No Name Bridge

Wildlife above, still life below:

The bridge joining Big Pine (to the left) to No Name Key at the other distant end. I decided to go out and see what I might see. My head was filled with visions of people fishing or boats buzzing, on  pleasant afternoon that seemed wasted on a day off unless I were out in it. So I went and took Rusty.

The bridge was devoid of life and the waters of Bogie Channel weren't much better:

Rusty had been entirely reluctant to go out on the bridge in the first place. He is so smart he could tell there was nothing there for either of us and he was ready to turn around as soon as I gave the word. Despite appearances I am actually in charge when we go out together though I do take advice from him as he is really smart.

He was not hugely interested in going for a longer walk and i suppose the fact that it was hot helped make up his mind. Across the canal a typical suburban home:

I was standing on Watson Boulevard a hundred yards from the infamous N Name Pub which is actually in Big Pine. There are three essays in the files on this page but the earliest was, much to my astonishment more than eleven years ago: Bonneville At No Name. I am forced to concede my photography has improved over the decade helped along I am sure by improvements in digital technology! The old Wooden Bridge Resort and Marina which was blown away by Hurricane Irma has been replaced by a new facility that offers fuel and floating bedrooms. Rather cool I think for a slightly different vacation.

However traces of the damage caused by the monster storm are still all too apparent:

Another view:

I was glad I got to come out over the wishes of my dog. 

Plus we got to see a Key Deer which always provokes interest interest in my dog who is well known to be scared out of his wits by chickens. Why he things Key Deer are fascinating I can't say. 

Greene Street

There aren't many brick buildings in Key West and the ones I see I want to photograph. This one is in the style of the original brick warehouses that replaced the original wooden structures along the very busy Key West waterfront of the 19th century.

Key West suffered a massive fire in 1886. We tend to forget how fearsome fires were in the 19th century and how easily they were set in a  time of lanterns candles, straw and wood. In 1886 a fire started in the 500 block of Duval Street.

 The statistics from it are pretty awful. It burned for twelve hours and destroyed 50 acres of the city's rime commercial real estate. It also killed seven people and injured 15, and in the end they estimated one and a half million dollars in damage, at a time when a million bucks was a lot of money.

Brick is obviously a good material against fire but against hurricanes wood can do quite well if properly braced and raised above water flooding. The great hurricane of 1909 wrecked brick buildings all over the south end of Key West and tore down a few wooden ones. So in the end choose your material and hope for the best.

Walking down Greene Street I was glad to see the cruise ship five blocks away was showing a movie on the top deck. Totally weird in my opinion and imagining that some people would rather do that than go for a walk in Key west...well there is no accounting for taste.

Looking back at Greene Street on Ann Street I saw this splendid sample of a colorful heavy duty Key West station wagon. And as far as I could tell it enjoyed no electrical propulsion.

As I like to say not everyone is on vacation in Key West and Old City Hall (510 Greene) was getting a  touch up.

 I posted this one on Instagram pondering the attraction of swimming in the rain:

Flooded Nature

The story is that twice a year the sun and the moon align and pull the tides strongly together. This effect is known as creating "King" tides. Boaters are used to the phenomenon of high high tides twice a lunar cycle, "spring tides" and low low tides known as "neap" tides. King Tides come but twice a year and this year seem reluctant to depart.

So for me to go take a relaxing after work walk with my dog, or to go wander off into the wilderness on an afternoon off is becoming a problem. Everywhere is under water.

I brought Rusty to the very end of Sugarloaf Key to walk a disused back road that sits higher slightly than the surrounding waters.

It was not at all above water so we wandered up the main road a little to see what we could see (and photograph). Winter cyclists are back it seems.

There were some birds in the branches of the trees killed by Hurricane Irma.

And debris floating in the flood making pretty reflections:

A butterfly, the hardest  creature to photograph.

The trail we came  to walk wasn't very appealing to Rusty and I was so confident it would be dry I was reluctant t walk in wet shoes and socks.

There was plenty of water flowing:

I keep hoping this elevated tide nonsense will shrink back to normal. Still waiting on the remaining narrow slivers of dry land.

No Loitering

The usual hot sunny morning in Old Town Key West with an hour to burn waiting for my wife's lunch break so i found myself looking for boats and water and sunshine scenery and landed instead in the middle of a Busy Place. People picking up mail...

...and dropping off mail. The air conditioned van looked good even though the docks in the marina were swept by a strong east wind which kept things bearable.

 I saw a beach dinghy forlorn and abandoned sitting by itself at the entrance to the Bight marinas. That's Turtle Kraals in the background. 

On the other side we find the Half Shell famous for oysters and fish and yet that was not enough to entice them to dive straight in. They paused and pondered their options. I would have said check Off the Hook round the corner but it was none of my business.

A man after my own heart taking his ease all by himself checking out the boats, the breeze, the turquoise waters. 

 And as he sat a couple came by just as tarpon came swimming into view. She lost her mind flapping around like she was on the set  of Jaws and she did like to draw attention to herself. 

 The cause of the disturbance which I photographed a few yards away after the fish lost interest in being stared at:

For everyone else life continued as normal, charter boats waiting for clients who wanted to go fishing (tarpon are catch and release game fish in case you were worried). Housekeeping under the sun:

I was having fun looking for a little irony to inject into my unplanned, unsupervised break: 

Requiem for a Dinghy I thought to myself as the pigeon flew away and the procession hove into view:

They were actually hauling it carefully out to the mother ship to put it back into service, neither dead not abandoned.

The sign offered no caveats for loitering even with a  camera so I took myself off for lunch before the police came and busted me. 

The Hot Sauce Of Life

To mark my sixty second birthday, the day I am at last eligible for a  social security pension, three years from being eligible for Medicare,  I thought I would ponder some words of wisdom. My friend Bruce in Arizona (below, when he lived on a boat in Key West),  turned me on to a blog by a man in Philadelphia called Don Springer, who writes Tales of the Streets and illustrates it with his black and white pictures of street photography from his hometown. 

All I know about Springer is what he writes about in his periodic essays, his time in Vietnam, his tremors that require him to use a stabilized camera (technology! Yay!)and the lessons he gives to street photographers. His discussions about photography are grounded in common sense and decency which I find thoroughly refreshing especially after I came across the usual crowd of nasty navel gazing poseurs on of all things photography forums -DPR leads the pack for cruel vociferous gear heads with nary a photo between them. Springer by contrast posts his pictures and discusses the meaning of life much as one might around a coffee shop table. Very refreshing. Check it out even if photography means nothing to you:

Tales of the Streets, The Hot Sauce Of Photography

After my accident last year I was determined to get back on my scooter and ride again and that I have done. However larger issues loomed and my life has  taken a turn in a  new direction. Motorcycling all my life has been a solitary pursuit, and for fifty years I have ridden alone all over the place. However my future is charted in a direction that at the moment doe snot allow for solo travel. Were my wife the stay at home type that would be one thing but she wants to be involved in all the risk taking and excessive travel I have mapped out for us. And in light of this can do attitude a motorcycle is not going to be the vehicle of choice. Not with a sidecar, not with a tent trailer, not as a solo ride. It will be a van to accommodate the three of us in comfort because we are old and grumpy and don't like to sleep on the ground. 

However this fine plan has cut me adrift from my solo riding hobby a bit. With limited time off I am bound to be more inclined to travel together in the van than take off by myself on the Burgman. We will have two years to get the van just right for the off and when I'm not working overtime to pay for it we will be testing it in various configurations and locations to simulate where we plan to travel and camp as we go. So I need some other hobby to occupy my fertile mind. I used to enjoy taking photographs in the days of film but terrible automated processing combined with high expense and too many shoeboxes filled with useless prints pushed me away from recording my life in pictures. I don't have many left from those days in mid 1980s when I wasn't quite 30. I always did like night work. I cleaned movie theaters for a while to get free tickets in the age before videos.

  

I used to go out at night with my Minolta and take pictures much as I do now of Key West, fighting the cold on the foggy California streets on my way home. Photography only came back into my life when I reluctantly bought an Android phone to replace  a outdated flip phone.  That phone soon taught me the fun of taking and sending pictures as electronic postcards. And the phone slowly convinced me to get a camera even as digital picture quality improved and put the last nail in the coffin of popular film photography. Nowadays I very much appreciate the ease of taking and seeing pictures instantly while storing them in Google's cloud and enjoying them whenever I want. Plus I get to select some of them to post online at Instagram Flickr Facebook and here as well of course. Once you have the equipment photography costs nothing and as I have discovered there is a ton to learn about digital picture taking that wasn't  a possibility with film. Despite the obsessions of "serious  photographers" telephone photography isn't all bad; my wife took this  phone picture on my last visit to Santa Cruz about five years ago:

When Springer talks about photography as hot sauce all he means is that you spice your photography and thus your life  the ways that tastes good for you. And life without hot sauce, whatever that may be for you, is flavorless and flat. It's really quite simple yet we all of us find it so hard to live like we understand this simple principle. The way he puts it  males me embarrassed to have had such difficulty with my hot sauce:

Do your thing and find your vision and don’t get sidetracked by the the so called negative energy users. You will never make too many photos and you’ll never have too much time to do it.

Enjoy your hot sauce my friends

Simple right? Well, that's my project I guess in my sixties. I have heard people talking about it being too late at a certain point but  I am more convinced than ever that it's the breath that counts...as long as you are breathing it's not too late. Time there for to mix  up a fresh batch of hot sauce. Happy Birthday To Me.