Duncan Street By Night

Duncan's Street most famous resident, I dare say, was the late Tennessee Williams. However the playwright lived a bit further up the street than the block directly off White Street. Furthermore his home is not exactly a shrine in Key West, so at night I like to walk this most picturesque block of a pretty little street.

It's not the first time I've been here on this mission but unlike last time in distant 2011 I chose to take pictures in color.

I drive by the entrance to Duncan Street on White Street and I always want to turn down this narrow defile covered by trees and designed in such a way it looks almost as though it is either not parallel or not exactly straight. In the geometric sense.

At  three in the morning it takes on its own mysterious mantle of silence with the sounds of the breeze rushing through the leaves. The trees seem to tower over the small Conch cottages underneath.

Twenty five miles an hour seems almost too fast for such a lane. Indeed It surprises me that this street isn't a one way, its that narrow. There again most of the city would be uni-directional  if the criterion were wide streets enough for modern cars.

I parked the Vespa and went for a walk around the block, enjoying the play of light and shadow.

And one in black and white, just because...

The Dump On Cudjoe

I was out walking, as one does, and the gorgeous views were blighted by a nasty looking rag left, I hope by a fisherperson on the rail of the fishing bridge. I am not conversant with the habits of anglers but I suspect killing fish involves blood and scales and a rag might come in useful. Why it didn't end up in a convenient nearby trash can I'm not sure, but that rag set me to thinking.

The way things have been lately in my life I figured that trash was looming larger and larger on my immediate horizon and today was the day, signaled by the reeking rag, that it was time to clean up around the retired homestead before handing it over to the next occupants. So I took Robert's trailer and piled it high with an assortment of crap that should have been hauled off to the dump ages ago but I had never got round to dealing with, even using my own much smaller utility trailer...procrastination never really does pay dividends and looking around at no longer discreetly lurking piles of discarded stuff I remembered why one should clean up properly long before one is vacating. We never do though, do we? We always clean up and tidy for the next person, not for ourselves. I've done it with boats, with cars and motorcycles, so why not with a house?

I am not fond of stuff, but like cats, stuff seems to be attracted to those who dislike it most. I am terrible about throwing away stuff that could conceivably be useful one day. I hoard only books and will wear clothes long past heir dump-by date, but odds and ends that might one day find purpose and meaning in my life I discard as fast as I can. So how the hell do I keep accumulating piles of stuff? It baffles me. Anyway the pile on the trailer was big enough I attracted the attention of one of the Sheriff's motorcycle cops who fell in behind me on his green and white BMW RT1200s and he followed me through Summerland. I drove three over the speed limit, and because Robert keeps his equipment working I fearlessly used brakes and turn signals in an effort to show him everything was pukka, which was helped by the fact that the leaning tower of pizza was actually properly strapped down. Eventually he peeled off and went to find a miscreant elsewhere; no probable cause here officer...

I quite like the dump, even though I am appalled by how much we waste, and we all know that five percent of the world population in North America is responsible for 25% of the world's waste stream etc  etc... but I am astonished by how efficiently it works. Monroe County, being 100 miles long and occasionally more than a mile wide requires triple services for everything, like driver license offices, jails and hospitals even though the total population of the county (not including Key West) is around 75,000 permanent residents. So it is with the dumps in Cudjoe, Layton and on Card Sound Road. This one, off Blimp Road has always been convenient to me living just south of Big Pine Key and its open six days a week, so with mys schedule hauling crap is easy. Plue they make recycling hazardous stuff and engine oil and all that very simple too.

Sure it pongs a bit on a ninety degree afternoon but that's just the detritus of an over stuffed society. If we don't shop the economy goes south and if stuff isn't over packaged people won't buy it, they say, as a result garbage is filling landfills and threatening ground water everywhere. But hey, that's tomorrow's problem and like climate change if you don't think too much about it, it isn't real. Like I say I do think about it yet crap sticks to me in the form of unnecessary stuff. No wonder stuff sticks to people, and grows around them, those people who really don't ponder these very serious issues. People throw away three pounds of stuff each every day! in the US. 

Bob and I took a customer service course together several years ago and we renew our acquaintance when I drop by to create some open space  in my life. He took $42 off me on this occasion, giving me a perfect customer service experience, after which we caught up on the details of life. I keep expecting him to be gone but he is still here and planning his retirement as one does to go north for less cost and closer family contacts. It's the hard part of life in the Keys, most of us hang in and get used to a life as an employee. Life as a retiree frequently pushes people to seek a cheaper life Up North. And so the cast of characters changes. Change is good. Remember that. 

Driving scenic Highway One you will frequently see these covered trailers plying their way to Pompano Beach which is where the nearest available landfill is, 200 miles away. The city of Key West used to have a waste-to-energy plant that generated around a third of the city's electrical requirements. However the scrubbers wore out and rather than replace them and fight wealthy condo owners, the city yielded and ended the sensible disposal of waste.  

In the end these are not subjects we can have sensible discussions about because we live in a  world where belief trumps  knowledge and facts are pliable. People who have strong opinions push hard and heaven help them if their timelines are wrong ( they usually are as the future remains as undecipherable as ever), yet the very notion that a finite world can have finite resources is unthinkable for those in the camp who believe technology will solve all and expansion can thus be permanent. Climate change? Peak Oil? Asset bubbles? How can we even think to doubt that the future must perforce mirror the immediate past? 

For now the rates to dispose of trash are affordable, the dump is open and after an aromatic visit one can do worse than take Cheyenne for a walk and let her cool off in the increasingly acidic, rising salt waters at the end of Blimp Road. Might as well enjoy life before Armageddon and there's few better places than this, and none that I can think of right now.

From The Archives: Road Trip!

The move from our old home on Ramrod to Cudjoe Key is almost complete and not a minute too soon. We get some time to settle in and then summer vacation looms which is a break to look forward to, in a year that has seen more than its fair share of change. We had hoped to visit my family in Italy but that's not on the cards one way and another so we will be doing the middle aged version of couch surfing and dog friendlty motels (La Quinta) to keep Princess happy.Were I to say I am ready for a road trip I would not be over stating the case, as I am also eyeing the end of June for a ride up the east coast to pick up my hopefully finished and completely restored 1979 Vespa. Well, that's the main excuse which will take us to Allentown in Pennsylvania and from there we aren't sure. This picture from a trip to the scenic and hidden Valle Crucis in North Carolina a few years ago: 

We also visited then, as we plan to this year my wife's sister and her husband at their Hansel and Gretel home in the North Carolina mountains. One thing I do like to do when we get out of the Keys is to see different stuff. I would wither and die in the mountains in winter but in summer its great to see the greenery and enjoy the long languid dusk that falls so fast at tropical latitudes.

They garden and there are no iguanas to eat their raspberries...so berry picking is actual fun for us, in weather that barely raises a sweat but puts mountain folk into full sunshade mode.

It was in 2010 we last went to New Orleans and much though I'd like to go back combining Pennsylvania and Louisiana  in one, two week drive is a bit much even for me. The bits I like of New Orleans are the bits that remind me of Key West, even though the food is better and the crime is a lot worse...

It gets hot in July and Cheyenne, on her first long trip had a tendency to try to overdo it. When we got her from the pound in the winter of 2009 she was frantic to be in the car and go everywhere as she had apparently spent much of her life getting left behind. She would sit in the car all day waiting for me to drive her, and I left her there with the door open so she could get out when she wanted to.  

New Orleans kept her amused.

 We ate beignets and she sat on the sidewalk outside the Cafe du Monde watching, in fact, the world go by. She was a long way from the Key West pound.

 I knew this dog was ready to see the world.

 She got as far as California, here seen playing at It's Beach in Santa Cruz. Pacific Ocean waves were a bit big for her but frisbee on the beach was fun.

She liked the woods and mountains of the west, here at Porter Sesnon in Aptos, her face artfully masked, and I felt a little twinge when i dragged her back to the mangroves ofSouth Florida.

 We got to met riders who (used to) blog. Dan Bateman in Oregon,

 Trobaritz who can be seen with her eyes open...

 ...her troubador with a penchant for Triumphs...

...and Bobscoot, always fiddling with stuff. Richard from Alaska is in the Witness Protection Program and avoided getting his picture taken.

Cheyenne got rather burnt out after three weeks on the road and a long drive home, but we were all three glad to be back as I know I shall be after our drive. Hopefully summer will be in full force in mid July and Duval Street will be properly empty:

 White Street Pier will look ready to serve as set for a post apocalyptic movie:

 But the reality is there will be people around. There are bound to be:

I am planning a summer in the water one way or another. The past two years have seen not enough swimming and we have an expansive and easily used 40 foot dock behind our new home on Cudjoe. It must be used.

 I will eat more fish:

I will enjoy summer rains and hopefully less flooding now the city has been working on drainage. Climate change is coming and the Florida Keys look likely to suffer quite a bit as seas rise.

Yes, vacations are good to look forward to, but iots nice to enjoy being at home.

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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