The Catholic Dead

I have to restrain myself from making too many cemetery visits with my camera, because I am endlessly fascinated by Key West's burial ground. It is filled with history, quirky graves, and panoramas that closely resemble movie sets such are the atmospheric and splendid  tombs to be found in the cemetery. People naturally behave badly here as one is reminded upon entry:

The cemetery is in the middle of Old Town and thanks to its own streets and trees and monuments it has  a park-like ambiance, so the cemetery naturally lends itself to a secondary role as a  bicycle short cut from Margaret to Frances Streets.

In order to try to keep myself focused I decided to try to limit myself to the Catholic section as I was entering on the Frances Street side. In a town filled with Cuban Catholics it is an oddity that there is a small Catholic corner in the cemetery with another corner dedicated to the Jewish diaspora which has had members in Key West since the city was chartered in 1828. The rest of the cemetery is everybody else I guess. 

Some money has been spent in the Catholic section, nit surprising when you find out that the major construction family in the Keys has a mausoleum here. Angela Street runs down the north side of the cemetery, the far distance in the photo below.  That's where Catholic Lane is located, obviously named for this section of the cemetery.

 Everybody else gets buried out there:

The reason the cemetery has this odd location on prime land in the middle of Old Town is due to the fact that the original cemetery at Higgs Beach was disrupted in the 19th century by a major hurricane and city residents were disturbed to find coffins and bodies pushed up out of the ground by the storm. So they decided to move the cemetery inland to protect its integrity in the face of future storms. 

The cemetery was actually located on the edge of town, as Key West was in the 19th century. The city had a population of about 12,000 in those days and the cemetery was on the outer city limits. The rest of the island, beyond Division Street (now Truman Avenue) was open space, including some dairy farms and the like, divided as the street name implied from the urban area.

This business of the dead being resurrected by Hurricanes has not unfortunately abated. Hurricane Irma, among the many indignities inflicted upon us pulled a coffin out of the ground in Big Pine, tore the lid off and set the unfortunate corpse inside upon one last journey through the island, as reported by the Miami Herald which I quote here to make sure I am not thought to be exaggerating:

After Hurricane Irma hit Big Pine Key, a casket from a nearby cemetery wound up lifted by storm surge across the Overseas Highway, winding up along a neighborhood street. The top broke open, exposing the remains of a man in a baby blue suit. The casket, one of a handful displaced statewide by Irma, is now back in its proper resting place.

I find the tombs in the Key West cemetery always worth a  pause and some contemplation. Elsewhere on this page I have recorded various well known and less well known graves as a look in the search box at the top left hand corner of this page will show if you want more pictures...even more pictures.

There is I believe more than one tomb dedicated to animals but this one I found among the Catholics. I lost my faith pretty much when my parish priest told me dogs have no souls, can't go to heaven and aren't allowed in church. Things seem to be changing on that front at least:

The graves in the cemetery have to be above ground to avoid a high water table and the difficulty of digging holes into limestone rock are not to be underestimated. Therefore like New Orleans, itself also a city fighting a high water table, Key West employs above ground graves, some more ornate than others:

The Toppino family got the contract to lay the cement for Flagler's railroad at the beginning of the 20th century and that lucrative monopoly laid the foundation also for the family fortune in the Keys.Their red and white cement trucks are out and about on the roads today. 

 This  tomb has got massive amounts of interest over the years but hopefully that will die down.

It used to express her fondness for a particular singer though I doubt any but the oldest among us now will remember Julio Iglesias ( the photo below I took six years ago) and his place on the tomb has been taken by another family member as shown above.

It's hot under the summer sun in the cemetery but I always a enjoy a walk there thinking about those who have gone before and enjoying the mementos family members leave behind.

West Summerland Key

I get the feeling the sign ain't coming down soon. It works though as I saw a couple of tourists wandering around helplessly. I tried to explain the waterfront path around the sign and they got in their car and left.

 Naturally I was not there alone.

Well actually Rusty and I were alone until we met the foreigners who thought my advice was  a snare and left immediately.

The Old Bahia Honda  bridge now 107  years old always looks spectacular.  The state park is off to the right in this picture:

Guess who he's waiting for? I negotiated the cement wall following Rusty without falling in, breaking another leg, or dropping my camera. Result!

Hunters were abroad on the water:

 I found a  collar. Well, someone else found it and courteously hung it on a  tree limb. 

 Somewhere there is a North Carolina scofflaw dog without it's rabies tag. 

The old pump house built in 1942  to move water through the new pipes built to supply water to the military in Key West. Hurricane Irma put paid to it's second career as a public  toilet in 2017. 

It used to smell awful.

It appears to be getting razed for public safety no doubt. The walls did look quite tottery after the 140 mph hurricane blew through here.

 As it was just a couple of years ago:

The clay of the hill used to build the rail road ramp to the bridge is slowly eroding:

Railroads come and go. Highways come and go. Water pipes come and burst. Fishing goes on forever:

Mangrove Walk

Today a few pictures without words on a windless day.

Wrecking and Walking

We haven't been out for a while early in the morning so when Rusty stuck his cold wet nose in my armpit at 4:45 in the morning I figured he deserved a pre-dawn city walk.

Tift Alley, above, is named for Asa Tift a wealthy Key West businessman who added to his wealth with waterfront warehouses and the business of wrecking. Wrecking is a much misunderstood trade which is not surprising  considering no one has done it legally for a good few decades. 

Wrecking was a salvage business and wreckers saved lives and cargoes if not the ships carrying them when they hit the reef. Where wrecking got a bit dodgy to put it mildly was when the wreckers set the ships up to go aground by putting out misleading lights at night. Done legally it was quite the business and gave people the opportunity to make  a fortune from a dangerous business. 

Key West thrived from the shipping that passed through the city. The latest European fashions were seen here first as traders stopped on their way to the big wealthy cotton cities of the south, Galveston, New Orleans and Apalachicola. They didn't have the Internet but they had catalogues and ordered furniture and furnishings and clothes from London and Paris. And when the ships ran aground trying to get into the harbor the wreckers salvaged the cargo and were awarded values by the courts. 

Nowadays bars are the goldfields but not for everyone it seems. IC  Doubles caused a stir by closing temporarily which is generally viewed as permanent until proved wrong. That didn't last. The place on Fitzpatrick that never seems to make it hasn't in it's latest dog friendly incarnation. 

I liked it when it was a Spanish sandwich shop  a couple of incarnations ago. It became some other stuff including an Italian place spun off  from the successful Onlywood but that didn't last either. The latest version has closed for a long vacation and Henry and Eli's to my chagrin welcomed dogs. Who knew? Not me, and now it seems to be too late. They'll be back they promise after an unspecified vacation. 

Duval Street is where the action is. Except at five in the morning when it's me and Rusty and later some street cleaners. 

CVS on Duval, one of the many chain pharmacies littering Key West these days, distinguishes itself by showing off local art, a tradition of the former tenant, the late lamented Fast Buck FReddie's Tropical Department Store. Pretty cool, and the store is open 24 hours if you need a beach ball at two in the morning. Or sunscreen. In this town one doesn't ask what for.

With the arrival of dawn we are both  hot and tired though I'm not dragging my tongue.

Wendy's proudly offers to sell you plastic bottled water in defiance of all currently approved eco norms.

While the other highly fashionable product is CBD, cannabidiol which we are reliably informed won't give anxious humans a buzz though it is some sort of highly fashionable cure all snake oil. I have been advised it will calm a dog during a thunderstorm. An actual cure all. Had the surgeon rubbed it on my spatchcocked pelvis I'd probably be lifting world record setting weights by now.

Rusty didn't need CBD for a deep restful sleep after two hours walking. And neither did I.

Little Hamaca Park

I see dogs in my neighborhood walked the same places every day and I think Rusty would do me an injury if I did that to him. We go on a circuit and some days he gets really excited especially when he hasn't been there for a while.  Some days he just doesn't want to go that way and the dog sitters in St Petersburg were surprised when he just sat down and stared at them real hard. I yield immediately.

He will wait for me while I fiddle with the camera but he likes to check everything out when he is in the mood. When he's not in the mood he stalks back to the car and  sits by his  rear  door. I figure walks are his time and he gets to do what he wants. 

I was walking a short dead end street not far from my home and Rusty likes to walk all the way to the end, look around and then turn back and walk out. Every street is a dead end in the Keys so we do this  alot. WEll this time some dude comes out from the sole house on the street and announces he has large attack dogs and they can jump his seven foot fence. I looked at him and wondered if he's got a meth lab going in the huge warehouse with the roll up front door next to his tiny little house. He realized he was coming on a  bit strong to some dude walking on a public street and hastened to reassure me he wasn't threatening me. I shrugged. He insisted his dogs, Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds would tear Rusty apart if they jumped the fence... 

It was a profoundly weird moment as there was absolutely no sound of baying dogs behind the fence or anything. I wanted to ask where he exercised his dogs to give them the strength to leap a seven foot wooden fence but he seemed half mad so I just thought happy thoughts and wished he'd evaporate. Then he started asking me where I lived so I told him John Avery Lane and he looked taken aback. That's the other side of the highway he said staring at me as though I were a Martian, like he thought I had walked all the way or flown my magic carpet two miles across Cudjoe Key. That I might put my magical dog in a car and drive him to an interesting place to walk never occurred to the meth lab owner who I doubt walked his invisible dogs anywhere. 

I had a moment of genius and I said I was the guy knocked off his scooter at Cutthroat Lane last August. It was a spectacular wreck I am told and my flight of the bumblebee over the car that blocked me made headlines locally. His eyes opened wide. It was pure genius I tell you. Suddenly I was the poor sap who died in the roadway, and as it was true that it was me, that was no bad thing. It's a bit like yelling at your neighbor over the fence and then feeling bad because he's in a wheelchair. Rusty's helping me exercise my legs I told him. That fact that all of this was true made his embarrassment all the sweeter. To see  such a shady character  trying to feel sorry for this interloper was pretty funny. He kept insisting his dogs would tear me to pieces as though he believed I really did want to know whatever nefarious trafficking he was up to. Not to worry I said cheerfully, I'm living on borrowed time and if it is my fate to be torn limb from limb I've already been through it once, don't you worry for me. I limped off leaving him no idea what to say. 

Key West has been looking particularly colorful after the recent rains and I was grateful Rusty felt like walking out to the Riviera Canal for a quick look. He doesn't usually care to cross the park for this view so the fact  we were there was a bit unusual. The only other place in Key West with private boat docks is Hilton Haven Drive on the north side of Garrison Bight.

It was a lovely tropical morning and we both enjoyed it. I like walking Rusty no matter whose toes he treads on, or worse, makes me tread on.

 Here are a few more pictures of Rusty doing his thing: