New Town

A good many years ago I was struck by a blasphemous comment I overheard from a visitor struggling to cope with a map of Key West. You'd think this would be an easy town to navigate, a rectangle two miles by four with a mostly grid pattern of streets...yet it is the most confoundedly confusing town to drive if you don't know it. The reason, as best as I can tell, is because the streets don't actually point north and south, as they should in a well ordered world. In fact the city is laid out in a northwest to southeast grid making everything slightly off kilter. Plus the town is flat to all intents and purposes so you can't see landmarks and locals who know the way get impatient (ahem) when slow pokes pause to figure out their next move at an intersection. Better then to take a Conch Train and listen to the spiel, than to drive yourself if you are of a nervous disposition.

Of course you could take to the wide straight streets of New Town, the north(west)/south(east) streets carefully labeled one though 20 and their corresponding grid patterned, named cross streets. However when tourists speak of the joys of Key West and its architecture they don't mean the banal suburban joys of full sized lots, ranchette homes and on street parking...

New Town was built over open fields, including a dairy farm, spaces that were separated by Division Street from the town that had grown up around the harbor on the northwest corner of the island. Timeline Photos doesn't have many pictures of boring old New Town but you can find an idea of what it was like "in the day." Division, the street that divided the known world from "here be dragons" in the unknown countryside beyond, is now called Truman. And the fields of the wilderness look more like this today:

What happened was, Key West got discovered and funny young men came to town looking for a different way of life and paid good money to buy ramshackle houses made of wood on tiny lots, thus freeing up the locals to buy fields and build well equipped modern boxes to build on them. The wood houses became particular guest houses and the Conchs got all modern conveniences in their ranchettes.

It's worth remembering that outsiders wouldn't have got a toehold here had they not been able to buy. If I had to live in the city, I'd rather live outside the narrow maze that is Old Town. The reason may not be immediately apparent but after you wake up to find an intoxicated person sleeping on your porch, a few times too many, the boring architecturally unremarkable joys of Old Town will become apparent.

Consider this: at Fogarty and say Sixth or Seventh Streets for example, you are a couple of miles from Sloppy Joe's, yet I know more than one Old Town resident who feels that traveling this far from the orbit of Duval Street puts you on the dark side of the moon. "Drive that far?" This is now the land of strip malls, supermarkets and chain stores to serve the city. If you find yourself missing large sun baked parking lots and Pier One, New Town is for you. Though if you get bored in mainland shopping centers these places will seem laughably small to you. Target, Costco, Bed Bath and all that stuff are 130 miles away and sometimes that seems too close.

I find cycling New Town to be much more relaxing than trying to share the streets of Old Town with aggravated drivers. There are no Conch Trains here, and only a handful of adventurous (lost) tourists. If you like to garden this is where you can indulge yourself and without the additional fertilizer of passersby throwing up in your flower bed at odd hours of the morning...

Cheyenne finds the smells and excitement of Old Town more to her taste, so you can see I am, once again, wrong about everything.

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A Plague Of Barricades

It has been said, long before I first drew breath that you should be careful what you wish for, lest you get it. I mention that because not long ago I had been wishing for some change in a life that had fallen into a routine and now everything is changing it seems, all the time. I check the commercial property listings in the Key West Citizen and just about every and any landmark business is for sale it seems, so more change seems likely. The rather odd Checkers hamburger stand, the one with two drive throughs and no inside seating has closed, a victim they say of diminished numbers of shoppers as people avoid the Boulevard during the interminable reconstruction (has it been two years yet?). Now, rumor has it, Key West, formerly the antithesis of chain stores, is about to get it's third Starbucks outlet. I try not to be a fan of fast food burgers for all the familiar reasons but I have fond specific memories of Checkers. From time to time instead of taking people sailing we self important boat captains/wharf rats had to actually maintain the charter boats we sailed. That was when our boss would reward us with large white paper bags of burgers and fries and fizzy drinks from Checkers. I don't know if it was the effect of the labor in the sun, but the memory of those burgers and hefty fries still make my mouth water, a decade on. Now its gone.

All of which was of no concern to my dog who dragged me through the roadworks with all the determination of a Labrador who has spent too little time walking and too much time trailing around a slowly disassembling house. I empathize with her impatience, as we both struggle to cope with the yellow tape in our lives.

Then my brain goes off on a  tangent and I wonder about Bob's  Barricades, these gruesome symbols of traffic back-ups, lumps in the roadway and dust in the air, automotive chaos, and I've seen them from coast to coast to coast. They are everywhere. So I started to wonder who Bob might be and it turns out two men, one with the delightfully unlikely name of "Happy" have been renting these things out to construction sites around South Florida since 1975. I think of all  the water I have passed since that year when I graduated high school and in that time Happy and his partner have been caught up in the exciting world of barricades. On their website they speculate with some modest that they are "among the largest barricade companies in the world." I wonder who the competition might be? 

I figured it was time I took an interest in these obnoxious symbols of organized chaos and disruption, so I discovered these things, often seen at Fantasy Fest parades and the like on Duval Street to control crowds are called "French Barricades"? I wonder why, and several risque suggestions come to mind. But everything has a name chez Bob.

                                             

Bob's drums and paraphernalia show up all over the place. We've had construction under way on Highway One, as Florida is flush with cash these days for some reason and I have found myself paused in my headlong rush to get somewhere staring at "Bob's Barricades."  

I hope that soon the Lower Keys sewer system will be installed, dust will abate and the barricades will go away from the neighborhoods.  One day soon I hope to get used to four full lanes on the Boulevard with a brand new turn lane and no barricades to be found. Barricade-free traffic on Highway One, on south Florida freeways, when road surfaces are freshly paved and new travel lanes are opened. Perhaps a future of tedious sameness, no improvements for a while, stasis achieved.                                                                               

Perhaps I have allowed my irritation at life's daily delays to get out of hand. A world with no orange for a while would be nice though.

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Kafka At The DMV

There is nothing quite so annoying as finding yourself in a car on a beautiful sunny day with a fresh cool breeze and not a care in the world until you pull up in your cage behind a trim motorcyclist enjoying a better two-wheeled day than you. And he had an Adventure Rider bumper sticker on his factory BMW saddlebags. It was all adventure on Highway One at Crane Boulevard, the only traffic light between Big Pine and Key West.

I lost track of the motorcycle by the time I got to the boulevard which the newspaper says is supposed to be finished in three months. A likely story... Mind you we have been living with this main artery looking like a war zone entering Key West so it will be rather odd when at last the work is finished.

A great victory took place, unnoticed, this week when my wife discovered our local tire shop is cheaper than Costco on the mainland. I prefer to shop locally even spending more money, but to get four tires for $170 less than the corporate chain cheered me up no end.

Cheyenne was welcome in the office which was nice, and the tires had arrived after being ordered a day before. The SEL version of the Fusion gets extra wide tires, on the order of 225 which no one seems to stock and I got four, mounted for five hundred bucks so I was pretty pleased with myself.

Plus we weren't hauling boxes...

Later, as we left on our new rubber, Cheyenne and I spotted a window tinting shop. It was my lucky Monday and we pulled in and the car went straight under the knife. That was another $160 plus a $15 dog hair vacuum charge, very reasonable under the circumstances...

...as she does tend to shed. A bit. Quite a bit really; Labrador hairs permeate every aspect of our lives. The finished result was lovely, and a legal shade of dark. We can face the summer with equanimity. I'll bet the BMW rider would have been jealous; all this with air conditioning and satellite radio too!

Another stop for a refill of ear medecine for Cheyenne and a lamb sandwich for me at Kennedy Cafe and we faced the constant stream of Highway One traffic again. For some reason not known to me traffic has been pouring thick and slow along the sole highway all day long, and the snowbirds left ages ago. This view across the salt flats I will miss when we leave next weekend:

The movers are coming Saturday to take the big stuff so I was grateful for the breeze that cooled me as I worked under the house emptying the portable shed and cleaning the contents.

Cheyenne took up her usual heavily involved posture supervising the operation:

I got a letter from Freddie Macs' lawyers saying I needed to prove my residence before I leave the house and hand over the place next week. What an odd request I thought to myself, after all these years of correspondence... But I had an official message from the supervisor of elections which I thought fit the requirement nicely. Then my wife called from the Deparrtment of Motor Vehicles in Marathon where she had gone during her lunch break... It seems that to change our address we have to provide the guardians of our safety at the motor vehicle office with a pile of IDs showing we are (still) who we are. For an address change! Amazing. The best part is we haven't changed our address so we have no bills sent to us at the new place but Florida wants us to change our documents within ten days of moving. So, you brainy legislators in Tallahassee how in hell do I provide proof of residence at our new address when I have to provide a utility bill or car registration with that address on it to get the address change recorded? I really do think Al Quaeda has won. They have frightened our leaders and most of my neighbors into premature senility and fearfulness. Welcome Big Brother. At this point the only benefit I seem to get from voting is being called up for Jury duty and never getting selected because I work for the police. I requested an exemption and because everyone in power is nuts, the judge acting like a Too-Big-To-Fail Bank, refused me. So next month I get to spend two days at the courthouse sitting around waiting to get rejected. Last time the judge asked me if I could face my colleagues at the police station if I returned a "Not Guilty" verdict? "Sure" I said suavely confident. They rejected me anyway.

I've been a citizen for twenty years and never missed a chance to vote but I am wearying of what is coming to seem more and more like a farce in the face of the removal of any pretense at restrictions on the flow of big money into the process. But the dogged part of me says that's what the dicks in power want so I guess I shan't give up and I shall keep voting. Maybe Florida could enact legal medical marijuana this November? That would be startling. I'm not sure what it would for the already weak work ethic in the Sunshine State, but medical marijuana might save Florida some incarceration costs. My home is starting you look either monastic or prison-like with all the decorations and travel souvenirs now settling in at the new house.

Cheyenne is not coping well with the move. I suspect she was dumped at the pound when her military family got ready to move because she has been acting really needy and worried. I keep hugging her and taking her with me as we go back and forth carrying stuff between the houses, but she isn't as relaxed as normal. We are planning on taking turns not leaving her home alone next week after we get settled in the new place. I wish I could reassure her but I fear that fussing will make it worse.

The cupboards are bare, save for a packet of tea bags and two plates, but I did find the front door key after a decade of sitting unused under a rock. I tried it in the lock and it broke, so the realtor had to get a locksmith right away. Even when the cupboards were full we never had anything much of value in the house and looking ourselves out seemed a more likely outcome had we been busy with the stupid key all those years...

Renting means we have to lock the home that is not our house. One more thing to get used to, not locking yourself out. The neighbors are lovely though, unlike the grumps on the street where we have been living. I am quite looking forward to living among cheerful people. It will be good for me.

 

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Last Week's Rain, Without Words

I took the picture above at West Summerland Key on a humid afternoon walk. That morning I spotted this young Key deer grazing and minding its own business on North Ramrod Key, not unheard of but several islands from their usual haunts on Big Pine Key.

 Rain threatened all day creating spectacular cloud cover:

Still I'm getting stuff moved and tidying up our new Cudjoe home. What a job!

Veterans Park Without Words

My life is not my own this week as we close in on the final epic struggle to sort through our crap, discard the overdue and decide that which can be stored in our handy new loft, and that which can be used in our spacious new home. Consequently not only are my profundities on this page being displaced, but my dog's walks are being cut a little short from time to time. Luckily it's too hot for Cheyenne to want to spend long hours strolling this time of year...but I am disappointed in myself that I am spread too thin. Next  week we should be installed and celebrating our new comforts and things should get back to normal.

The inside of the tiki hut, with enterprising graffiti in the rafters:

The palm tree I photographed in many different lights last week:

 Towards Marathon, the light poles mark the course of the Seven Mile Bridge:

 Seven Mile Bridge

After we left Veterans Park next to the Seven Mile Bridge we back tracked to a small parking area where boats are launched to fish Big Spanish Channel near Big Pine Key.

I am not fond of blogs with little to say and lots of pictures so I cannot wait for things to settle down for a stretch of being myself again.