Walking With Korzeniowski

Isla Contadora, Panama Summer 1999

I was feeling feverish and I was glad we had dropped anchor and the boat was snug up the rivermouth and I had nothing more to think about in terms of piloting, going aground, dealing with the paperwork of a Nicaraguan port captain, while coping with his anti-American bad attitude on top of all the folderol required to enter a new country. All I had to do now was get the dogs ashore and let them run after twenty four hours cooped up on the boat. Puerto Corinto beckoned. 

Getting ashore was no easy thing as the harbor was designed for  commercial shipping and the formidable seawall was designed to support merchant ships so it's only concession to pantywaist recreational sailors like us was a vertical steel ladder set in the gray cement wall. Which would be fine for us but hauling an eighty pound Labrador and a sixty pound Husky was out of the question. One more time I used my initiative to make international sailing dog-friendly and cruised my dinghy to the end of the seawall, found a black sand beach 20 feet wide, dumped the dogs who scrambled up the rocky face only too happily while I went back to the infernal ladder and tied off the dinghy after I scrambled to the top to meet my seafaring dogs.  That I did all this running a  fever and feeling horribly out of sorts is a credit to the peculiar habits I had developed since we had left San Francisco with Emma and Debs in the summer of that year 1998. By now figuring out how to land the dogs in the most improbable places was second nature to us all.

 Doing laundry on the dock in Puerto Corinto.

In those days sailors traveled with book bags and we exchanged books as we went. We soon discovered the trading left us with romance novels, classics and unreadable dreck, in that order. Now that I store books on my iPhone I am never tempted to miss the days of paper. Never. So if I tell you I read War and Peace cover to cover while moored in the Panama Canal for a month, and On Walden Pond while enjoying Thanksgiving 1999 in the fabled San Blas Islands you will understand I am not being a  literary snob, those were simply the most palatable titles I could find at book exchanges. I did enjoy some of them thoroughly I must say and I am proud to be able to say I have in fact read War and Peace in its entirety. Had I had anything else I'd have burned the book rather than put it back in the pile as it was a tedious read and all 1300 pages bored me rigid. There; I've said it.

It so happened that while we were in La Union in El Salvador I had found a particular book in the dark recesses of our bag. I felt I should want to read it so I picked up Nostromo and dived in. Joseph Conrad is variously described as the greatest English language author ever etc ... and one can't help but feel he wins the title thanks in part to his Polish upbringing. He  is undoubtedly the best non native English speaker to write great literature even if he is not terribly fashionable just now. In school I had Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness thrust down my unwilling  craw but as an adult in my thirties a tale by the seafarer seemed a likely prospect. I was listening to BBC Radio 4 recently (love the Internet!) to a serialized version of a new biography of Conrad (LINK) and listening to the reading of The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff I was put in mind of the time I read Nostromo.

If you aren't familiar with this novel, and why should you be as it is often described as one of Korzeniowski's lesser books, I should explain it is set in a country unknown to Conrad, a Latin American republic not unlike Nicaragua in fact, at a  time of social ferment when Italian emigrants are fomenting drama and a silver mining operation figures prominently. Not exactly a tale of the sea! But finding myself wandering the streets of this unknown port city late at night with my head filled with fever and Nostromo created an extremely vivid sensation of having been transported to another time and place. The streets were empty and the dogs and I walked at random, my head throbbing my breath raspy and all I can remember is the peculiar pattern of the typical cobbled streets, the crumbling Conradian warehouses with wide overhangs casting dark shadows from the iridescent orange globes of the occasional street lights. Everything was dark and silent overhung  by a wispy gray mist. From time to time I saw shadows lounging in the doorways of the warehouses they were paid to guard. They said nothing to us as they watched us warily, the gringo and his hounds.

Sulaco in Conrad's Costaguana is supposed to lie somewhere in Colombia but that night I was convinced Nostromo the incorruptible was walking the streets of Puerto Corinto. Nowadays Nicaragua is touting for tourism but in those days two decades distant the memories of American explosive mines outside the harbor were still fresh enough and though the people of the town were kind enough one got the feeling the Port Captain was holding us personally responsible for something not good that had happened to him during the civil war and the era of American support for the Contras. His active dislike for us pushed us out of Sulaco/Corinto and we made our way rapidly to San Juan del Sur where Nostromo faded away and yielded to a beach vacation culture in Nicaragua's only truly tourist town.

Were you to take me back to Corinto today I doubt I could find my way anywhere, it would be as though I'd never been there. Because in my imagination I never have. The fever broke a couple of days after we checked in and we were gone and all I have left in my head are the images of the dark streets, the orange glow of the street lamps and the image of Nostromo stalking the streets of Sulaco.

Cleaning the hulls and chaning the gear oil on a Costa Rican beach. 

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: