Flying

I was thinking about how people leave Key West after I read a Facebook comment from someone ending their vacation and returning to Canada for the summer. I like to take Rusty to Little Hamaca in the middle of New Town, especially now the winter residents have left and the place is mostly empty as summer heats up. 

Little Hamaca is right next to the airport which as you can see is heavily fenced in along Government Road, the roadway that leads all the way to the back of the city park.  It is actually a peaceful spot wedged between the Riviera Canal and the airport fencing, however you do get to listen to the aircraft coming and going, and aeroplanes are not really peaceful if meditative silence is what you are looking for.

What I mean is, there is open space in the park, trees and shade and room to wander with your dog, and aside from the aero engines there's not much going on among the trees. Little Hamaca used to be renowned as a pick up place for closeted gay men and perhaps it still is for all I know but  Rusty and I walk there unmolested.  

And yet, through the impenetrable fence there is a surprising hive of activity. Planes are taking off and landing all the time. I see helicopters, commercial airliners and tons of private planes coming and going. I used to know an air traffic controller who worked there for a while and to him it was a sleepy little backwater and I suppose he knows what he is talking about but it looks busy to my untrained eye.

I think of all those people in the planes looking back as they leave, some looking forward to their next visit, others lamenting their departure and I suppose some who are glad to be escaping this claustrophobic little island...And as I watch the take offs and struggle to photograph the flying machines in some interesting and previously unimagined way I recognize I am glad to be the one staying behind.  

I cannot say I am a fan of flying in commercial airliners as I find the process dismal and out of my control, thinking of all the lines, the inspections, the lack of dignity in the process. Air travel is a means to an end for me and I would love to cross oceans as a passenger on freighters in my retirement instead of flying. My wife would beat me up if I suggested that but the dream lives on. 

So I feel rather sorry for those in the planes looking back wishing they were here or looking down wishing they were driving and of course I am glad to be the one left behind.

Then there are those planes I might like to fly in like the Dry Tortugas tour planes which fly low over the multicolored waters and give you a short half day to wander the ruins of Fort Jefferson out in the ocean. 

The float planes take off from the airport whence they return in a few hours, but at the fort they land on the water and taxi up to the beach to avoid their passengers getting wet feet. It's actually pretty cool.

 And there are the little privately owned bluebottles buzzing back and forth around the skies, what pilots call "general aviation":

 In between the relatively large machines:

 And I even saw an odd looking experimental type machine take off:

And then there is the plane that will never fly again. It was hijacked to the US during an internal Cuban flight. Instead of being returned to Cuba  a Miami federal judge awarded it as compensation to an exile Cuban family in the city and the plane sits behind the fence in Key West and seems to be slowly fading away. Weird.

And to wrap up this Thursday's look at Key West and the Keys here are a couple of gratuitous dog pictures.

 Rusty enjoying yesterday's sunny afternoon at Little Hamaca City Park.

A dog shadow flitting hither and yon.

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.