New Town Walk

I remember when they built the new weather station on White Street and the walls were painted bright red. Everyone hated it. Then it became apparent the red was the undercoat and the hurricane proof (one hopes) building was clad as planned in wood and looked quite different. All the angry voices were stilled. A little patience I learned goes a long way.

Rusty was channeling the late Cheyenne in the heat as we walked from shady spot to shady spot in the September broiling heat.

Clearly he's not a proper Key Wester as he will walk past a mountain of beer without even bothering to notice it.

Yellow house and yellow flowers on Von Phister Street. I've packed my copy of Streets of Key West so I can't look it up anymore, but I can look in the search function at the top left corner of this very page and find my essay from 2010 where all is explained:

According to J. Wills Burke's The Streets of Key West there are two William Von Phisters buried in the Key West cemetery, one who died in 1850 and owned the building that houses the Green Parrot on Whitehead Street. He dabbled in real estate and ran a store in that building and according to Burke he was one of two men who was responsible for platting much of the island. If you have no offsets today on your lot you should apparently blame Von Phister. This is the eponymous street looking east toward New Town.

Von Phister's offspring was elected a Judge just as the Civil War was about to break out and he refused to serve according to Burke when Florida seceded. He stepped up to the bench once more when Key West was declared Union territory by the soldiers at Fort Zachary and after the war he went on to be elected to the city commission. As Burke reports rather dryly it did not seem to matter to the voters that the younger William Von Phister had been a Union sympathizer.

At some point Rusty and I strolled past the maintenance building for the school district and I saw colors and light and shapes. I like to point out if you are parking in Key West and you see someone parking where it's not allowed don't do likewise. You don't know who is who or who knows who or who owns what. Just because they can park in a No Parking does not mean you can.

The Monroe Association for Remarkable Citizens sells plants and if you can read the sign you will know you are there. The weird spelling originates in the original name of the MARC House at a time in history when remarkable citizens were known as Retarded. They cleverly figured out a more appropriate name for the group without changing the letters. They do remarkable work for their remarkable citizens.

Key West somehow manages to do a lot of good for a lot of people, shelters for domestic abuse  survivors, homeless shelters kitchens and facilities to get people back into society. Literacy volunteers and so forth. A lot for a small town.

If you walk the streets of New town you are in Key West where the tourists don't go. Be a local! Actually I think locals have retreated to Stock Island and Big Coppitt these days as you might easily find yourself paying. quarter of a million for house on a street with no sidewalks.

And they keep coming to claim a slice of paradise. Not quite all paved over yet.

Bahia Honda

There are two places above all others I like to walk. Bahia Honda is one of them, and the other one I want to keep to myself for now. The landmarks here are obvious and rarely Rusty and I walk alone. For me to have time alone in the woods in these ever more crowded islands is my privilege. That Rusty enjoys walking with me is icing on the cake and keeps me alone but not lonely.

I see a lot of people fishing around here and I guess they outnumber me, dozens of anglers to one photographer usually. Occasionally I see camera carriers with tripods and filters and serious looks hunting the ideal sunrise. The picture below I didn't clean up and you can see the ocean sliding off to the right! Drives me nuts but I'm not driven to complicate my walks with apparatus. The drive to overcomplicate things drives me equally nuts.

Rusty is out there somewhere and I'm strolling with a small black box around my neck relying on clouds and light to make the pictures interesting.

I know what I see but I wonder what they see. 

Do we see the same scenery? 

I have to suppose so. I wonder if when they go home they review their catch and ponder the beauty of the place where they caught it?

I post my pictures here but this really is a diary and when I look back, and I do, I remember the circumstances of the capture. I fish for pictures and use them to remember.

So many meanings in a lonely stop sign. I made this picture and thought of the prairies I hope to be crossing soon. This actually is the crest of the hill alongside Highway One and the stop sign is warning beach goers to merge with the traffic with care!

There is a cement block under the gumbo limbo that survived Hurricane Irma and is slowly growing back. The kudzu is spreading too fast for me to keep it completely clear but I stop by from time to time and clear it and sit and think and sometimes I just sit.

I didn't sort this picture out either so now the ocean is going uphill to the right! Life as it is lived.

Eaton/Duval Night

We finally got something approaching a cold front which didn't do much for temperatures but it does seem to have tamped down the ghastly humidity a bit. Check out in the photo below. Get your camera out of an air-conditioned car and you have to wait a few minutes for things to settle down. Usually I'm impatient and start wiping the lens with a microfiber cloth and but its bets to just wait for temperatures to equalize by themselves. Watch your dog enjoying himself as you wait:

I was on Eaton just off Duval looking at the posters advertising productions to come after we're gone at the Key West Theater. I am glad they have brought the long empty space back to life and I recall with pleasure a pre pandemic concert my friend Gary actually got us tickets to check it out. Covid would not encourage us to go to a public performance this winter so we leave town with less regret than we otherwise might. 

We closed down the yard sale after a slow Sunday but we did make about $1500 which seemed like a lot to me. I congratulated my wife and then we took a nap. My wife is friends with a Haitian pastor and she's invited his prisoners you d to collect anything they might want to help put our stuff somewhere useful other than the landfill. That will leave us camping at home for our last few weeks. Re-use is a great way to pass stuff along for others to enjoy in their homes.

As I step out the door at work the Teamsters have negotiated pretty big raises for my former colleagues. My wife looked at me for a minute and said two bucks more an hour? Sign up! And we burst out laughing. I'm glad they will get more money because life in the Keys doesn't get any cheaper but I am so glad not to have to think about all that anymore.

One thing I noticed at the yard sale was tenor of conversations with people new to the Keys looking for stuff. It was interesting to me to listen to their reactions to life in this new place. One new arrival in Marathon was really relieved not to live in Key West, home of the weirdos which made me smile. My grumble at the reduction of weirdness is clearly the perception of someone who has lived here too long. That was a thought provoking conversation.

There was the buyer who lives with an active wife and he's worried she may not settle down to a slower pace of life. I could do nothing all day he said, sweating to put his purchases into the narrow space in his car.

I stopped in front of the presbytery, the pastor's home, at St Paul's. In years past this has been a prime viewing platform for the Fantasy Fest Grand Parade. This year the parade is cancelled but Fantasy fest goes ahead anyway. No viewing platforms required, I guess. The gate was padlocked at four in the morning!

Tourism has been hot all summer. The thinking is that the desire to move is best served by visiting interesting places in the US no matter whether it's in season or not. It's not high season in the Keys but you wouldn't know it looking at the numbers.

AsI was standing there looking at details as Rusty paused at the base of every tree (no peeing, good boy) there were hung over looking people stumbling back and forth. We were supposed to be alone but Key West is the city that has a hard time sleeping this year.

And Bank of America is back downtown. They closed the office on Southard Street a few years ago and then I saw this employee-free box on the 300 block. It's a page out of Wells Fargo's book as there are a couple of rival ATMs just up the street. My bank on Summerland Key has been closed since Hurricane Irma trashed the Lower Keys so I guess inconvenience is the new customer service.  I like the trash can, it kales it look almost like a real bank.

The Waterfront

The business of the yard sale does not come easily to me. A client who stopped by and tried negotiating with my wife over some trinket or another gave up "You're good at this," he said and handed over his cash.  My instinct is to offer stuff that doesn't interest me at two bits and beg them to take it, then my wife beats me about the head and its it up for five bucks and negotiates it down to four and takes the cash and makes them happy. The psychology of the sale defeats me.

Its been a busy time organizing all that stuff and looking back at pictures I took last week cheers me up. Key West looks good!

Walking around the Bight is good relaxation for me and my camera and of course young Rusty. He has been perfect as usual around the buyers in our car port, allowing himself to be admired and petted as he lays there, his front paws crossed.

I've heard rumors a cold front may be descending upon us from the heights of South Carolina and we could sure use some cold air.

The heat and humidity has been stifling, so much so just standing outside prickles your skin with sweat and even I who likes the heat its too much. 

Here's the thing: in three or four weeks I'm going to be freezing my tail off somewhere north of here and maybe west of here in the desert crispy cold. When I start to whine I would appreciate the odd comment reminding me how hot I was in the Keys in September.

The picture above I took for Gary who likes to stay at the Galleon Resort when he comes to Key West. We plan to stop by his place Up North after we stay with my sister in law in Asheville.  I doubt we will see Gary's family at the Galleon again.  I'll miss that because the views are spectacular.

I look at the dinghies in the Bight, the vehicles they use to come to town from their boats out on the water, their immobile homes glued to the harbor bottom by lack of use and I'm glad we will be mobile in our funny little van. Living like this isn't fun to me,  stationary boats grow weed and mildew. I'm thinking stationary vans do too, so I'll have to guard against that!

I won't miss the chickens of Key West, noisy messy assholes much loved by some people. I figure the chickens will do fine without Rusty who is scared of them anyway. I'm glad he is, because chickens are valuable in Mexico and if a gringo dog kills a chicken in Mexico the gringo has to pay cash to resolve the situation.

Good advertising, life imitating art as you will see nicely painted bikes displayed around town. This machine seems quite pricey to me at $120  but I don't know much about bikes. To me bicycles are machines that require the concentration of a car with none of the speed or range. I'd rather walk. Does that make me too weird for Key West?

Learning

I have been posting pictures of rather questionable quality from the days of film when we sailed around Central America. They are easy stories to tell  and by now they are happy memories and I needed to turn the pictures into digital format so it all came together.

I hope the stories of my trip to Key West have had another beneficial effect as well and that is to show that Layne and I have done this packing up of a life before. In case there be any doubt the task of taking off is not easy. It's not a simple get up and go, as there is so much involved in the process of changing your life. You leave behind the known, your friends, the familiar processes and known resources that you rely on every time you have a problem. If the van makes a strange noise on the road, and it will sooner or later, it could be quite the circus finding a suitable response. Here at home I know exactly where I'd go. 

Leaving home like this means relying on each other to the exclusion of any other resource. It is up to Layne Rusty and I to make this work. There is no one else to turn to. At dusk on the road travelers are known to get the five o'clock blues, that momentary sense of being lost and away and pressed by the need to find a place to sleep. I've had that feeling while traveling by boat when I had no actual need to find a sleeping place, but at dusk a human's thoughts turn to the need to find a safe place to let the guard down. It's not something you think about when you have a routine and a home.

The best advice I can give if you are looking for advice is to practice. Do not under any circumstances except the most dire, get the idea you should buy a vehicle move in and drive off all at once. People who are forced to do this by a life altering event, death divorce or similar, have my respect because that's the hardest way to take to the road. I recommend practice above all. Take vacations, take weekends, try out your systems and your response, make modifications, feel comfortable doing things that make you uncomfortable. We have learned to park and sleep wherever we find ourselves.I have been trying to figure where everything is stored in all the cubbyholes. It's hard work. It takes time. At least I know where my tea ingredients are. I think.

We've been forcing ourselves to relearn how to pack for a trip. The big difference between a boat and a van is the availability of food along the way. Part of our pleasure as we tour involves visiting grocery stores as we go. On the boat we had to assume much more infrequent access to local stores.Overloading the van is guaranteed to cause mechanical issues so we think twice before adding anything. It took five years to find the right van but our two year preparation plan got cut short ironically by Covid. We have systems but they may change and we are ready for that. 

We look back at our Michigan vacation and shake our heads: we'd have done so many things very differently. However instead of a second vacation this year in which we had hoped to check our systems we find ourselves taking off and hoping for the best. We may be on our way in two weeks after you read this. Times are shrinking here.

Don't think it's easy. We have experience, but we have two new secret weapons for this journey that go beyond our knowledge. For the first time in our lives we will get paid as we travel. And the second thing that is totally new for us is that there is no deadline. Imagine that: time and money on our side, until we lose our health, get too old or the van expires on us. That is decidedly mind bending for us. We've always had to make time and save money to go away for a while. Not this time. Weird. We just have to keep an eye on growing old.

I have three sisters and of them two are agoraphobics. One is afraid to fly and the other hates leaving home. Put her twenty miles from her house and she's looking panicked. The third one likes to travel more than the others but she is so spacey she came to key West once without checking in with me and I was on vacation somewhere else. She brought her husband from Italy and I wasn't home. Me? I'm the one who has always taken to the road from when I was a kid. It's in my genes I guess but not theirs. They are home bodies but I have always enjoyed the thrill of the unknown, the opportunity to reinvent myself among strangers. Travel is fun for me. 

My wife had been far and wide before she met me so there was no need to check her credentials and there have been occasions she has had to drag me out of my comfort zone as she can be much more adventurous.  I find passersby react predictably by expressing envy when one talks of taking to the road. I'd love to do that or I wish I could do that, and my thought is why don't you?  Clearly there are practical reasons why not but in the First World where we have so many choices, you will have to prioritize travel to make it happen. Layne and I have no children and no parents to answer to. Unfortunate? Thats for you to answer. For us it means no excuses

I noticed long ago that people who stay still in one place get ahead.  You pay off your house, you get ahead at work, your friends are solid. I have been known to wonder if I was making the right choice quitting and buggering off. Think about it: I stayed at work I had seniority, free health care, and a place in society. I could go boating, go drinking, wave to people who know me on the street and live with no surprises.

Now, instead of being the guy who sends the cops to check on people sleeping in their cars I will be the guy sleeping in his car. The world turned upside down. I like the reinvention but it isn’t the only way to live and if you don't like change then don’t and I will think none the worse of you. The important thing for each of us able to make a choice is to make yourself the life you want. This change isn’t a value judgement, it’s simply me being true to my nature. Key West gave me a chance to secure my old age by sitting still for two long decades, and I took it with gratitude, but my old age doesn’t have to be lived out in the same place. If you can try to live with no regrets whatever path you take because when you are faced with your inevitable end regrets are the worst baggage of all. 

Sorting Stuff

I've mislaid ten pounds of myself since I quit work. I know how that happened yet it never happened on purpose. I have been walking my weight off since I retired. Actually I'm on leave until October 2nd when I work my last shift. Doubtless I will eat from boredom and as a last hurrah might even order in food from places if fond memory but it will be a shift representative of those many hours of simply sitting there and waiting for the next call. 

My days now are determined by the amount of stuff that needs moving and the amount of stairs that need to be climbed. I feel like a Sherpa and that joke has caused Webb to empathize with my pain, I think, as I trudge up and down shedding calories like Niagara Falls sheds water. September is the steamiest month and that has added to my pain. 

Rusty has enjoyed my being at home. He follows me room to room some days and takes naps with me in the afternoon, and other days he lays down in the sun and waits for me to flop next to him and rub his stomach. The chaos of the home doesn't seem to affect him at all. Cheyenne. was terrified by our move from Ramrod to Cudjoe Key, most likely because she was abandoned when her last family moved, and they weren't even very nice to her. She was terrified we’d abandon her too. I reassured her as best I could but she was traumatized. 

I used to enjoy my evening walks with Rusty as relief from work stress and nowadays its the anxiety produced by dismantling a life. I'm looking forward to what's next but every day is a new series of choices and decisions and even though you'd think they can't be that fraught they are decisions that end up sucking the life out of you.

It's enough to send you spinning. I've got my new health insurance plan ready to kick in in November. That took a few hours on the phone. 

I've selected a few paper books to stuff in my clothes lockers. I've been checking the hurricane website of the National Weather Service obsessively and am pleased to see no need to worry. For now.

Its rainy season and showers seem to fall at random out of a clear blue sky. Bruce in Arizona says. temperatures are falling and I know he expects me to shrivel up when we get there in December. Won't he be surprised?

Layne sold our second TV, a DVD player a desk, chair and filing cabinet. Shit just keeps evaporating from around me. So far I've hung on to my laptop and cameras but I'm not letting them far out of sight.

And yes, we have some jitters. We float in the canal after another day of sorting crap and she looks at me and says are you nervous? And we laugh only slightly hysterically.  Here goes nothing.