Old Bahia Honda

The seasons are changing at last in the Keys as we move from Winter High Season to Summer High Season by  way of the few weeks of doldrums in between when there is a period of fewer visitors and more open space.

I know there are fewer winter residents in the Keys because my street has no more dog walkers shuffling up and down it all hours. They'll be back after the first snowfalls blanket unspeakable places Up North, but by Easter they all leave to escape summer, much dreaded, in the Keys.

Summer visitors will start showing up when school gets out and families show up expecting to see beaches, not knowing that mainland Florida is where the beaches are...

...and the rocky Florida Keys are where the beaches look like this:

The arrival of summer means migratory birds are migrating away, just like the people so a chance to snag a pelican or two is a late season pleasure.

Ospreys hang around for the summer so life for fish remains fraught with danger. I wonder how they feel about that last flight far out of their element before ending up on the breakfast table. Not happy probably.

Down on Earth I will always take advantage of a day off to drive the van, even if its just twenty minutes from home. It feels like a road trip! 

A nice fresh breeze to blow through the vehicle, but first Rusty needs to scope out the scene.

The new (1982) road bridge across the deep waters of Bahia Honda, always good for a moment of abstract art:

I don't think the scenery is improved by scribbles but the meessage caught my eye:

Bottoms Up! Fishermen trolling like ducks ona  pond....

The old pump house was blown away finally by hurricane Irma after 75 years on this spot. 

It sits next to to the original water line which was  run from Miami to key West during World War Two to supply the expanded Naval Base.

I took the advice given to me on this page and removed the shackles from the new winch which has the added benefit of making the installation even less obvious. My next move will be to organize a driving lesson to learn how to use the thing as necessary when necessary. Which I hope won't be often.

Parking to receive the breeze through the side door made for a pleasant moment drinking tea and reading and not being close to a ringing phone.

I bought a door mat for the van, a stiff piece of PVC that I can use to lie on the ground to change a tire say, or to step on before I step inside. It works well and folds easily away.

I also used it to lie on the ground and test the spare tire arrangement. The driving to Alaska books stress having a  full sized spare onboard and the Promaster arrangement requires winching the spare down from under the back of the van. Having a firm pad to lie on is invaluable it turns out. I blanched at the cost of $80 but at 63 years of age I think I'm entitled to lie down comfortably as I insert the winch into the slot on the frame to lift the van. 

I then stuck my foot onto the bumper step and waxed the windshield, my monthly chore. It's an odd occupation waxing a windshield but a few months ago I had a plastic cover put on the glass which is supposed to prevent gravel strikes cracking the windshield. My wife says she's noticed two strikes here in Florida and the glass is prefect. To keep the plastic coat supple I have to keep waxing it. I'm motivated as I'm told Alaskan roads are full of gravelly bits thrown up by passing vehicles.

All these nuances Rusty ignores. He's grown to enjoy the van and jumps up immediately and takes his place ready to ride. When we arrive he knows how to handle the great outdoors. With a sound nap.

Summerland Key

I grumble to anyone who will listen, and there aren't many left who care, that y days off are marked by rain and heavy gray skies. Wednesday went exactly that way. Boo hiss. Rusty didn't care, he ran and splashed ahead of me.

I was surprised to see a tree stump in the path looking like a cow skull. I knew it wasn't anything so esoteric as the hound rushed on by without a second glance. And from there we moved from Georgia O'Keefe to the Henri Cartier Bresson moment, decisively.

The French photographer who died five or six years ago created a belief in the value of the "decisive moment" in photography, exemplified by one his most famous pictures, a fat man in a hat and raincoat jumping a puddle in 1932. Cartier Bresson said later it was a moment captured when he stuck his camera through a gap in a fence and he simply squeezed the button. I saw my decisive moment coming and this was the middle of three attempts. Rusty continued to ignore me naturellement.

When first I saw these pipes organized into a battlefield I also saw a lot of spent paintball ammunition on the ground but these days it seems the war is won as the graffiti are fading and the ground is clean. I hope the right side came out on top.

There is an awful lot of cement out here in the abomination of desolation. Once upon a time the mangrove swamps were seen as useless and fit only to be used as a dumping ground. I've stumbled across vehicles of every description along the trails and around here I have photographed a gently decaying cement mixer of all things.

Graffiti mostly looks like scribble with the occasional obscenity thrown in to shock but every now and again one wonders why the artist hasn't gone on to greater things.

I found a courtyard lifted from the lost city of Atlantis, or possibly a pile of construction debris laid out symmetrically for some obscure reason.

Bits of rubber, light poles, cement and wires. It's all here decomposing.

It was my day off so rain threatened all the time we were out but after an hour it was time to go home even though the threatened rain had held off. 

This area must have been a gravel pit before it became a dumping ground. It used to be legal to dig holes in the mangroves and remove gravel for construction before anyone figured out you couldn't have fish without mangroves. So now they are protected and dumping is not allowed.

Highway One runs next to the not so pretty but probably hurricane proof block that is for sale on Summerland Key. It's right next to the highway but it has some space surrounded by a high wall right on a  canal. Sounds ideal for an unsocial millionaire who likes traffic noise.

The weather is become hot and sticky already so Rusty has adopted a summer posture of a slow pace, much sniffing and frequent dunks in murky warm water. He got his bath when we got home and he remained annoyed at me for about thirty minutes after he escaped the towel rub down and scampered off to seek solace from my wife.

A seaplane.  Not fascinating, I know but I find them to be the most interesting planes I see around here. Next year, virus permitting, I want to fly onto a  glacier in Alaska and  those flights  go on planes equipped not with floats but with skis. Alaskan planes go skiing. 

Back on planet Earth where humans are meant to roam I started looking down at the rocks and shapes underfoot, temporarily exposed by low tides and a rapidly receding  dry season. 

I had anticipated the summer flooding season so I was wearing my Crocs, a consideration Rusty doesn't worry about. 

A snail or something similar had been for an underwater walk, spinning out a graffito because crawling off to dry land through the puddle:

A little sunshine, a little color and a reflection.

On our way back the non skull stump was still there sitting proud in the puddle. Rusty, panting heavily had to come back with me to reality and chores and deadlines and stuff.  

Impatience

My days off fall into a pattern, my evenings after work are fairly predictable, there is talk I may have to go back to night shift as we are falling desperately short of 911 dispatchers. I am happy enough working day shift but we don't always get what we want and my comfortable routines may be upset one more time before I get out the door.

Summer time means long evenings usually with some sunlight, less traffic and sweaty walks with my dog and my small camera. IN summer I tend to use my Lumix LX100ii which weighs half the amount of my big camera and feels like less of a burden when my shirt collar is sticking to the back of my neck.

There isn't much to see in the mangroves so I look for patterns and shapes and colors and shades while Rusty runs back and forth nose down. It's a companionable way to spend 40 minutes after our nightly YouTube exercise sweat on arrival at home, when my wife cooks and Rusty and I walk.

Webb Chiles has gone sailing in a large arc across the Atlantic and as he got his boat ready for a trip around Bermuda I felt a twinge of excitement anticipating my own departure next year. The year ahead promises lots of last minute appointments and decisions and the deeper we get into the year the further my mind floats from the daily routine.

Reading about the Yukon and Alaska I have realized one thing and that is I haven't a clue about animals I keep hearing about. Caribou reindeer elk and moose and what is the difference. Google knows and apparently they are all forms of deer. 

Difference.guru 

The main differences between the moose, elk, caribou, and reindeer would be in their body size, as well as the size and shape of their antlers. All four of these animals are species of deer but among the four, the moose is the largest. The elk, caribou and reindeer are almost the same size. When it comes to the antlers, the moose is the most different since its antlers are flat and wide. The caribou’s antlers can be easily identified since they are tall and curved. The antlers of the elk and reindeer are somewhat similar. However, the reindeer’s antlers are covered in velvet.

Among the four, the moose is the only solitary animal, while the elk, caribou and reindeer often travel in herds. The moose and elk are browsers or selective feeders. Reindeer, on the other hand, are grazers or roughage feeders. The caribou is noted to be an intermediate feeder or mixed forager.

The moose can be found in Canada and Alaska, while elk live in mountainous forests in North America and East Asia. Caribou are found in North America, Europe, Asia, and Greenland, whereas reindeer live primarily in the Arctic.

I like how the notion that one wants to travel brings out the nanny in people who don't like to travel. I have been reading a history of the Great Game and when I compare the places I want to wander to the fates of people who got mixed up in Empire building and that gives me a certain perspective. I think of Colonel Stoddart who was held by the Emir of Bokhara for four years variously under house arrest and in a  pit filled with rats and scorpions before he was beheaded in the square in front of Bokhara's Registan in 1842.  I shall spare him a thought if I get the van that far. I doubt in any event I shall be put in a  pit of beheaded but I suppose anything is possible.

Rusty has got used to the van and he hops in and out like he has been doing it all his life. He sits outside while we park and watches the world go by. When he and I are alone he rides on the passenger seat looking down on traffic as we go. He won't lay down on the bed by himself when we are underway but if my wife takes a nap he'll join her. I think he will do well on the road and I rely on him to let me know if a caribou or elk or something is in the vicinity. 

I face a  life of stress at work trying to make ends meet without enough employees but knowing there is an end in sight makes it bearable. At home my wife has a spreadsheet developing with chores to do and services to organize. She found a mail forwarding service based in Florida so we keep our state residence which is much prized for not having state income taxes. She has her eye on an airconditioned third floor storage place near the Miami airport which looks unlikely to flood and to be close by when we fly home. It's all in the details.

Colonoscopy? Tooth cleaning? Eyeglass prescription update? Order spare parts for the van? It all has to be done before we leave. It is an object lesson in how many complicated ways our lives are weaved.   

We had a fully vaccinated dinner at the house of a friend and his wife, a refugee from Venezuela (a wealthy one, not a manual laborer) looked frantic and sucked air through her teeth as she put down her piece of steak and shook her head violently when I spoke cheerfully of my ambitions to sit on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. That notion went over like a fart in church and I got a long lecture about the communists in Bolivia and so forth as though I were planning to set myself up in business there.  The steak was good so I focused on that and let the hostess vent.

Her husband thought I was nuts and kept nudging my wife who speaks fluent Spanish and teaches English as a second language to avoid putting up with my lunacy. She of course wants to see Macchu Picchu in Peru and the wineries of Argentina and that provoked another fearsome round of warnings and head shaking. Dessert was a rather delicious cheese cake from Publix. I closed my eyes as well as my ears and focused on the creamy texture. 

Finally Manfred said he wanted to see the van so out we trooped and I was pretty certain there was another lecture in the works. Instead something very weird happened, and as I explained the van and it's systems he got a faraway look in his eyes. I think this might work he said. That's a good idea, he said and nodded in approval at the winch and the solar panels and all the stuff draped off the modest Promaster. 

He was a lot more thoughtful as we waved goodbye. He and his wife life in a palatial home on a  canal with all modern conveniences and great beauty and no way would she be seen dead on the road. And yet I can't help but think that there was a little seed planted there and in a  way I felt sad.

He spoke of slowing down and feeling less strong at seventy than he had a decade earlier. That sensation of life slipping away I suppose. I haven't felt it yet but knowing its coming pushes me harder in the direction of getting stuff done. I look forward to seeing them again, especially if he gets to ride along a bit, and the van allows him to bring out the boy as it does for me. For now I sit still and mark time and prepare to face all the daily irritations of getting stuff done. The payoff will come later.