Seeing Key West

I keep thinking there's nothing new for me to see after eleven years chronicling my walks around the  Key West neighborhoods. 

 There is. It might be the angle of sunlight falling on a house or a man sitting on the sidewalk.

 Or the older generation cleaning the gutter by hand:

 I am inclined to forget not all US  cities offer these varied old frontispieces to their city streets:

 And not every city expects to see eager scooter riders cluttering their streets.

 When in doubt, look up.

Another Country

I have never treated my telephone as anything other than the miracle it is. I have listened to people curse the mobile telephone world we live in as though it is somehow an implement without an "off" button. To like one's potable phone is somehow to epitomize  the life of an anti-social, hermit freak, someone who lives without true friends who exists only in the ether on"social media." Yet for me, my iPhone is so much more. It is a camera, a library, a compass, a navigator, a flashlight, a telegraph, a fax, a radio, a television, a publishing house, a weather station, a notebook,a gramophone player, a news stand,an archive,a Dictaphone, an atlas and so much more. I grew up in a world which lived by actual horsepower, that expected people to live in homes with (hopefully) cold running water and communal televisions, a world where oxen plowed fields and walking was the main means of locomotion.

I was a child of privilege fully equipped with hot and cold water, indoor plumbing and servants, but I who grew up speaking three languages no more imagined portable telephones than I could conceive a world where everyone in these villages owned a car.

I first noticed the mobile phone transformation when we traveled, my wife and I, on a three week road trip behind the recently removed Iron Curtain. The countries of Eastern Europe in those days of the mid 90s went straight to cell phones and skipped the whole landline dilemma, which we clung to for a decade longer. Our Western rental car out performed the two stroke Trabants we encountered but the young people in Czechia and Poland walked around with phones glued to their ears. Texting was still just over the horizon. In the picture below you can see an outline of my mother watching the procession from the shadow of the kitchen window in the castle where I grew up. We had a TV and the rest of the village shared a TV for the single channel broadcast in Italy at the time. We children democratically preferred to watch television with the children of the village rather than alone in one of our several living rooms.

Before she left to live a month with my family in Italy my wife took me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to download one more application on my phone. I whined but she was relentless. WhatsApp uses the Internet to make phone calls and unlike the cell signal my wife uses in the lonely mountains of my youth the WiFi at my family's bed and breakfast gives us a perfectly clear signal on which to talk. It is amazing. In my childhood the task of calling my father in England when my mother and sisters and I were on summer vacation in Italy was an all night affair. There were no cinemas within 45 minutes drive on gravel roads, so for entertainment we went to the next village which had a phone and sat for hours in the cobblers shop where Carletto repaired shoes and waited for the various operators to connect lines from our home in England to our village in Umbria. Our world in Italy was limited to a few villages in a narrow radius.

These days there is an app for everything, including travel bookings, such that travel agents are pretty much vanished for ordinary folk. Newspapers struggle  with electrons and writers struggle with free content. Cable TV is overrun by streaming content. Change is everywhere; food delivery is real, electioneering by Facebook is commonplace. Yet to me the simple fact that I can talk to my wife in Italy for free on a  crystal clear internet phone line from the phone in my pocket still seems like a miracle. I could even do a video link if I so chose but we are old and prefer our phone links to be audio only.

"The past is another country; they do things differently there." That quotation from L P Hartley has haunted the second half of my life, every time I think about my bifurcated youth, half in a proper English boarding school, half let loose in the empty countryside of my Italian vacations, I think of how much the world has changed. My wife spent months with her telephone studying Italian on a Duolingo App (of course) and now she is away for three weeks in a classroom setting every weekday, learning to drive without me, to order food without me, to talk to my Italian relatives without me, learning to function without me as her interpreter I am connected once again only by my iPhone.

When I was a child the phone booth in the 1960s was installed in this man's shop (above), Lorenzo was the cobbler and his shop smelled of glue and leather and I sat at that well worn table playing with tacks and lumps of dried glue while my mother handled the phone and tried to get a connection to London. If, after hours of calling back and forth the connection was made my father's voice came down the wires reverberating and distant as though he was on he moon. Even then my little mind was boggled imaging our distant connection putting me monetarily in the living room at home in England, lifting me out of Lorenzo's workshop in Morre, all along the length of a tiny piece of wire. After the call my mother and sisters and sleepy little me staggered out into the night once more immersed in Italy and Italian and dirt roads and faint street lights and outhouses, a century behind our orderly English life. 

Gravel roads and a beast of burden, a human being, in the good old days:

I don't know if phones are stunting our social skills or if Amazon will destroy our middle class insecurities as we know them. But I do know its nice to be able to call half way round the world on a whim and to be able to hear the voice at the other end as though she were here. At least I am getting something slightly useful out of the revolution before it destroys us.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Rusty resting at the monument to Norberg Thompson, the man who created Key West Bight and commercial fishing they say. From the Key West Historic Marker Tour which you can see all around town:

"Norberg Thompson was a man of initiative and enterprise who always seemed to be ahead of the times. By shaping much of the economic infrastructure that gave growth to the town in the first half of the 20th century, he significantly influenced the development of Key West.

In an early business venture, he was involved in the sponge industry, having taken over for his father as the representative of several New York sponge buyers. At its peak, local spongers held a monopoly on the sponge industry- supplying 60% of the sponge demand nationally. Thompson was responsible for a good portion of that success.

Most of Thompson's businesses were located in the Historic Seaport District. His business, Thompson Enterprises engaged in fishing, ice production, cigar box manufacturing, pineapple and guava canning, turtle soup production, sponging, and hardware sales. Over time, business after business would emerge, flourish, decline and be replaced by another. Thompson's various business ventures are a reflection of changes to Key West during the early 20th century.

At the peak of his career, Thompson owned most of the Historic Seaport. His greatest achievement was the thousands of local jobs his businesses supported for nearly 50 years."

Of course when I chose to sit on a  bench and Rusty decided to pause and watch the world go by a local resident took our decision badly. I don't know why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird because they do like to dive bomb passersby for no apparent reason:

From Harper Lee's novel we get that quotation that you can shoot all the blue jays you want if you can hit them but it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Which is a shame as jays aren't nearly as aggressive. Rusty just ignored the irritant. Maybe he's read the book?

From the history blog Facing Today this observation:

"The longest quotation about the book's title appears in Chapter 10, when Scout explains:

"'Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

'Your father's right,' she said. 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy…but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

So, who is the symbolic mockingbird? Later in the book, Scout explains to Atticus that hurting their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley would be "sort of like shootin' a mockingbird." Mockingbirds are not the only birds in the book. Finch, the last name of Scout, Jem, and Atticus, is a small bird. Like mockingbirds, they are also songbirds."

And so home to be annoyed by the camera, my soulful dog on his choice of furniture:

Key West Sunrise

Key West has elections this fall and both the city and the Monroe County commissioners are playing musical chairs. Term limits move occupants out of city jobs while county commissioners are not limited but it is believed there may be a retirement or two in the offing. Or not.

Key West produces some fiercely odd elections and I suppose that must be the case in a town where people come and go and commitments are frequently killed by alcohol and  upsetting the wrong person can lose you your job and thus your tenuous hold on life in Paradise.  So when an election cycles comes round all sorts of names pop up as candidates. And within days or weeks most of them drop away.

Teri Johnston with eight years on the city commission and a well oiled electoral machine must be the odds-on favorite for mayor. Especially since the only candidate to raise more money than her has dropped out suddenly because of a bad back. Yup tens of thousands of dollars from a sugar daddy in Louisiana and the candidate's back problems put the kibosh on that candidate. Key Weird in  full flow.

I matured in a  very politically active town in California and though I was never directly involved in campaigns I learned early on as a journalist that if you are alone you aren't going to get attention. It takes a circus to get elected, by which I mean an organization with fundraising and scheduling and  reply to enquiries people all involved. A lone wolf is an eccentric candidate.

In Key West  that is not an easy thing to organize:  a group of committed people into a a single campaigning unit.  Those that have that kind of backing are well entrenched in the community and are known quantities. That leads to more confusion.

Here's the thing and it's not easy to understand when you assume that every small town is like Key West. While it's true many towns are small enough that everyone knows everyone but the actual physical isolation of Key West makes it truly isolated.  Often there aren't that many bids for a contract, or a contract requires local knowledge. Or only local money is close enough to an issue. All this leads to a certain kind of conflict of interest. Everyone knows everyone and many people bidding are related.

For all the above reasons politics in Key West is  rather inbred. And inescapably so. The issues are all the same and no one really wants to deal with the intractable problems of a small town that is too popular with the monied classes and thus ever less accessible to the rest of us.  There is lots of talk about building worker housing known as "affordable" though the affordability seems mighty suspect.

 A friend had an apartment come available and she asked my wife and if we'd like to live in New Town in her two bedroom, two bath unit. Not at $3,000 a month we don't but that is an easily attainable rent nowadays.  The fact is wages have not kept up with prices in Key West and some creative solutions will be needed to keep services functioning.

I suspect the future is one of company housing with a majority of rotating staff, often of course "illegal" immigrants, around here mostly Europeans on student visas not authorized to work. Thats has already been happening and it's hard to envision a future where housing can be made affordable. The other issue I have with the affordability thing is that when you tie housing to a job you create a dependency that seems unhealthy to me. It's bad enough needing a job in a town with no outlying communities but when your home is tied directly to your job you are pretty much in servitude.

 Commuting is the new way of life, long lines of cars morning and night snaking from Key West to Big Pine, thirty miles in pursuit of a place to live. It's not what many people move here to do but the commute to Big Pine is the way of life now. That Big Pine got wrecked by Hurricane Irma doesn't make it any easier...

 I learned that Bier Boutique a funky delightful hamburger joint of First Street will be gone in a  couple of weeks. It will be missed but the young owner swill find their way in a less expensive less exclusive community and  their departure is Key West's loss. Mine too as I like their food. Supposedly their corner of First at Flagler will sprout worker housing after they are gone.

I am glad I have managed to make Key West my home. In a few years my wife and I are looking at  a departure date, hopefully around 202, when we take to the road to seek out those corners of the world not yet enjoyed. We could stay in our home here but I cannot see a retirement  in a place that offers fishing and drinking for recreation and increasing traffic and housing woes ina  community bleached of color by money and entitlement. I wish it weren't so but the free wheeling Key West that is celebrated in tourist literature is harder and harder to discern in a  town struggling to find the definition of "affordable." 

Sammy Creek

It's good to get away sometimes, and there is another road trip planned for July but when I get home I am reminded how easy it is to get off the beaten path in the Keys. Visitors beat the beaten path down Highway One, the ones that drive, and go straight to Old Town Key West. In summer families take school vacations here at home and swim and fish in some of the more popular spots but Rusty and I can always get away pretty easily.

I remember when Sammy Creek was an abandoned house before the family gave the land to the state for a park. A nice thing they did too. Irma wrecked the place but its back now ready to be ravaged by the next hurricane.

It was a test of my camera's zoom lense, a  bit distorted but the boat was a long way out:

American Shoals Lighthouse on the horizon marking the edge of the reef:

It was a hot afternoon but this guy was focused on his fishing under the blazing sun:

There was no one else around so a plane overhead caught my eye. I was quite surprised I managed to get a clear picture. 

Rusty loves walking these dead end streets. Until he doesn't and then he stops, waiots for me and turns around.

We walked a mile total away and  back to the park and I was sweating, Rusty was panting and yet he refused water. Strange dog.

Afternoon walk done.

Shopping

When you ask a resident of the city if they go to Duval Street the usual reply is "not much." I'm not sure if this is a form of snobbery in an effort to put distance between the much revered locals and the much despised tourists or if it is actually a  response to a lack of useful shopping. The fact is downtown Key West is home to a great many chain stores and not all of them are what you might call useful, unless you ant pornographic t-shirts, alcohol or sugary processed foods.

I got a  911 call from someone standing in front of a business on Duval Street and I had no idea there was a business called River Street Sweets. Luckily our computer at work had the place listed but I still had to see for myself. Turns out it seems to be a chain too.  

There have been stories in the newspaper about perfume stores overcharging customers so signs like this one popped up promising refunds. Aside form the stories about strong arming gullible customers I am not a fan of being accosted on the street by people forcing me to look at products I don't care for and these stores are infamous for that. Another reason to avoid Duval. Apparently this one has bought the farm, at least for now:

This is a local store as far as I know and has taken up a position in the political campaign. Barrios is a solid Conch name:

Fausto's Food Palace promotes itself as a social center as much as a supermarket and it is decidedly local, on Fleming Street here, with another store on White Street for people allergic to shopping near Duval Street.

I was surprised to notice the Christian Science Church is temporarily closing it's reading room. I used to submit stories to the Christian Science Monitor and its radio services so I have a soft spot for this lot. They paid really well, double fees if your story went on the national Monitor Radio and then was rebroadcast on their short wave world wide service. Those were the days.

I'm not sure if this counts as a chain. Well actually its not really a  business either is it?