Goombay 2017

The street party on Petronia Street off Duval lasts a couple of days and I enjoy going down for a visit.

This year Fantasy Fest is under new management after the last management team retired so before the Catastrophe there had been quite a bit of speculation as to how the new fantasy fest might play out. Some residents hoped for a little less nudity and a little more fantasy...me among them, but now with the effects of Hurricane Irma Fantasy Fest becomes a bit less urgent. Making floats when you have to rebuild your home...its no contest really. Then there's Goombay.

This year Goombay has been officially aligned with Fantasy Fest as the opening event of the week long party:

I like Goombay as it is the first street fair of the winter season and I get my fill of the street food that reappears as the winter season winds along. Technically its supposed to celebrate the common heritage of Bahama Village, the African American community in Key West and their roots in the Bahamas and the Caribbean. I have had goat curry at Goombay offered by Blue heaven restaurant but mostly the food looks Colombian to me with the abundance of sweet cheese filled corn cakes called arepas:

My attendance this year got completely gummed up as my plans for a visit on Friday, my night off were killed by a major wreck on Highway One which closed the road for hours. I had come in to Key West for my exercise class and riding home I got snarled in traffic. So I got off the Vespa and pushed the 240 pound wheelbarrow on the bike path for more than a mile to get around the overturned tanker. That little walk after an hour of hard gym exercise got me all sweaty all over again:

Then my wife, coming home from Marathon, a 45 minute commute, ended up spending five and a half hours getting home...Not only was Goombay out but we didn't even have dinner together. Boo hiss. So I swung by Goombay before work last night, before the rain too:

It didn't seem terribly crowded to me but no doubt more people will come as they discover the trash in Key West has been cleared and the city mostly looks pretty normal. 

And here endeth the family friendly portion of Fantasy Fest, music food and good cheer. Now we move on to the odd parties and people wandering around Duval Street in various stages of undress. Sigh.

Fort Zachary Taylor

Key West has had a habit of naming certain monuments after the strangest people. Mallory Square is named for the Confederate Secretary of the Navy who abandoned his Senator's allegiance to the Federal Government to join the rebels. Fort Zachary Taylor is named for the 12th US President a man who survived 17 months in office and was elected on the strength of his popularity as a wartime general. I found this very readable discussion about the President and the manner of his death: LINK 

Nowadays local people who make contributions tend to get named even before they are dead, but Fort Zach is a popular and worthwhile place to visit.

The fort itself is closed to dogs so I came earlier this week when I was in town without Rusty. It's $4:50 for one person in a  car or on a  scooter but walking or cycling will save you a couple of bucks.

I wandered around trying to close my ears to the sounds made by the only other people in the fort with a very loud child which set me to wondering why my very quiet well mannered dog (and his eveready plastic bag) is kept away... 

The views from the battlements are tremendous and it's odd to imagine how far out in the water the fort was located originally. It was an island approached by a wooden causeway but slowly the dredged materials from the harbor were thrown up around it and now it is set inland surrounded by a moat.  

 Captain James Brannan in charge of an artillery company in Key West in 1860 is held responsible for keeping Key West in the Union by stealthily marching to the fort in the night and securing it for the government. Thus despite huge pro-Confederacy sentiment among city leaders Key West stayed in the Union and was a very useful blockading harbor for the Federal Navy. There is a great description of those perilous times here: LINK  

In the end the fort never fired a shot in anger just like the larger but similar Fort Jefferson 70 miles to the west in the Dry Tortugas which became better known as a Federal military prison filled with yellow fever.

Fort Zachary was dug out of obscurity in the mid 20th century by a Navy employee and native of Key West called Howard England after whom the approach road is named. The path to and from the fort itself got a bit of a haircut but the trees are still there:

More suitable I suppose than the controversial president who got the bigger prize of the fort being named for him! 

 It's well worth a walk especially if you feel like laying around with your camera. 

 I wanted something more interesting to pop out of my lense but this is what I got, pretty much what you might expect from this location.

I tootled out to the beach area and found half the pine grove is open to visitors while the other half isn't:

The new plantings survived nicely and I look forward to the native plant forest throwing shade everywhere:

Hurricane recovery takes time and patience.

Higgs Beach

What an odd winter this promises to be in Key West, if not all the Keys. This place depends on tourism and finds itself in conflict between the people who make tourism work and have nowhere to live, and the needs of turism themselves. Outsiders are speculating wildly that tourism this winter will die in Key West thanks to the damage caused by Hurricane Irma, which mostly spared Key West itself ironically, and now we have Fantasy Fest looming, usually a break from the mundane in this town which lately has had nothing mundane to deal with.

 I went by Higgs beach a couple of days ago before the recent spat of rain and it looked dare I say better than it used to. Some inventive soul has adapted the Mediterranean fashion of making people pay to sit on at least a portion of the beach and they seem to like it.

 There is plenty of free parking as it were, on the beach for those who want to lay out in the sun on their own piece of towel but the umbrella things seems quite popular. 

The bandstand is looking none the worse for wear from a  distance at least as though there had never been a Category Four...

Salute is open and there is a plywood sign at the White Street Pier to tell you so.  Businesses face two big issues as they open for business in what has traditionally been the tourist ump in the Fall doldrums: publicity and staff.  The storms were over hyped before they arrived which was okay as lots of people evacuated but apparently afterwards the story was that everything got wiped out. My neck of the woods in the Lower Keys got trashed and is still heaped with garbage but Key West is all rouged up and ready to play. 

As long as the staff can show up. One of the biggest issues now is housing for the workers who got displaced. The deal for them of getting FEMA vouchers to stay in hotels is not only running out of time it's also going to take up rooms that hotels hope to rent at much higher rates to visitors. The local versus tourist debate that inflames so many opinions has suddenly become stark and cannot be ignored.

One side will point out that without tourists there is no income while the other says without workers there are no tourists. It's become a kind of Mexican Stand Off. Its as though not one single person can figure out a way to untie this Gordian Knot. 

Which should give you some idea of how much strategic planning goes into the road map aid out for the future of the Keys. And I think its safe to say the Keys have the capacity to attract people no matter what so even though Fantasy Fest may be more low key which I wouldn't mind, people will come I'm pretty sure. Even though everything isn't completely back to normal.

Key West's residentially challenged are still on the streets as though they have anywhere else to go, so some things never change. 

People worried about the birds and iguanas in the aftermath of the storm and though I think iguanas have suffered a temporary set back the wildlife is still here.

Scenes like these are unique among all the spectacular scenery available in the continental US. How best t make them available to people who want to see them is still very much up in the air as long as worker housing is seen as being in opposition to visitor needs. No change there apparently.

The Point

As though to conveniently illustrate the force of 130 mph winds the very inconvenient Hurricane Irma sandblasted one side of the freshly painted Southernmost Point buoy.

In happier times, two days before the sandblasting it looked like this as I struggled with the concept of selfie while playing tourist in a  deserted town:

This week a city employee had the task of fixing it up under the impatient gaze of visitors eager to get their picture taken at the monument marking the somewhat fictitious point. 

I say fictitious as it is only more or less the southernmost civilian point in the US with the Navy base behind it rather more so. Furthermore Hawaii claims the southernmost point in a US state even though you could say they are trumped by American Samoa. Whatever, you get the point (pun intended.)

 Certainly the people lined up to take their pictures get the point even if it has been mauled:

 Further up the street the Southernmost House which may or may not be furthest south, still stands:

And all I could think while taking that picture above was how much better off we would be if all power lines were buried. Imagine: no more wind related power outages!

Flying Key West

Standing across the salt ponds from the airport on a  cloudy undefined afternoon I caught this scene of the old hawk missile tower between my vantage point and the airport in the distance.

They are flying in and out of the airport which had been a staging area for relief supplies during the hurricane emergency. I saw a mobile tower installed off Government Road so it seems the airport didn't escape unscathed.

 From across the way it all looks normal enough, the palms bending to the fresh east wind...

I came close to understanding why some people like to go to airports to watch planes come and go. You can follow them up into the sky and over the horizon and wonder where they are going and why and  who is on board and so forth. 

 It feels a bit nerdy to think of myself as a plane watcher and in reality I'm not. Mostly I don't like flying with all the security checks and invasive searches and uncomfortable cabins with bad air...

 And on the ground I can't stand the noise they make.

 I wandered about and took some pictures while Rusty hunted for God knows what in the bushes. 

I'm glad flying is returning to normal.