Wandering Key West

A cat napping next to a dog's water bowl outside a Key West business is putting itself directly in the line of fire. Check out how composed the cat is. Not a car in the world, especially considering 107 pounds of furry Labrador love was bearing down on her.

We were in the meadows and a pick up truck pulled up. Two strapping men, one younger one not so much, started working a big cardboard box off the truck and into the garden gate. It looked like an appliance delivery and it made me think back to when I used to work at Fast Buck Freddie's shipping and receiving. The younger kids loved to get out of the warehouse for a delivery. For me it was always a pain as Key West homes more closely resemble jigsaw puzzles than houses and maneuvering furniture through Hobbitland was a pain in the ass even when I was 20 years younger. I did not envy these two even though it looked reasonably simple as these things go. My colleague told of getting a new full sized refrigerator in her apartment last week. The movers had to take the door off the hinges to work it into her tiny nest. They earned their tips.

Speaking of Fast Buck Freddie's I met a former coworker on the street as Cheyenne and I strolled. Ann Lorraine is a local artist who used to dress the windows of the famous department store on Duval, now sadly closed. An artistic soul behind the windows | KeysNews.com. I used to hang out and chat with her and she had stories to tell about her youthful travels. She was married for a while to a diplomat and lived in faraway places. She told me of wandering the streets of Vientiane, the capital of Laos with her sketchbook drawing what she saw. She made quite the impression on me. "I don't understand people who get bored in retirement," she said, expressing the wish she could get a good old medieval patron to fund her and let her paint in peace. Nowadays they all worry about ROI and their image so it's the splashy charities that give tax credits that get the attention. Medieval Florence and Rome seem a long way away.

 

This next picture is the former waste-to-energy plant that the city declined to refurbish with modern scrubbers owing yo the complaints of wealthy condo owners in the Stock Island neighborhood. Now the trash gets trucked 200 miles to Pompano Beach and planted in the ground. And this space, with Mount Trashmore in the background will become something else along College Road.

Citgo here at Truman and White is a popular gas stop. The Chevron across the street has a small convenience store as well and they also have a mechanic during the day. A friend of mine has worked there since I can remember, but Citgo has one thing that trounces all other advantages: Dion's Fried Chicken, as I mentioned previously

 

One thing that I find amusing about Citgo is how they always stress their local roots. I don't know if anyone remembers anymore, short attention spans being what they are, but there was a scandal in 2006 when a convenience chain decided to drop Citgo owing to then president Chavez's anti-US government comments. So we see these signs of local fervor seven years later...

This I labeled "DIY" on my Facebook page. $99 for three months inside the gym or buy the bicycle for $200 and take it home. I like to sweat in private so its no contest where I would spend my money if I were in the market.

Cheyenne laboring on a hot February day. Winter has been too short for her.

But relief is always at hand after a cold front, be it ever so mild.

I have been enjoying the eighty degree days with cool breezes. They make me think of pleasant summer days in more temperate climes.

 

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Better in Bisbee

An alert reader noted that Chuck formerly of Frances Street has relocated to Bisbee Arizona, a town of 5,000 perched on an apparently steep hillside almost overlooking the Mexican border. It's Better in Bisbee | Living on the edge… is Chuck's page writing about life in the high desert. Here he was on Frances Street showing me his collection of motorcycles, including this AllstateTwingle by Puch.

When my wife and I were struggling to figure out where we should relocate to get away from California's cold damp coast which was wreaking havoc on her rheumatoid arthritis we checked everywhere you could describe as warmer living. We checked Arizona but the desert is searing in summer and cold in winter and oddly enough the dry air of the desert did nothing for her joints or my skin. I get parchment-like in dry air and I don't like it. I know, I know humidity is everyone's pet hate but with air conditioning one can live a civilized temperate lifestyle and show up to work without sweat rings everywhere. Chuck starting his lovely Beeza 650. That one was my favorite in his collection even though it needed work.

I suppose the fact that I knew people in Key West, that I had lived there previously helped, but we we weren't sure about Key West at all. Arriving by boat from California, with all the color and heat of a 7,000 mile journey to Panama from San Francisco and on to Key West had worn us down. We were ready for secure income, for familiar waters and for a change of pace. My buddy Robert expressed surprise when we got jobs and settled into the new routine. Not many people come to Key West and actually do that he said. Mostly they talk about getting a job and leave when the money runs out. We hadn't had a bad life at all in California but when we started living in the tropics, south of Baja in Mexico, my wife's pain receded and she started to sleep more soundly than ever she had in Santa Cruz.

Chuck sounds like he is enjoying Bisbee, a town that's off the map and where he can indulge his love of old cars and eccentric architecture and where apparently real estate is relatively cheap. Housing he says is one fifth of Key West prices so it would seem for a hundred grand you could buy a small home. How to pay for it is the question, as a city of 5,000 has limited work opportunities for those of us that need them. To pass the time Chuck will rent bicycles to visitors.

My wife and I stayed in Key West because we got good work, not that our jobs have been drama free but we have each of us negotiated the prickly personalities and prima donnas of our respective workplaces and are now able to live and work in peace. My wife had been a lawyer in California and she was burned out. Teaching appealed but she stayed in the criminal justice system at first by becoming a juvenile probation officer. Her interview was absurd, consisting of an hour's worth of questions about the lack of housing and the high cost of living in Key West...they gave her the job and warned her off visiting clients alone in Bahama Village, a nest of high criminality. She bought a scooter and made house calls unaccompanied. After defending murderers and gang members in California she thought the "gang problem" in Key West was laughable.

I was walking the waterfront one day when a man came up to me and asked if I knew how to sail. Yes I said, I enjoy it. Can you get a Coastguard license? He asked. I have a fifty ton license I replied. Want a job he said, not really I replied. Oh go on it will be fun he insisted and I need captains. I'm not at all sure about this I demurred but off I went. We were living in Key West and working. A Key West house in Bisbee, by accident probably, or maybe by design...

Chuck spent much of his life traveling for work, trouble shooting and being an engineer much in demand across the Far East. He burned out too and settled in Key West to retire as his children started to launch their own lives. He seemed to like Key West but apparently not enough to stay. Read his blog and see how he feels more a part of the very small desert community than I suppose he felt a part of Key West, a town that can be stand-offish. I don't know why it is that some people fit in and others don't. I like living here because there are no social requirements, there are no dress codes, no value set by name brands or styles. It's the same apparently in Bisbee, but Key West is large enough that at the same time as making space for oddballs it offers real work too. At least not as far as I can tell so that works for me. I enjoy my own company and I can get that space here not least because so many people come and go. The transient nature of life in Key West suits me as much as it aggravates my social wife. Chuck admiring his BSA, his grimace was caught by the camera as usual and does not I believe reflect his feelings toward the machine.

Reading his blog one sees a man frustrated with the irritations of Key West, the drunken revelers, the gentrification, the stuff that makes Key West a place that is not stultified or dying but alive and irritating. I enjoy my life in the suburbs but that notion of not needing a car is appealing to a lot of people that think they want to live in Old Town. It's hard to be around true eccentrics and rebels when you are a nostalgic I find, and I have little need of human company and I enjoy commuting on two wheels. And like I've always said, ambition is frowned upon in Key West. He wanted to develop a business plan for my blog and I was flattered by his attention and his notion that there could be more to this modest pixelated page, a plan that fell through when his attention was diverted to canvas sewing on a more familiar business model, and I found myself worried about what I wrote, anxious not to let The Plan down. With relief I slipped back to my more familiar format, a page of dusty ramblings and ironic observations of my small place in life's broad canvas. Buchi, the new dog in Danger Boy and Pixie's life. Apparently the soil of a Bisbee is toxic to puppy paws and the dog may only travel without touching the ground. Danger Boy indeed! Bisbee Friends of Shelter Animals

My wife applied to work at the juvenile jail when it opened and needed a teacher willing to work a twelve month schedule. She was the sole applicant, got the job and promised to get her teaching credential subsequently. They were dubious, ambition is always frowned upon, but they had no choice so she did just that. And qualified to teach English as a second language, and qualified as a reading coach, but carefully did not qualify to be an administrator. She teaches with no ambition to lead so she threatened no one over the years. And she added to her juvenile probation state pension through the teachers' pension fund. Florida's state pension system is one of the few in the country that is solidly funded, surprisingly enough. Two years later Dade county laid off 400 qualified teachers and Monroe County was flooded with more applicants than it knew what to do with. "I'd never get that job today," my wife says, now enjoying her dream job of teaching adults in Marathon, a town filled with sober working adults eager to learn, taught by a fully qualified teacher who enjoys commuting the Seven Mile Bridge in her Fiat convertible. Pixie caught in a pensive moment on her Frances Street porch.

We came to realise that living on a boat and working in town was getting tedious. Our own neighbors in the marina viewed boats as low income housing and we started to feel trapped in our slip. Our boat never moved, our elderly Labrador could no longer get on or off easily and we liked Key West. It was a slow curve of appreciation but yes, we could live and grow old here. We had money from our home sale in California, a momentous sale choice selling that house that sealed our fate. We put a large deposit on a tree house on Ramrod Key and moved off the boat which we promptly sold. Goodbye Gemini catamaran, hello suburbia. I got a job at the police department much to my surprise after Captain McNeil (who bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the Ulster firebrand Ian Paisley) looked me in the eye after studying my sailing resume and said normally he'd never hire a dispatcher with such a spotty work history but he was desperate. I will outlast you I told him, and I did. And I still enjoy my work. My pension through the city of Key West is also reportedly well funded. How we got jobs with defined benefit pension plans so late in life I can hardly understand. The possibility of retirement made real by Key West of all places?

Bisbee is without doubt pretty and I think Chuck has found a place that might serve him well. It fulfills his nostalgia kick from growing up on the margins of modern society and the social nature of life in a small isolated mountain community, like that of my Italian youth, might suit him well as it would not suit me. Does this Bisbee Street not look French or Spanish or Italian?

People come and go in Key West, Chuck's Frances Street home is still adorned with his daughter's art project though the old Harley Davidson's parking spot has been replaced by a banal plastic scooter. I am growing into an old timer, trying to nurture my young colleagues into an appreciation of our extraordinary good fortune earning a living wage in a job we actually enjoy. And those pensions..!

I ride my Bonneville in the heat of a Florida Spring and feel my good fortune. Soon my new/old Vespa should be restored and perhaps I shall get it before too long. At least I know the job will be done right by Gene in Pennsylvania. Slow and steady wins the race I hope. We are taking a road trip during my wife's Spring Break in two weeks and we plan to cruise up the coast exploring in depth the small towns between Jacksonville and Wilmington. Essays to follow as I get some time off after these buddy weeks of drunken student revelers in town! I expect Chuck is glad to be far from Spring Break in Key West. I envy Chuck his proximity to Mexico, though he shows no signs of cruising his lovely Suzuki GS850 to nearby Naco for authentic Mexican tacos...I'd be there right away because to me the best thing about Tucson when we checked it out was proximity to Mexico and it's food.

I lived my life backwards in many respects traveling when I was young and experiencing as much as I could. Watching my mother die when I was 14 gave me a clear understanding of the fragility and limited nature of life. I wanted to live as many lives as I could with no guarantee of retirement as far as I could see. As my wife and I edge closer to that date cancer-free and active we feel lucky we landed here in middle age with good jobs, pensions we never had previously, lovely weather and thanks to the good offices of my gregarious wife, friends. For me it's still better in Key West and it's suburbs.

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Key West Bight By Night

A lunch break on a crisp cool night. The waters were still and only a few young men were around scuttling back to their boats, as though the witching hour were upon them. The place was otherwise empty. All mine.

Above Turtle Kraals, named for the place where they used to corral captured turtles before killing them. Below the old Waterfront Market boardwalk.

The Western Union which used to be used to lay telegraph cable between Key West and Havana until World War Two. Recently restored for a million and a half bucks, she continues to haul tourists to the sunsets.

Appledore, another "tall ship" nomenclature that bugs me. Square rigger or barque depending on how the sails are deployed. Tall. Ship. Oh well.

People live at anchor and bring their dinghies in while they spend the day in town. Traveling sailors call their dinghies their "station wagon" as the little boats are indispensable.

 

My Vespa is pretty indispensable to me when it's time to go home...

Conch Republic Seafood, as I like it, empty and devoid of people, like a stage set waiting for today's performance to begin.

Lazy Way Lane. Heading back to work.

 

Key West on Dwellable

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Keys Illustrated

Random pictures taken from my Picasa albums. This first picture is a bicycle decorated by Chuck's daughter and left in front of their house out of which he has apparently moved. It's pretty enough the bicycle is still there.

Pirate days at Truman Waterfront. I don't believe the pirate myths that are muttered around Key West tourists but the make believe is made fun by these people.

I see this sign each winter on Little Torch Key. 6pm seems a little early for curfew but I am no fan of noise and the jab at Duval street, well, that's what people like to do.

Haters gonna hate the engine of the local economy!

Key West, Catherine Street, perennially bored youth having fun.

I have a photo somewhere, it will show up some Sunday, of the retired banker with the bird on his shoulder. I heard it mentioned he had died. Perhaps not. He is no longer on the streets of Key West.

Houseboats. The newspaper noticed the yellow smiley face. It was a big deal for a week.

I did an essay years ago on Garrison Bight. She was enjoying her catch. I wish they wouldn't leave their fish to suffocate.

My pig in a fur coat likes anglers and their bait.

I also took my camera one winter to Cocoplum Beach in Marathon.

My non swimming Labrador likes to paddle.

I went to Sparky's for lunch one day in Key Colony Beach, a city inside Marathon. A good fish lunch.

Near Islamorada on a windy day.

 

 

And back in Key West, people watching.

It was winter, note the heavy clothing.

 

Another few pictures from the archives.

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