Roadside Stop

I was early into town so for some reason unknown to my sentient self I pulled over at the western end of Boca Chica Bridge on Highway 1.

 I  saw a plastic bag fluttering out of reach in the median and it put me in mind of one of those Facebook debates over single use plastic bags. My buddy Robert, and eco-warrior was making the case for eliminating plastic bags which was riling some other people up. And there it was all ready to fly off into the water and look like indigestible food for wildlife.

The flats north of the approaches to Stock Island are jet ski country, and I saw a couple of them zipping across flat water:

 I wasn't alone as an angler came round the corner hunting his prey:

I am no fisherman as I fear that pitting my wits against the fish would only result in me coming out second best. I hunt fish at Publix.

The fisherman being hauled hither and yon on the flats boat was more involved with his phone than the scenery. A commonplace nowadays.

 A lovely day in the Lower Keys.

 One more lovely day in fact.

 Not bad for the reptiles either.

 Good to be alive.

Frances Street

Standing on White Street at four in the morning. I looked up Angela Street and set up my tripod. 

On the other side of the street, the cemetery, above ground to avoid a high water table of course.

For some reason the night sky over Key West seems particularly velvety and black. The full moon comes around the 19th as I recall so there wasn't a lot of light in the sky last week when I took these pictures. 

I switched between color and black and white.

It was windy which tended to give the palms a little blurry motion effect at slow shutter speeds.

Normally the larger gate on Frances is open during the day but when it's closed, as it is at night it looks rather forbidding:

Frances Street looking north toward Eaton.

And then in color which does not improve it much in my opinion.

Picturesque Key West.

The Studios Portraits

The last of this week's  exhibits I saw at The Studios of Key West on Eaton Street, is the showing of 101 water colors of residents of Key West. 

 It put me strongly in mind of the portrait show I posted here that was on display a while back at the Tropic Cinema. That was a pairing of black and white photos of people a few years apart. 

 Here instead  the artist used a camera lucida a description of which I found on Wikipedia.

The camera lucida performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. 

The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure. This allows the artist to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, thus aiding in the accurate rendering of perspective.

 Interestingly they also had a slide show pairing the subjects with their portraits:

At first I couldn't figure out who I was looking at, unless I knew the subject, but I did find subtle name tags after looking for a bit:

 "In February, Artist-in-Residence Brenda Zlamany invited 101 Key Westers to pose for watercolor portraits as part of her ongoing “The Itinerant Portraitist” series, in which she travels the globe to explore the positive effects of painted portraiture. Previous chapters have included the Aboriginal population from Taiwan, girls from an orphanage in the United Arab Emirates, taxicab drivers in Cuba, artists in Brooklyn, and elderly and disabled people in a nursing home in the Bronx."

 "Zlamany uses the camera lucida, a device for drawing that dates back to the Renaissance and that promotes a two-way exchange between the artist and the subject. She aimed to capture a wide cross-section of the community, and her Key West subjects include drag queens, teachers, fishermen, MARC House residents, artists, and even Mayor Teri Johnston. All the portraits will be on view in the XOJ Gallery."

 We had the hall to ourselves.

And best of all a glimpse into the finest part of the The Studios I think, the places where they encourage, train and teach artists.

It's a higher calling I think, to be on the spot in a town like Key West drawing out the artistic inclinations.

 I wanted to hang out and absorb the molecules.

 Back to the painted elevator and the real world outside.

Assam Summer

I read a story about  a commercial moon landing that is proposed to put a Japanese billionaire on the moon. It's one of those less-than-real stories that pop up from time to time as people with too much money look for eccentric ways to  make themselves well known. And yet the objective of landing people on the moon and returning them safely to Earth has only been accomplished by the US government in an era I look back at fondly as a time of innovation and accomplishment. I was alive back then and I know as much as anyone it wasn't all great, certainly not in my life, but I suppose I am also at an age when nostalgia grips the mind.

I was in India that fateful July of 1969, living on a school friend's tea plantation in Assam, with China and Nepal dark smudges on the horizon. It seemed at the time and even in retrospect, as remote and exotic a place as the surface of the moon and as far out of touch, perhaps even more so. I remember very clearly being called in to the living room one  warm Indian night by Simon's father, the very British tea planter, to gather round the wireless which was our only communication with the outside world and there we sat listening to a description of what the rest of the world saw on their scratchy television screens: The Moon Landing. I did not get to see the film of that momentous event for years. We had no video tapes back then, no Internet, no way of seeing something later that had flitted by on our screens one night. My absence from the world, hidden in distant Assam, meant I was consumed with curiosity about an event I only got to hear but never got to see. Pick up your phone, search for first moon landing on YouTube and there you have what I missed out on seeing live or recorded for years after the singular event which grabbed my eleven year old's imagination.

At the time my eleven year old self felt deprived. Now I look back on that intimate closed world I lived in for about a month and I am astonished by my privilege.When Simon had suggested to me coming to stay with him at his Indian home for the summer vacation from boarding school I presented the plan to my rather distant severe father with no expectation he would agree. Wasn't I surprised when he agreed enthusiastically and ordered my ticket promptly and made immediate arrangements for my travel. I was to fly from London to Karachi and from there to Calcutta by jet where a local plane would transport us past East Pakistan which was not quite at war with India to the isolated Indian peninsula of Assam. I could hardly understand how my father would agree to this madness but he did and I was not always grateful.

In Calcutta our onward flight to Assam was delayed and we stayed in a five star hotel with a majestic and gorgeous Indian flight attendant in a sari who between stealing our innocence by purloining our money kept us amused, and myself appalled by showing us the astonishing city whose name has now been changed to Kolkota. It was a dreadful city for one as innocent and young as myself, filled with color and light and death and smells and sights such as I had never expected to encounter in my life. It was medieval, it was the city where I first saw dead bodies, stacked like cords of wood in ox carts, the dead of the night before picked off the sidewalks for removal at dawn, bodies as gray as the early morning light polluted by charcoal fires on the sidewalks and millions of engines and thousands of factories in a  city that epitomized hell for my young brain. I saw mutilated beggars, women shitting in the gutters, families living under tarps on the sidewalks, trash swept away by the monsoon rains that drenched the city. 

The city smelled of wood smoke and exotic spices. Dirt was everywhere except in our five star hotel whose entrance was guarded by two mighty Sikhs dressed in red and white and fierce enough to keep the most insistent beggars away. We stepped from middle class comfort into hell every time we left the hotel to see the  city sights and keep youthful boredom at bay. I stood on the banks of the Ganges river watching bodies being burned by the sacred waters in an effort to release their souls from the purgatory of reincarnation. Beggars surrounded me and the flight attendant scolded me fiercely when I gave away a few coins in a shock of guilt, and sure enough I was drowned in a sea of clawing desperate hands until I ran out of the flimsy little coins that passed for currency and the desperation of the deprived went up a notch or two as they realized they had missed out on the little white boy's breakdown. She hustled us into a cab to get us away from the mob that threatened to swallow us whole, me and Simon and the hostess in her sari. That's what happens when you give them anything she spat and I stared through the glass at the faces condemned to a life unimaginable.

Assam was a relief not least because the Pakistanis didn't shoot our plane down as we trundled across the mountains threading the narrow line of Indian territory that connected Assam to the rest of the country. We flew over a brown smear far below, another of those irritatingly sacred rivers, this time the Brahmaputra which rose in Tibet and flowed sluggishly all through India and split Assam in two. From the streets of Calcutta I landed in rural Assam, a half separate entity with its own language and tribes and customs inhabited they said, by head hunters and cannibals in the weirdly disjointed language of the day. Indeed my life for that month was bizarrely 19th century, an Imperial lifestyle as though the British had never left. We had servants and lived in a large "bungalow" a vast house on stilts with shaded window blinds and fans and silent servants ready to fulfill the young sahib's least wish. To this day I recall the order made in Hindi when you wanted your water glass refilled: Paanee mankta. And the paanee wallah (water bearer) would rush to the table. It was unnerving and yet I watched Simon transform from average English school kid into young Imperial master and it made me wonder what on earth was this life. As much as the apocalypse that was Calcutta, this place offered serenity and comfort and certainty. Here there was order and clean sheets and lassitude, swimming pools and country clubs, elephants to ride and tigers to seek in hunting expeditions redolent of the sort of colorful excess you saw only on television back in the world. Our picnics in the tea plantation were elaborate and celebrated the ease of a world set apart from normal concerns. I justified my presence by learning to swim in the club pool and fending off the amorous advances of Simon's sister that I was too innocent and dim to recognize as such. I failed to alleviate what must have been terminal boredom for her, poor thing. My life as disappointment continued to unfold just as it did at home and at school.

I don't think I was the ideal house guest and they were as glad to see me gone as I was to go and I made the long trek back to the real world landing in Rome where things were familiar in my bi-cultural life and my family was waiting for me.This was also the moment when the reason for my trip to India, and the ease with which my father had agreed to the expensive, mind expanding jaunt became clear. We had a family meeting in the tumbledown country house that had been in my mother's family for three hundred years and was about to revert to her control once more.My father stood like a patriarch and announced he and my mother were getting a  divorce. In 1969 this news was a bombshell as divorces were not at all commonplace. The artificial serenity of parents making a  go of a failed marriage was shattered and the family split never to be reunited. My mother stayed, my father went back, publicly now, to be with his mistress, a woman I learned to loathe and I went back to boarding school after a life altering summer vacation.

Apollo 11 altered the lives of it's crew and opened up a new world of exploration for all of us, one that we don't seem to have made the best use of in my opinion. That summer changed my life and set me on a path to emigration as soon as I decently felt I could escape my family and it's drama. 25 years later in a foot note to the Assam moment in my life my older sister, older by a decade,  told my future wife in all seriousness I was the cause of the family's split. There I said to Layne, now you know why I had to escape. And the year it all happened was marked for me by that other little historical incident when men first stepped on the moon.

Powering Down

I was in a deep sleep, a refreshing sleep in the late afternoon to help me prepare for another night shift. The plan was to rest, have dinner and leave at nine o’clock for a night of telling the police where to go to, hopefully not too often as a foul night of wind and rain was forecast. All of  which tends to keep rowdy drunks off the streets of Key West and reduces traffic on the police radio channel which I would be monitoring. Suddenly I found myself struggling to wake from a startling sense of drowning, unable to suck in a breath, try as I might. I sat up flailing wildly in a room so dark I couldn’t even see the alarm clock normally a reassuring red glow on top of the chest of drawers. It was a power outage. 

My inability to draw breath was caused by a helpful breathing machine I use since my hospital stay for broken bones discovered I have sleep apnea. The sudden loss of power caused the rubber “pillow” (their name) to collapse against my nostrils not only no longer pumping air but actively blocking up my nose. That was a wake up call. Good Afternoon Florida Keys. 

Facebook wasted no time in posting the photo above to explain the cause of our sudden powerlessness along with numerous comments speculating on the boat owners origins and family tree. To my astonishment my phone went off and I found myself in receipt of unsolicited information from Keys Energy explaining the problem and with a shrug further explaining the loss of power had no end in sight. Bugger. Then I was texted fresh information: local generation was underway to fill the gap until the mainline (“tie” line in  KeysEnergySpeak) was liberated from its derangement. Or words to that effect. That liberation was also eventually recorded on the universally useful Facebook. Thank you Carlos (whoever you are) and Towboat US. 

Local power generation is a wondrous thing enabled by the old power station on Stock Islsnd next to the Hogfish restaurant. I heard once they have enough fuel to provide power for two weeks should the tie line from Miami break. After a hurricane it’s usefulness is limited as they can’t just power up willy nilly when electrical lines have been reduced to angel hair pasta across whole neighborhoods. However when there is one single problem like this minor fiasco the local generation thing gets the a/c and Netflix back on line sharpish and normal living was rapidly resumed in this case at the expense of manual workers struggling in the teeth of a very wet and windy storm raking the Keys. I arrived at the police station at ten o’clock glad to be working indoors out of the weather. 

Power outages used to be, I don't want to say frequent, but they weren't surprising in a place subject to wild weather and exposed  power lines. Power outages were not one has to remember the devastating thing they can be today with all these delicate electronics that don't take to power spikes and brown outs. Basically power went out, candles were deployed and life went on, without air conditioning of course which was not a luxury universally enjoyed. Sweating was a popular past  time in the late 20th century in these islands. Since the bad old days things have changed markedly.   

City Electric as it used to be known has turned itself into Keys Energy and is responsible for electricity from the Seven Mile Bridge to Key West. In the decades since the bad old days they have carried out a  massive and amazing job is installing power poles that are, so far at least hurricane proof.   These huge power poles are not the most aesthetic additions to the  skyline, but they do work. The poles and wires have survived major storms like Wilma and Irma and in daily living they stand there and do their jobs, which is to transmit life giving power. 

And despite all best efforts a simple sailboat mast is enough to screw up power for a hundred miles. It's cheaper to import electricity from the mainland along the "tie line" than it is to generate it locally so when something interrupts the line everyone goes dark, just like the bad old days. Mostly though I am astonished when I hear the wind howling and the rain slashing my home or office and see no power outages at all. At work we have generators so there is a momentary black out and all continues as normal. At home we count down the minutes hoping the power will come back before the interior heat becomes unbearable. Did I mention I am grateful for affordable air conditioning? Grateful too for reliable power. And these days grateful for my machine that helps me sleep and kills my snoring even if it does rely on electricity.Which happily is now much more reliable than ever.

Signs of Summer

We were walking downtown when I said to my wife it feels like summer. I was not wrong, the heat of summer is back at last and even though it's not hot and sticky the weather has turned. I am not a fan of being cold so the cool breeze is welcome but the heat of a strong sun overhead is even more welcome to me. 

I am not a purist and air conditioning is required in my summer life to be comfortable and to sleep well. I do use the sunroof in my car which gets a nice flow of air when a back window is open but I am not a fan of convertibles in this climate. I was amused to note the Quebec tag on this $75,000 car according to a friend of mine who knows this stuff. They keep telling us we can't afford Medicare for all but Canada  can and they have their share of  people who can afford nice stuff. Weird, eh?

It's been raining a bit  and a short cut I take sometimes in the morning to avoid  jams on the highway took me by surprise by being flooded. I guess it rained a fair bit near Baby's Coffee. Another sign of summer, I say hopefully.

 I was walking Rusty at Little Hamaca Park and in the distance I saw a flurry of planes maneuvering. The airport was busy with small planes leaving. It reminded me of the RVs I've been seeing lately northbound on the highway. Winter is over I tell my wife hopefully.

Strong sunlight, shiny palm fronds and bright flowers, all of which flourish here in winter. Still I tell myself  with a touch of self delusion, another sign of Summer.

Casa Antigua is still there on Simonton Street across from the Federal Building. However the Pelican Poop Shoppe selling dustcatchers and souvenirs is long gone. Now there's a very modern Escape Room here instead. The old signs  are forgotten reminders of a world that has died away. With winter over  there is room downtown for me to wander and remember. 

 I saw this oddity, a pad to protect a gutter from a palm trunk.  Makes sense I suppose.

 Duval Street reflected in a  quiet moment:

 Sunday morning, church doors flung open, all welcome I suppose. Summer stillness.