Dry Tortugas Holiday

From Christmas Day 2009 this essay from our last camping trip to the Dry Tortugas, 70 miles west of Key West. Which is by way of a reminder that we should do it again I suppose. It's not cheap as the ferry is somewhere between $150 and $200 each, though the camping fee in the park is as reasonable as only a government service can be, a few dollars per tent site, first come first gets. One big obstacle to taking another camping trip arrived at our home just after this trip...dogs are not allowed on the ferry (though they are allowed on the island outside the fort, so bring your own boat).

Tortugas People

I saved these pictures from our Thanksgiving trip to Fort Jefferson. They had no place in other essays I wrote and today does not seem to be the day for much heavy commentary. Besides everybody is cloyingly sentimental about the holiday thing, so here is an antidote with not one picture that is Christmas related, I promise.

I like to think few enough people will even be reading blogs when they should be with their families, such that my pink crocs (my only footwear in the National Park) might pass unnoticed.This phallic object (below) is called a Parrot Rifle, after it's inventor I think. The rifling referred to makes the shell spin about it's axis as it flies through the air, a common refinement in modern weapons, but it spelled the end, paradoxically for brick walls just like those of Fort Jefferson.
It was cold in November, much more so than December which has more closely resembled summer. We huddled by the fire grate and wore long clothing.Of course summer reasserts itself eventually in the Keys.Sun, blue skies, and brick walls.The life of a Park Ranger is, I think, somewhat less glamorous than one might at first imagine.A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a nice private beach. Except of course for the irritating photographer on top of the fort's walls.
I think this pensive figure was Sarah from Fort Lauderdale who bumped into our party for Thanksgiving. At the time I failed to recognize her, I just liked the picture.
I guess I was quite busy sneaking pictures of stick figures all round the fort.
This lot reminded me of nothing so much as those field trips we used to make as school children. They were actually day trippers off the ferries starting their organized tour of the fort:
This Key West woman was camping with her family and as they got ready to leave her child took a ride in the hand cart, waving goodbye to all that:

Later her kids were throwing themselves off the picnic tables and making their own fun, which is a skill more youngsters need to develop:On the beach I spotted parties of Japanese (Asian really) tourists doing inexplicably odd things. I had never previously seen women in ankle length dresses wearing snorkel gear and then posing for a photographer. Maybe they are gag holiday pictures to satisfy some Japanese (Asian?) fad?

Here was one more conventionally dressed for the beach but the pose looks bizarre, like something out of a Hollywood poster from the 30's. Talk about culture incomprehension; the American pose is barely visible at the bottom of the picture.
Here is a Park Ranger on top of the fort doing something, I know not what, more glamorous than taking out the trash:Jan was drinking coffee from his happy mug, a container covered with smiling flower faces. He posed to try and keep up. Any stray Japanese/Asian tourist watching us might have been culturally confused as we collapsed laughing after the pose was struck.This was Jan as he looks normally. We watched him cross the campground as we snarfed pancakes and wondered if he looked more like a cat burglar after an unsuccessful night, or a mobster returning from a hit.People checking the view. Lots of water out there, with whitecaps on a windy day. People from England call them, rather more picturesquely, "white horses" when the water gets all frothy:
In this next picture Carol was walking back to camp after doing her usual watching the sunrise from the top of the fort. Behind her you can see what I call "buffaloes" on the horizon. When the buffalo are running is when you stay put in your anchorage and wait for calmer weather to go sailing.
A quick look back at the beach on a cool windy day when towels become the equivalent of fluffy warm sweaters. What they were looking at so intently, I have no idea, unless it was a dried up old seashell. Tourists love those.Weather still cool:

Still cool and breezy unless you are a butch male of the species:More Park Ranger work. They nattered for a while poring over their all important list. Then they looked off into the middle distance, thoughtfully. Possibly world peace hung in the balance and I had no idea. I was just camping.This lot stood around on the swimming beach. I wondered what there is to be puzzled about when in your swimsuit on a beach designated for swimming. The woman with fins has the right idea, if you like swimming in rough waters.
Awww! I like dog pictures. Other people, inexplicably, like pictures of small noisy infants.

This next one just makes a child free man like me wish he had procreated and produced noisy, squalling, needy, versions of himself. That's me being sarcastic (not ironic please note, lest you get the two confused).And we close with Kathy glad to have made it back to Key West without puking.
It was a surprisingly smooth ride home from Fort Jefferson. 45 minutes after this picture was taken I was back at work barking orders at police officers over the radio. Camping in the rain sucks, but the memories of the sunny days, the majority of our days, are priceless.

The Imitation Game

Many years ago I interviewed a woman when I worked at a radio station and she had done some memorable thing, so memorable I can't remember what it was precisely, but she had come out and was talking about being a Lesbian long before it was possible for gays to get married in Florida (imagine that!). Indeed I think she was living with a "roomate" in the years after World War Two, so long ago Frank Sinatra was just becoming noticed. I remember asking her what it was like to have to live a life in secret, me becoming an adult in a progressive California university town, she denied her love in a country terrified of people just like her. Was it a source of intimacy I asked, being required to live in secrecy, a privately shared private life. She looked at me, and then through me, and she seemed to be remembering a place and a time a thousand yards behind my shoulder. Her simple reply to my convoluted and hopeful question: "No."

The Imitation Game is playing at the Tropic and while it may not be entirely accurate in its facts, as though any fictional movie could ever be, it opens a window on a world that seems at long last to be behind us. Alan Turing shown below in a file photo was the Englishman credited with creating binary computing before World War Two. His mathematical genius created the groundwork for everything we think of as computer technology today. His claim to fame and the story of the movie is how he broke an unbreakable code in World War Two by creating a binary computer capable of outsmarting the unbreakable German code called Enigma.

He committed suicide at 41 years of age after being found guilty of "gross indecency" which was the same charge half a century earlier that had brought down Oscar Wilde. It was illegal in those unhappy times for two men to have sex together and Turing faced two years in prison or chemical castration for his appalling crime. Good old days indeed! So it was that the brilliant mathematician took his own life and left unanswered the tantalizing question of what he might have achieved in the second half of his life cut short. There is the school of thought that most geniuses do their best work when young; in this case we can only hope so.

The movie is worth a view, its a story well told and nicely paced even though one goes in knowing the outcome. I came away from the theater into a cool breezy Key West evening and I was thinking more about homosexuality than code breaking. Tuesday saw the first gay marriages celebrated in Florida starting in Key West and the whole crazy civil rights debate seems to be settled, even if the homophobe dinosaurs are still thrashing their tails in an effort to prove they still have life. According to the newspapers 70% of the US population can now enjoy the benefits of gay marriage and presumably the holdouts will have to fold and accept that they have lost. Even Arizona celebrates Martin Luther King's birthday these days.

The movie seemed tailor made to suit the occasion, which is the passage of Florida into the gathering of States that allow everyone to marry. Turing in real life was a strange man, and speaking as one with autism the character portrayed in the film, the fictional mathematician Alan Turing certainly came across as autistic. He was brilliant and socially inept, lonely and confused and punished for the crime of "being different." His mind worked differently. There was one scene in the movie that resonated with me, even if it didn't happen in real life...The young Alan is with his friend Christopher who is reading a book on codes and ciphers. Christopher explains that the ciphers allow people to write one thing when they mean something completely different. "Like language," says the young Turing. "People always say one thing and seem to mean something completely different." Ah yes, I thought to myself as I watched. Just so.

Men and machines was the other theme of the movie which told the Enigma code breaking story in flashback. Turing recounts his life at Bletchly Park to a sympathetic detective in 1951. The detective had hoped he was busting a spy ring and ended up embarrassed to be busting a poof for gross indecency. The detective asks Turing if machines think like people. By way of answer Turing names his binary machine after his unrequited schoolboy crush who died while they were at school together. Just as I find dogs suit my stunted emotions better than people, Turing bonded with machines. Ah yes, but it's a movie and in the end the movie tells a ripping yarn, a couple of hours spent alone in the dark bring stimulated. Over stimulated possibly in my case.

Outdoors in Key West when I'd escaped the old age pensioner crowd at the Tropic life continued on Duval Street. That's a platitude isn't it? But it's true, and it's good, life did go on. Watching people march up and down checking their phones, turning on their turn signals, stepping off the sidewalk as the light turns green, all those simple little computations all thanks in the end to the mind of an extraordinary poof.

Whoever told you to work hard, do good to do well, and thus earn your neighbors' respect was, as it turns out not telling you the whole truth. Be normal even as you work as a genius, don't rock the boat of common custom even as you rock the foundations of civilization itself. Wait a minute, the head of Apple is a poof isn't he? And even Turing got a royal pardon in 2013 for his misguided act of buggery 60 years earlier (!), so I guess now it's okay to be queer, at least for some. A bit late but even today every binary act of computation carries a little piece of the genius, who was the poof, with it. Let the buggers marry and live in peace please. They might end up doing us all some good. Imagine that.

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Je Suis Charlie

"Keep Them Trembling:"

"I'm threatened by a pencil. What should I do?"

 

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A Gift

I read with some horror of the temperatures Up North.

Rest assured, there are places on the planet where all is not reduced to single digit temperatures.

Indeed, lounging in the living room, contemplating going to work tonight, a wild windy chilly scooter ride...

Cool enough and windy enough I don't want to open everything up. I'd have to put on a shirt or something equally drastic if I slid the deck access open and let the afternoon all the way in.

The front door wide open, listening to the breeze in the palm fronds outside... 65 degrees and sunny.

I started this as a gift to those laboring under gray skies, in gray frost, but it ended up as a gift to me. The Florida Keys keep on giving.

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Hung Over

The threat of a cold front hangs over the Keys, which is a bit of a joke when the northern half of the entire country is being snowed under this week...However the possibility of rain under cloudy skies and a chance that night time lows today might reach 63 degrees requires some thought. We got sprinkled on yesterday morning as Cheyenne and I admired the ultra low tide at the Ramrod Key pool.

The moon was full when we arrived in the dark but clouds were busy flying across the sky covering the light source and plunging us into darkness. The moon affects the tides to maximum effect when the moon is full or new, roughly (spring tides) and the full moon here drained the bath water from the pool.

I find my life defined by my endless amounts of overtime, my work preparing the podcasts, sleep and lines of traffic clogging the highway. Winter is in full swing yet Key West seems to have priced itself out of the youth market, the winter visitors, lots of them, are older, wealthier as they need to be, and less inclined to be rowdy.

Winter weather in South a Florida has hot weird and I am not the only one to notice. True cold fronts no longer seen to occur, and I can't remember the last time a true cold snap produced 50 daytime degrees. Rain seems year round now, lighter and less frequent in winter but we now get random unpredictable showers in winter where previously rain fell only before the arrival of a cold north wind. Now winter is humid and wet, similar to summer only less so.

I am not sure how I feel about these changes. I don't like the cold but some winter chill seems right and proper. The issue of how much our leaders ignore climate change and pretend it isn't there gets progressively more interesting as the effects become less and less deniable. If I had children I'd be getting worried and vocal.

As it is I have a dog and she reminds me that the here and now is what matters most. It's not raining right now so a walk is possible and the hunt for interesting smells is possible.

Perhaps my judgement is impaired, perhaps I spend too much time at work but sometimes it feels like the whole world is hung over.

Everywhere the trash cans are full, the New Year's celebrations are a memory, represented by empty bottles and cans, bulging plastic bags and a scene something like this:

Cheap gas, another sign of what..? Demand destruction, geo political chess games or some other strange need of the powerful which will only become clear later when the dust has settled and prices go back up to normal peak production levels. Still it's good to be alive in the Keys, even if the planet really should stop over indulging.

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