Cruising

The city commission in Key West is pondering how to reduce cruise ship passengers from landing in vast numbers in the city. The battle which seemed to be over when the Governor signed a state law overriding local initiatives to limit cruise ship passenger numbers.

It's a frantic business as newspapers are reporting an advocate of cruise ships gave the Governor a million dollars to sign the law under the usual embarrassing guise of "no quid pro quo" lobbying.

Meanwhile the opponents of massive  seabed churning cruise ships argue the city can pass a local law limiting the number of passengers a cruise ship can land. It's an interesting debate to me as the local control loving Republicans in Tallahassee stomp on the local law preferred by Key West Democrats. 

This isn't directly about partisan politics, its all about local politics and playing to your audience. Cruise ship passengers don't bother me one way or the other. if there are a ton of marked cruise ship passengers swarming three blocks of Lower Duval I have plenty of the city to enjoy where they have no clue how to find me. 

I have seen a  ton of business tore fronts go out of business and these are hardly the kind of businesses locals need, though some are restaurants others are branches of chains devoted to tourist knick knacks.

The question is really one of economics. If you need three jobs to survive is the city commission doing you any favors by depriving you of places to seek employment?  Supporters of cruise ships make the point they are opposed by Weather people whose income is not dependent on mass tourism. 

Its just one more  step down the long gentrification path that Key West has been trying to deal with. In the end money talks and I'm betting cruise ships of any size and in any number will end up docking in Key West and I don't suppose they will make pirate town any the more interesting or exciting or eccentric. 

 

Duval and Eaton

Were you planning to bring a dog to the United States from any one of a hundred countries the  journey  must be completed today because tomorrow they are banned. The CDC has imposed a ban on importing dogs "for the time being," unless they are form a handful of countries.

The temporary (I hope) ban is in response to the demand for pedigree dogs during the pandemic when rescuing a mutt is not suitable for the fashion conscious and those in pursuit of precocious status symbols.

What happened was unscrupulous breeders and puppy mills abroad took to faking vet certificates which were hard to obtain thanks to Covid restrictions and they shoved off their pedigree dogs to the US unprotected against rabies. For fear of an outbreak of the disease the CDC imposed the ban. Supposedly it will be lifted once the Centers for Disease Control figure out what to do.

Western (not Eastern) Europe is exempt from the ban as are Mexico, Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Dogs must have lived in those countries for six months to be eligible to enter the US. Everywhere else is closed as of tomorrow.

Rusty will not be affected as any decision to go beyond Mexico will not be a short term trip, though I find this idea of a blanket ban by an agency touting the value of vaccinations to be weird. I got my second Covid shot on February 16th and very glad I was too. I believe in the value of vaccinations as they have saved me from disease over the decades. Why incoming dogs from suspect countries  can't be vaccinated at our border I don't know. May be that will become the policy who knows.

The dogs facing issues right now are rescue dogs in Third World countries who have found homes in the US but will be banned from travel. Personally I don't think any dog should be a stray and why people insist on buying dogs when 2.4 million abandoned dogs are killed each year in this country baffles me. Rusty is just one more proof its the owners not the dogs that are the problem.

I guess the reason this story struck me was the notion that Covid is wrecking so much in so many ways and in so many places. Unemployment, underemployment, travel restrictions, extra poverty, all on top of death and disruption. Now stray dogs are getting screwed. Does it ever end?

A stray no longer.

Reflections

It occurred to me on  a road trip that I am lucky to have space to be alone, and who would have thought I'd find that space in the Keys?

I suppose the solitude is a product of the lack of social value in the places I walk. These are no kind of shady forest glen, obviously I am alone far from beaches and bikinis.

I think many people fear the mangroves and the ghastly reptiles they harbor and all the poisonous snakes and ravenous crocodiles and spiders the size of your fist. We mustn't forget the human element where contrary  to real life the imagination fills the woods with sex traffickers rapists and robbers.   

Or me, lumbering around with camera  and dog dressed in rubber shoes to cope with high tides and flooding.

For me the mangroves paint pictures, always varying with the light and the weather, always the same for want of topographical features.

You could walk for hours here and the scenery won't change much. Hammocks of high ground produce taller trees but not by much. A pile of rubble produced by digging anti- mosquito gambusia trenches allows a short person to see over the mangroves slightly: they don't vary.

I came across  a death struggle- bird versus caterpillar and the hungry bully won. It's what happens while you aren't looking, lives get destroyed and you travel on none the wiser. 

I drive home after work and lives were changed in the preceding twelve hours, hospitalization, arrest, death, from the banal to the awful and no one around me knows or notices or cares.

I watched the worm curl up in an attempt to defend itself from the beak but the bird was having none of it. Hairy caterpillar was on the menu. I was God and declined to intervene so I suppose the caterpillar had cause to deny me my majesty.

I took a photograph instead of a puddle with a reflection. Life goes on.
 

After The Storm

I can tell you this: if the morning after a  tropical event everything is back to normal it wasn't a hurricane you survived; it was just some wind and rain. Higgs Beach the morning after Tropical Storm Elsa blew through town at 65 miles per hour looked like this:

It was a lovely sunny day, typical of the scene left behind by a hurricane, however flooding had receded electricity was flowing and the Internet never left town. 

At first I was puzzled by all the ventilating in public about the weather system's arrival and then I was exposed to some of the reporting by people whose job it is to report boring stuff

Tropical Storm Elsa was clearly not going to derange our lives much if at all, so even though my family in Europe (!) started sending me messages of consolation I declined to get ramped up about this thing.

I wonder if (when?) we face a true test of our collective mettle whether people who survived Tropical Storm Elsa unscathed will brag about their hurricane expertise and their survival credentials? And how many people exposed to television nonsense about this rains storm will keep their fears in proportion to the next tropical storm? Fear and urgency are entirely appropriate for certain conditions, having lived through them, but worrying about 65 mile per hour winds makes you unqualified to enjoy life in these latitudes.

A quick walk along the waterfront illustrated my point that things were entirely back to normal so I spent the short time remaining on my lunch break to take a  quick walk through the Garden Club.

                                   

I dropped off five bucks in the donation bucket.  There is no entry fee nor any required donation, which when it is required or suggested removes the notion of donation from my mind. So when I visit I like to drop off some cash for this most genteel and serene public spaces.

I am not a botanist, I have never been one and it is far too late to turn me into one. I enjoy plants and trees and flowers for what they bring to the world and the idea that I should fill my rather small brain with a filing system to name plants seems absurd to me.

                  

I dislike cutting trees down, I honestly don't much like to prune plants however good it may be for them. 

I see perfectly manicured gardens around town and I know were I to live in such a place I would need an expensive contract to keep a landscape company well supplied with work as I am totally uninterested in gardening as a hobby.

                                   

I told my wife that when we sold the sailboat with plans to move ashore if she wanted a lawn she would have to hire someone to maintain it. I love the summer sound of lawnmowers droning but I would rather eat crushed glass than be tied to a schedule of lawn mowing all summer long.

                                     

And yet, for as much as I know myself to be a Philistine in these matters I never skip a chance to enjoy the Garden Club and form time to time the Botanical Gardens on Stock Island. Indeed I am overdue a visit there and I only have 276 days left to get another walk done there.

The Garden Club is an excellent spot to spend time in the shade looking out at the water. A book, a thermos flask of Yorkshire Gold and a winter cold front can make this spot ideal. 

Of course in winter it is much more crowded, not only with people who have "flown onto the island" for the winter, as they tend to say rather grandiloquently, but also with lots of colorful flowers whose names escape me of course.

Summer is low season for birds and plants and people which is when I come out of my hiding place and wander round.

This time next year I hope to be in British Columbia, one hopes not in a 120 degree heat wave, though I haven't yet made the case to my wife that we should detour by ferry to Victoria for high tea at The Empress...

                                

...and a visit to Butchart Gardens where even Rusty is welcome. 

But for all that other cities have more land and bigger gardens and vast expanses of green, Key West does pretty well by its location.

                                   

The West Martello Tower was built as part o the coastal defenses of this border town but it was never actually used in war. Instead the gunners at Fort Zachary Taylor trained their artillery pieces on it and used it for practice! Which is why it so much more deteriorated than the perfectly maintained East Martello Tower at the airport.

                                   

It should give us some pause to picture Key West after the Civil War when you had a line of sight from Fort Zachary to Higgs Beach and didn't have to gun down the Reach Resort or the Casa Marina to lay your sights on the Martello Tower. 

                                     

The Martello Tower was popularized by the British around the world as a small coastal defense point with a  flat roof giving a cannon a wide range of fire. 

However it was an Italian who designed the first one in Corsica ( a colony of Genova at the time) in a place called Mortella in 1565. And here they still are in Key West. 

Rather than blowing up passing traffic this old wreck makes for an excellent viewing platform over the glorious colors in the Straits of Florida, from behind a secure iron fence...

A place to sit and contemplate the glories of nature.

No such luck for me. I had to go back to work.