Coronavirus Blues

If I could have any single superpower in some alternative Marvel Comics World I should like to have hindsight as a gift from the gods. As superpowers go it would be pretty useless for everyone except myself because I have found that knowledge does not overcome prejudice, that common sense does not overcome fear and proof never overcomes conviction. Yet had I the ability to project myself forward six months and see where the world is before returning to the present I should count myself a lucky man.

I sit here in the Keys, so far free of reports of the disease, and ask myself where shall we be in six months and I have no answers. I want to lay my hands on Márquez' book Love in the Time of Cholera and see if I can find any useful advice. Probably not - as a love triangle in Colombia doesn't seem especially relevant despite the alluring title. When I read the book a global pandemic was far from my mind so the cholera details are sketchy in my memory. I could I suppose refer to our leaders for useful advice but as the scientific and medical personnel in the US are pushed to the background the politically laden advice we hear minimizing the disease seems rather unreliable.

I have read the harrowing stories coming out of Italy where the entire country is now under a lock down and movement is prohibited for all but essential travel. There is a nationwide curfew and still they die by the hundreds every day. There is a Facebook post circulating in Italian but the best I could find in English is a link HERE from a New York Post article highlighting a little of what he wrote. Read it if you want to get the pants scared off you. In it an emergency room doctor in Bergamo has written a long post about his experiences in an Italian hospital overwhelmed by people seeking help. They triage and set aside the hopeless cases to die and struggle to save who they can, and even young people they tell us struggle to breathe. It is no normal flu he says, panic is justified.

Sitting on my deck watching Rusty sleep after his usual long morning walk on my days off, watching the cold  gray clouds overhead as another front hovers over the Keys, it's hard to imagine people suffocating in Italy Iran and China by the hundreds, and even now here and there in our own country. It seems inevitable that this will get worse before it gets better. And yet life is so normal, so placid, so even tempered. At work when we take calls from people wanting an ambulance for an unspecified illness we have to ask questions about the possibility of exposure to the virus and the paramedics approach the patient accordingly. The newspaper reports plans to cope if we get a high number of sick people and locally preparations seem measured calm and sensible. And I look around and get a feeling much like I do before the arrival of a severe hurricane, and I have sat through several. I wrote THIS prior to the arrival of Hurricane Irma in 2017.

So what price now my superpower? Would you believe me if I came back from next September to report thousands dead and a country struggling to find equilibrium? Or would you prefer a report saying the whole coronavirus was a damp squib in a well fed first world country with top flight medical care (for those like me with insurance)? I'd love to know the answer myself.

My sisters in Italy are like everybody else confined to their homes but they aren't travelers by nature so it's hard to imagine their hardship as the continue living close to home, tilling fields and killing their own chickens for lunch. Situation normal. Other than the economic losses of a country shut down and vacations abolished, and the usual flow of money dried up. Unimaginable. I had planned a trip to Britain to see my other sister during our Spring Break next week, but the doctor said not to travel especially as my wife has a weakened immune system and could be at risk. She takes, weirdly enough, cancer drugs to suppress her rheumatoid arthritis which in turn suppresses her immune system. Coronavirus could kill her as she is precisely the type of person at risk. Me? I dread looking after her as well as she looked after me when I was unable to move in a hospital bed.

I hope some good will might come out of this crisis, I'd like to think the people who have died will leave a mark that our ideologues will pay attention to, the value of a public health system, universal access to health care and why not, a bit more consideration in public discourse. In Italy the national health service is accessible to all and free hospitals don't have to worry about billing or insurance oversight and they make no economic judgement on the value of a patient. I know I got 58 days of proper rehabilitation after my accident because Cigna was made to pay, largely by my wife's bulldog insistence they meet their obligations. And today I walk normally. I wonder what our society will do with people who have Covid-19 and can't pay? Pushing them back onto the streets will create an ever wider more profound epidemic and suddenly not having the means to pay becomes everybody's problem. There is a lesson in that but I know knowledge doesn't promote sensible decision making. Fear of Socialism will triumph over Fear of Epidemic after this crisis has passed and our society will sink back into a social torpor until next time. And there will be a next time, count on history to tell you that.

We've seen this pattern before and we shall see it again. Hurricane Irma is but one example of rebuilding where disaster has struck. I'm sure your own neighborhood has seen the same, rebuilding in flood plains, under land slide prone areas, etc... On our good days we call it resilience and in moments of enlightenment we scratch our heads. I crashed through no fault of my own and I paid a high price. Are you surprised I no longer ride the same highway where I lay in the road dying?

I'd like to think that by September the world will back on an even keel and as we in the keys gird our loins for another damned hurricane season economies are flourishing Fantasy Fest looks promising and not filthy and coronavirus is a joke in the rear view mirror. I actually rather expect it to look that way. I would be astonished if we had a catastrophic death rate like the Spanish 'Flu of 1918, but what I do fear is indifference to experience.

If in 2021 we aren't talking seriously about the challenges facing us all, be it climate change, energy independence or future pandemics all this fear and panic buying and public hand wringing and political haymaking will have been for nothing. I hear the President blame his political opponents and I hear his political opponents tear him down. Of constructive dialogue I hear nothing. Perhaps it's there behind the grand standing but I feel like a child watching his home burn down while his parents bicker about which photo album is worth saving. 

I wish my camper van were finished and ready for occupation right now. Perhaps it's as well it isn't, else I might be tempted to use it. In a time of cholera we have to stand up and keep on keeping on. There is nowhere to run to or to hide, unless like Webb you could cast off and not touch land for a few weeks and listen to Bach and eat freeze dried food and read books and ponder what to do when the Laphroaig runs out. For the rest of us coronavirus means showing up and doing our jobs and hoping against hope the people in charge learn the real lesson here. I admire Webb and his carefully thought out possibilities.

Its not about washing our hands. It's about getting along.

Silhouettes

I find myself thinking a lot these days about how i will use a camera on the road, when away from Key West. I have been taking these pictures for 13 years with much better technical capabilities in telephones and dedicated cameras. I look back over my early forays into digital photography and I cringe a bit. 

Even now I struggle to define what it is I do as I wander around recording mangroves and mudflats, historic homes and little street eccentricities. In an era of personal pocket cameras it's hard to imagine my trove of tens of thousands of street pictures of wildly varying quality will be of any interest to anyone, certainly not in the form of pioneering photography. I see photos taken a hundred years ago, smudged blurry and banal in composition yet they will live forever because they were first, they broke new ground and all that follows is a pale imitation of the pioneering shutter click.

In the twenty years I have lived and worked in Key West the city has undergone radical transformation as the Internet and improved utilities and remote delivery have made this outpost of non-conformity accessible to the mainstream. I am unapologetic in saying that before the Internet and before the rebuilt highway Key West was too isolated for me, but I have equally done my best not to tread on those parts of this town that I cherish in others, the ability to behave oddly in public and not be berated for it. 

I remember vividly an encounter a good few years ago when someone on Pohalski Lane asked me what I was doing and i replied taking photos because I think it's pretty. Do you live here she asked as though interrogating a low life... No I said but I work in town and I like to walk around and enjoy it on my breaks. She looked accusingly at me and said I've never seen you around. Well I said I go to work then I go home to my wife and I don't  go to parties at bars. She gave up on me. Which exchange about sums it up. I would rather poke my eye out than parade down Duval Street in my underwear, or attend a party dressed as a pirate or even spend a day chasing fish on the water under a burning sun or post pictures of myself doing any of that.  I flit  like  a shadow, a not very agile shadow but out of the limelight nonetheless.

If it is abundantly clear from the nearly 5,000 entries on this page key West for me is somewhere else, a place not populated by bikinis and bars, or sunsets and margaritas but it is mine own, a place of odd signs and elaborate gingerbread decorations, a place where being yourself allowed for a measure of freedom from the herd. My colleagues tell me I am weird because I like to walk and take pictures. I think they are weird because they live and work here and seem to have no curiosity about this town filled with history and physical beauty. 

I wonder how, when traveling with wife and dog I shall find the space to seek out these quiet spaces along the way, to be alone with my thoughts and my camera. My Rusty is an excellent partner in that he waits when he is leashed and he amuses himself when he is off leash as I frame and focus and press the shutter. My wife is very patient and encouraging, pushing me out of the door and making suggestions as to what to photograph, suggestions that used to irritate me until I came to appreciate her eye and her wisdom. I have tried to encourage her to take pictures but it is a seed that sprouts imperceptibly slowly.

I had a thought the other day while reading the blog of a man I dare call a  friend now that I have met him: Scooter In The Sticks . Steve's meditations on riding and photographing and finding serenity on a Vespa in Central Pennsylvania never completely translated to my own use of two wheels. I had a very different riding style which makes it all the more ironic I got knocked down while riding as gently as Steve habitually does. I never found riding to be a meditation, it was exhilarating and engaging and offered lovely solitude but not meditation. I suddenly realized that my camera offers me similar sensations to those so deftly observed by Steve on his page. Where he rides a Vespa to look inward I make pictures to do the same. 

I don't view myself as an artist, my Asperger-ish brain  doesn't much allow flights of fantasy and I struggle to see the abstract in the world around me, or heaven forbid, manipulate the world to create an image pleasing to my artistic mind.I guess I have to settle on being a documentary photographer inasmuch as I like to document the world around me. Were I inclined to seek drama I would rate this as being a journalist but I am tired of the nonsense of pursuing the news as I once did.  

I like to walk around the keys with a  camera and make pictures. That's all. I shall do the same and try to make them interesting to accompany my stories on the road. How I'm going to do that I'm not at all sure but I expect we shall muddle through.

Riding Key West

From time to time I post pictures of people cycling around my home town and the reason I do is because I like seeing bicycles in an urban setting being used as daily riders, as useful vehicles rather than status symbols or public exercise machines.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with those other uses for bikes but Key West is a rare community, not unique but in a decided minority where people use bicycles to get around, and they don't seem to much care what kind of bike.

There are those who ride internal combustion but I see a future of electrical propulsion replacing scooters.  The human species never fails to confuse me and I'll use motor scooters as an example of why that is. I have read endless complaints by city residents in the newspaper's anonymous gripe column haranguing scooter riders for being loud and noisy and smelly and wrecking the peace and quiet of Old Town.

And they are all over the place. Yet now we have a revolution of silent efficient clean non polluting electric bikes replacing scooters and cars and still the complaints keep flooding in! Now it turns out electric vehicles are too silent and stealth and confusing and dangerous and on and on and on.

And to overlay all those complaints parking issues are still a hot button issue and I can't tell you how many parking complaints we get in police dispatch. twenty four hours a day people are calling in vehicles parked for more than 72 hours which by city code are abandoned and liable to being towed. Then the other perennial complaint is that of  vehicles parking in residential spots, very clearly marked these days, by vehicles not equipped with stickers.

I really like the new residential program where you have to show proof of actual residence (part time if fine) and pay for a sticker. people like me who work in the city but live in the county are excluded though scooters and golf carts can park in residential spots. Why a scooter rider wouldn't use free scooter parking everywhere I don't know. One of those mysteries we shall never have an answer for...One thing about this program is that residents are now on the prowl at all hours looking for out of town vehicles cluttering the residential program. An electric bike bypasses all these issues yet they struggle to gain favor with a majority of the population.

And then we have bicycles as art.  I miss Captain Outrageous, a former stock broker if I recall correctly who lived the dream and came to Key West to become of all things an artist. He did very nicely too painting anything mobile in bright primary tropical colors and covering his under coat with dots and whirls and whimsy. He died a good few years ago, I took the call to send him an ambulance and I felt bereft when I realized who it was because he created the best of that quirky good natured spirit of  Key West that we want this town to remain. You can still see a few scooters and bicycles around town with his peculiar and particular polka dots and I enjoy the reminder of his being here.

When winter closes in Up North the other kind of cyclist shows up in the Keys, hunched over curved handlebars, brightly colored spandex covered in advertising looking like they have lost the rest of their peloton in the Tour de France. I wish them joy of their public display of athleticism and cycling verve but I prefer the dude in the first photo managing an ill managed life or the second guy lumbering to work on two wheels.

I take myself off to spinning classes dressed in my usual cerements as I prefer to sweat copiously in private as my mother taught me. I was never one of those who cheered on the Giro d'Italia from the sidewalks and then attempted to emulate my heroes on a bicycle. I know my limitations.

Urban Forest

Riding around on my electric bicycle I saw quite a few trees and  I pulled together a few pictures to illustrate our urban jungle in Key West.  Before the Navy piped tap water to key West in World War Two the city survived on rain water stored in cisterns so there wasn't water to spare to irrigate gardens and trees. Since then Key West has become a lot greener.

We end with a weird looking palm with horns at the post office.

It isn't a boat or a home afloat but Webb Chiles asked me if I would consider naming it - I who don't name vehicles - Gannet 2 after his world girdling Moore 24, the original GANNET. Sure I thought to myself as it is a kind of home afloat even if it rides on wheels and is propelled not by sails but by an engine. There it sat in front of the office of Custom Coach Creations waiting for us to sign papers to take ownership of this brand new Golden Van. 

When I got the call last week from Lois who owns the custom van business with her husband Bob, that our special order gold colored Promaster 3500 had finally arrived from the factory I had the feeling things were getting very real.  The idea of moving into a mobile retirement from our comfortable canal side Keys home has never been far from my mind. I grew up in a world that didn't much seem to want me so it was easy to take off leaving my family and everything I knew behind. I don't know if nomadism is a gene or a cultivated trait but whatever it is I have found it enormously difficult to sit still. My father's irritation with me at 17 sent me to Italy from his proper life in London, away from his side of the fractured family to the world my mother had left for me. It took several years of agonizing but in the end I abandoned my family's three hundred year old roots in central Italy as easy as climbing on my motorcycle and not looking back. In 1998 I convinced my wife to dump our lovely beachside home in Santa Cruz a couple of blocks from Pleasure Point, one of the great surf spots on the California Coast and off we took on a sailboat with dogs to Key West a two year trip via Panama. Now the time is drawing near to dump one more great place to live and to start looking away. Why? I don't know. It's just my nature.

There is work to be done to convert the interior into a living space but the good people at the shop have been doing this for some time and they know what to do and how to do it. We spent a few hours in the world headquarters of Custom Coach Creations in their DeLand office with Bob and manager RJ. They have a computer design program to create the interior we want with the amenities with which we would like to live.  The notion of living comfortably in a  small space may seem like a contradiction but once you get past the question of space and how much you actually use, the greatest complaint most van travelers voice is that of discomfort and boredom on bad weather days. No matter how big your house you can only sit in one chair and eat one meal at a time and read one book and invite so many friends round for dinner. All possible in the Golden Van.

We took that warning to heart, of bad weather day boredom, so in this age of miniaturization we determined to make the interior of our van capable of offering space to live while awake, while asleep and even to offer separate spaces when one is up and the other is not. To that end the front seats swivel to offer seating with fold up tables, the back of the van has plans for two couches that convert at the push of a button to a queen sized bed and the all electric kitchen will have storage and appliances to match those we use at home now.

Television, Internet, sound system and quality lighting is all easy to install, relatively in this age of electronic reliability and with a large battery bank air conditioning and heat, fans windows and mosquito netting will enable we hope an indoor/outdoor life to take advantage of weather and scenery. At the same time on those days when we crave silence and stillness, when we miss home and friends and things familiar we will be able to close the doors, draw the curtains and surround ourselves with what we know and like to remind us of home, to allow us to recharge our travel batteries inside our heads. It's a lot to ask of  a small space and of ourselves so all plans are tentative of course. We have allowed ourselves two years to test our resolve and the systems before retirement starts and doors to the Keys close behind us. 

Bob the boss in the cap and RJ his plant manager spent an afternoon talking details with us in the office discussing everything from color schemes and types of wood to electrical needs, placement of the toilet and shower compartment and size of the water tank - as big as possible which may mean 40 gallons of fresh water if Bob can weasel the space under the passenger side couch. Below you see the proposed rear of the van with RJ pointing out the back rest we asked for to allow us to stretch out sitting up facing forward on those previously mentioned rainy boring days.

The build will be everything we had hoped for and will give us some change out of one hundred thousand dollars but not much. As a bill it seems enormous, as the cost of a home it seems modest, but whichever way you look at it we are going to have to work a good few hours to pay off the loan. My wife of course has a plan and all effort will be directed to clearing the bill as we have no other debts or obligations. It is the final step of the twenty year scheme she concocted to secure our old age with retirement plans lo those many years ago when we took off from California and sailed to Key West. She was pissed she had worked almost till 40 and had not had a law firm that believed in pension plans to boost her own savings. Key West was going to be different she promised. I have held up my end of the bargain with almost 16 years of city employment under my belt and she has worked for the state building her own defined benefit plan. All well and good but I am ready to get rolling.

So much effort to get a professionally built van. What does Bob know about taking my money, really hard earned I might add, and turning it into a nice place to live and travel? He's done it a few times prior to this golden van. There was a van next to mine (mine! eek!) in the first stages of its three month transformation:

Bob doesn't care what make or model of vehicle you want transformed. He'll do a Promaster by Dodge (his preferred for it's broad interior) or a Mercedes or a Ford Transit which are taller and thinner and don't allow for beds set across the body thus using more interior volume. A lot of people are surprised we deliberately rejected diesel as a motive source of power. Unlike marine engines which are largely unregulated in the US, road diesel engines suffer from anti pollution requirements that make them expensive to run and fiddly to maintain even though they deliver a couple more miles to the gallon over the road. New diesel products for instance are increasing the proportion of biodiesel at the pumps which make refueling even more complicated. for Sprinter engines that don't take 20% biofuel mixtures. Going to Latin America is even worse as low sulphur diesel is still relatively scarce in South America. Gasoline is easy and ubiquitous.

Bob builds mobile offices for doctors and vets, he's built specialized vans for transporting anything you can think of...you dream it up he'll build it. Most recently? He put in a fireplace after some investigation of the risks he said. That took some convincing to persuade him it was safe modification. Most of his Promaster conversions are white as they are factory ready almost immediately but we wanted something a little different and were in no hurry to get a van delivered. This is only the second such golden van he has converted. I actually wanted maroon but Herself nixed that on the grounds red would absorb heat.  Gold was a compromise.

I am not entirely comfortable discussing these strange plans like this with nothing to show for them. I much prefer to do the thing first and then report back but my life is headed in this direction and as much as I gird my loins to get used to spending weekends learning to stealth camp and boondock, to overcome my reticence at sleeping on the streets in a glorified car for heaven's sake! I feel obliged to be honest about our plans. And as we have seen  recently it's all very well to make plans but we are in our 60s and things can easily go wrong. Yet I know we both are really tired of sitting still, my wife and I are both nomads at heart and we are ready to ditch being responsible after nearly two decades. The motorcycle wreck that nearly killed me was a wake up call and I spent a lot of the three months in the hospital trying to figure how to make the best use of whatever time remains. As odd as this may seem it is deeply thought out and well considered as end of life preparations go.

We talked at some great length after I came out of the hospital and we both of us figured that a journey, an undertaking, an exploration was how we both want to end our travel filled lives. There are places we both want to see and we want to drive  there with our own home. Silly? I suppose you could say that. Presumptuous? Not at all, we both know how to evaluate risk and reward and we both know how wrong things can go. If we lose our mobility or some other problem arises we will do what we can and go where we can. We make no promises except to do our best. Right now our best is to create a mobile home and hope that politics, climate change, our own health and our pension plans stay in an orbit that will allow us to fulfill the dream. I am not still in a. wheelchair so that's one good thing.

Fear is the thing that holds us all back and when Layne and I talk to others of driving South America and further afield we are viewed not with the enthusiasm we would like to share, but as idiots taking unpardonable liberties. I accept that, but I also know that travel just drags along your limitations and shortcomings behind you; you don't shake them loose by moving away. And if you are timid and fearful in the environment you know and live every day you will not enjoy the road where new and different and unaccustomed are the order of each and every day. For my part I would rather be scared and worried seeking out trouble rather than letting it creep up on me in the old familiar places and ways. Rusty has always shown a surprising degree of curiosity and willingness to explore so I trust he will enjoy the ride. He will certainly enjoy the cooler temperatures near the Arctic Circle and in the High Andes.

And you might be surprised how welcoming and fun the road can also be. Some of our tightest friendships were forged while sailing in lonely places with people of very different backgrounds we would never meet in normal suburban life. After the journey I am confident the future will reveal itself to the people we are become. I am hoping it will be a boat in a marina in Key West with the van as our escape pod parked close by ashore.

Summer vacation this year is supposed to be a three week shake up cruise in the finished van, coronavirus be damned. That will be the next step and the first real test of this long drawn out preparation for our  retirement plan. Fingers crossed and I have been studying the Atlas of the Great Silk Road, our way home I hope. 

The Golden Road to Samarkand

HASSAN:
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells,
 When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
 Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.
ISHAK:
We travel not for trafficking alone;
 By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
 We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.
MASTER OF THE CARAVAN:
Open the gate, O watchman of the night!
THE WATCHMAN:
 Ho, travellers, I open. For what land
Leave you the dim-moon city of delight?
MERCHANTS (with a shout):
 We take the Golden Road to Samarkand!
(The Caravan passes through the gate)
THE WATCHMAN (consoling the women):
What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus.
 Men are unwise and curiously planned.
A WOMAN:
They have their dreams, and do not think of us.
VOICES OF THE CARAVAN (in the distance singing):
 We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Mallory Square

I rather liked this picture of a cruise ship at Margaritaville which I put through a  mild sepia filter.

And in black and white the modern ugly cruise ships gain a touch of old world elegance. 

Mallory Square during the day isn't what tourists see at sunset when everyone gathers to enjoy a spectacle. At the moment there is some refurbishing going on so it is rather utilitarian.

The views across the water happily don't change.

The Waterfront Playhouse has been offering performances of not much interest to me this year. I like dramas over musicals and the Red Barn has captured my attention. The location of this one actually on the waterfront isn't at all bad.

He takes time to sit and watch people, does Rusty:

By virtue of the fact that I enjoy walking around downtown I am become quite fond of the public toilets, even though this corner of Mallory Square isn't exactly picturesque. Sorry about that, but it is historic. 

I like the other views of popular attractions, pull back the curtain and here it is after hours...