fantasy Fest with eager anticipation. The rest of us not so much.

Key West on Dwellable

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Fort Jefferson Closed

 

I got a comment from logbookwasilla - logbookwasilla to the effect that Washington DC shutting things down doesn't matter much on the Last Frontier as they are going into hibernation in Alaska soon anyway. In the Florida Keys hibernation is replaced most frequently by drunken stupors and they can come on people at any time. For the rest of us who earn a living here the shut down is shutting down jobs.

Thursday I took my break by walking around Fort Zachary Taylor a state park, and yesterday I went as close as I could to the Dry Tortugas National Park which is closed as part of the Federal government shut down.

This rather lovely model on the docks at Key west Bight is all we have to look at right now.

The newspaper ran a story on the making of this amazingly detailed model of the military Fort in it's heyday and I promised myself a visit. I did not expect to drop by when the fort itself was not available.

I've been to the fort several times as a search of this blog will reveal. Key West Diary: Life At Fort Jefferson whose most famous occupant is of course celebrated in the free museum they have built.

The man whose name was Mudd is depicted in a diorama. His cell at the fort was a corner room and though not terribly comfortable seems quite pleasant nowadays considering how much people pay to visit the island and camp there! He tried to sneak on a ship to get away, and that's hardly surprising as there were 1500 bored soldiers in wool uniforms in Florida heat and humidity stuck on that small piece of sand guarding him. They could not have been much fun for the man who set the leg of President Lincoln's assassin.

As a prison the Dry Tortugas were nicely isolated seventy miles west of Key West. Which makes them impossible to visit without a boat or plane and now that the Feds have closed the place we have no access at all.

I spoke with a woman at the ticket booth supposedly selling rides to the Dry Tortugas on the Yankee Freedom, the sole franchised ferry service to Fort Jefferson departing at eight am and returning at five thirty pm daily... But not anymore.

She said they are mostly giving refunds right now and trying to sell tickets for the Christmas season. Basically they are hoping Congress hurries up and gets the job done. Unlike the boat crews and the operators of seaplanes to the island, the ticket sellers still have work.

I feel very lucky to,work for the city and I am thankful for my job every day. I get paid well, I live in the Keys and I have time off. I feel privileged. Almost a like a member of a Congress who are paying themselves even as many other federal employees not only don't have work and don't get paid, but who will never get back pay for the days they missed.

Running the ferry has to be a pretty good job too, spending all day on the water and seeing the Fort up close every work day isn't bad. It would seem like reliable year round work in a town that doesn't always offer such a commodity. Until now it was reliable.

I said to the Historic Tours of America ticket seller at the Yankee Freedom booth that we seem to be living in an alternative universe. Rather grimly she agreed.

 

So Republicans don't want us to have access to cheap health insurance, with all its flaws, they don't want to tax the one percent, and now they don't want the rest of us to visit the National Parks. Whose universe is this?

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National Parks Closed, State Parks Open

I knew I should never have opened my mouth at the entrance to Fort Zachary Taylor on my lunch break. When I inquired mildly whether they had seen more or less visitors with all the talk of park closures in the news I got a short lecture about state versus national and the bitter comment that the state can't print it's own money. 

Fort Zachary Taylor State Park is the southernmost in the state system and it's wedged on the southwest corner of Key West, tucked away behind the Navy Annex. It used to be surrounded by Navy land so the approach road to the park gates and the drive inside the gates to the parking lot tends to appear mysteriously long and winding for no apparent reason. Visitors on foot have a bit of a hike.

According to the information at the trance to the Fort there is a ranger tour every day at noon starting at the flagpole. I got there late so I contented myself with a self guided walk and some light photography. The fort is very easy to enjoy.

The fort was built starting in 1845 and named for the recently deceased President in 1850. It was designed to protect the approaches to Key West harbor, which became a critical Union blockade base and trade route in the Civil War. The garrison commander Artillery Captain John Brannan secured the fort and therefore the city for the Union by secretly marching from his barracks on White Street to the fort in the early hours and refusing to hand it over to confederate sympathizers in the city.

Back then the fort was surrounded by water and was accessible across a long wooden bridge that connected it to land. As the harbor was dredged the dirt was thrown up,around the fort at the entrance and the landmass grew around the brick building. Today it has a moat separating the fort from the woods and beaches that surround it.

It costs one person on or in one vehicle four and a half dollars for a day pass to the park and I spent more than half an hour in the fort alone before I had to run back to my scooter to get back to work. There is lots to see and views to enjoy and much to meditate on.

I like most people enjoy our parks both national and state and all the paraphernalia of monuments and wildernesses scattered round the country and at this time of Federal shut down the closure of the parks seems like the meanest and most visible side effect of the drive to deprive people of affordable health care.

Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas is closed, putting quite a few people and tours out of work, and perhaps that closure makes this place all the more valuable. Quite aside from the fact that the architecture is similar.

Key West Diary: Fort Jefferson-16 Million Bricks. I have written several essays on Ft Jefferson as I really enjoy the place.

Fort Zachary has its share of guns and military stuff. Originally, when the fort was finished in 1866 it was three floors tall but in 1898 they knocked off the top two to make the fort a less obvious target for modern artillery.

In fact the fort never was defended in any meaningful way against an attacker and nowadays it hosts an annual civil war reenactment as a tribute to the past, as well as a haunted fort theme for Halloween. Friends of Fort Taylor

It's a great place to go for a walk and think profound thoughts if you are so moved. How they built these arches using bricks is conundrum enough.

The US President for whom the fort is named was, quite frankly, an odd fish. He was born in 1874 and he fought in the War of 1812, Indian wars and most famously in the Mexican-American war and he was known as "Old Rough And Ready." His ascent to the presidency was pretty odd too. He didn't find out he was nominated for quite a while as he refused to receive the notification as it was a postage-due letter and he didn't want to pay for it. Also because he had moved around so much as a soldier he had no official place of residence and he first voted at age 62. Rumors that he was poisoned in office were finally dispelled in 1991when his body was exhumed and inspected. It's hard to imagine Zachary Taylor getting elected to anything in the television age. So much the worse are we for it, as the Federal shut down demonstrates.

Climbing the spiral staircase gives a nice view...

...across the Key West harbor, where the deleting study was to have taken place.

And even though the channel won't be widened any time soon there are still plenty of cruise ships dominating the skyline:

I saw rain clouds moving off shore after they doused Key West with one more summer thunderstorm yesterday, and in front of the clouds you may be able to see a few black specks that were a kettle of turkey cultures hovering in the updrafts.

And I enjoyed myself so much I had no time to go to the beach and take a few pictures of Key West's best swimming beach. Key West Diary: Fort Zachary Beach

Time to get on the Vespa and buzz across town back to work. Down the long winding road to the entrance...

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