Algeria 1975

I hope to cheat death in one respect: I'd like to make another chance for myself to travel through Africa. I have never been to Southern or East Africa and my friend Webb, who has, says it is worth the visit. It is a short cargo ship ride from Buenos Aires to Cape Town so who knows what opportunities may arise. in van life.

When I was 19 and not at all keen on cold winters I decided to take my unsuitable motorcycle on a journey across North Africa. Much like van life today, in the era before the Internet motorcycle touring in the 1970s was becoming fashionable and youngsters like me attached whatever luggage we could to whatever motorcycle we owned and we took off, an army of scruffy youngsters stopped by the side of the road fixing our temperamental, but romantic rides in the August heat, the time of year when all Europe takes an intercontinental siesta. As I lived on a farm, winter was the season to travel so my only chance to make a trip was to take a ferry from Naples to Tunis. Africa they said was warm in winter.

They lied. An overnight ferry ride did not transport people to the land of winter tropics, and Tunisia was not the land of milk and honey. However the temperatures were bearable and occasionally warm during the day and despite being a Muslim country they had back then a more tourist oriented approach to alcohol. State liquor stores sold cheap North African wine and French beer so the needs of the scruffy young travelers were taken care of, especially as even then hashish held no allure for me.  I stayed in campground with other European snowbirds though we did not use that term, but that winter of 1975 was my first exposure to the concept of living in a van to escape the seasons. Oases all around Tunisia were filled with Germans in vans not missing snow and ice at all.

I am 62 now but over four decades my nature hasn't changed that much and I was then as much as I am now a man with itchy feet. I explored the old Roman ruins of Carthage and I tried and very much enjoyed the hammams which forced me to slow down and actually experience the fine art of taking a bath. I grew bored and wanted to cross to Algeria on the other side of the Atlas Mountains. Algeria was much less Europeanized, much bigger and more spread out across the plains, and the country penetrated far deeper in the Sahara than the modest dunes and classic oases of Tunisia. Algeria was wild.

I had no resources other than a Michelin roadmap and my wits. There was no forum online or crowds of naysayers in the ether telling me not to go. I saw a road that wiggled up into the mountains gains on my crisp clean map and up I went. It was cold and windy and the road was lined with eucalyptus trees bending in the wind. The hillsides were rocky and arid and the road was smooth and sited a great deal through the canyons filled with no visible human activity at all. I crouch over the low handlebars of my ridiculous sport bike and never gave a thought to falling off or crashing or getting hurt. I was 19.

As always happens on the road, the images of despair and disaster and failure and robbery and death never materialized. Algeria was huge and even better than Tunisia in that they were real Muslims and Berbers and lived medieval lives outside the cities in small isolated homesteads and villages that looked dusty and forgotten by the very advanced standards of 20th century modernity. Algeria had won a bloody war for independence from France only a decade earlier and they felt like they were still finding their way.  I saw the ruins at Annaba and ran into a protest of some sort, young people clogging traffic and throwing stones and stuff, just like nowadays. Sleeping rough in the streets seemed a bit unlikely which was when of course a car stopped by and a friendly Italian voice asked me what I was doing there on my Italian registered motorcycle and my dusty luggage. He was a lonely Italian engineer on a. contract for his company in Algeria and we talked late into the night, drank and eventually slept to the sounds of yelling and sirens and what sounded like gunfire outside his walled compound. Just another night in Annaba he said philosophically. Early next morning the rioters or protestors or freedom fighters were asleep and I was  on the road Constatine and the Roman ruins in the mountains.

In Algiers I found the Arab capital city that we see idealized in Western movies, a French influenced city of terraced streets, sidewalk cafes and a souk, a street market that looked like the illustrated stories of the Thousand and One Nights. That Marseille was an overnight boat ride north seemed impossible. I was in another world. I got off my road trip diet of rubbery local cheese and grit filled baguettes and ate street food that cost nothing and was filled with olive oil and tomatoes and green spices. I slept in a sort of bed that reminded me of boarding school, a cot in dormitory that cost nothing and introduced me to many voices and people who spoke more languages and far better than I did. I met a young Arab on the street peering in despair at his motorcycle. It ended up that I had the right tool and he had a wedding to go to and he thought a ride on my splendid 350cc scarlet Italian motorcycle would be a great way for me to see some of the mountains outside Algiers. Plus it saved him a dreary bus ride to see his family in his home village. 

I suppose in the modern world one might have thought I was bound to disappear in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains and never be heard from again. I had no Spot locator, no satellite phone, nor even a cell phone, and no one in the world had a clue where I was. I suppose he could have killed me and buried me among the rocks of those desolate mountain passes, as it was I got to watch a Berber wedding, eat camel and rice, clap my hands in time to the wedding dance and have a damned good time drinking mint tea and coffee and cheering on the new hopes of bride and groom whoever they were. We rode back to Algiers at dusk, parted ways and never heard from each other again.  I hope his experience riding a Moto Morini 350, all I had to offer, was as interesting and weird as attending a Berber wedding, but I doubt it.

Life is not a series of highs, there are some lows in-between and my next target was the city of Mascara. I thought how odd to be the place where mascara must have originated, it must therefore be an interesting place plunked in the middle of the rocky scrubby foothills of the Atlas Mountains. How wrong I was. Thirty years later I made the same mistake again in Tupelo Mississippi where I assumed the honey was made. It isn't but the enterprising shopkeepers there have stopped trying to explain the error and simply offer honey for sale in Tupelo and call it good. Perhaps nowadays there is a shopkeeper in Mascara selling eyeliner and calling it what it is but somehow I doubt it.  I son't suppose I shall ever find out as Algeria, after my two visits there got shut down by a civil war of epic proportions that you have never heard about and the place is still not safe for certain among us. I'd like to go back in the van but I m not at all sure I shall I've long enough for the to settle down in a world where Muslims and Christians seem determined not to get along.

And finally the usual gratuitous Rusty picture, this time sunbathing in the drive. 

Giving Thanks

Not Thanksgiving, when we have to give thanks to order,  but for reasons more in my head I am feeling thankful today. I was looking at pictures of the Gulf Coast with people waist deep in water and that of course had me remembering three years ago living through the wreckage of Hurricane Irma, no electricity, no water for days and dirt and smells everywhere. I was lucky as the police station's generator kept going, and though we were unwashed and flushed toilets with buckets we had cold air and camaraderie. In those moments of crisis, as I am sure they are discovering once again in battered Pensacola and Gulf Shores there are moments of good that come through the misery.

I am enjoying normal even if I have to get up at 4:30 to walk Rusty through an empty, distanced town. The city commission was supposed to lift the requirement that we wear masks outdoors at all times but old fashioned news in these times of rapid social gossip moves slowly. Apparently the city did agree to align with the county which requires outdoor masks only when social distancing is impossible, and that seems sensible and less divisive to me in time when being annoyed is the norm. I also read the governor is now questioning the six foot rule even as he moves to lift all restrictions on bars and restaurants today. My wife and I plod on in isolation, she working from home, me working in the tightly locked dispatch center...the new abnormal.

The simple fact that so far we have had no hurricane threaten us has been something to be grateful for this summer and fall. To cope with the wild variety of problems storms bring with them while while at the same time trying to cope with the pandemic seems too much. Reading the stories of ghastly fire evacuations and homelessness from the Western States makes me realize how doubly lucky we are in this part of the world to be storm free in a pandemic. And so far we live serene normal peaceful lives in the Keys.

Meteorologically speaking it is serene for the moment, but economically it's another story. Store closures are nothing new in Key West. Ever since the last great revitalization effort began in the late 60s and  mid 70s Key West has seen stores and restaurants come and go. People who want to prove their local superiority will throw out names of past glories...as though Pantry Pride or El Cacique, Hukilau or The Copa give you longevity and credibility in the struggle to be a true local in Key West. Yet these days the rate of closure and the prospects for re-opening when the problems aren't simply a local phenomenon should give one pause. How do you bring back a local economy when the planet itself is struggling to redefine normal?

Generally speaking entrepreneurs love Key West with its defined market and tons of foot traffic and reputation as a place where visitors enjoy eating and drinking while enjoying live music. Anyone with a powerful desire to open a restaurant wants to try their luck and test their fortitude here at the end of the road. Every closure reported on the grapevine is accompanied by the curiosity quotient: what will come next? My wife always hoped the  attempts at Indian dining would stick but they never did. She's given up now and part of her enforced home life is ordering cookbooks and using an Instapot. She makes a mean masala bowl of legumes and spices as a reminder that we face an era of self reliance newly defined. Bad news for restaurants perhaps?

We have indeed stepped up during the pandemic by ordering take out and delivery and yet it isn't always enough. The iconic Roof Top Cafe is gone, the 200 block of Duval is half shuttered and so on. Schools are in session but given the reports from around the country one can only imagine how the youngsters are currently busy infecting each other and in a few weeks the results should be visible. How do you get a middle school classroom to understand social distancing? I have no children but unless kids have changed a lot since I was beardless it seems impossible to method they can understand the nuances that confuse the grown ups around them.

In my head I struggle with the violence of daily life that seems to be made that much worse by online anonymity, political rage, medical threats to our collective health, lies, conspiracies, confusion and fear. But the boredom of self imposed confinement, the sameness of daily life cannot obscure the good fortune we still have to to get through these trying times with our own dignity and sense of purpose. I see giving thanks hoping things will speed up and start getting better soon. Two more years of pandemic they tell us?  I groan but at least the national elections will be done one way or another...What strange times we live in.

These meandering unformed thanksgiving thoughts were prompted by an innocent question from a youngster at work who asked me what the world looked like thirty years ago compared to now. Was forced to think and try to remember and conjure up long buried feelings from that era. I remember the Iran-Contra scandal and the apparent violations of assorted laws and the sense of wild lawlessness of the fight against Communism which threatened the integrity of our neighbors in Central America...it seemed a pivotal time. And yet as I tried to explain it I look back to photos from the era with a certain comfortable nostalgia. Nothing seems as bad as the present time and that thought encouraged me to find comfort in the tribulations of the present. Perhaps in thirty years if I am still alive (92 years old?) these will look like halcyon days in retrospect. We humans are very peculiar.

Fishing With Birds

I got my 'flu shot Friday morning, a last minute appointment which I could not refuse as I don't much like the 'flu. The unfortunate part was that my plans to spend the morning, a rare morning off with no rain, at the beach got scuppered. Rusty and I went out nothing daunted to grab an hour or so wandering with camera. The van stayed home unfortunately as there would be no time to swim shower or laze around. 

The moon must have been doing something fishy because everyone was out chasing fish that morning, except me. I watched from the heights near the old Bahia Honda bridge as people rushed around in their boats looking very picturesque.

Rusty and I drove on the Veterans Memorial Park, reopened with limited facilities following the leveling it got by Hurricane Irma in 2017. There are picnic tables without shelter and porta-potties while the toilet block remains boarded up. The views are still lovely. And the pelicans were circling around and making a solid breakfast from one particular patch of ocean.

There was one other car in the parking lot with a roof rack and the occupant soon hove into view in his rather pretty canoe. He made for the pelicans and shooed them off by casting a bait net into their breakfast.

Then a flats boat showed up, apparently everyone trusts the pelicans to know where the fish are. They stood and stared at the water for a bit and then disappeared at which point the patient pelicans came back and started diving for brunch once again. 

I enjoyed watching the birds doing their thing and even though the fish must have been having a hard time of it there seemed to be, from the safety and distance of my picnic table, a certain symmetry to the process. Nature at work and that sort of thing. 

The birds were certainly more picturesque than the lumping boaters who barged in and scared them off.

You can see the pelican sitting patiently to one side as the intruder churned through the school of fish.

It was a beautiful morning and it was decidedly a shame to have to leave so early and go back to the big city and face the needle. Actually since I was in the hospital where I was pricked with a needle, at least one every day for 90 days fear of the needle has rather evaporated. Fear of missing out on the chance to spend a morning at the beach with the van which I enjoy more and more is uppermost in my mind. Swimming season will end most likely in six weeks when we switch back to winter time and cold fronts.

African Cemetery

There was a time when Key West had it's cemetery close by until a storm washed ashore and uncovered the graves and left coffins exposed after the hurricane blew by. At that point in the mid 19th century the city moved the cemetery to the edge of town in the middle of the island. This cemetery not only wasn't moved, it was never even acknowledged.

I included a picture of the historical marker because nowadays the African Cemetery is acknowledged and if your screen is large enough and your patience strong enough you can rad the words for yourself.

The story is told in the images embedded in the monument as well but here's the short version: It was 1860  and slavers were transporting humans to Cuba in defiance of US rules enacted in 1808 against the importation of slaves. The US Navy intercepted three slavers bound for Havana and saved 1432 Africans from a fate worse than death. Except they didn't because the after that simple introduction the story went off the rails.

The ex-slaves were brought to Key West where the slavery debate was fierce and those in support of slavery ended up supporting the Confederacy even as the US military forcibly held Key West as a critical Union port throughout the war. Stephen Mallory took the job of Secretary of the Confederate Navy, and is still memorialized at Mallory Square, ironically enough.

No one wanted 1432 Africans dumped on their doorstep, and remember these were by no means African-Americans, they were as foreign to this hemisphere as any voluntary traveler. Naturally the city cast around for a Federal representative to deal with this sudden immigration issue and the Postmaster of all people was deemed the senior Federal representative in the city. They built shacks and a sort of hospital to deal with these people who found themselves abandoned in the middle of literally nowhere.

In those days Higgs beach was the back of beyond. Rest Beach was where cattle were landed by boat from Stock Island and slaughtered for the residents of the city a couple of miles away. This was not the back yard of the Casa marina Resort in 1860.

As you can imagine things didn't go well for the Africans. 294 died following the ill-treatment on their passage across The Atlantic and who arrived in key West beyond saving. The other 1100 became a sore point for everyone. They couldn't stay because then they would end up slaves and avoiding that fate was the whole point of the interception by the US Navy. No one knew where they came from. Africa is a continent, not a country and their origins were lost at a time when Africa was barely mapped and not by slave traders.

The Postmaster who did his best by the sudden arrivals petitioned the Federal Government for reimbursement of the money he personally spent on the Africans and never got a penny back, naturally.

In the end the slaves were put on ships and sent back to Africa, to America's quasi-colony of Liberia lacking any better destination. The next time you figure life is unfair imagine the unfairness these people suffered, being uprooted, transported, dumped, rerouted and dumped in a strange place far from home to live out your life among strangers in a. foreign, albeit African land.  The mind boggles.

It's a lot to think about as you wander the cemetery which in point of fact is rather more an open air museum than a simple burial ground. Ground penetrating radar turned up the burial sites in 2002 which eventually led to the creation of the place you see in these pictures, a map, some names, some symbols and rather disturbingly you can see these oval shapes in the cement.

Each one a known body among the 294 buried here and possibly under ground in areas nearby. September is a good time to come and think about this place as the crowds are away and you can be alone tiptoeing around the thoughts that come to mind as even today we struggle to understand the legacy of those days.

The notion that "All Lives Matter' seems rather fatuous to me when you consider the likelihood of this story unfolding in 1860 in the US and being forgotten for 140 years. Some lives have mattered much more than others over the decades and this spot is evidence of that indisputable fact.  

The Blue Hour

This photo inspired this page. All I saw was a busy dog at dusk and everything was a shade of blue and I wasn't even messing with the white balance setting. If you use the indoor setting in sunlight it give your pictures this sort of blue shade. And that sort of messing around is what I like to do with my camera. Sometimes the drive behind the picture is to reproduce reality and other times it becomes obvious reality can't be encapsulated in a frame and then unreality takes over.  I can't do that with my phone. The phone camera I find overrides my vision and reproduces a perfect picture, no peculiar taste allowed. Besides which the phone doesn't feel like a camera, it feels like a slippery cube with no viewfinder. It works really well as a telegraph machine and a book. 

Were you foolish enough to scroll back through the years you'd see horrid small garish pictures on this page which were as good as my half megapixel Android phone could manage... and it seemed like a miracle to take pictures with a phone. And then post them online on my own page. Extraordinary.  I well remember the moment I realized I needed a phone capable of taking pictures. I was working night shift in police dispatch and the heat alarm went off in the radio room, a closet filled with towers of electronics that manage 911, administrative phone lines, and the police fire and rescue radio systems.  The stacks generate huge amounts of heat but cannot go above a certain temperature otherwise the electronics burn up.

Anyway the alarm went off and I was in charge and had to deal with it before everything melted down. My supervisor asked me sleepily to take a picture of the alarm panel and send it to her. I looked at my flip phone and pondered my options. where were: None. So I asked Nick for help and he whipped out a camera, took a picture and miraculously the camera became a phone and then a fax and the picture got sent. Furthermore Nick got exact instructions how to reset the system and the night progressed uneventfully. I was a convert and my flip phone anachronism was soon replaced by an Android camera and this page was born in 2007 as I got the urge to take pictures for fun.  Later I got tired of having to build my own phone by using Android options and  drank the iPhone integrated Kool Aid and now have electronics that work seamlessly, thus exposing myself electronically to the Apple overlords who I doubt care very much about me or my pictures or my private information. The fact is modern phones work utterly reliably and take excellent pictures. And yet I like to walk around with a camera.

In those distant days I declined to even remove overhead wires, all those black lines that clutter the beauty of Key West were reality and I was tied to reality. I struggled to make the tiny telephone take color accurate pictures which it was loth to do. Then I noticed I really liked the orange glow of night pictures which I thought imparted a warmth which seemed suitable to a place where nights are as hot as days. But for general photography I wanted more reach, a telephoto lens and the ability to compose more interesting pictures. I actually came to feel limited by the phone.

Cell phone cameras now have telephoto lenses and all sorts of electronic trickery but somehow I find looking through the viewfinder of my camera piques my interest to see more. Oddly enough my cameras aren't expensive and seater than use a thousand dollar newest iPhone I walk around with a $500 camera  with a telephoto lens and lots of electronic knobs to mess with my pictures. On a sunny day blue skies fill my viewfinder:

At night the Truman Waterfront Park showed deep sky blue on the ground at the children's water park. I filled the frame of my telephoto lens with blue, I zoomed out the extraneous rides and different colors and tried to take advantage of the street light to assist my camera. Rusty watches the performance and I'm not sure if he is bored, applauding or critical. Perhaps he wishes he could use a camera but he's not saying. I photograph for both of us.

The skies this summer have yielded surprising shades of blue often filled with impressive banks of clouds lit up morning and evening as though they are on fire. My camera inspires me to go out and look. My phone doesn't. The heat and the coronavirus have pushed me away from crowded places in daylight. My memories of this bizarre year in Key West will be tinged with the blue shades of many dawns which have seen me walking my patient dog waiting for the sun to come up. Photographers call the first shards of light and the last of the light in the evening "the blue hour" when the sun is gone and with it the preferred golden rays which give everything that special light.  Like a vampire I get to see a lot of predawn blue this year.

My Key West is a place not much recorded. When I look around I see online the pictures of a Key West that lives in the imagination of visitors and the promotional materials of the businesses that want them. I am acutely aware that after I take to the road these images will go with me and are unlikely to be replaced until I get back. I keep my pictures in the cloud on Goggle for the princely sum of a dollar a month and I like to flip through them from time to time and enjoy the memories they trigger. 

I expect I will be pushed to the fringes the deeper we go into the century. Already I see video as the tool of the short attention span masses and I can't be bothered with time and complexity of video and I hate watching videos as they rarely have high production values and don't give mt the time to linger with images or thoughts the way still pictures do. I enjoy lingering over images I like, I enjoy words, and I enjoy thinking. I do believe I am an anachronism already but this doesn't make me blue. It makes me want to seek out more pictures, they're out there, and to do it on my cheap FZ1000 camera, a six year old model still sold brand new by Panasonic. Its a complicated piece of plastic but coming to terms with all the buttons and menus and making it do what I want is where I find the fun. It has one fixed lens which is undoubtedly not the best at any one thing but it is a jack of all trades and lightweight so it travels with me everywhere. It works with no maintenance except charging the batteries and as it has no attachments all I carry is the camera, a cloth to wipe the lens clean and sometimes a spare battery. I laugh when photographers announce to the world the merits of traveling light and staying simple. I am certain my cheap simple camera is far too old fashioned for them but I do what I do for me, not a paymaster. This picture I took in the dark, in a. range of light that causes graininess in the picture, called "noise." Nevertheless I find the view across the mangroves deep into the blue hour at Blimp Road evocative for me and that's what counts. A three thousand dollar camera or the hassle of mine with a tripod could have got a cleaner image. But how could I follow Rusty with my machine stuck on a tripod? A conundrum.

I hope you can find your fun in this never-ending semi-lockdown state we live in. If you can't then the virus wins and you go mad. Better to take fuzzy pictures and keep your dog happy than to go mad. better to do that than risk getting the blues....good luck.