Joy On Eliza

 Irony, hope, or an order? Perhaps a reflection of my mood...

A couple of blocks from my work there are a few streets filled with Conch cottages, trees and shrubs and occasional quirky decorating motifs.

It's where I come from time to time to get some relief from work, where I have to sit and listen to misery and anger for hours at a time. 

On Eliza Street I find a different world especially at this time of year when there is no one around, no earnest winter cyclists in broad brimmed hats clutching sweaty maps of impenetrable streets.

The sign on the door said "Star Fleet" but I think of this place less as intergalactic and more as the brush house. I included a hint as to why that is in the lower part of the frame. I wish I had the nerve to live in a house so blue but my Pepto-Bismol home on Cudjoe Key has weathered to a more acceptable shade of fade. This one I liked not necessarily for the relatively sober colors but for the mass of rooflines:

Rooflines and palm fronds everywhere. I tend to walk around here with my head in the air.

Back to work. Coronavirus has it's usefulness as we are socially distanced at work and after a half hour wandering in this heat one needs a little time in air conditioning to resume normal bodily temperature. I can't wait for a proper cold front.

Duval Street Sunshine

I had a reason to be downtown, dropping off my ballot along with my wife's, ironically on the day the President went on television to denounce the peaceful voting process that brought him to power. The voting process that he now threatens to ignore. Well, that's two Florida votes for Biden. 

The bars are open, as shown by my decision to take a walk on Duval and see what's what. In case you are wondering I am of a strong enough constitution to walk while masked, even in 95 degree heat so that was what I did.   

Not everyone followed suit, though I was surprised how many did. If you feel the need to support a local business, a fresh air seat in an almost empty bar seems like a pretty good plan for a liquid lunch. I had work to go back to shortly.

I was reading my selection of online papers yesterday and the numbers are going up in Wisconsin and I have to say I am surprised it took so long. When we were there in our camper van in July the entire state was functioning as normal, that is to say as we used to live before this pandemic. My wife and I felt like time travelers coming as we did from a high infection state. We wished them luck and went to Michigan where precautions were in effect. Now Florida is banning a science based response to infection.

It was a hot afternoon on Duval and I was in long pants for work but there was quite a bit of traffic on the sidewalks, because whatever else is going on this is September, traditionally the slowest month of the year. Peak hurricane season, schools are open and the cool breezes of winter haven't yet arrived.

The solution to the Fall doldrums years ago was to create a carnival to draw people to the town where it was said a cannon shot down Duval might at best wake a dog sleeping in the shade. Fantasy Fest grew over the years and created a rather irritating name for itself as a magnet for bad taste in pursuit of tourist dollars.. The new organizers were slowly turning around the tits-on-display attitude where a week long street party in Key West was for elderly middle class pillars of their communities back home to pretend to be reprobates in secret far away.  However all that came to a screeching halt this year.

Or did it? The newspaper is reporting a  group of people from Tampa, exactly those who can't strip naked at home in public want to have their own tasteless display in Key West. I never have found the Tampa crowd particularly in tune with the event and this year they are apparently planning their own party in Key West crowing that thanks to the Governor they can ignore local reticence on the subject. 

I used to enjoy the week of Fantasy Fest and my friends thought I was stupid for sticking up for the week we spent in our own reality. I got overtime rather than time off and i am not one to dress up in costumes but I enjoy the good cheer of a downtown party and ignored the tastelessness that went with it. It was not an easy balance to find but in a  town where tacky and tourism have always seemed synonymous it wasn't that much of a stretch to enjoy the carnival and ignore the puerile humor.

And this year the silliness of the last week in October is perforce missing. I doubt the Tampa gate crashers will organize much of anything and to announce a Black Lingerie Matters bike ride to the newspaper is hardly a portent of good sense in a year when BLM are initials far too pregnant with meaning to be made fun of. The Zombie Bike Ride is just another casualty of our First World Problem and mocking a political movement that has everyone on both sides riled up seems to cross a bad taste line that is bad even by Fantasy Fest's loose morals. Bad taste is one thing but political hay making is quite another.

Next year, assuming the pandemic has run its course and all things are equal, should be my last Fantasy Fest at the police department so I'm keeping my fingers crossed hoping it will be brilliant and sparkle and make people happy, a portent of good times to come. This year we just keep on keeping on and wait with patience for things to somehow get better.

Bahama Village

Whitehead Street at five in the morning. Mask ordinances are finished by order of the Governor,  everyone has to use their common sense and social distance or use a mask based on their own intelligence level. I am rather dubious about that approach but I am resigned to this virus being around for far longer than I ever initially imagined. 

My neighbor told me of a friend of theirs, 40 years old who got coronavirus and was on a ventilator for ten days. Now she has stroke like symptoms that the doctors can't figure out, headaches, lopsided features and an arm that doesn't work, but only intermittently.  The reason I don't want to blunder into coronavirus is because I don't want to deal with the third outcome which isn't death or recovery. Its recovery with side effects of unknown severity, complexity and duration.  So I creep around Key West hen everyone else is asleep.

I used take night pictures for a change but I seem to find myself figuring out how to take pictures with not much light and that is most of the time. I wandered down Petronia Street which is actually quite picturesque even under sunlight.

Was thinking how in a normal year the city would be gearing up for Goombay in about three weeks. And Goombay, the Bahamian celebration which clogs Petronia Street for a weekend, is the precursor to Fantasy Fest.

Goombay, Zombie Bike Ride, Fantasy Fest...all gone this year.I fear if we don't get our mask wearing and social distancing organized we may not see them next year. I like the holiday spirit of the end of October especially as FantasyFest was being redirected away from stupid nudity to more of a costume public event. Perhaps by the time the pandemic is behind us and Fantasy Fest resumes it will be better placed to be a downtown celebration. I have one more opportunity to see fantasy fest before retirement. I Amy already have seen my last if next year repeats this year. The same goes for Goombay, a less riotous event with more music and food and less stupid drunks. To not see one last Goombay would be a real shame.

 

Checking The Mail

My alarm goes off at 4:25 every morning I work. I have a second alarm set at 4:55 in case I fail to wake up and that is about the time I have to get into high gear and get ready to go to work. That first half hour belongs to Rusty. We eave the house together and check the mail.

I read a long scientific article about a dog's sense of smell and thoughI came across it years ago the information I discovered has stuck with me. It explained a lot about the behavior I see in Rusty, his ability to smell in stereo, directionally and also his ability to separate smells by time, not only space. Dogs don't find smells disgusting in the same way we do, as they dissect smells for information, not for pleasure or to pass moral judgements. 

So it is that he takes great interest in the neighborhood, checking where other dogs have walked, noticing what's new and who might be new. He chooses the route, he selects his own stops and I trail along with a flashlight and a plastic bag always at his service.

We are alone at the hour, even the party goers have passed out and a neighbor's cat has got used to Rusty padding by at an hour when civil creatures are asleep. I don't know what the cat is outdoors by himself but I am forced to accept not everyone is as overwrought by their companion animal's welfare as am I. Rusty's freedom to operate is limited by my watchfulness and subsequent irritation if he does something stupid.

It is a walk that is only the preamble to my wife's more leisurely arrival on the scene and she takes him off in the car for a longer walk after dawn but before she settles down to teach at home. Rusty and I get back around the time the second alarm goes off and he goes off with a treat while I head towards the usual ablutions, uniform, lunch bag packing and all that daily nonsense.

He sits next to the ridiculously overgrown greenery at the top of the stairs and watches me go away to a world of unimaginable delights that won't release me back to him until 6:30 that evening when we get in the car and go off again to watch the sun set over the mangroves. 

I can't help but feel that we might all of us benefit from the simplicity and the lessons to be gleaned from an unambitious dog secure in his routines and not needing any great plans to keep him happy. 

Key West

I was looking back over my photos from years past and I notice a pattern in my travels around the Keys. I liked to walk around town in the summer when there are fewer people on the streets resaving winter for more back country time away from the crowds. This year things have taken a decidedly odd turn with a summer filled with blisteringly hot days, coronavirus and peculiar political ructions. 1968 - we missed you!

Florida's governor, a close supporter of the president has declared Florida is mask free and coronavirus numbers are going down so no local government can require masks. Businesses can but compliance is reduced pretty much to a shirt wearing requirement. In the way a business can require customers to be clothed they can also require customers to be masked but cities and counties can't. 

My life won't change much and my wife who works at home is suddenly going to be dining out on the strength of the governor's reassurance that Covid is cured. From here on out you either work or not but there is no compensation for coronavirus related unemployment. I watch the numbers going up in Europe and I return to my original position which was not so much lock down as strict social distancing, masks and take out food and entertainment. But no one cares what I think so I shall continue to navigate a solitary course.

Rusty and I have been pursuing solitary walks with a vengeance since March 15th, the Ides of March, and I feel the anniversary of our isolation will be upon us before we know it.  I miss the ease and freedom of walking among people and photographing what I saw in a. town filled with color and life. I enjoyed night walks as an alternative, a change, but nowadays I feel a bit like a vampire, either looking for a sun close to the horizon among the mangroves, or darkness enveloping empty city streets.

The piecemeal chaotic politicized response to the pandemic seems to indicate to me the prolongation of this ridiculous state of affairs well into 2021and I am resigned to another year of creeping round on the margins of society waiting for the all clear from reputable scientists and physicians. 

We got our mail ballots this week and I am pondering my choices, either drop them in the main post office around the corner from the elections office or vote early in person October 24th. There are many limitations on life in a  small town distant from population centers but the sort of post office shenanigans and mail ballot arguments that I read about Up North seem not very applicable here. I won't mail my ballot in Summerland Key because any mail dropped there for Key West is shipped via Homestead as part of the efficiency drive of the postal service. In normal times that makes no appreciable difference to delivery but paranoia reigns and only mail posted within Key West's zip code directed to 33040 itself, is mailed directly and locally. Absurd that one even has to think about these things.

I have no doubt elections arguments and protests and debates will continue on into the New Year and so far 2021 seems to look much like 2020. Great prospects. I only hope I can keep finding items of interest for my camera to help me ignore the madness around me.

Van By The Sea

As picnic plans go I thought it was pretty slick. Take the van go and sit by the ocean, walk the dog, enjoy the breeze and spend a few hours reading and napping. It was my one day off in ten days and I planned on enjoying the view on a lovely sunny day of low humidity and, hard to believe, no rain in the forecast.

The text from my boss set me back. Emergency overtime with two people calling out sick. It's that time of year when people like to escape the September heat by taking vacation, so even had I not wanted the extra money I would have had to go in because someone has to be there to answer 911.  I had to leave for work at eleven o'clock so I rushed Rusty downstairs, remembered to unplug the power cord and took off.  

Before hurricane irma wrecked this stretch of waterfront I used to come here every chance I could with a book and a chair and take my ease in the shade. The waterfront isn't very good for swimming as it's rocky and exceeding shallow but the breeze blows straight off the water and on the warmest days its not a bad place to be.

They've rebuilt the bridge supports and the seawall and cleared the bike path and the gumbo limbo trees are growing back. I was surprised to see the state even paid to have the paved access ramp rebuilt after the hurricane tore it up and threw it into the ocean.  So it was the work of a moment to steer the tank down the hill into the gravel and grass.  Rusty hopped out and gave the place the usual once over.

However I had a cunning plan. I had previously observed the gravel laid down along the seawall was compressed thoughtfully by some other people and I had walked it with an eye to maneuvering a 21 foot camper van on the track.

When Rusty was ready we got back in the van and we drove down the dirt track into the dead end at the end of the seawall. Compared to more experienced truck drivers I worked with many years ago I was not great at backing an 18 wheeler into a loading bay but compared to non professional drivers I have a pretty good grasp of how to go backwards.

The Promaster has an excellent (optional) reversing camera which makes it easy and I was confident we could back down if I had miscalculated and the van, all 21 feet of it, couldn't make the turn around. However I backed and frothed a few times, ignoring Rusty's impatience to descend, and got Gannet 2 facing the way we had come.

It's a lumpy track but we took it slowly and aside from some swaying (all cupboards were locked) it was no problem at all and here we are facing the way we had come:

I released the hound from hell and threw the side door open. 

The hurricane that blew in only increased after I got the back doors open and the cabin became a wind tunnel. Fans, air conditioning and all that were absolutely not necessary. I got my book out and left Rusty to root around outside.

It would have been an excellent spot to spend the afternoon and watch the sun set even though most of the view is looking south. A couple of chairs, a table all of which we carry in the basement of the van and we would have been set to have a dinner by the ocean's edge. Not bad.

I have 620 days to go until I retire but this is a way and a place to remind myself why I am looking forward to hitting the road.

I am not fond of aphorisms that are thrown out online all the time, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Or "Live your best life" or some other platitude. Portentously stating the obvious. However there is always the exception and I have no idea why I stopped to read this one but it fits with how my wife and Rusty and I are starting to adapt to van life. A little at a time, shifting our perception as we go is how we did it when we moved onto a boat prior to boating away and now we are doing the same as we prepare to go vanning. I found the advice good for life changes putting into words what I have got in the habit of doing over the decades. Its framed for "behaviors" but for me it works for lifestyle changes too!

Slowly the van will start to feel like home if we get this right.