July 4th Corsican Style

I visited Corsica about a decade ago and spent a delightful week riding a motorcycle on narrow winding mountain roads and along some of the prettiest yellow sand beaches you have seen. But there is of course a ton of history on this island 50 miles wide and a hundred miles long which rises to a jagged peak 9,000 feet up. Corsica has been described as a continent contained in an island. In the 1970s it was known for its violent radical Corsican independence movement which represented and still to some degree represents the minority desire for independence from France.

 

from the Web

The island has had to deal with an influx of people from France who have overwhelmed the native Italian speaking Corsicans in a similar way to that invasion of wealth that is stressing the lifestyle in Key West. Independence advocates are a minority even among native Corsicans though they do mess with road sings and from time to time blow up a bomb here and there. They set off a bomb at a post office while I was there and injured a child mailing a postcard.   which is an act of stupidity not worthy of Corsica's historic struggle for political independence.

from the Web

All of this by way of introduction to the Father of the Nation, Pasquale Paoli a remarkable politican born on the island and whose career influenced the founding of the United States in ways most people have never heard of, and why should they? Paoli was born in Morosaglia, a tony village in the mountains and grew up to be one of the mot celebrated rebel leaders in exile of the 18th century. He was actually very respectable and a darling of the English speaking world.

At the tender age of thirty in 1755 Paoli found himself head of state of a new republic, having kicked out the Genoese occupiers from all but a couple of coastal forts. He sat down and wrote a set of rules for his new nation. Much is made of his universal suffrage, everyone over 25 got the vote, including women. The independent Corsicans beat off the overlords from Genoa who gave up and sold their island to France who took two expeditions to finally destroy Pasquali's Republic in 1869. But his ideas lived on and were adopted by the revolutionaries in the United States a few years later. Count him a father of the founding fathers. 

From the Web

Which brings us to the nub: I am not alone in noticing this extraordinary connection. After years of never being able to find any confirmation of my crazy idea, the US- Corsica connection, I found a page that agrees with me. Check it out HERE LINK.

 Of the French defeat of Paoli and his army in 1769, Voltaire wrote:

The main weapon of the Corsicans was their courage. This courage was so great that in one of those battles, at a river called Golo, they made a rampart of their dead to have time to reload behind them before making a necessary retreat; their wounded were mingled among the dead in order to strengthen the rampart. Such actions one only sees among free peoples.

Paoli was an inspiration for the patriots’ group, Sons of Liberty. One of the founding Sons of Liberty members, Ebenezer McIntosh, named his son after the Corsican leader, calling the lad Paschal Paoli McIntosh. Furthermore:

In 1768, the editor of the New York Journal described Paoli as “the greatest man on earth“.

The Sons of Liberty started as an underground group championing ‘no taxation without representation’, which became their well known motto. All of the 13 colonies had a Sons of Liberty chapter.

Everything is connected and it all goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a revolutionary that these days would be rated far too radical for consideration. Who would have thought?

Hackley's Diary

The Key West Citizen had a brilliant idea about a year and a half ago, and in January 2016 started running excerpts from the diary of a man who lived here before the Civil War.

 

William Hackley practiced law in Key West between 1829 and 1852, according to county historian Tom Hambright who works out of the county library in Key West and furnished the newspaper with the diary excerpts. Apparently they are a popular read even if the author of the diary isn't that well liked according to Hambright. I had no idea as for me he is simply a diarist and I hadn't attached judgement to his character.

 

In an interview with the Citizen newspaper Hambright explained some of the diarist's background:

William Randolph Hackley was from an old-money Virginia family. 

"His mother was a Randolph, and the only family older than the Randolphs in Virginia would have been descendants of Pocahontas," Hambright said laughing. 

Hackley was born in 1806 and moved to Tallahassee, probably for law school, in 1826. He was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1827 and a year later began practicing law in Key West, where he did well financially representing ship captains in the wrecking industry. He married Matilda Folker in 1841  and was appointed U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 1849. He held that position for eight years.

"By then, though, he must have seen the writing on the wall and his wealth coming to an end, because they were building lighthouses throughout the Keys, and Hackley would have known the wrecking industry was coming to an end," Hambright said. "So he moved the family to Illinois in 1857, but he never did very well financially there."

Ironically, if Hackley had remained in Key West through the Civil War, he would have again been a rich man, Hambright said.

"All the federal blockade running cases of the Civil War came through Key West," Hambright said. "As U.S. attorney, Hackley would have tried all those cases."

I noticed this excerpt from the diary (above) published by the Citizen yesterday which included this gem: "...and also made an inventory of the boy and piano as Matilda's separate property and signed it myself..." Signing off a human as property didn't turn a hair in those lovely antebellum days.

 

The excerpts in the newspaper are fairly bland and brief for the most part, yet strangely compelling, hypnotic almost. I read then after I study the front page and check the Citizen's Voice, the anonymous complaints column followed by a view of the Citizen of the Day. Usually it's a recent arrival the newspaper reporters run into during their home or work related chores. Hackley  gets up early, walks to the Salt Ponds and goes home and does paperwork and has dinner with his family. End of story.

The diary does bring to life those corners of Key West that used to be involved in the various sea trades. I thought about the author when I crossed Mallory Square before dawn last week, thinking back to when it was a commercial wharf. I wonder what Hackley would think of modern Key West.

Boats Boating

I wanted to share a few pictures from my day on the water. I'm back at work taking 911 calls from angry desperate people and I like to look at a good day away  from the madness. So I thought these might do the trick.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure what the boat in the picture below was doing. It was at the limit of my telephoto but I thought maybe they were diving on a  wreck. Maybe, I don't know. I hope they had a good time.

 

 

I saw this catamaran on a lift and I was impressed by the size out of the water. 

 

It's a nice way to get your ride out of harm's way and easy to use when you are ready. 

Vanishing Key West

There is a category of Key West resident that gets my goat and it is that person who is leaving or has left and looks over their shoulder as they head to the real world sniffing about how Key West has gone to the dogs and is a hopeless place and they are glad to be gone. I don't think I will ever allow myself to be one of those but I am witnessing the transformation of a town that had qualities I enjoyed into one that is geared toward a class of human with whom I share no cultural values. I plan to retire from my job in 2021 and I fear I shall find myself even more socially dislocated than I do already.

 

These  thoughts have been growing in me over the months as I watch more and more development and less and less true progress blighting this town.Perhaps it is because I have lived here for a while but I think there is a  fundamental shift under way that is preparing Key West for a future that holds no interest for me. And yet when I read commentaries on Key West from bright eyed and bushy tailed new arrivals I remember with some consternation that universal feeling of pleasure anyone gets when they discover there is a place in the sun for them and Key West is it... the End of the Road:

A colleague of mine was on "Wheel of Fortune" a few months ago fulfilling a lifelong ambition. He came back from Los Angeles giddy at his brush with Vanna White and fleeting fame but he also had a check to pay off his car and a ticket for a ten day vacation all expenses paid in Hawaii. His return from that other tropical US destination left him filled with wonder at a state where every home has a solar panel, streets are clean and panhandling was a Key West memory. Why can't Key West be like that? was the question hovering over his vacation pictures. Because the vision the city leaders offer us is merely more of the same. 

 

I have said it before that this town is so lucrative for the people in charge there is no incentive to upset the apple cart. While I acknowledge this truth I also see the future it is leading to and I don't much like it. Key West was once hip and daring and innovative, a home to quirky people and nationally renowned artists. It was easy for someone like me to fit in because my quirks are modest and in a  town where cross dressing was routine and bizarre habits lived side by side with prodigious inventiveness someone like me can blend in seamlessly even though I find it impossible to adapt to modern suburban America. My natural state of rebelliousness is very low key compared to what used to roam the streets of Key West. I like living in places where the outlandish is routine; I hide more successfully there and enjoy watching from the sidelines.

 

I look across the US and I see urban innovation and renovation underway. President Trump is free to imagine climate change is a Chinese hoax because local leaders are responding to the very real threats of desertification, sea level rise and increasing energy costs with local responses embedded in their own communities. It makes sense in a country dedicated to the tug of war between Federalism and local control. It's this lack of thoughtful innovation that worries me the most about Key West's future. Despite the community control of public utilities these are not agencies offering us modern solutions to urgent questions. Solar power is nowhere, and the water supply is piped from a  shrinking aquifer while at the same time ancient skills deployed for local rainwater collection are banned! It is not permitted to collect rainwater in cisterns and use it for household purposes. I did it for years when I lived in a  a house with a dual cistern and also piped water supply and it was great. The water tasted good, it didn't poison me and I proved to myself banning cisterns is stupid. But if everyone caught their own water the utility couldn't figure out how to make money. 

 

A new "car free Key West" program has been unveiled to much fanfare and not much information. All I have heard is criticism from people fearful that their use of cars will be legislated away in favor of cycling. Which you might think would be no bad thing, and yet there is no coherence to the plan such as it is. Key West has the highest incidence of bike related injuries and death among Florida cities, possibly because there already is a high percentage of people riding bikes. Possibly too because bike paths are scarce and riding a bike in Old Town is an exercise in taking your life into your hands. Visitors driving around have a hard time with the narrow streets lined with distractions.Asking them to not run over cyclists is too much. Oh and alcohol of course. A plan to create a pedestrian zone on two blocks of Duval Friday nights was hot down because merchants outside the zone thought it would be too successful. So did the city think to expand it? Of course not. That's the kind of thinking that makes me fear for Key West's future. A planned free bus loop across town has been delayed forever because they can't get the drivers and equipment sorted and in place to get the service started. Yet. Lower Keys shuttle buses banned bicycles for a while as the bike racks were too popular. I don't know what the status of carrying bikes on the shuttles is anymore, I've given up trying to understand these decisions anymore. To every hump in the road the only solution is to give up. When the city put solar panels in the new city hall parking lot all they got was grief from neighbors who thought they were ugly. It just goes on and on. How they plan to attract young forward thinkers to this town I have no idea and i don't think anyone cares.

 

Key West hasn't caught the renewable energy wave sweeping the country and recycling remains a vague promise but it isn't driven by an interior monologue that requires and believes in cleaning up after oneself. Mote Marine Lab on Summerland Key is working with State and Federal officials to repopulate the reef one healthy coral at a  time.  But there is no limit to the numbers of people and boats and sunscreen and beer that  covers the reef in any one day. We all know it is stressed out and lots of causes are bruited to blame for the decline of the coral but it is all merely an academic exercise in discussing an interesting future problem. Some day the visitors will realize there are abundant colorful reefs elsewhere in the world, nurtured and protected even as climate change, that implacable Chinese hoax heats up tropical waters and slowly strangles the coral worldwide. That  Key West has an accelerated program of stressing the coral is of no interest. Tourists bring money q.e.d. 

 

The Studios at Key West are another bright spot, like Coast a rather less well funded artistic hideaway on Stock Island. They are the last publicly acknowledged centers nurturing the art that once made this town well known beyond it's size. Key West today lives on its reputation as a haven for dead artists most of whom don't get a mention these days unless they are the stoutly masculine Hemingway or the florid Gothic playwright Williams whose appeal lies mostly among lovers of the arts not the day trippers who line up to see Hemingway's cats and his garden urinal. Elizabeth Bishop? Robert Frost or even the very much alive former resident and current novelist Anne Beattie? I look forward with interest to see what the new voice of Fantasy Fest will offer up this year, more local fantasy they say and less dangling genitals. We live in hope. But I don't think artists will be taking up residence in million dollar cottages anytime soon. That ship has sailed.

 

Key West is still a lovely little town set in beautiful turquoise waters with what I consider the perfect climate because I have no  love for seasons and snow and stuff. But it is a town populated more and more by temporary residents with no real attachment to it, not people who live work and raise children here. It is governed by people who see only dollar signs in its attractiveness and lack the vision and determination to support and sustain those  dwindling few who still try to live here and live lives of daily domesticity, the backbone of any town. The eccentrics, the artists, the social outliers have moved on to more interesting towns, more affordable towns and like other formerly interesting towns that lost their grip on character, Portland, Santa Cruz, Aspen and Taos to name a few that I know of Key West is slipping away to mediocrity, the worst fate I can imagine for a town that has so much potential and so little likelihood of achieving it. 

Night Waterfront

It was very early in the morning and Rusty was ambling by himself sniffing here and there and circling around me giving me time to look and see what I could see without the need to be lurched along at the end of a leash. It was liberating for both of us.

 

I noticed the lighted globes at the Marker Hotel recently sold I am told by developer Singh for one hundred million dollars. Which gives him play money to build more impossibly expensive accommodation in the town formerly believed to be quirky. We still see funky bicycles in Key West; all is not lost.

 

I am not an occupier of bar stools much. I have no facility for small talk and i struggle to remember the details of people's lives, their births marriages deaths and recent events. My own life seems to ebb and flow with a regularity that would frighten me if I thought too hard about it. Sitting on a bar stool trying to impress a stranger would make me pass out from over exertion. I have no idea how people do it, but look at this picture of well worn stools at Conch Republic Seafood and you'll see they do just that:

 

In keeping with it's city lease I assume, Conch Republic keeps commercial boats at it's docks, the remnants of a fleet that once filled the Key West Bight, now known to some as the Historic Seaport for those people who buy Singh's developments, and now this boat or two is here for a touch of authenticity.  

 

This is what the tourists want, comfortable seating, a solicitous captain kn knowledgeable of where the fish are and ready with a flow of cheerful soothing banter and cold drinks. 

 

This si the modern fishing fleet of Key west, the smelly commercial boats are banished, for now, to Stock Island, where the Monroe County government fights a desperate rear guard action trying to buy up commercial dockage to preserve an actual commercial fleet for a while longer. 

 

It was lovely at five in the morning, no traffic no people just me and my dog and my camera and the sound of the breeze. That's when the old Key West manifests itself a little bit from behind the stage paint of name brands and accessories and the vacant looks of those who don't know what thrill they seek.

 

By the time they come out to play Rusty and I were long gone home and to bed. Vampires both.

Bernstein Park

It happened that the passenger window in my wife's convertible Fiat 500 decided to die with a  very loud crack as I was driving the car and opening the window at the same time. The glass didn't break but it gradually and inexorably sank slowly out of sight into the door. No amount of pressing the button brought it back, nor did my efforts to pry it back up to keep potential rain squalls out...Suddenly in this past week of sudden and very heavy rain we had a car repair emergency. Bugger.

Mind you my wife gets mad at me when I point out what a nuisance her car has been from time to time, I who had endless struggles to keep my classic Vespa P200 on the road, ultimately unsuccessfully...She notes I also broke the slider on the passenger window of her Sebring convertible, an incident I no longer recall.  Anyway she made the appointment and I drove the car to the shop so they could install new plastic runners for $350 to restore the window.

Rusty wanted to come along and he unlike my late lamented Cheyenne is much more flexible than the old Labrador so he hops in and out of the Fiat with no problem. So we went for a walk, as you do while the mechanics sweated in the non air conditioned shop. $350 seemed like a bargain thank you.

 We wandered past Bernstein Park which is getting a  massive make over. The eight million dollar project started over a year ago and has work still to be done.

 Konk Life magazine reporting on how county commissioners are sprucing up Key West's neighboring island:

Danny Kolhage said the change began with the last County Commission agreeing to build a new fire station on Stock Island, and has continued with the current Commission signing off on two new road and drainage projects for the area that will begin later this year.

“But the cornerstone of our efforts out here is this major capital improvement to Bernstein Park,” Kolhage said. “Bernstein Park, as you can see, sits at the heart of south Stock Island. It’s the only recreational area that this community has.”

The $7.9-million project will have a baseball field, soccer field, soccer practice field, playground, basketball court, exercise trail and new field lighting. It also will have a new 5,500-square-foot community center, with a large room and a smaller room for public use.

The project also will raise six acres of the park (the non-wetlands portion) by up to two feet to address flooding caused by rains and high tides that have hampered use of the fields. This will require about 20,000 cubic yards of additional fill.

The fields will have natural grass and be watered using rain water collected in cisterns and reclaimed water from Key West Resort Utilities.

I think the cause of all the walking spotted an iguana which was much more interesting to him. They don't allow dogs into Bernstein Park so I don't think he cares too much about the redevelopment.