From the Archives 2009 : Flame Trees

June 2009.

Much to my astonishment we are almost half way into the month of June already, and half of the year 2009 is on the back side of the calendar. So it came upon me slowly that this is the month that poinciana trees choose to bloom. You would have to be oblivious to life itself not to spot these bright orange flowers glowing all over town:

In the Keys they are known as Royal Poinciana, Delonix regia to give them their latin name, but who gave them the regal appellation I don't know I'm sure. The size and quantity of the blooms varies from tree to tree though the clusters of flowers always make an impression:

Even though I live in a corner of the United States which overflows with fantastic flora, I am no botanist, so you can take my word that you can't miss the poincianas anywhere around town, Old Town:

Or in New Town:

The poincianas, known in the Caribbean islands as "flamboyants" create a backdrop all their own:

In parts of Asia and Africa they are known as Flame Trees (Australian flame trees are I think something a little different):

The picture above is Eaton Street at Elizabeth, this is William Street from Eaton looking towards the Schooner Wharf area at the waterfront:

Look up and there are flame trees burning overhead:

Look down and the petals become so much debris, littering driveways, sidewalks and parked cars:

There are trees at the post office on Whitehead Street:

And the green and orange of the tree contrast nicely with the classic white wood of Key West homes:

The flowers themselves look like orchids to me, seen close up:

In New Town the Poinciana Public Housing complex is converted Navy Housing which is now affordable rental apartments for city residents, in the the sort of spacious tree lined tract that one doesn't generally associate with public housing. Personally I think public housing could use fewer high rises and more poincianas:

And across the street is a Key West version of a strip mall:

And just up the street Smurf Village has its own flaming poincianas to brighten up the street:

Call it what you will, royal poinciana, flamboyant or flame tree, its a bloom worth celebrating.

Thomas Street By Night

It's just gone two thirty in the morning and no one has died but we've had drunks, fights, arrests, car wrecks and every single ambulance busy for hours, all three of them, someone stabbed, someone else ate a peanut and threatened to stop breathing, someone got drunk and fell, someone else drove drunk and crashed and a woman slept with someone and angered someone else and she had a warrant which he knew about and called and told me, so I sicc'ed the police on her. Hell hath no fury like a man, scorned. What a night, what a planet I share with these people. I needed air when I took my lunch break.

Thomas Street was the perfect antidote to human failings, dark, quiet and peaceful. My Bonneville had delivered me back to the womb.

Who knows what human dramas were swelling up in the darkened Conch cottages. I didn't care, I was just looking at their characteristic facades.

Every size of picket fence, hoping presumably to keep the wild world outdoors, outside.

 

The Pepsi Cola banner disfiguring the renovated exterior of the A.M.E. Church. What a pity.

 

Typical outdoor furniture, comfortable, padded, set out to be used, not admired as though garden sculptures:

Thomas Street at 3:15am:

Olivia Street a little while later on the ride back to work:

Happily for me it was the report writing stage of the night, that dull part of police work not shown on TV, the officers sucking their pencils and calling dispatch to confirm their times....What time did I call out the arrest? And I thumb through my computer screens and find the hour and the minute recorded, and then they want to know which judge to put on their notice to appear...information stored in dispatch...and on and on till the lovely half hour ride home, moon shining silver on the water, dog waiting for a walk, the sun barely rising as I fall asleep at last, no reports to write, no arrests to confirm, not even a motorcycle to ride into oblivion.

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Pouncing Tourists

The cold front has pretty much blown itself out and sunshine is back where it belongs, right over South Florida, my back yard.

 

I need to pull myself together and go into Key West for more than work, there are good movies at the Tropic and parking is available (which it always is for motorcycles of course) but here I am at the end of another short week and no sign of me idly away an afternoon in the metropolis. I am enjoying the outdoors in the out islands just a tad too much. It is pleasant with the added benefit of avoiding encounters like with these good folk who came by and disturbed me, but not my dog, as we hung out on Niles  Road on Summerland Key of an afternoon reading and tasting the breeze. 

I was sitting in my beach chair at the end of a dead end reading. I like to use a folding chair that I carry in the trunk of my Fusion as it gives me the versatility to stop and be by myself as the mood takes me.

Then they pulled up, got out, left the engine running and walked up to me and pounced.

"It's shallow here," she said staring at the water like a general planning a strategy. Then she turned to me and accused me of knowledge which I desperately wanted to deny. " Fishing good here?" she was as  brusque as a New Yorker trying to make friends. "I'm told so," I whispered hoping to escape with my testes intact. "Want to kayak," she barked. "I think its pretty boring," I said, foolishly offering an opinion, "when you've seen one mangrove, you've seen 'em all they say." I have watched squadrons of people battling wind and current on vast expanses of water and they seem to make such a meal of it. I like to paddle gently close in and take my time looking but she didn't seem the type. I figured she'd get bored but I needn't have worried.  They strode off ignoring the dog turd and his dog as though we never had existed. Cheyenne had already taken her cue from the visiting general and was practicing ignoring rude people.

I have been reading this  rather fun story about a Canadian and his Danish wife riding a Lambretta through Latin America in 1959. I am amazed how little they knew before they set off and I have reflected that they were probably greatly helped by the lack of Internet. Web fora  are full of  unsolicited advice and cautions that make any potential adventure sound like a death trap. Plus nowadays people seem to need affirmation on line for every planned adventure and ask strangers to tell them how to evaluate their plans for them. In those days knowing nothing we just tended to take off and hope for the best and no one was any the wiser which I think made it easier.  Reading this makes me want to get my restored 1979 Vespa ready for a trip before I die. First I need to get the P200 back from the restorer, an interminable process it turns out.

Meanwhile one has to be prepared for a few more years work, including quite a few short weeks when much of the time between Saturdays is mine own to do with as I please and frequently I please to sit and watch the water under the sun.

Hanging out watching other people, and birds, be industrious suits my  non-industrious temperament.

Most days even my dog looks more busy than me chasing hints of smells with much energy.

I like to stop and stare because I think of myself more as a human being than a human doing. Clyde Butcher calls clouds "Florida Mountains." I love his pictures, as technically brilliant as Ansell Adams but very much alive where an Adams picture looks like a still life, to me.

I was walking Cheyenne back to the car on William Street in Key West a while back when a stranger approached me and started shouting at me. I stared at him wondering if he needed an ambulance. In fact he had a question about parking but he was so aggressive about it I felt like Ukraine facing down Russia. Whatever happened to saying "Good morning" or "Sorry to bother you..." Instead these crass people just walk up to you and launch into some diatribe or another. This guy needed to know how long you could park on a Key West street and he asked a total stranger trusting me to be honest. Which, as I work for the police, I felt obliged to be truthful. I also felt like asking him to bring his manners  next time he travels south but I didn't want to sound like some petulant character out of a Faulkner novel. 

How to be a tourist might be the title of the next self help book that needs to be published except no one would buy it because no one wants to be identified as a tourist. Everyone wants to be a traveler, or worse yet, a local, or at least look like one but being aggressive marks you as decidedly not unless you are drunk. For instance, when you have a vast spacious empty parking lot in a beautiful place, park your car properly and take a short gentle stroll, enjoy the scenery, breathe deep of the fresh sea air. Or be crass and park attempting to evade any locomotion at all, and above all never turn your engine off to allow annoying nature to be audible.

But whatever you do, try to summon up those manners your mother never bothered to teach you. Make her proud even if she really couldn't care less, because as nice as it is to live here, being pounced on by strangers does not enhance the experience, y'all.

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More Bloody Alligators

I had to do some of those absurd chores that mainland dwellers only ever have to do. Here in paradise stuff like going to the bank and buying milk is not something we have to concern ourselves with, as this is like living in Disneyworld and everyday chores happen effortlessly after dark when the Disney gnomes and janitors come out and re-stock our fridges and launder our costumes for us so we can go about our day being locals in the Fabulous Florida Keys.

Which is not exactly how it happens in real life so I was in fact going to the bank and Winn Dixie and Cheyenne was snoozing so I figured I might as well ride. It was an overcast cool day and I was having as much as fun as one can have with a Vespa in a  corner of Flatistan not renowned for its variety of roads. But I have been around Big Pine Key a bit so I knew where there were some back roads I hadn't explored in a  while, so yesterday was the day to do just that.

Then  as Ixora became 17th which dead ended into Wilder Road I thought to myself: Self, how can we put off shopping for  food for a little bit longer while having fun puttering by Vespa? Why, we should go and see if there are any alligators at the Blue Hole, self suggested. And, by gum there were alligators in the Blue Hole, two of them sunning themselves in the weak sunshine that had broken through the cloud cover.   

Usually in winter there is always somebody at the Blue Hole, a former gravel quarry on Key Deer Boulevard but  winter season is over and emptiness is starting to prevail.

A loud family was walking across the opposite side of the pond but I was alone at the observation deck with two relatively large dinosaurs, the largest perhaps six feet long at most?

It was me, alone with my alligators, and the usual detritus of human visitors, plastic and trash. I wasn't going to reach in to collect the bottles thoughtlessly hurled into the water, but it was in fact a plastic toy that a previous occupant known as Bacardi swallowed and from which ingestion the alligator died. These creatures have more to fear from us than we from them it turns out. 

That lesson is brought home to any thinking visitor by the fact that there are no fences keeping these toothy residents away from stupid people ambling the paths around the hole. Last time I brought Cheyenne here she tried to get down to the water to take a drink but she is not necessarily large enough to frighten an alligator so a tight leash is a good idea around here.

It is true that people do get attacked by alligators in South Florida  so it is wise not to swim in fresh water unless you have a pretty good idea who is in it. The problem with alligators and crocodiles is that they are opportunistic, and will seize and drown victims even if they aren't hungry. they cannot tear very easily with their fixed jaws so they parked their drowned victims in  holes and wait for them to rot. This means that unlike sharks which hunt when hungry usually at dusk and dawn, alligators and crocodiles snag  food when available.

 Florida has  an abundance of fresh water alligators but the rather less aggressive (they say) salt water crocodile is endangered. The difference between the two is hard to discern, a slightly more square snout on the crocodile I am told and a shy retiring personality. Supposedly you can find them anywhere in the Keys and Florida Bay but outside Key Largo crocodiles are hardly ever seen and outside the Blue Hole there is no body of fresh water to sustain alligators.

Like pirates, alligators suffer from an image problem that has little to do with the reality of their lives, and like pirates that never hung out in Key West, alligators animate visitors' imaginations more than they do any reality of daily life in the Fabulous Florida Keys.

The truth is that laundry plays a far bigger role in daily life around here than alligators. It would be fun to be able to claim that alligator wrestling is a constant feature of an exciting dynamic life around here but you are probably more at risk of dying in a blizzard than I am of encountering an aggressive reptile.

 

If I am to die a violent death I am far more likely to be run down while amusing myself on two wheels than as lunch for a croc...banal but true.

My wife's ET4 Vespa is a mild unassuming thing but like alligators it moves surprisingly fast and has cut off more low self esteem penises on Overseas Highway drivers than you might imagine have been eaten by alligators. I am still waiting for my restored P200 Vespa to be restored to me, but that too should do a nice job of riding faster than car drivers expect and with a manual gearbox it should be easier to explore on dirt on the back roads of Big Pine. At least we know the alligators will always be at the Blue Hole on Big Pine assuming the humans don't kill them.   

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