Airport

The day before Thanksgiving enjoying some greenery in the city of Key West.

 The airport as seem from across the Salt Ponds at the Hawk Missile site.

 I stood on the berm built in the Cuban Missile Crisis era to protect US Hawk Missile installations.

 

 A couple were out enjoying the sun and the (relatively) cool breeze.

 It is a mildly mysterious place worth exploring.

 Hawk Missile installations:

 Salt Pond condos at the eastern end of the island:

 A friend remarked this view does not look like Key West, the city:

 Joe Cool chasing chimeras in the bushes,. 

 He had a grand time, and these days he no longer feels compelled to kill iguanas. 

We take care of his dietary needs now. No more stray dog hunting for Rusty.

November In The Keys

A few sunny photos from my backyard.

Morning In The Keys

It was close to six in the morning when I took a breather and went out on the balcony at the back of the police station. I like to check the skies and the temperature and the strength of the wind like I was some weather nerd instead of being a dispatcher facing a 25  mile scooter ride home. I've  been sitting up all night  for more than a decade going home at dawn and I still get a cheap thrill from looking forward to the ride. 

You get some spectacular dawns over the Keys this time of year. The air is drier and for some reason it produces orange skies and  as I ride home I just get to sit back and think how lucky I am to see all this  stuff while others  sleep or  struggle to get to their day jobs.

I  would never want to live in the  city itself. Recently after Hurricane Irma when some friends kindly helped us out by  giving us a room in town I was seven minutes from work on a  slow day, five minutes when there was no traffic.  I hated it. I had no time to enjoy the transition from work and all the jangling 911 calls. I have been riding this road all these years and I am still not tired of it. I surprise myself.

Then when I get home Joe Cool is waiting at the top of the steps and he starts howling and leaping around which is the best greeting in the world. I stuff him in the car and choose a place to go for a walk. On this particular  morning I went to Summerland Key where by now the sun was up. A quick burst of mosquito repellent,  a plastic bag in my pocket and off we go.   We walked past this house which seems to have survived the storm quite nicely except for the greenery which used to surround the place. It's brilliantly conceived with its aerial garage which is a measure of how freaked out we all were by the flooding from Hurricane Wilma. I hate seeing the wispy half  dead trees but we keep getting reminded they will grow  back. One day.

The mangroves too got a trim but nowhere near as bad as the non native trees, the flourishing palms and nicely arranged  flowers in  people's  gardens. You can't keep anything nice in the Keys, so I have taken to looking at what Nature provides. 

Rusty too.

Oh and the wreckage is still to be seen piled up on side streets in front of houses still recovering from Hurricane Irma. There have been all sorts of issues with the contract to clear the streets. The state is clearing Highway One but the county has or had a contract to clear side streets. Then the contractor sued saying the state was paying an excessively high rate and the local contractor couldn't pay enough to hire trucks to remove the trash. That all fell through and now the trash is sitting patiently waiting for pick up while the rat population flourishes.

Now the county is trying to get some housing for the people displaced by the storm. Thousands of homes got damaged and quite a few got destroyed leaving a couple of thousand people homeless in the immediate aftermath. That number is reportedly down to roughly 500 displaced persons and ten weeks after the storm there was an announcement that there may be a deal to put 80  FEMA trailers in the Lower Keys. I suppose that's a start. And as glacial as these responses are, I keep reminding myself at least we aren't Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. 

And check this story out in the newspaper:

I was pretty upset by the total, failure of everything in the Keys after the storm. No water, no power no cell service, no fuel no newspaper....It seemed as though there was every chance for our leaders to lead but to my surprise we had no community meetings, no block parties, no celebrations of survival, no public  gathering of any kind and not even a reliable source of information. Without Facebook no one would have known anything and we only got internet service after several very long days. US One Radio as usual did a stand out job though I confess this former radio reporter has no radio receiver anymore and my car and it's radio were destroyed  by the storm...I have come to terms with the fact that as a community the Lower Keys are leaderless but all this does is leave me fearful about our next run in with a major storm. But we are still open for tourists. 

So I retreat to the world of my dog and Rusty's happy, and that's something.

AIDS Memorial

Many people who live in Key West and don't drive up the Keys have a tendency to forget things are cleared up everywhere like they are in the tourist centered city. But even here a few signs of hurricane damage linger, like the drunken lamp atop the post at the AIDS Memorial at the White Street Pier;

A couple of months ago it looked, not damaged but raggedy, so its been quite nicely spruced up to hide any evidence of the passage of a  Category Four storm.

Rest Beach was made whole after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 with beds of sea oats and nice landscaping but all thta has been shot to hell once again.

The AIDS Memorial was a response to the deaths of hundreds in that distant era when Gay Related Immune Deficiency was slowly transformed into AIDS and all too often proved fatal. It was a time when Gay Liberation was a notion nationally and a reality in a few small corners of the country. Key West being one and thus susceptible to a vastly disproportionate number of deaths from this weird new plague that terrified everyone. 

So they organized a memorial with lots of plaques and many words and names and thoughts concentrated into this small space. Small because there isn't a lot of space on this tiny strip of land.

I wonder what the memorial means to people too young to remember. Nowadays AIDS is just another nasty illness treated with many expensive chemicals and is no longer the sudden nasty death sentence it once was.

I did not live very long in Key West in the 1980s so I had the pleasure of living with the unfolding drama in California in another town with a high gay population ( I do do that don't I?). In fact I lived in the house where the first AIDS related death in Santa Cruz county took place so I got a ringside seat at the rapid and total destruction of a human being by the mystery virus. Perhaps that's why this place means something to me. That and the fact I did know some few of these names and remember them as people.

There are lots of them.

And there was corporate money to help build this monument. AIDS was profoundly political in the early days, another sore point for those who witnessed the plague  amid official indifference.

The artistic representation of the Florida Keys:

A celebration of lives lived and cut off early is how I see it. But then I'm not very good with the sugarcoat.

Refreshment

A bicycle, a telephone and a six pack. What more do you need n a pleasantly breezy Fall afternoon in Key West?

Another of the city's pocket parks, this one on Seminole Street not properly cleaned yet. In the background a selfie in progress, standard operating procedure. In the foreground my unvarnished view of tourist town, and overflowing trash can:

I had occasion to visit the Winn Dixie in Key West one night and what a ghastly place it is. It is completely unlike the supermarket in Big Pine which is clean and friendly and organized. With construction work underway I wasn't even sure the place was open. I got a packet of throat lozenges for my wife and scuttled out as fast as I could, before the black stuff got me.

My expectations since Hurricane Irma have been quite low and they are not rising much. Th cable TV provider which also provides high speed internet to many businesses can't seem to manage to restore much service outside Key West. I use AT&T to stream Netflix so I am okay but I feel bad for my ever grumpier neighbors as they wait for service. Things are broken, power still goes out occasionally and the clean up of the Lower Keys has stalled as the contractor walked off in a huff. 

In times like these one breathes a sigh of relief and remembers the little Vespa 150 has a pocket or two to stash a can of powerful caffeine. I find myself turning to mother's little helper more and moire to cope with the daily stress of seeking relaxation.

Walking Rusty always helps even among the reduced leafiness of the mangrove woods:

Coming Home

To mark my return and to give me a chance to cast around for Keys scenes here are a few random pictures of the life I abandoned for the past week or so:

 A rusting forgotten truck trailer now re-purposed by graffiti artists:

 Playing with my camera waiting for Rusty to finish being a dog prowling:

 Then he waits for me to stop arsing about:

 The nighttime view from the balcony at the back of the police station:

Back to commuting by Vespa.

Good.