Simonton

Looking north up Simonton Street one sunny afternoon:

Harry Truman came speeding up the street just like the good old days.

I stood on the sidewalk enjoying the sun and the blue sky and the usual wooden architecture.

And the scooter riders buzzing by in what you might think is the bicycle lane.

Florida encourages bicycles to share the lanes with internal combustion which on the face of it sounds nice.  However  Key West has the most bicycles in the state I guess and therefore has the highest per capita  bicycle accident rate in Florida. Sharing the road has decided perils in a tourist town with drivers who don't know their way and enjoy the scenery while driving.

There's lots to see:

In my upside down world Duval Street would be pedestrian only while Simonton and Whitehead Streets would carry traffic one southbound and the other one way northbound allowing room for parking and safe bicycle lanes.  That sort of thinking brings down every kind of criticism in a  town filled with opinions. Luckily mine carry no weight and can therefore be ignored.

Nigeria And Cameroon, 1979

It was in a sense, a race to chase the setting of the sun and the outcome was still in the balance. Every so often, when my backside got tired I suppose I pulled over and balanced the overloaded Yamaha SR500 on the side stand and lifted my leg over the seat. I could see a long black trail snaking down the paved highway toward Zinder whence I had ridden that day on the motorcycle. It was the steady stream of oil leaking from the gearbox of the Yamaha caused by a  broken seal and required me to buy and add oil as I rode.

Between Zinder in Niger, a former French colony where French is the unified language, and Kano in English speaking Nigeria, even in 1979 the highway was paved and a welcome relief after miles of sand dust and washboard ruts around Agadez on the way out of the Sahara Desert. I had crossed from Algeria in a German truck convoy, 350 miles of unmarked sand that in four wheel drive trucks took four days of intense struggle from Tamanrasset to Arlit where the hard packed road resumed, and where I unloaded my motorcycle from the truck and continued my bumpy ride with many falls in soft sand. On a map the brown line looks like a road, but mostly it was a suggestion.

In one of the falls my chain cover, an aftermarket rubber tube designed to keep sand out of the vulnerable drive chain came loose and I was too hot young and stupid to do a quick check of loose bolts after one of my many tumbles. The inevitable happened and the chain guard came off and bunched up in the chain sprocket sending me into a slide that for once did not cause me to fall but did cause the seal on the gearbox to burst and allow oil to seep out onto the roadway as I drove.

Unfortunately my camera was one victim of my youthful bravado which I left exposed to the elements so I have no pictures of that journey and relying on my memory is as good as I can manage. However there was one aspect of that trip that has stayed fresh in my mind forty years later. As bad as the broken seal disaster was, or appeared to be, I was confident I could overcome it. I have no idea where that certainty came from but that night I laid my head down in the dust and dirt of the Nigerian border post parking lot and went calmly to sleep secure that I would get it all solved in Kano the next day.

It was a hot dry dusty ride, happily on the familiar right hand side like Niger, as Nigeria recently decided to maintain the same driving patterns as it's neighbors, all former French colonies. I was more focused on my oil situation than remembering which side of the road to ride on... I kept pouring oil into the gearbox and the seal kept letting a  stream out onto the roadway. No one noticed or cared in the traffic jams of buses, cattle, pedestrians, scooters and large bundles of stuff carried on the backs of people of unimaginable strength and perseverance in that heat. I was 21, well nourished and exhausted.

In keeping with my weird and unexpected feeling of confidence I was picked up off the street by an expatriate British engineering firm  whose workshops built me a new seal and after a  week of luxurious hospitality I was on my way with an almost oil tight Yamaha. I watched the new seal like a hawk but it barely perspired and instead of being amazed I felt like it was all part of the adventure of getting things wrong and learning to put them right. I kept on keeping on. I took the main road to Maiduguri hoping to reach the border with Cameroon in a  couple of days. Just like that. It had all worked out.

These days northern Nigeria is the badlands of sub Saharan Africa with fierce fighting between Muslims and Christians in places that when I rode through were settled and peaceful farmland. I would never now do what I did then, stopping in a clearing by the main road, setting up my bright blue tent and heating packet soup for dinner on my gas stove.(I told you my motorcycle was hopelessly overloaded). Shepherds would stop by and squat and watch me watch them as we made signs and grunted words to try to explain my bizarre presence in their backyard. I dare say I was the only tourist for hundreds of miles. I slept the sleep of the just, unmolested.

I had always had a great fear of snakes especially after Saharan travelers told stories of snakes sliding into warm sleeping bags to escape the cold desert sand at night. I had taken the precaution of buying a tent with a sewn in ground sheet for my journey so that I might sleep critter free and it did seem to work. A couple of years later when I rode my Vespa across the US I reduced my luggage considerably and traveled with a  waterproof sleeping bag and no tent and that worked too for those snake-free roads. I put my tent up all over West and Central Africa and no one ever bothered me. I was into boondocking before it was fashionable apparently. And I didn't have Rusty the survivor to alert me to hidden perils in the wilderness!

I got lost trying to find the border with Cameroon, a former German colony managed by France and Britain after World War One with the result that half the population spoke French and the other English and no one was terribly happy about it. Least of all me as I never knew how to address anyone and the Francophones took umbrage if I greeted them in French and the English speakers looked politely pained if I opened the conversation in French.

I took an easterly route into the forest off the main road and of course the pavement ended and the dirt got rough until the track petered out into a dry river bed. My Michelin road map showed this as a road to Maroua in Cameroon where there was a main road south to the capital. I had a sneaking suspicion I was all wrong and lost but I pressed on through the river and onto the track on the other side. Youthful hope overcomes the wisdom of the elderly once again. 

Wasn't I surprised when a police station appeared in the golden afternoon sunlight. It was as though the gods were following my progress and mocking me with barriers to my ridiculous tourist impulses. On a  road little more than a dirt track in the jungle where I should have been alone and lost, a frontier post materialized. The flag was the red yellow and green tricolor of Cameroon and not the white and green stripes of Nigeria. I was back to speaking French once again I thought as I got my passport and carnet de passage (international customs bond for the bike) out of my tank bag. "Bonjour," I said confidently as I walked into the whitewashed building. "Oh hello," said the man at the desk in cultured middle class English, "What on earth are you doing here?"

I rather think the inspector was lonely in his backwater and in the manner of a Somerset Maugham short story he collared me and reminisced at some great length about the happy days of his youth in England. He looked at the consular signature on my visa, stamped and signed in distant London before the trip. He sighed, "I was at school with this fellow," he said as though we were old Etonians watching a cricket match and he wasn't thinking about a career that took a wrong turn. I forgot to mention I hadn't checked out of Nigeria owing to my unorthodox route and I wasn't going to bring it up when I did remember. A shortcoming that got me into hot water further up the road and required some dazzling footwork (in French)  to save me a return journey to the Nigerian border to straighten out my carnet de passage paperwork. I slept  one more night in the jungle setting up my tent in the dark, a job that I was quite used to and enjoyed without an audience for once; I was that alone. The next couple of  days I rode to the train station and put my motorcycle on a train from Ngaoundere to Yaoundé to bypass a stretch of highway that was reported barely passable in rainy season. The neighboring country of Chad was enjoying a private but bloody civil war and that road was closed even to halfwits like me.

I had no seat and sat in the doorway with my feet dangling outside as we rumbled through dark forest and over long bridges, stopping in stations where I could buy coffee from vendors on the platform along with peculiar flour buns for a breakfast on the move. My companions put up with this strange cuckoo in their midst and made me at home in their overnight train world. It was magic (in French mostly).The journey was almost over though I didn't know it. I had contracted jaundice in Nigeria and I was flown home, my motorcycle following later by ship. From smelly train toilet to first class Air France, the privilege of wealth, and on to an isolation bed in an Italian hospital to recover from my hepatitis in surroundings familiar and boringly sanitary. I knew I was seriously ill as my family looked horrified as the skeleton stumbled through the castle door late one night and they barely recognized me, thin frail and bright yellow. I saw the look of horror in their eyes and I knew this time I'd gone a bit too far. Half a year spent wandering, unarmed, alone and naïvely hopeful put me in the hospital immediately and for three weeks. It seemed to be in retrospect the trip that set the tone for the rest of my life when I walked out permanently on my disapproving family and all that I had grown up with. No regrets as I was never cut out to be a farmer. Much more fun to get sick in the middle of nowhere.

I actually enjoyed coping with these types of streets.

Petronia

Driving up or down Simonton Street the big old lollipop shown below marks the turn for Petronia Street.

Walking on my lunch break enjoying an 87 degree Spring afternoon I figured a few photos of some Conch cottages might not come amiss.  Here's what I rounded up:

A common-or-garden modern apartment complex end sup with a touch of the exotic with date palms in the frame:

The Mad House:

Not your average Key West style:

A longer lunch break and I might have taken up residence:

The Late Buzz Rossman

 I was told Buzz Rossman died recently. Decidedly, the generations are changing. This is from 2014.  

Buzz The Window Washer

Walking Duval with my indefatigable dog yesterday I came across a sight I had not seen before, perhaps because I don't pay enough attention.

Buzz says he came to Key West in 1982 "because it was cheap." There's a thought, cheap. But I remember at the time Key West was not the suave debonair retreat of wealthy Americans it is today. It was a dusty little fishing village with a hippy problem at the end of a very long road from Miami. I was a bit too straight laced for a hippy, gay fishing village. The fault was all mine.

Buzz was not terribly forthcoming about himself in those days but he decided back then shopkeepers needed a window cleaner so he set himself up in business. He says he grew up on a farm in south New Jersey, "...it really was the Garden State," he remarked wryly. He says his birthplace was a few miles from the first successful American glass factory which was it seems in Alloway, New Jersey. Buzz said transporting glass across the ocean broke a lot of it so two a German brothers decided to make their own in the New World. That's Alloway's claim to fame and the hint was that it's place in history inspired its son on his voyage south to a new life.

Check out his tricycle-workshop, which I suppose you refine over time if you have been squeegee-ing in windows for thirty years...think about that for a minute. Where were you when Buzz was abandoning the snowy Garden State for hot cheap Key West. He's still here, still doing it and he seems content.

He left behind a family including a twin sister but they seem to be made of sterner stuff. "They've been down a few times..." but a casual unconventional life cleaning windows and being a wine salesman ("it sells itself") has seen Buzz well all these years. It's hard to imagine he could have done better with a proper job and an address at an exit off the famous Turnpike. I look at Buzz and wonder where he got the fortitude to just squeegee and expect it to work out.

I didn't much like Key West in 1981 and I took off right away for the bright lights of California. I wonder if I could have become Buzz?

Nah, probably not on mature thought. I am a conventional wage slave.

 

We Happy Few

Denise Latta got me started in dispatching in July 2004:

If you ask me I will tell you I couldn't answer 911 in a big city. At first when I was hired in the summer of 2004 I thought to myself I could move from place to place and answer 911 for a living but I soon figured out this job wasn't nearly as portable as I would like. While it's true every 911 center in the country is looking to hire it can be arduous work beyond what I can manage in large cities filled with frequent acts of violence and serious crime. Long hours, mandatory overtime and no room for the slightest error can make 911 centers tough workplaces to handle. When concerned citizens call and complain about someone who they think "may be dead" or is simply making the town look bad to tourists by  lying huddled on a sidewalk, I think of this guy using the exact same walker I graduated to, out of my hospital bed. I am not of the school who believes poverty is a sign of lack of moral character. Each life has its story and fear of sleeping on the streets in my old age has kept me harnessed to this very job. I got a call about Mick one day and the caller, a worried tourist was surprised I knew the sleeper who I said liked to pet my dog when he met him on our walks. I still had to send an officer to wake him up.

Next year I figure I will quit and run off to a retirement that will require nothing more arduous than driving the van and walking the dog and trying to figure out how to photograph new landscapes without churning out endless clichés.  Somehow I made it through almost two decades of answering queries and sending help and listening to people rant. Sometimes I got it right and other times I got it wrong but aside from annoying a few callers I never failed to figure out who needed what where. I never missed an address such that someone died, I never sent an innocent person to jail (innocent in the sense that they did not have a warrant which was my sole concern, not what the jury ultimately decided). In that sense and the sense I got a pension it was a success. The calls that I gave  a less than stellar response to are the ones that cause me some pain as I look back over a wobbly path of being annoying, of missing the point, of lacking empathy.

Less successful is the fact that I have been exposed to the worst of human nature, and the worst of circumstances and I can tell you that at the end of a three day weekend, 36 hours of work, I take my first day off and sleep and walk Rusty and say nothing to anybody except perhaps my wife. Police officers recoil in horror at the thought they might have to dispatch. One officer told me once that they only answer maybe one in ten calls as we send different officers on each shift to a different call for service. But because we collect all the calls that come to the police station and deal with them directly we answer one hundred percent of the complaints about life. The pay is good and steady, the benefits are astonishing as I discovered in the hospital. We, like every other employer in Key West are short staffed but that is a fact of life in the Keys where everyone is hiring and no one can afford to live here. I have been one of the lucky ones in Key West a town notorious for high turnover jobs and feeble pay combined with unaffordable housing. I make a living wage, I have first rate health insurance and I get a defined benefit pension plan, the crux of my longevity.

Most phone calls are nothing very interesting especially as we also transfer calls to the administrative offices in the building. The police station is just one more city department like any other, with bureaucratic needs and forms that need filling. On the other had there are of course the calls no one wants to make, and no one wants to think about. Part of my job is calling in support of the first responders asking questions of callers no one wants to ask. I also  routinely call wreckers, the funeral home, the utility companies and so forth to help restore order in a suddenly disordered world. I have forgotten what it's like to have a normal job where everything isn't on the line, where death isn't just another incident, where Key West is more real than mythical tourist tales swapped over intoxicating drinks. My neighbors with whom we have occasional outdoor distanced dinners used to ask me how was work. I saw the look in their eyes when one day I absentmindedly told  them a too detailed irritation about my day: they recoiled and never asked again. In some respects my job gives me leprosy. I tell strangers I work for the city of Key West and leave it at that.

I remember many more of the startling calls from the beginning of my career than what happened last week at work. After 17 years I get up from my desk, leave the six computer screens to night shift and walk out into the parking lot masked and ready to climb in the car and go home. By the time I'm accelerating on North Roosevelt I have forgotten pretty much the entire day that locked me to the desk for the past twelve hours. Over the years I have taken all the ghastly calls you can imagine involving death and dismemberment, human failure filled with lies and deceptions, but even human misery gets repetitive and dulls the senses. It's awful to say but it's true unfortunately. The worst call I have taken recently involved a couple who left their dog in the car to suffocate after three hours. By the time officers found it and broke the window it was too late. Everyone was crying and the station was filled with a blanket of mourning for a dog that died a ghastly death. You can imagine how I felt. Rusty was surprised by my intensity when I got home that night. You don't brush all of it under the carpet.

Most of what I do is try to help people handle mistakes and bad judgement. Most people aren't hard core criminals, even the ones who get arrested. Most are honestly stupid enough to make a bad call. I suppose all of us could be considered that stupid from time to time at particular moments in our lives. Most of us don't unleash our inner demons but those that do and get caught have to answer, and I am usually the first step in that process, the recipient of a call from a  sobbing victim.  That rationale keeps me from feeling hostility toward the social failures who get caught up in the legal system. The bums who get drunk and lose their bicycles, the single mothers who cry over custody issues, the tourists who park badly and get their cars towed, it's all endless grist for the police mill, a flow of minor failures, that magnify themselves into life changing events from time to time. I answer the phone, type in the details and send the call to whoever, police fire or rescue, is lucky enough to deal with it. Over and over again the format repeats itself, then I try to forget on the way home and take a few pictures of Nature doing her thing. I long to retire as I am convinced I was never cut out to be a serious employee with an actual career; it happened by accident your honor. I swear.

The fact is this job and this life in Key West was a massive challenge for me and for the most part I navigated the pitfalls of office life and office gossip with only a few failures along the way. I have been the object of gossip and anger and some of it I brought on myself with incautious comments too freely given, but after 17 years of high stress work I have managed to get to the end reasonably emotionally intact. That was the challenge I set for myself in July 2004 and here I am, still here, still answering phones and still reasonably civil with my colleagues. Some of us don't get along of course but the job overrides everything and I have never seen anyone let their animosities prevent them doing their duty. As  I toil among workers so young, of a generation much derided, I have found that fact quite inspiring. For me, with all the shortcomings of my personality I rate my experience at the Department a success. I managed during the decades not to give up and quit though I came close a few times. Sometimes I expressed despair at the stress and didn't quit and I guess that was a  good result considering I face the prospect of a properly funded old age now.

Which is to say the job has been a way for me to find personal inner growth after the first decades of my life which were footloose and fancy free filled with travel and unconcerned with future planning. The middle years I was lucky to live in Key West with a stable and forgiving job as hard as it has been, and the final chapter starts next year open ended, uncertain, and filled with promise. I hope I can handle it as any well prepared expedition to the edge of experience should be handled. The irony of course is that now I will be the bum sleeping in his car after decades of taking calls from outraged tax payers spotting bums sleeping in their cars. I hope I have learned a few tricks but when the cop eventually does knock on my door to move me on I shall say nothing about my previous  career, but I will know I handled a job that would fill the cop writing me a ticket with fear and dread if anyone asked him to put down his gun and his badge and be a civilian dispatcher!