Searstown

Rusty is a living, breathing, alarm clock as I am reminded each morning at 4:23, two minutes before my phone alarm goes off. The  only place I can walk him at that hour without fear of tripping over mangrove roots or getting lost in the woods, or worse getting bored walking the same few suburban sidewalks is to drive 25 minutes to  Key West,  city of light and smells and interest.  One day I found myself  not keen to drive an extra twelve minutes to Mallory Square so I stopped at Searstown on the eastern edge of town. To my astonishment Rusty became totally absorbed in the place, trotting back and forth nose down. He didn't miss Duval Street at all. Good boy!

Downtown Key West has produced pictures for me for years but like most people the urban/suburban industrial grime of the shopping centers had passed me by. Being driven to record as much of key West as I can now I figured I might enjoy a different view. And it turns out I did so I brought Rusty back. Who needs Mallory Square for a backdrop?

In the years before the pandemic I think my pleasure at eating at Outback was one of the conch-iest things I did. Native born residents of Key West love Outback and I do too, much to the chagrin of visitors who ask me where do the locals eat? Miami Subs and Outback I say, because it's true.  Conchs love Outback because its good value unpretentious and its warm and efficient in a town where finding good help is getting harder and harder. Now of course after the virus fiasco every outing will be an adventure. I think we are meeting friends at Off the Hook next week so that will be a start.

            

Sears Roebuck is continuing to fade into memory but the signs are still posted. Sears created the modern shopping mall experience for Conchs in 1965 offering services and seen only on the mainland, and the company paid well and gave employment for life. In the age of Amazon where you shop and they drop Sears sounds quaint and I suppose in the end it was. I can't stop thinking about how Sears was the Amazon of the wild frontier supplying settlers with catalogs and shipping by US mail. Going...going...

                   

When we travel and stay in hotels which are modern roadside accommodations thus usually plunked right next to shopping malls which are similar to Searstown, though of course much bigger than this. Just like at home if you plunk Rusty down in a Hampton Inn he wakes up like an alarm clock and I, even more grumpy because I'm not at work and entitled to sleep,  assemble room key, leash, plastic bags, phone and camera and creep out of the hotel to explore at 5 in the morning.

       

By now it was close to six am and the early workers were starting to show up. You have to wonder how many jobs they have to hold to pay rent. Stock Island is under threat of development and no one would say the trailers there are a joy to behold but they are cheap-ish and house many of the low paid workers that keep Key West functioning.

           

I took a complaint call on Sunday from a resident of Casa Marina, the posh neighborhood, saying someone was sleeping in the car on her street and he made her "uncomfortable." She wanted him gone by the time she got back from church. Okey doke. I did my duty and a police officer cleared the suspicious sleeper from the street. ( That will be me next year - don't think I'm not taking notes on how to avoid being noticed...).

Later the man called and wanted to know why he had been moved along. I explained that those calls are a response to citizen complaints and I wasn't sure what is illegal about sleeping in your car during the day. He told me he works the night shift at the airport and he was tired, too tired to drive safely home to Miami and he wanted to take a nap before he started the drive. I sympathized and I think he understood we are all cogs in a bureaucratic chain. I felt bad for him, much good my empathy did.

Here's the thing: more and more people are coming to the Keys for better paid jobs while living on the mainland in more affordable housing. It's been going on already for a while in the Upper Keys that are closer to Homestead and Florida City. Nowadays it is starting to happen with greater frequency even in Key West. This situation must be giving community leaders for pause but there is no sign of any sense of urgency about how to make the Lower Keys sustainable with workers committed to the community.  I find it extraordinary and disheartening.

Even in police jobs that pay well the cost of housing and the economic commitment required to raise a family is too much. For officers from out of town there is no family support to help raise children while spouses may not make enough money to on one of these hospitality jobs...It takes luck and persistence to have all the possibilities line up so by contrast its much easier to live well somewhere else and there goes the exodus.

                                

It's never been easy to live in Key West and I suppose its safe to say when we landed in town with the idea of remaining we had no obligations and our boat gave us a place to stay. After that it was having a plan combined with persistence and of course good luck. Nowadays it seems as though having a comfortable berth in Homestead might be just as useful. That's a hard concept for me to wrap my head around, working by three hour commute. I belong to a different generation, we did things differently then to land in Key West, we walked from our boats.

And so, after fixing absolutely nothing in my head it was time to go home to bed. Just another magnificent sunrise over US One.

 

The Holiday

RIP David Thorpe

 David Thorpe was an English photographer who kept a blog about photography and wrote with the sort of self deprecating wit I enjoy. He made YouTube videos and photography with an emphasis on gear which interested me less. Obviously video spread his name further afield which is nice, but his written words were gold. He died of cancer May 26th and amid the usual online lamentation I found myself revisiting photographs from his time as a newspaper photographer. He posted this picture below, of refugee children in Central Africa. His  picture and his commentary are typical of the man, the thinker and photographer. I am not one of those who thinks "everything happens for a reason" and  I question the how people living comfortable lives can suggest that it does, in the face of these horrors:

"Covering the Rwanda genocide changed my view of the world. I realised how utterly bloody awful life could be if you were unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I realised (maybe not realised, more understood, felt) how lucky and privileged are most of us. We just take it for granted, as we would.

Look at these kids. In the West, they would probably be being taken to school by their mum or their dad. They'd have friends and warm bedrooms and fish fingers. Here, in a camp in Goma, they have nothing. Their parents are murdered or have died from cholera. They have just been hosed down to clean them.

I went on this job with my friend and (then) colleague Stuart White. We were camping with Oxfam people, surrounded by death. Late in the evening, we heard music. In the darkness, we made our way towards it. There was a hotel. There was a band playing and the restaurant was full of aid workers. We went in and ate a 3 course meal with wine.

It was surreal. I still find it hard to believe. Why were we eating a 3 course meal in a restaurant when a mile away people were keeling over from hunger and disease? Because we're worth it? I don't think so. Because we're lucky more like it."

                                  _____------------_____

He took pictures of war and celebrity, of human interest as he calls lovely animals-with-people pictures, and he thought about life as it is lived. But even in the small things, the weirdness of everyday living gave Thorpe cause to ponder and say something profound:

"A few years ago I went into a Darty electrical retailer in France to buy a digital clock alarm. it was €3.95. I unpacked it, plugged it in, set the time and it worked perfectly. But there was a little voice inside of me saying “this doesn’t feel right”. Like anyone else, I’m happy to buy something that’s a bargain but this struck me as somehow immoral. I may sound mad but it should have cost more. I’m used to good value for money but this went beyond that. If it had been three times the price it would still have been good buy and I would still have bought it. It was worth more than that. It just seemed plain wrong to me."

I miss David Thorpe already and I never met him or told him how much I appreciated his wit. He made no bones about being baffled by the technology he loved and explained so eloquently:

"I remember one day being in Hampton Court Park when a robin landed on the handlebars of my Brompton bike as it leaned against a tree. A charming little snap. I needed to act fast but simply couldn’t get the Lumix G9 to fire. It seemed to have a mind of its own. No amount of fiddling made any difference. I switched the camera on and off to reset it to my standard Custom setting and got my focus back. No joy. The robin, having watched my bumbling, ascertained that I was not threatening its territory and therefore had no need to peck out my eyes. So it flew away."

Standing, Not Walking

I feel stuck in a  rut at the moment and I don't know quite how to get out of it. A fellow I met on the road many years ago remarked that he expected me to run out of words sooner or later. Bob Leong was one of the nicest people you could hop[e to meet on the Internet and made friends all over the place. I thought he was wrong and I told him so at the time. 

Aside from riding motorcycles Bob was an avid Corvette owner in his corner of far Western Canada and on a  trip to the heart of Corvette-land in Kentucky, you might call it a pilgrimage, he died in his sleep in distant 2014. As sudden and as unexpected as it was, his death caused all of us that knew and liked him to sit back a second and think. I remembered his words and even after he was no longer around to debate with, I continued to disagree. Now I wish he were here to help me unravel this conundrum that he had predicted: some day you will use up all your words.

I'm not sure if I've squeezed Key West dry and thus am ready to see something new, or if, as I believe more likely I am ready to see something new and thus am failing to see Key West in a fresh new light each day. It is a conundrum. Thinking about it put me in mind of the wisdom of the late Bob Cheong.

The every day beauty is here, but my ability to capture the essence of daily life here is slipping through my fingers. I cannot believe reading about the tightening noose of lack of economic sense in this community makes for interesting reading. I am constrained from writing about my difficulties at work where we have 15 budgeted positions and only eight of them are filled. Going to work constantly short staffed  is wearing me down, I admit it.  

Normally the rush of people this time of year slows down and for a couple of months before family summer vacations we see a period of quiet, of refreshment after the winter crowds. This year as usual Covid has changed all that and the pent up desire to travel and be away means Key West hotels are full and some of the money lost during the height of the pandemic is being made up.

I am told the city itself has done okay during this time of stress, with cautious budgeting and planning for the worst, so the city according to our union negotiators is not in bad financial shape. Good news I suppose for people looking at a long term job situation. But Key West as I frequently point out has an astonishing capacity for reinventing itself and surviving. 

 I keep walking Rusty, taking pictures, seeking new angles or shapes or perspectives, different light, sticking with an awkward lense to force myself to see and not take things I've seen for twenty years for granted. I want new horizons and different challenges and ther thought of learning to see on the fly, as we drive by makes me nervous. I know what to expect in the Keys, rainy season or dry, morning noon or evening or night.

Places I love, the origami tree shadows against the colors of the setting sun, the clouds of summer, the shadows of noon with the sun overhead, the irritating sweat of summer walks fogging the camera and my glasses and my mind. It's what I know. It's safe. 

Time for a change, time to risk making a mistake, time to see new things and new places and put my view of them on this same page. My wife is wrapping up her last school year, her last class is taught, she has some papers to shuffle and graduations to attend but he career as a teacher is over.  Next week she starts her new and important job of Chief Planning Officer for the Alaska to Argentina expedition of 2022. Rusty the Chief Security Officer has been practicing sleeping in the van under the air conditioner these hot summer days so he is transitioning nicely. I am still showing up at my desk holding to the routine. It seems unfair but my wife says she started working before me all those years ago. 

This time next year I hope to be in Alberta, or the Yukon perhaps, depending on the snowline. Bob Leong country, as it were. I wonder what I shall be seeing. This page will still be here, I've added a url to it already, thegoldenvan.com but it simply forwards along with Key West Diary  to this same page: conchscooter.blogspot. A different photograph, a new tag, the more things change the more they will stay the same. I hope new words will come with new environments and I hope my camera will reveal them to my eye.  

Slices of Life

I mentioned to a friend how this new distillery in town, very fashionable, was trading on the Hemingway connection, and her reaction struck me then, a while ago, and sticks with me now. 

Only in Key West she said, can you advertise liquor using a long dead literary figure; everyone else uses bikinis and sunsets. She had a point, so now when I walk past the distillery I take the Hemingway connection as a compliment to the modern class of Key West drinkers. The rum itself isn't bad either.

I asked, he said yes, and told me his name was Bushman. I really think I need to take a trip to the sunset at Mallory Square, long overdue to update my database of street performers.  The people I remember are long gone. swept away by hurricanes and the virus.

In the photo above I was photographing the appalling agglomeration of wires and fortuitously a pigeon flew into the frame. I was listening to a discussion of photography taboos and the removal of wires from pictures by computer is one such. I can't make up my mind if the mad nests of wires add to or detract from the charming weirdness of a town exposed to the elements and which would benefit from burying the wires. Too expensive they say. Below we see a typical outdoor scene in Key West. random wires and phone lines and junction boxes slapped outside buildings, Jimmy Buffett's studio in this case, slapped with a. coat of paint and called good. Good but ugly.

The pizza place on Greene Street, run by an actual Italian who ones for New York, is up for sale. Apparently some organization that rates these things puts Duetto in the top ten pizza places in the country. That boggled my mind, but then again every day we are bombarded with best this and that irrelevance. It is very good pizza by my standards. Their focaccia sandwiches (piadini in Italy) are Americanized and very good too.

The light was rather poor so the two cyclists who ran into my frames were moving too fast for the shutter speed set for stationary shots. And yet this guy illustrates perfectly the day off in Key West. Bucket, rod and bicycle and off to fish. At speed past my camera.

This guy rode into the picture which was going to make a point about parking. At first I was irritated at myself. Then I saw the expression next to the no parking sign. I was reminded how maddening parking has remained in Key West over the years.  Too many cars and too few spaces. 

I am forced to the conclusion that life is a matter of mathematics. I haven't quite fleshed out the proposition but I think that at the heart of all human aggravations numbers are the explanation. Luckily you can't blame numbers for anything as they are blameless. Real estate in Key West is become so expensive even tables are shrunk in size to accommodate more customers in less room.  Yesterday's bar stool is today's table:

Webb Chiles put a burr up where burrs are not wanted when he pointed out to me the human population in the Southern Hemisphere is only 20% of the global total. Since 1981 the US population has increased by about 100 million people to a grand estimated total of 330,000,000. And they all have to park their cars, and some days it seems like they do it in Key West.

No idea what this trio was doing but nowadays cell phones carry photographs and sometimes they are well worth peering at. I hope these were. 

Mallory Square

The Nao Santa Maria has returned to Key West which arrival has been duly photographed and so forth. When I strolled by last weekend I was reminded of the effort it took me to get aboard on it's last visit to Key West. I was using a cane and relied on my arms to pull me around the ship as my legs were not very functional. I enjoyed ambling by just like anyone else with two legs, on this fleeting sighting.

The ship is a re-creation of the vessel the Italian Christopher Columbus used to discover the land named for Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian explorer. The irony is that Columbus discovered the Bahamas for his Spanish patron and colonized, not very well and with great brutality, islands in the Caribbean but he never set foot on the country we call America. Unlike Columbus the modern Spaniards have electronics, mechanicals and modern appliances to a degree. 

I'd rather ride a modern motor boat if that were the choice between the Santa Maria and a modern power boat. Even though sailing has progressed over the centuries, particularly since the creation of plastics, the fundamentals remain the same. Sails, ropes, balance and weather predictions are all parts of the equation. I enjoy sailing as an intellectual pursuit but I find as time runs out I want to travel and see places up close. I find it stimulating to think Columbus sailed the course he chose because of the prevailing winds and a modern pleasure sailor would do the same to avoid head on confrontations with wind and wave. One hopes climate change will not soon change those patterns.

The modern way to chase fish is to drive hard through the water. Altogether different.

Jesus loves you, and yet the rest of us stroll past with no idea how to behave any differently. Homelessness in Key West waxes and wanes with the seasons but there is a hardcore group who prefer to live outdoors and avoid the free shelter and all attempts to tame them. I think life on the streets must be incredibly boring but the homeless I have talked  to look at me as though I am crazy when I say that.

19th century brickwork at the Clinton Square Mall, a former warehouse for the traders docking at Key West. I trust it too will outlive us.

A decorative motif from the same building:

And this terracotta I noticed, really noticed at the Custom House on Front Street just around the corner. And no, its proper name is not Customs House. It is singular.

I can't make up my mind if it is pretty or angular and ugly. It sure does look uncomfortable from any angle. Good luck to those young people aboard.