1981

I was a teenager and visiting a friend in Rome when she lent me a copy of National geographic magazine, a publication filled with glossy photographs and uncomplicated prose extolling the beauty of the world around us. You could only get a subscription by recommendation of another member of the National Geographic Society and she nominated me for membership. The idea grew in my head to visit the US as I started to receive and devour my own magazines.

I knew of an English language arts movie house in Rome and I happened upon a showing of Easy Rider, a movie that fueled my ambitions. I was going to ride a Harley across the US, though I was planning to fund the ride from my savings not by dealing cocaine. I also shelved plans to be murdered on my trip in imitation of the movie...I ended up making the trip, not on a  Harley Davidson which had a terrible reputation for reliability in 1980, but on a  modest Vespa which by chance was promoted as the ideal long distance ride by an Italian journalist who made his name riding a  Vespa to Tokyo in 1964. 

I rode south from New York city where I landed the day they shot the pope in Rome, the city I had just left. I arrived bright eyed and bushy tailed and negotiated my multiple entry visa  terms with an older cheerful Immigration officer. "How long do you want?" he asked "How long will you give?" I parried. "I asked first," he said smiling. "A year?" I was tentative and he gave me six months. Plenty of time for what I had to do, which was ride to San Francisco from New York via Mexico which was on my list of interesting countries to visit.

It was, as I recall one of the wetter Springs on record, endless days of rain that washed out the Shenandoah Valley but the sun came out in the south and I was soon riding in decent weather confounded by the differences so marked in the New World. Turning right on the red felt very alien to me, as much as it annoys me now when I drive in Europe and I am hamstrung at red traffic lights.

National Geographic showed a ferry running from Key West to Cancun and my plan in those pre-Internet days was to not skip New Orleans and then back track from the Crescent City around the Gulf Coast to Key West, board the ferry and ride up through Mexico back to the US. My first night in the Keys was at Long Key State Park sitting at a picnic table writing up my travel notes when a blonde sidled up and started asking about my spending habits.

We laugh about that encounter today but Denise was always curious about foreigners and travelers and me and a Vespa  were bound to be roped in as she made summer money doing a  tourist survey for her college course. She invited me back to her home in Delray beach after I was done with the Keys.  It was not enough to put me off the ferry but of course I agreed (in principle).

I rode to Mallory Square and asked about the ferry to Mexico. My question was greeted with guffaws and seeing my long face a beer in a brown paper bag was pressed into my hand. As usual no one was ready to believe I had ridden a Vespa from New York, but there I was and there was Key West. 

It was a nice enough town but it was a long way from anywhere and after years spent living in an idyllic isolated mountain village in Italy I was ready for the bright lights of a more cosmopolitan America. Key West in 1981 really was isolated. The road took five hours as I recall to ride to Homestead on narrow bridges and a highway that was nothing like the modern high speed road. It was picturesque but the outside world was far away.

I went back to mainland Florida for more road adventures. I found them too, weaving a path through Texas and down to Guadalajara and back to the Grand Canyon before touring California within my allotted six months. The n I flew to Japan, took a boat to the USSR and from there took a series of trains to West Berlin. The woman I met in California was waiting in Florence which made the homecoming much less of a let down. 

It was Valentine's Day in 2000 when we landed back in Key West, the latest arrival in a  series of visits we had made since we got married six years before. This time we were toying with the idea of settling down as we had found the tropical heat of our journey much to our liking. Layne's arthritis had been much less painful in the heat compared to the cold damp climate of the California Coast.

We arrived from a  long slow wet trip from Mexico and anchored at dusk west of Wisteria Island. I took the dogs ashore for a run on dry land which they appreciated which was how we came across a campfire burning on the beach. The guy tending the fire  asked if we had just arrived and I allowed as how we had. He had no curiosity and I offered no details but he handed me a beer to celebrate my arrival, the planting of my anchor, as though he knew the pleasure of rest after a  spell at sea. It was silent and companionable and I felt good.

A few weeks later a friend of mine confided in me that he was surprised we settled in so quickly. Usually, he said people arrive and talk about getting jobs but you settled down right away. We make a plan only when we intend to follow through and we did. 

I had never and did not plan to ever sit still for a couple of decades but Key West sucked me in. Most people come for vacation and we came to earn pensions, and Layne was quite clear about that.

My life in Key West has been rich with experiences and friendships and learning curves some far too steep for my liking. I learned to love and respect statistics here, and I went back to school to learn. I've never had a drink at Sloppy Joe's or Ricks's and don't plan to, though Captain Tony's I have enjoyed a couple of times. My Key West is a humble thing but it is mine own, mangroves, watery landscapes, mosquitoes and the perils of back country walks getting lost and enjoying it. 

It has not been a conventional vacation in Paradise but it has been great fun. This time next year I hope we shall be in Montana, passing through.

A Windy Day

Fun on a windy day at White Street Pier. 

Disturbance 1

Thursday's bulletin from the National Hurricane Center caught me slightly by surprise:

A non-tropical low pressure system is located about 800 miles east 
of Bermuda.  The low is expected to develop gale-force winds later 
today while it moves generally northward. The low is then forecast 
to move westward and southwestward over warmer waters tonight and 
Friday, and it will likely become a subtropical cyclone near and to 
the northeast of Bermuda on Friday. The system is expected to move 
toward the north and northeast into a more hostile environment by 
late Sunday into Monday. For more information on this developing low 
pressure area, please see High Seas forecasts issued by the NOAA 
Ocean Prediction Center and forecast products issued by the Bermuda 
Weather Service.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...high...70 percent.
* Formation chance through 5 days...high...90 percent.

Every it seems as though May a disturbance disturbs the North Atlantic and every year the feeling is one of wholesale rejection. This is normal, one storm does not a season predict and so forth. And yet the little voice wonders if Bermuda deserves to get clipped by a cyclone this early in the year. Now Bermuda and tomorrow...?

I was discussing my feelings this hurricane season with my wife and I told her that this is the first year I face summer storms with some trepidation. I overthink most things and in this case I suspect I am so close to ending my static relationship with hurricanes that I am gaining an unreasonable fear of getting whacked one last time.

In our first world of building codes and relative wealth hurricanes aren't perilous to life inasmuch as we get plenty of warning and buildings don't collapse on a whim. The 140 mile an hour winds of Hurricane Irma in 2017 caused plenty of damage everywhere but in the end 72 Floridians died and lots of them by neglect, the elderly condemned by power outages and no help.  That many are missing presumed dead in one shipwreck in India following a cyclone there this week.

Hurricanes cause disruptions, they ruin structures and economies, in vacation land evacuations are a nuisance. Survivors live in great discomfort if the hurricane spawned lots of tornadoes that tore everything up. Five days without water and weeks without electricity wore us down after Hurricane Irma. Meals Ready To Eat kept us going but it was a matter of surviving and plugging along.

Repairs take forever as there just aren't enough people and machines to put everything straight instantly. It's hard to sleep and tiring to think and boring to be stuck picking up trash all the time. It isn't deadly but it is dreary.

I have always accepted Hurricane Season as the price one pays, and our plans were simple. Schools close Layne and Rusty drive north, no hesitation, and they got out of the Irma traffic jam throughout Florida by arriving in Pensacola before the evacuations were even ordered. I sat alone at home cocooned by hurricane shutters pottering around putting the last few things away and hoping for the best. The house survived intact, but the trash piles and the rats and the smells impacted our neighborhoods for weeks.

Answering 911 calls and telling people in Monroe County there were no responders was harrowing, because when the storm arrived there was no help to be had, which is the reason for the evacuation orders. If you stay you are on your own and that is a horrid reality to face in a society where help is always to hand. You don't forget those moments.

I had hoped to sit this season out but staffing shortages make that unlikely. I want to store the van undercover somewhere on the mainland as the destruction of all our plans would break my heart. My wife is going to California in September and Rusty will spend any lockdown with people he knows and trusts as I can't keep him at the police station. 

These tedious calculations are the reality of life in the near tropics, and then when the National Hurricane Center wakes us up again the casual planning is made real. And Hurricane Season is supposed to run from June 1st to November 30th. As they are weather phenomena there are always outliers. 

Last year Webb Chiles who was planning a voyage noticed, because he watches weather closely, that hurricanes had developed a nasty new trick in these heated times, of becoming massively more powerful in very short order indeed. Today's Category One becomes tomorrow's Category Four with no warning.  That's a nice new wrinkle I shall have to keep my eye on. And with Disturbance One on the tracking map we shall have to start keeping an eye on the forecasts from now till December.

Year Of The Ginsu

For my wife and I 1998 was the year of the Ginsu knives. That Spring my wife had called my bluff by telling the owner of her law firm that she was taking off on a sabbatical...after I had thrown a hissy fit about growing old stuck in the same space in Santa Cruz, and she didn't care! She really did care and off we went to Central America.  In point of fact when the six months were up she found a pay phone in Puntarenas Costa Rica and while admiring our boat floating at anchor nearby told Mitchell her life as a lawyer was over. She didn't tell him she was going to become a teacher in Key West because at that point our future and that of our dogs was an open book filled with blank pages; nothing was written. 

We had six months to get ready for the grand sailing migration to Mexico from San Diego, an informal rally called the Baja Ha Ha organized by Latitude 38, the west coast sailing newspaper. Normally Layne and I are not into tours and gatherings and flocking together but faced with our first long passage into a profound unknown, and given the unorganized nature of this rally, by then in its 6th edition, we figured we could fit in. No one held our hand to Cabo San Lucas, we sailed alone and gathered at a couple of anchorages along the way. It was the prefect introduction to a very long undertaking for our family.

The summer of 1998 we spent getting rid of some things, preserving far too much stuff in our garage which we turned into a storage locker while we prepared to rent out the house and granny unit. The idea was that we would sail more relaxed if we knew everything wasn't totally committed to the boat which might easily end up sunk, crushed, stolen, or burned to the waterline. Disaster is one's constant mental companion while preparing an undertaking. It seemed inconceivable at the time we could make it 6,000 miles to Key West through a dozen countries. Curt with his spare mooring outside Garrison Bight seemed a very long way away even as he invited us to hang with him when we arrived. We took him up on the offer in 2000.

I find myself once again in a Ginsu frame of mind as I face the last ten months before departure, and its a frame of mind I don't recommend as it becomes a note  note  symphony in the head. I find it hard to concentrate on fiction when I read. I find myself drawn most to literature that somehow reflects the next phase of my life - travel, overlanding, vehicle preparation, all the tedious notes that fill the mind of someone uncertain of his ability to make the thing happen. That summer 23 years ago Layne and I sat up in a bed made of plywood over cinder blocks, like middle aged students and we watched late night television infomercials to empty our minds and relax. That thing could be useful we told ourselves watching eager salespeople on television, as we telephoned in our orders for helpful gadgets. Cellphones were a novelty and the Internet was a military secret in those days of the Sears catalogue and Penny's mail order stores. We still have the Ginsu knives we ordered that summer. They took the boat trip and are still in our kitchen drawers today on Cudjoe Key as I write. They were excellent and are still sharp.

Nowadays we exchange ideas in texts. I sent Layne a text with a link for a suspension lift for the van to travel torn up roads, and she returned the compliment suggesting a  very small electric cabin heater for Alaska summers and Andean boondocking at 10,000 feet in Chile. Amazon is the new infomercial. We decided to dump our mosquito proof gazebo as it is big and heavy and we can't usually be bothered to put it up. A friend bought it eager for the extra "outdoor room."

It is impossible to think of everything and at some point the umbilical cord must be cut. Layne's recovery from shoulder surgery is going well, the pain is dropping dramatically and soon she will start physical therapy. In two weeks she will be retired. I'm expecting she will channel her energy into making doctor's appointments and dealing with the paperwork that I am useless at. We keep promising ourselves this will be an orderly departure, lists will shrink not grow, all will be settled by the time daylight saving time comes around in 2022.

Rusty has his vaccination card and his place in the van. Layne has prepared a space to store his food and we have several collars with his name and phone number on them in case we manage to lose them. Losing him is not something I want to think about. I used to worry on the boat if a dig were to disappear. Death is one thing, a finality, but disappearing into an uncertain void is too awful.  

I have entered the twilight zone of one more, one more hurricane season so I keep my fingers crossed.  I realized I have  sat out every single storm since  July 2004 and this year I was hoping I would get a break but we are so short staffed I doubt I will have that option this summer. Hurricane Irma is not an experience I want to repeat, the aftermath was even worse than Hurricane Wilma in 2005, a storm of lesser winds and dreadful flooding.    

I laugh at myself as we go into another hurricane season, because in years past I never really cared that much. Hurricane season is part of life in the Keys, and not just here. But this year because it's my last time around everything seems more delicate, more in balance. Layne is going to California in September and for that month I'm going to take the van to Central Florida and store it under cover. I couldn't bear being stuck at work and having my retirement home destroyed. 

All these considerations pile up as the weeks go by, a final tooth check, an eye exam, a colonoscopy because one is old and that exam is a mark of advancing years, and this year is the Year of The Ginsu, the period of recollection and preparation and the hope that the blade is as sharp now as it was 25 years ago. So far, so good.