A Viral Wildfire

I have worked in a police department for 16 years, and I'm as surprised as anyone about that, even though I am self aware enough to realize that I would make an abysmal police officer. I am far too inclined to believe people and hope for the best even though I know the best is an unlikely outcome. Working in dispatch and being a non sworn civilian (we use odd language in here) I have come to understand there is no such thing as coincidence. 

For instance yesterday I got an alarm call advising (funny language we use again) there was a fire alarm at a Duval Street restaurant, and almost simultaneously a responsible person or responding party (odd language  we...) called in a transformer explosion five blocks away on Angela Street. Coincidence? Hardly because as it turned out the alarm was triggered by the power outage following the transformer failure. Despite my instinct to assume I sent one engine to the alarm and another to the transformer. One related to the other, thus is was not a coincidence.  After 16 years of this stuff I don’t believe in coincidences much.  

While coincidences aren't real, and that is as broad a generalization as I can come up with at the moment, unintended consequences are real, very much so. I love unintended consequences as they are  the lesson any living human being should carry around with them. While I am not at all fond of the coronavirus and its tedious intrusion into the spontaneity of my life, I have greatly enjoyed the numerous ironies of the unintended consequences of the new rules for living in a  time of plague. Social distancing? I'm in! Working from home? My wife loves it! That's the easy stuff. It gets much harder from there.

It seems like a lifetime ago but there used to be a rule that you couldn't enter a bank wearing a  hoodie or sunglasses or a baseball cap so when I had to go to the bank to get an actual cashier's check to pay the van factory, wasn't I amused by the requirement I cover my face up. I am not an epidemiologist and I don't play one on Facebook so if the scientists who study this disease say wear a mask I am perfectly ready to do so, at risk of losing my masculinity and self worth in our current bizarre chapter of culture wars. What makes me laugh is how suddenly wearing a face cover no longer poses a hold up threat. Let's rephrase that: Covid-19 or hold up? Which do you think is more likely?  In Key West? Well, I know now the coronavirus numbers aren't at all encouraging. That's not a coincidence either when you know what's been going on.

The coronavirus has opened up a huge crack in the papered over civility of modern life, and that has created unintended consequences which worry me a lot more than before. I find the arguments against mask wearing seem to e rooted in cruelty and lack of consideration that really gets me down. Until I found myself in a wheelchair and later pushing a walker to get around I had never really paid much heed to handicapped parking except when I couldn't park there and the lot was full. Suddenly the little blue square gave me permission to go out and struggle and strain and make my way among the able bodied. 

When I hear people say with the casual cruelty of unthinking certainty that those who are at risk from coronavirus should just stay home I think of my own period of infirmity and how much I valued the ability to get out even though my legs didn't work. Handicapped parking denies most people prime parking spots close to attractions, but they gave me a chance to get out of the house and mingle, even at knee height. I wonder how it is that wearing a mask for the public good has become an act of political submission rather than an act of social solidarity, of being in this together, of looking after each other. I just don't get the glee with which the thoughtless pronounce their indomitable will to hurt their neighbors. It makes me wonder if after Pearl Harbor  they would have sued Japan for peace to avoid having their summer vacations in 1942  disrupted. We are lucky the generations before us knew how to meet the challenge of hardship and deal with it.

Is it any surprise Willie T's bar closed after the reopening owing to coronavirus infection among the staff? Shanna Key has apparently done the same and I suppose more will follow. Sloppy Joe's says they aren't going to reopen July 1st as originally thought... The number of daily reported cases in Florida has reached 5500 and Homestead Baptist Health has reported its ICU is full. Despite, or because of the cataclysm Duval's pedestrian zone is back! This is the weirdest unintended consequence: Duval Mall has been recreated on the lower end of the street. I loved the idea of a pedestrian zone on Duval Street and after some experimentation businesses outside the two block zone last year felt they were losing out so they shut the whole experiment down. It seemed like that was the price one paid for success. Nowadays too many people are crowding the sidewalks of Lower Duval so the street has been barricaded to traffic...whatever next?

So on the one hand you can go into a business, indeed you must go into a business looking like  a bandit, plus you can walk some of Duval Street with impunity to allow social distancing.  But as much as locals struggle to maintain the economy and protect themselves from the idiocy of online epidemiology, infections are going up. Northern states who did their legwork early on now threaten to ban Floridians from their states unless we quarantine on arrival. I can hardly imagine the fun of sitting in the van, the three of us spending my vacation stationary on the New York stateline.

There is an Alice-In-Wonderland quality to every minor decision or choice in life these days. I who have retained my paycheck through it all miss the bad old days of the checkpoints. Now we have an economy limping along, infection rates going through the roof with the median patient age dropping, and a country divided over the simplest of public health actions. I wonder what happens next and how much worse do things have to get? I for one am not going anywhere  near Duval Street during the day and I marvel that Key West maintains the allure of a desirable vacation destination, but people keep coming.  

The stories from the Upper Keys  that we hear are equally hallucinatory of huge crowds coming down from the mainland lining the narrow strips of beach where they congregate without masks and no social distancing and act as though they live in a  state where the virus could never spread like wildfire. I have no idea where this all ends but I have equally no idea about the simplest of things these days. The only thing I can think is that in some indefinable manner things can only get worse. Oh and by the way I don't think the heat is a deterrent to the spread of this thing. At least the 100 degree hell we are enjoying doesn't seem hot enough. Maybe it needs to get even hotter, heaven help us.

The Golden Van

An idea made real. A future defined. The last great adventure my wife said to me after 26 years of marriage and many trips.  The farcical millennial lifestyle: hashtag vanlife. Yes we two old farts, and a dog, can't forget the dog, will we hope take off joints creaking to emulate the fresh young things with their YouTube Upspeak and rivettingly enviable lifestyle full of sunsets and beaches and impossible clean interiors....this will be a different story I fear.

The idea of a van was born out of a series of choices over the years that directed my travels in other different directions. I used a motorcycle as a youth for pleasure while happily able to spend less money. In California I got into sailing to satisfy a long held desire and discovered the pleasures of living on the water and discovering places from a totally unpredictable angle. There was nothing like coming ashore in a strange place in  a dinghy.

One day I discovered the interior of an RV which was a revelation when I compared it, even in the primitive 1980s to my kerosene stove, my small sailboat with no heating, a small cramped toilet and no shower or running water. Wow!  I thought, you get a  lot for the money in an RV however at that tender age one is inclined to hold excessively romantic notions of oneself and all the bold writers wrote of sailing as heroic travel and decidedly not National Lampoon's Vacation in a station wagon. I was rugged and revelled in my pointy bed.

Time passed and I did try van traveling, once a disastrous cross country journey with a dying Volkswagen, and later a commute to a job in a van with a bed and a camp stove to allow me to reduce my journeys to a distant job.  Neither experience was well planned or executed and sailboats remained my preferred means of escaping the humdrum. But time passes and older travelers sometimes end up with dogs who don't want to go sailing and husbands who got sick of sailing with dogs and the work they entailed. At the same time a new form or RV travel had the great good timing to appear on the scene a few years ago.

There was another thing and that was that I do enjoy travel. Sailing was a great way to boff around and be romantic but as far as seeing things it does have certain limitations. A trip to the interior from the coast requires wheels so in an effort as it were to eliminate the middle man (and keep Rusty happy) we thought about traveling in a  self contained home. 

My accident gave me the time and the inclination to think long and hard about how to spend the rest of the time left to me. From being rated unlikely to survive  to being told that I would most likely be able to walk again I found myself wondering why I got to live. "Everything happens for a reason," is a fatuous saying which implies that one is too important to be killed off pointlessly. My accident was not Fate telling me to get a move on, it was just the product of inattentive driving by a driver with almost no insurance. However the saying I like to apply is "making lemonade when handed lemons," which is a saying that allows us to write our own endings in life. I had a job with excellent health insurance which, as I grew up with socialized medicine is a requirement for my peace of mind. Then when they told me to do physical therapy I threw myself into it six hours a day and any weekend they needed overtime I asked to be their patient. I made my own lemonade. By the way, the reason I am retiring in 2022 is because I qualify for Medicare that year. I take health insurance very seriously and try not to leave that to chance because "I am healthy" or some other such platitude. I only look spontaneous but I try to make sensible plans. Hence the van after years of thought.

You could argue that good works and settling in a community and being part of the fabric would be the most recognizable way of contributing to a purposeful life but my talents such as they are point in a different direction. I like Webb Chiles' phrase describing his own peripatetic sailing life of "going to the edge of human experience and sending back reports" as my template for this van journey. The tug of staying put is always there, as Key West is after all as good a place as any to live, but the call of the unexpected is stronger. There will be time enough to return after the exploration is done to settle down and wait for death.

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The boring stuff. 

The van is a Promaster 3500 extended, a high roof cube with lots of standing headroom inside a box 21 feet long overall and six feet wide. The living space is about 12 feet by 6 feet behind the cab which is a standard 2020 Ram Promaster van cab. These machines are designed as work vehicles and lack many of the electronic amenities of lane control and automatic braking and such beeping bells and whistles which I did not want. 

Promasters come with one engine and the designation 1500,2500,3500 refers to suspension capacity as the boxes come in various lengths. We went for the biggest box as  17 feet we found was too short to give us an expansive interior feeling. Promasters are work vans as I said and to give you an idea cruise control is an option. I went for that.

Most are sold in standard white but we went for a hundred dollar option and special ordered a gold colored van which took four extra months to be delivered. I came across Custom Coach Creations by accident while perusing RV Trader online and lamenting the lack of a commercially built van that hit all the needs wants and desires we had for a mobile home...They are a family business based in Deland, North Florida and the business grew out of the owners' own love of travel. What I discovered is they will build what you want the way you want it and they have a reputation they enjoy maintaining.

We had some idea we wanted to developed from our years of traveling by sailboat and as eccentric as they sounded the crew at Custom Coach Creations got to work. 

You can see samples of their work on Facebook as well as their website. One issue we had seen raised frequently by vanlifers is how to cope with bad weather. It's easy to be  a picture postcard perfect van dweller in the right conditions but dark gloomy weather with rain and cold dampened proceedings quite severely. We decided we needed an interior to try and counteract that problem. So we built comfortable benches in the back which at the press of a button become a queen sized bed across the back of the very broad Promaster.

From a commercial design by Pleasure Way we copied the idea of having front office space with swiveling front seats and tables that unfold when the cabin seats face backward. Thus one of us could be asleep in back while the other might be reading or computing up front a whole 8 feet away...The van is littered with 12v and USB ports everywhere we asked for them so one need never have a device with a flat battery.

I had wanted an all electric van, dispensing with gas stoves and fridges both of which we had used while afloat. My thinking is that traveling with gas creates issues on ferries and cargo ships when we send the van overseas, plus every country seems to have its own gas fittings and filling systems. To ensure we have plenty of power we went with a monster electrical installation: 600 amps of Lithium battery storage fed by a 3000 watt inverter to provide 110 volts as well as 12 volts (there will be a test later) in turn fed by 400 watts of solar panels on the roof and two alternators under the hood. Three hours driving or four hours idling should charge the entire system completely from empty. There is a separate battery for the engine so if all else fails we can start the engine and refill the entire bank from dead. This $15,000 package (more or less) should keep us cool warm, cooking, refrigerated and fed.

There's even a cell phone booster on the roof and a TV antenna of all things inside the air conditioner unit. I'm not an electrical engineer but I play one in my van...

The toilet, also known as the spare room hence the absence of photos as we chucked everything in there for the trip home...sorry about that; as I'm sure you'd like to see our 2.5 gallon Thetford porta potti before we soil it with use. Or not. CCC's fabric queen, a miracle worker called Michelle who leads a team with whose work my exacting wife could find no fault. I never saw a cleaner  more smoothly finished van interior. 

We wanted a faucet with a boat style foot pump but Bob the boss talked us out of that water saving program by pointing out the faucet over the sink reaches outside the van and can double as a shower for us or even for Rusty...done! However he was puzzled by my request for a shower compartment with no shower. My wife was fine with this mad plan as she had found she preferred solar showers on the boat rather than using the pressure water system we had. So my idea was to put a hook in the ceiling and hang a shower filled with either solar heated water or with water heated on the induction stove. The bonus is we use less water, far less, and secondly the solar showers are cheap, easy to carry and can be used outside the van in clement weather. Our reasoning made sense to us. The porta potti has a small unobtrusive tank to make it easy to dump anywhere there is a toilet without having to use an RV dump site. I am of the opinion there are more public toilets in the world than specialized RV dump stations. On a nicer cedar smelling note here we have Dave the Carpenter who wore a mask and made last minute decisions for us on the placement of a few items we needed to make a personal decision on, the shape of the table, the location of the shower hook,which is exactly what makes this a custom van:

I even asked for a spare water pump for under the sink and Custom Coach Conversions did not let me down. I hope you understand that even before coronavirus I wanted our van to be as self sufficient as possible, not in the hopes of becoming hermits but of being able to travel further without worrying all the time about stuff breaking and not being able to repair it, or wasting face time with strangers asking them where the RV parts store is (or isn't).  Everything is a compromise of course and we tried to thread the path between reducing complexity and maintaining a pleasant living environment. For instance even though we will travel with hikers' water filters we did specify the biggest water tank possible please and Bob gave us fully 35 gallons (140 liters in Canadian currency). Enough for a month of comfortable living:

This whole idea may strike you as lunacy but in my defense I can only say that we have done stuff similar to this previously and enjoyed it. We have tried to balance the needs of first world sybarites with the requirements of long distance travelers. We shall break no exploration records nor shall we claim world class endurance feats or acts of driving derring-do but I hope we shall see things worth seeing and do things worth doing such that one day we may wash up in the old folks home in Key West with plenty of stories with which to bore the other inmates. It's hard to justify even to myself the notion that it is worth leaving Key West to do this thing so I hold on to the idea that we can come back as idle retirees which would be lovely. I could stay in my job for twenty more years working hours that pay well, in a position that has better health benefits than any other in town, and in a department that offers security and comfort but... In a world gone mad on Internet aphorisms I'm sure you can find one to suit your taste that advises you to live your life before it's too late. For instance this one isn't too saccharine:   

We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize we only have one.

My family got even more mad when I left  and emigrated and never went back because they had been mad at me to start with. After a quarter of a century away they did grudgingly admit that my emigration may not have been at all a bad idea. I am used to disapproval but after 62 years I have figured out that if I don't do this I will regret it. Luckily my wife feels the same way and my dog has no choice. Oh and the cost of the van thus tricked out with mood lighting, a television, cell phone signal booster, air conditioning, etc etc etc...$89,000 including van, conversion, tax, tag and all. And some people spend that on tricking out a pick up truck. Lunatics!

West Summerland Key

After a long weekend of answering 911 calls and dealing with people and their problems I was looking forward to spending lots of time all at once with Rusty and the camera. I try to take a picture or two every day to experiment and keep my hand in but on my days off I like to put in extra effort. 

I didn't feel like Key West especially as it had rained but despite my late start I hoped clouds might provide some amusement and Rusty always whines when I stop here, impatient to get out and run.

I was in a  meditative mood looking for shapes and colors as usual, finding odd lumps in the clay being worn away by rain. This stuff used to be at the bottom of the sea and was dredged up by the railroad engineers where they planted their bridges and they used it to build up the ramp to get the track to the bridge. Since the road was reopened to visitors overnight anglers have come back leaving all sorts of detritus which I don't need to show. The beer bottle put me in mind of the question as to who is the corona virus, the lazy human or the efficient virus...

This unhappily gormless person failed to dent my pleasure. He apparently showed up in a Jeep to fish but didn't last long. 

I was trying to frame this gumbo limbo against the sky to emphasize it's growth since Hurricane Irma decimated all greenery here. These trees grow easily and quickly in South Florida and they at least are repopulating this desert. As I knelt the silver Jeep came down the newly paved access ramp and parked right next to me. I got the picture and moved away. The helpful half wit got out and said "I can move if my shadow is in your way." I was very polite and said no thank you and scrammed.  Social distancing? What's that?

I returned while he was still fruitlessly casting and got this picture of his vehicle which had plenty of room to drive on and find a space to pull off the track. Instead he just dumped it there and seemed surprised when I didn't want to engage with him. Aside form the fact that social distancing suits my reticent personality, I am constantly surprised by people who don't give strangers a chance to be six feet away before they try to get permission to approach. Had he puled forward and greeted me from a respectful distance I could have engaged in the usual dreary niceties of pointless small talk. As it was his lack of awareness freaked me out. 

On a happier note it is clear that growth is regenerated in this place where the storm wrenched everything up and turned growth to dust.  I actually had some lovely gumbo limbo shade to sit in on my favorite piece of cement buried in the undergrowth!

As much as the rain on my days off has annoyed me it has done some good.

I was sitting waiting for Rusty grumbling about how flighty butterflies are, darting hither and yon. I had read on a  camera forum how dragonflies dart but tend to go back to land on the same twig repeatedly which makes them easier to capture and I had put that into practice. Butterflies on the other hand never sit still and they were annoying me...until this one stopped close by long enough for me to get a bead and relieve my irritation. Thank you. I am never going to be an insect macro specialist but even with a regular zoom lense they display beauty.

And then I tried a different view of my much photographed bridge. Out of focus with some vintage overlay courtesy of Snapseed. I think I like it just for a change, as I do know what the bridge looks like. This is the pinhole camera view!

Flora

From a couple of recent walks in the wilds I gleaned some pictures of shapes and colors and flowers. No stories, no words, just pictures. I really enjoy following Rusty and spotting contrasts and colors while he sniffs around independent of me and the camera. I don't always have much time but in camera stabilization and a quick eye produce pretty pictures even if they aren't going to set the world on fire and I like to share them.

Sunrise Over Water

Sunrise pictures taken on a  cloudy morning over Key West Bight, known to the salespeople as the Historic Seaport. I don't spend a lot of time trying to tell stories with sunrises and sunsets as people a lot more involved with selling Key West are busy doing that, but these I thought worth sharing.