Coral Castle, Homestead

Ladies, gentlemen and others! Roll up roll up! Prepare to be Amazed!! What we are about to experience today is something akin to the pyramids at Giza, or England's Stonehenge or, I kid you not the Inca temples in South America! Roll up and be astounded right here in beautiful Homestead!

The story goes that a Latvian stone mason known in the United States as Ed (pictured below), fell in love and was rejected so, as you do, he built a stone monument to his lost love.  The thing is no one knows how the diminutive immigrant pulled off this slightly bizarre feat of construction.

Ed Leedskalnin stood five feet tall and weighed 100 pounds but managed to create a stone garden piling blocks on top of blocks and sculpting statuary weighing dozens of tons.  All by himself he labored by night so no one could watch him work and when asked how he did it he said other people could figure it out just as he, and the builders of the pyramids had done.

If you take a turn off Highway One, a long strip mall of dreary modern shopping outlets and ugly used car lots leading out of Homestead and into the southern suburbs of Miami you will find a neat trim attraction that charges $18  for each adult to participate in the mandatory tour. No touching, no sitting and no leaving the tour group.

With the end of our time in Florida fast approaching we have a list of places we have managed to overlook among all our travels, and this was one such. I was last here forty years ago and mostly what I remember is a grassy field with weird coral structures and a giant slab of rock spinning on its axis.  The rock is still there but the axis has seized up.

Ed was born in in Riga, the capital of Latvia in 1887 and at the age of 26 he chose to fall in love with the appropriately named Agnes Scuffs who rejected the advances of the man who decided to emigrate to the United States to get over the pain of being stood up at the altar by his Sweet Sixteen. He was actually ten years older than Scuffs who it is said never came to the US to see the monument built in her name.

He used hand tools still stored on the site to build Rock Gate Park in Florida City but before long he figured the new highway being built to Miami would attract traffic so he hired a youngster with a truck and moved his statuary up to the ten acres he bought in North Homestead. 

Our guide Tom marched us through the various parts of the structure explaining Ed moved from California to Florida for his health as he had tuberculosis.  He died at Jackson Memorial in 1951  after he closed the Castle to visitors and rode the bus to Miami, (he never learned to drive). He was 64 and he left the castle and thirty-five hundred bucks to his nephew who had no idea what to do with the castle and sold it to the family that owns it to this day.

The rock walls tended to funnel the persistent easterly breeze and in the bits where we were shielded it got quite warm.  The umbrellas you see were offered to the guests to shield themselves a little from the sun and they were very popular much to my annoyance...but I waited at the back to try to snag a few unimpeded views of a place I probably shan't live long enough to see again if I come here every 40 years...

The big blockhouse in the corner became Ed's home after he moved out of a wooden shack he had built on the grounds next to his castle.

This place is modern and has you under observation. Don't sit in the seats! Tom pointed out coral rock (oolite and limestone actually) is sharp and will do you no good if you slip. Imagine sliding down a dirty ragged razor blade. 

Ed had his own imagination and his own view of the world nicely expressed in rock with all sorts of oddities  pointed out as we circled the place.

A stone in a heart shape:

An obelisk weighing 36 tons if I remember correctly winched into place by Ed with a masonic star on the top:

A hat surrounded by grass:

I told you this place was eccentric. Big moon, little moon Mars and Uranus shown in silhouette:

His first project was to build a well to get access to fresh water.

We tourists can be relied on to muck stuff up, leaning over the rail and dropping our lives into the void:

The chairs consist of a throne for the man, chairs for the family with the least comfortable reserved for Agnes' mother,  harty-har-har for the mother-in-law joke:

There was also a sundial drawn to Ed's own specifications:

One true peculiarity that surprised me was that dogs are welcome in the castle. We left Rusty in the van on the bed under the air conditioner which runs off the batteries/ He was comfortable while we sweated. especially as he like me is not fond of crowds at the best of times.

A sightline to the North Star. I guess some days Ed had to keep himself amused doing some stone carving for fun:

And so we passed through, no returns allowed so I lingered for a second trying to capture the serenity that Ed must have enjoyed.

Tom the patient guide. He didn't even hang around for a tip which surprised me.

One last oddity: when engineers tried to replace the pivoting mechanism of the Rock Gate they failed, even after scraping the rock to allow the gate to resume swiveling. The gate is now locked in the open position. 

Worth a visit. Almost as weird as the mermaids of Weeki Wachee.

Rusty hopped out after rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. 

Then he dived for the nearest shade.

The journey resumed:

 

Amelia And Windsor

This is one of my favorite intersections in Key West, a mixture of architecture, powerful shade trees and touches reminiscent of a funkier past.

I came out on a recent lunch break to test my new waterproof camera hoping the bright sunlight would produce acceptable images to post online.

The Panasonic TS7 has a viewfinder so my wife sold the Olympus TG6 I bought which requires you compose on a screen like a cellphone which I dislike. The idea behind the indestructible camera is to be able to get images in windy, rainy, sandy, icy conditions that may wreck an unprotected regular camera. As it is capable of being used underwater the Lumix TS7 also comes with buttons that still work even if your fingers are wet, a problem I have found with cellphone screens.

I like this corner because stuff like this turtle thrive here:

And a lovely old limestone wall with  all those hints of a remembered sea cast into stone:

There is shade from tall trees:

And the intersection is weird jog which goes two ways, left and right to Royal street and right to Amelia towards Duval. Not symmetrical, not linear, and perfect.

No Turn Arounds

This place is  so odd to me,  a pleasant isolated home with a guest house, harbor and tennis courts listed a few years ago for ten million dollars. And so buttoned up it looks more like a prison than a luxury home. 

Hurricane Irma wasn't kind but constant work by people with very little English, friendly enough and cheerful to the passing dog walker who spoke Spanish, and very hard working, has brought back the vegetation and fences and and lots of signs. And rocks.  I feel like I'm walking past one of those places on the highway that advise not to pick up hitchhikers.

The Old State Road 939 heads south from the Overseas Highway, passes the KOA which is finally being rebuilt and dead ends in a gate put across the old road by the wildlife people. You can walk it but not drive it. Its about two miles long and ends in the Sugarloaf Creek, a tidal waterway where the road bridge has been taken down.

This business of no turn arounds is a positive obsession for these relative newcomers. I come here to walk Rusty so I park close the campground and come down on foot, but others are exploring and find themselves stuck in a  dead end. And they confront these signs:

The gate closing the road is out of sight about a quarter of a mile down the road and there is a small turn around there but if you arrive here the owner of the manse is determined you will back the other half mile to get back to the KOA entrance where you can turn around without backing into the bushes (as I do) beyond the Lord of the Manor's irritated reach. 

I rode my Bonneville down the old state road a good few years ago, in 2007  more precisely:

and I enjoy walking down to the saltwater creek from time to time. But it is decidedly a one track lane nowadays and once in, you are committed. Especially as not many people seemed to be trained in the art of the three point turn. 

I noticed all the signage because it has sprouted up suddenly from people who don't really seem to have set up a winter home in laid-back-land with the intention of relaxing into the ambiance. Furthermore this sort of face on the world is emblematic of the changes that have been spooling up around here. You used to have to go to the mainland to see this lining A1A up the coast.

I don't suppose it's illegal nor do I care. The lady of the manse once caught me photographing a succulent and drove up in a cream colored Mercedes convertible and imperiously demanded to know what I was doing to her mailbox. Nothing I said. She glared at me. I said you really don't have much to fear in the Keys compared to where you are from, most people try to get along fairly peaceably. Then I was naughty. I told her I was relaxing after a day working 911 at the POLICE STATION and realization dawned that I was an instrument of her class and therefore on her side and she couldn't have been nicer. I was slightly revolted. The barricades don't make me feel any better.

It's not to my taste this style of hiding behind moats. I was born into the landowning classes and ran away as soon as I could when I realized I could not do my duty. Now I am a serf and I enjoy not being responsible for anything but myself and the possessions on my back (in my van). I see all this anxiety and wonder at the stress. So what if someone turns around in your driveway? You can turn around in mine on John Avery Lane as often as you want between now and April. When I leave we'll hand the landlord the keys, I think my wife knows where they are, and off we shall putt. To me that is freedom, not worrying about who is backing into your driveway. 

The Long Haul

The employment situation in Key West is bleak and in my job we are as understaffed as anyone. We have three dispatchers for day shift where we are supposed to have at least six and at night we will shortly be down to two. Even though we have police officers, former dispatchers, assigned to help, the situation is critical until the latest batch of trainees finish training this Fall.

The net result will be three weeks scheduled without a day off which is my way of saying I will run out of pictures and words before long, probably even before I run out of brain cells. So if this page gets stuck don't be surprised. I hope that by mid August I will get a day off or two and normal certainty will be resumed.

Rusty will get his walks though I expect my wife will be picking up the slack there a bit. I try to vary the photographs between town and country but that may not be in the cards. I shall post what I have, but whatever shortcomings appear on this page has everything to do with too much work and nothing to do with anything else. I enjoy walking Rusty and taking pictures. It is my stress release.

I am not surprised when I walk into Circle K to get some milk for my tea and find the place filled with half empty boxes. There aren't enough people to staff the checkout and unload the new stock. Hotels are desperate for staff and are trying to find ways to automate processes we have become used to being carried out by humans. Even to schedule a colonoscopy (getting stuff done while I have work insurance which covers every cost!) I had to fill out a giant questionare on line. No more sitting in a waiting room scribbling on a clip board. Understaffing is the new normal in every line of work and apparently not just in the Keys.

Finding people in this employment climate who want a job that requires sitting still for twelve hours and needs the ability to stay calm in crisis after crisis after crisis is no easy matter. It takes six to nine months to train someone suitable and the process isn't made easier with understaffing already taking a bite out of the energy required to train new people. 

I had a conversation with someone half my age who advised me the old work parameters no longer apply. A job is an anchor for a couple of years, working from home is preferred and commitment is limited and not terribly important. I think that was what he was saying and I liked none of it.

I guess my old fuddy duddy pleasure at having a secure job with benefits while doing something useful is out of date. I can actually see why retirement is so important. Things change, generations change and I feel horribly out of date in this work place of new attitudes. It is time I disappeared.

But not until some replacements are trained and seated. Someone needs to be ready in 260 days because I will be ready to slide on out.

Meanwhile I will keep on keeping on and under these circumstances my life shrinks down to sleeping, walking Rusty and showing up at my desk. Playing with words will be a secondary concern for a couple of weeks I fear. I don't like living like this but it is temporary I hope, though as we have seen life intervenes sometimes spectacularly and without warning.

I am ready to expect the unexpected, I know plans can unravel or be unraveled by twists of fate, but you have to keep planning. The plan is to get through our worker shortage with my mind intact. 

A camera, a walk, a surprise along the way.

Looking for the beauty in unlikely places.

August promises to be brutal around here! Enjoy yours and take a vacation while you can. I will rest later.