Off Course

I was pinching myself as we left the border behind and bounced down the uneven road into the stark granite countryside. After all these years this was the country that had been closed to the world all my life, the place where no outsider was welcome. I was inside the mountains that ringed Zenda, or Ruritania or any fantasy land dreamed up by writers, telling stories of places too far away to be imaginable. My desire to know this place was fed by those stories, and in an unhappy childhood I read a great many, more or less uplifting tales, not least the Belgian detective known as Tintin.He had adventures all over the world including the Balkans, possibly a Ruritanian version of ... I liked to think it was Albania which to a 20th century traveler, was far beyond the horizon, as distant and unreachable as the moon. Until 2007.

Under the late Enver Hoxha, Albania was the last place on Earth anyone might want to visit, a circle of mountains backed onto the Adriatic, closed to Greece to the south and Yugolsavia to the North. Hoxha pulled his country back within itself, declining to join the United Nations, trading only with China, a country so small and forgotten no one knew it was there. Hoxha had no nuclear weapons so his people could starve in peace, protected from a well nourished world by concrete bunkers strewn through the fields facing outwards. Nowadays these little concrete bus stops serve as emergency toilets for travelers too curious to drive past without stopping to inspect their reeking interiors. I cannot imagine standing guard in one of these structures, no facilities, no electricity, no water faucet. All to insure the bloodthirsty Yugoslavs will stay on their side of the line.

The sun was setting and the light was golden as we drove away from the unusually lengthy passport inspection at the border between Montenegro and Albania. Montenegro seemed amazingly sophisticated compared to the Albanian goat herders cluttering the main road to Shkoder, 23 long slow miles inside the country. We were filled with wonder- where were we going to sleep? What currency did they use? What on Earth were we going to find round the next corner? Why in hell did we choose to come here? My wife has never harbored lunatic desires to visit Albania so this side trip was all on me.The closer we got to Shkoder the thicker the traffic became, and traffic was an absurd mixture of ox carts and Mercedes Benz cars. The only in between vehicle was our modest Ford diesel station wagon which was an entirely inadequate weapon to carve a path between the indifference of the ox cart drivers and the imbeciles in the Mercedes.God looks after drunks and idiots and once again, as the sun got close to the horizon and we got close to the center of chaos that is the heart of the provincial city of Shkoder we found paradise. No, it wasn't a palm tree but it was five star hotel rising up above the dust and swirling noise of a busy little town. The Hotel Europa, a small squat skyscraper rose up glistening in the fading sunlight. "We get a room there," my wife whispered, and later she confessed she was ready to pay $400 (300 euros) for a room up there. As it turned out we got a palatial room with hot and cold running water and Italian television programs for 60 euros or $100 with free car parking in the secure basement. I sat on the bed and watched Fawlty Towers with Albanian(?) subtitles to try to forget where we were for a short while. Driving in Albania quite takes it out of you.

We went out into the streets of Shkoder and wandered through the park, kids were running around, mothers in scarves sat placidly on blankets while the old men huddled over upturned cardboard boxes and slammed down dominoes. We watched for a while and when they asked something we said "America" the universal word and they gave us big, stubbly, gap toothed grins.

Dinner was a slice of some sort of Albanian pizza, spinach wrapped with strong cheese and wedged between slices of flaky Greek-style pastry. It was very greasy and good. The scarfed lady in the doorway took a Euro ($1.30), for we had no Leks, and the nature of our brief visit meant we likely wouldn't get to buy any local currency either. We wandered down the main street as darkness descended. The sidewalk was lumpy, the traffic endless and the little stores were filled with varieties of universal plastic gewgaws. It was entrancing.

We bought me a pair of $15 shoes, the lady clerk grinning like she was going to die of amusement at these strange creatures. My wife looked for a set of metal dominoes among the plastic and failed. We sat at a sidewalk cafe and drank crisp beer, across the street from a mosque, and the domino players sat at a neighboring table and grinned cheerily. We wanted to ask if they used family heirlooms in the park, but we lacked the Albanian to ask where they got their dominoes. We went to bed exhausted and slept like zombies, so deep was our state of unconsciousness the morning call to prayers from the neighboring mosque did nothing to pull us out of our coma.

The hotel put on a breakfast worthy of far more than the Italian engineers who shared the buffet with us in a sumptuous ballroom. We ate syrupy fruit, sweet cheese, salamis of every type, pastries with sugary jam and yogurt of some strange Balkan variety. We took a few pictures of downtown Shkoder and dropped off an English language book Layne had finished reading in a little bookstore. We also picked up a picture book about Shkoder which revealed to me that this was Scutari, famous in the Crimean War of 1855 for the arrival of nurse Florence Nightingale and the creation of the first modern military hospital. The shopkeeper, thin and aristocratic had no knowledge of this slice of Shkoder's history. We chatted in French and he told me of his life as an agronomist, skirting the realities of life in a closed country. He bought us coffee and we parted best of friends. He went back to being a bookseller, we set our sights on the Balkan fastness to the north of us.

We had a plane to catch in Vienna in four days and we had all the mountains of Montenegro, Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia ahead. No time at all to pause and linger, and check out the medieval fort or the shores of Lake Shkoder. Shame though it was, we had to leave the mysterious country whose intimacies we had barely touched. We drove out of the city of Florence Nightingale and got back on the bouncy highway to the border. By lunchtime we were well past Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro ready to climb the mountains to Bosnia. Albania we had seen and done.

Pasta, Mafia, Spaghetti

"How is it that people in this country always associate Italians with the Mafia?" It has to be a longstanding friendship when you get sideswiped by such a complicated question late at night. We were standing on the White Street Pier watching the street lights twinkle along Smathers Beach, and such a watery place would naturally lead to reflection. The fact that Giovanni, a cardiologist, was visiting for just two days on the back of a medical convention on the mainland meant we had a lot of catching up to do in a short while.

We grew up together, Giovanni's family spent most of their time in the city and I spent most of my life in exile at that age, in an English boarding school. After I left Europe Giovanni, who followed the conventional life plan laid out for the son of a doctor remained my tenuous connection with he Old World, a thread threatened by time, distance and commitments, but that has become less frayed as we grow older. We try to meet at least every couple of years alone or with family and ride a motorcycle, laze on a beach always staying up late to set history and the world to rights.

Explaining the Mafia stereotype to a forty-nine year old Italian who has never imagined hanging out with, or being intimidated by Cosa Nostra back home isn't easy. The Mafia is as far from his life as it is for any American, its a subject for the movies; Hollywood is short hand for graven images. "Well, you've seen the Godfather," I start out by saying. "Il Padrino reinforced the image first created when Italian immigrants started coming in large numbers to the US..." And his rebuttal, built around the irritation he feels when he replies, in his broken English, to strangers that he is Italian not Mexican, and they go on and on about the few things they know about Italy,The Mafia, and Italian history followed by a tour of monuments they've seen. Giovanni sighs and leads us to a discussion about the stereotypes of la dolce vita an image of Italy created in turn by Italian filmmakers.

Too often I hear about how Europeans have it easy with long vacations and lots of time off, but I remember well Giovanni's incredulity when we walked one morning into a California Starbucks and he couldn't believe all the lounging around going on during a workday. In France the 35-hour work week stands a good chance of being overturned because people are tired of the financial constraints of a short work week which yes, allows for more time off but it also severely limits incomes. The new French President is currently struggling with that problem and at the same time in Italy, pension plans, those distant rewards for a life time of 51/2 day work weeks, are being pushed back by threats of State bankruptcy.

Giovanni, who lives in a magnificent, high ceiling'ed, apartment in the heart of the Terni envies me my suburban American life. He loved to sprawl in my California backyard smoking and pretending to be house owner for a week or two. In Florida its the wide open deck we hung out on at night, me in my Keys uniform of cargo shorts and a tee shirt while Giovanni, even en deshabille, wore a crisp collared shirt and ironed Dockers, stretched out in our recliners admiring the stars and setting the world to rights.

We don't drink much alcohol together, we usually get drunk on exhaustion, talking about the past, musing about the future, wondering how we got to where we are. Giovanni doesn't see a very rosy future as he has bills to pay and many more years of hospital work and private practice to pay his bills, get his kids through college, help them buy homes, pay off his own mortgage and finally qualify for a his State pension. He drives a nice car, rides a big motorcycle, takes vacations where he likes, and rarely has time to be alone and think. Which he says, is just as well. Even when he is alone he thinks about what gifts to shop for and take home to his family.

"The big difference between us, " he said as he was struck by an epiphany between the eyes as it were." The difference between us is that you don't have children." He's right. I view the future as a series of different choices, variations on the various forks in the road that have led me to this point. It's all speculative but I wonder if perhaps I may or may not allow myself to live some of the time in Italy, riding around in Giovanni's wake... A fantasy rudely shattered by his insistence that these possibilities aren't open to him. La dolce vita promises him a life lived hard at work till the last possible minute. But always fashionably well dressed...

Over the decades I have come to appreciate the reality of Giovanni's daily life in Italy which is, for most Americans, a romantic idyll far removed from reality, a movie set inhabited by cheerfully gesturing lovers divorced from traffic jams, endless bills, and unemployment. Pretty much the same way every Italian in America is probably intimate with the inner workings of the Mafia.

I snapped this picture of Giovanni hanging with my buddy Scott at the Tropic cinema one warm sunset. I too love hanging out with Giovanni, he always makes me appreciate my life all the more.

Central America 1951

There is a need in one's life for flights of imagination, and there in my bathroom lies a well thumbed copy of a paperback book filled with pictures, photographs fit to dream on, especially if you ride a motorcycle with a big round headlamp, flat handlebars and those tight curving mudguards, so typical of the era. William Carroll's business went into bankruptcy during 1950, which crisis naturally prompted him to do the obvious thing: sell his home and take off on a motorcycle tour, more precisely a B33, a 500cc BSA single, the apotheosis of motorcycle engineering of the era. And he took off for the dangerous lands south of the Rio Grande.
Its a book of words and images that set a boy's mind to take off on flights of fancy- here today, gone tomorrow, especially when one has the modern equivalent of a B33 of one's own, lurking underneath the house. Copper Canyon, here I come!
Its the effect images have on the brain. You look and without warning you are sucked in, to a world perhaps that doesn't even interest you. And yet that image won't go away. For instance I would never want to see myself wrapped up for winter riding, dodging heaps of snow, yet the Aerostitch catalogue is utterly irresistible.

Big knobby tire, huge headlamp, scenic but not desirable, it all sets a even tropical brain to dreaming, while sitting. I can't say I care for the electronic gadgets offered in the catalogue, but Lord knows there are plenty of toys that I just know I will (would?) need on the road to Mexico... Dry bags to throw over the tank, tool rolls, and widgets and gadgets that cost less than an arm and a leg but are about as useful to my current style of riding as snow tires. Yet they make me dream, those masters of the soft sell make me dream.


So I flip the pages of Carroll's fabulous picture book and read of his detainment in Mexico at the Guatemalan border, his struggle through the ruts and rocks of the main highway to Tegucigalpa, a chance encounter with another rider on a Triumph, in the dust of Central America. He wears as illustrated here a sensible, and carefully thought out riding uniform of baseball cap, overalls and stout boots. Not a GPS in sight, and the Triumph rider he met was wearing similar ATGATT.

And after a money grubbing detour in Costa Rica to sell a few useful articles on railways and bananas, a sudden anti-climactic arrival at the Panama Canal. And all this illustrated by 175 pictures of that dreamy tour, which we currently find beyond our reach, if not beyond our motorcycles. Hell they look like twins, excepting of course a few accessories like mirrors, turn signals and front tag holders ($60 nostalgia option in the current New Bonneville catalogue!).

There is mention in the book of just how small his BSA appeared on the road to passersby. I suspect the author, who was lanky, made it look more so, as he appears positively crouched on the motorcycle in some of his pictures. One couldn't say the same of my Bonneville, until I suppose one comes across a fully dressed Harley, or a Gold Wing or some other sport tourer with all the bells and whistles. They make my 900 Triumph look similarly compact if compared across the decades to the BSA 500 of 1951.

And here I am enjoying the daily grind with all the security of a paycheck, a routine, a front door to kick my boots off in front of. A wife to soothe my fevered brow. This must be a good life, not on the road.

The long way home, not on the Pan American Highway, but on Card Sound Road, after a day riding the mainland.

To Snow Or Not

There was a question, perhaps rhetorical, about the possibility of familiarity breeding contempt when it comes to the bright colors bathed in constant sunshine that is the lot of a Florida Keys resident. The short answer is, no it never gets boring, and no, I never take it for granted. Every day is a fresh reminder of one of the chief pleasures of living at 24 degrees north latitude.Yesterday I was training a new dispatcher in the arcane science of the police intranet system that connects law enforcement agencies across the country. We spoke briefly to Nome PD where daylight is down to 9 hours a day, ("It's not that dark, we are below the Arctic Circle," their dispatcher told us slightly defensively), and I'm not sure if my trainee was more impressed by the secure law enforcement network or the notion of policing snowdrifts.
Its getting to be that time of year when it starts freezing Up North and so we have to start policing bad parking, bad public drinking and bad bums begging for money at the tops of their voices on street corners in the Southernmost City. The trick to enjoying life in the Keys is to leave behind as much baggage as you can, and to learn as fast as you can to take things as they are. especially if you come from some button down community Up North where skittles are lined up, i-s are dotted and t-s are crossed. In Key West things just don't work that way. The confrontation brews when people who are used to order and cleanliness come up against chaos and small town clubbiness.
So snowbirds flutter into town each Fall and discover that things haven't changed since last year. And they sure as hell haven't changed either, so disorganized parking, public displays of begging (beggars like warm winters too!) and apparent municipal indifference set them off. What to do? Why, call the police!

Its hard to explain to well dressed people why its okay for smelly people to occupy city parks during the day, but the Supreme Court has outlawed discrimination on the basis of hygiene so its hard to get police officers to arrest people for being dressed in cerements. Impossible in fact, and this state of affairs hasn't changed since the last time the snowbirds were cluttering up the streets and restaurants. The Citizens' Voice Column in the paper is filling up again with quality of life complaints which are rather dull compared to the throat clutching verbal wrestling that locals indulge in while the more strait jacketed winter residents are away.
These unrelated photographs illustrate the beauty of Winter in the Keys, sunlight takes on a crisp white light, and the brisk cold fronts sweep away the dusty summer particles rendering colors that much sharper. My Bonneville is running equally crisply and is a joy to point down the highway. I've passed the 25-hundred mile mark since October 10th and I'm starting to find my way with more instinct and habit than previously. The Vespa is soon to go back on the "for sale" circuit now that we have those lovely wealthy snowbirds in town, and curiously, I find myself missing the Vespa less and less. The Bonneville is proving to be an easy fun ride in the flatlands of the Keys. In some ways it takes less skill to ride the Bonneville, as the twin cylinder takes anything in its stride, head winds, moonstruck tourists, lumbering heffalumps (SUVs) and juvenile testosterone cases. And snowbirds.
Staring at the Straits of Florida south of Sugarloaf Key has its compensations, on a golden winter evening, but there are occasions when a visit to the movies makes sense too. Last Monday it was the turn of Into The Wild an adventure film about a young man taking things to extremes until they get completely out of hand. Only then does he figure out the meaning of life; when its too late. This young man, according to the movie, made a solo kayak trip down the Colorado river, through the Grand Canyon all the way to the Sea of Cortez. He hitch hiked, made friends, disappeared, regrouped, worked and lazed away sunny desert days. But he did just have to go to Alaska, the borne from which some travelers fail to return.It was a fine movie, absorbing, demanding attention and posing difficult questions about age, impetuosity and the meaning of being alive. I couldn't get over the notion that the true test of one's mettle has to be found in the snowdrifts of the frozen north. One sun's oneself in a pansy hammock under coconut palms in the tropics while heroes forge themselves in blizzards and drizzle and cold slippery roads Up North.

By those restricted standards I am glad to be a pansy. I lived for a great deal too many years in the cold confines of Northern California to enjoy the notion of rain and cold. I just don't like it, and no amount of hairpins or mountains or spectacular views across death defying valleys compensates me for the cold in my fingers, the slush on my boots, and the depressing need to take the car on exceptionally horrendous winter days. Sitting by the fire sucks when compared to stretching out on the deck under the illusory cold embrace of a winter full moon. So, no, the winter landscapes never dull or fade or crumble into rust. The moon last night was round and red as it sank into the Gulf of Mexico on my early ride in to work. Today it was cold and steely and threw out shards of ice across the ruffled lagoons in the Saddlebunch Keys. Tomorrow I hope for more crisp and clear and sun, but if not it makes no matter because sooner rather than later sub tropical nature will reassert itself and the sun will shine.

That's what all those visitors and snowbirds come here for after all, not to mention the twittering year round residents, who came for the weather and stay for it too, no matter how unwilling they may be to admit they revere it. The Weather.

Going To Paradise

I was out on the west facing deck Thanksgiving morning reading the Citizen (new employee housing at Sugarloaf School-controversy! read all about it!!) while my wife prepped breakfast (scrambled eggs, polenta and fruit salad) when I realised it was Fall once again in the Keys. Not because the tree leaves are gradually changing color, at least some of them.

Prudence is back. Prudence is an elderly single female who occupies a house across the canal, kitti-corner to my tree house. Prudence grew up in New York and carries a loud grating accent to prove it. She has lived in the Keys for decades and is a "character." Unhappily she is a character by virtue of longevity, not because she is at all quirky. Nowadays she spends much of the year away as she is elderly and lives alone when she is in her canal-side house. She stays away during summer, and spends less and less time each year in the Fall and Winter. With her return the peace of our neighborhood is shattered.

So I know its fall in Paradise not when the West Indian almond tree drops its leaves and thoughtfully trickles them across my decks. Its not when my bare feet land thoughtlessly on the West Indian almonds themselves, nuts that my avoir-du-poids cannot begin to crush, not even when smothered entirely by my tender naked foot. No, Fall hits paradise when Prudence's dulcet tones ring across the canal.

Yesterday, mercifully, there were no boats cruising the canal, and this was a mercy because local boaters spend all winter proving they are "old hands" in the neighborhood by yelling greetings to the hard of hearing Prudence, who barks back incomprehension in the stentorian tones of the Bronx. When I used to work nights (by choice, curiously enough) I was frequently dragged back from the arms of the sweet patron of the peaceful hour, as the poet has it,by Prudence carrying on a whispered conversation.

Thanksgiving morning I learned, by virtue of megaphone eavesdropping of plans put in motion for family fun far from snowdrifts. "I'm going to Paradise!" was the call across the canal from one neighbor to Prudence. One could only wish for such luck, on a less charitably inclined day, but all it actually means is that the family will be going to eat at Parrotdise, a local restaurant who's offerings are washed down by Big Pecker Parrot wines, which gives an idea of how they grill blacken and fry their fish. Non vintage, I 'm sure.

Prudence brings a smile to my lips when she bawls out a greeting or a comment on the vegetative growth in a friend's garden. She is a symbol of the village-like nature of life in the Lower Keys, of a time when people really did care about their neighbors, not just out of benevolence perhaps, but out of boredom when the news was constant and neighborliness was part of the local tree of gossip. I will miss her bawled banalties when they are silenced by the passage of time. Life in the keys makes one grateful for the weirdest things.

Read All About It!

When I travel I like to pick up the local paper to hold in my hands the daily goings on. At home where all the print is available online, I still cherish the pleasure of messing my fingers with newsprint, connecting to a 250 year tradition of formalizing gossip and word-of-mouth on a properly printed page. My face isn't online- its in the broadsheet!

As small towns go Key West has lots of papers to choose among for information. I've assembled a modest selection which I like to read each week, and though there are others, the only publication dedicated to gay goings on has gone out of business (in a flurry of predictable accusations of non payment etc among the principals. Small town scandal on the front pages).

The Key West Citizen has focused on local news and does a decent job of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, as the saying goes. Page Two features the Citizen's Voice, a column of anonymous call-ins from usually upset neighbors. Page Three includes my all time small town favorite feature the "Citizen of the Day," fully dressed of course. The Citizen is the only daily published locally, which is delivered in the early hours to my driveway for $102 per year. It is the paper of record and Cooke Communications, an independent publishing family, has assembled a modest empire in the Keys. They also have an interest in 104.1 US One radio in Big Pine which has a modest local news operation including interviews with local bigwigs (Very Important People Only!) at 8am with the local voice Bill Becker, an interviewer who wouldn't know a hard question if it forced itself down his throat.

The Citizen isn't a bad paper with its steady diet of local news from around the Keys. From time to time it'll avoid offending VIPs on particularly touchy issues, so sometimes its more a matter of observing what they've left out rather than included, to get an idea whats going on. The Citizen's Voice is the source of irritation among Important People, and the anonymous comments are the first place we all go after we open the paper. Each Thursday the Citizen also puts out a harmless Arts supplement called Paradise! which I find rather bland and generally goes the way I send the daily sports section- into the recycling bin. But that's just my taste.

The other outlets from Cooke Communications include a Marathon- based free weekly, the Free-Press, which comes to Lower Keys subscribers each Wednesday. Its a way to fight back against the inroads of the Miami Herald which sells and delivers all around the Keys. The Citizen does a much better job of covering local news, not least with the Friday free offering of Solares Hill.

This paper started out as an alternative weekly aimed at irritating the powers that be and sounding an irreverent voice against the all powerful Citizen. It was a paper that barely made economic sense in a town where people fished or drank as expressions of intellectual activity. When Cooke bought Solares Hill its imminent demise was widely predicted, but that never came to pass. Now under Nancy Klingener's leadership Solares Hill has flourished as a source of in depth prickly commentary and real arts news. It is the highlight of my newspaper perusal, arriving every Friday, carefully wrapped inside my Citizen delivery.

What to say about the Blue Paper? More properly known as Key West The Newspaper, the free weekly that describes itself as the home of "Journalism as a Contact Sport"? This is the critic that anybody who is somebody in Key West wants silenced, even more than the Citizens' Voice column in the daily paper.

Dennis Reeves Cooper is seen around town wearing a ragged beard, as every rebel should, accompanied by a black Labrador who rides alongside him in his silver convertible. Cooper is an old school style of yellow journalist, always criticized, though never do critics succeed in proving that he gets his facts wrong though his idle speculation often falls wide of the mark. For instance when he wrote that a past police chief had had a previous sexual liaison with a juvenile boy he was never shown to be wrong. When he publicizes the embarrassing sources of funding in election campaigns everyone involved screams blue murder but they can't show he's wrong. He exposed to all and sundry a tawdry sexual affair the mayor got invovled in, and no one could contradict him because it was true, apparently. He's not someone I'd have round to dinner, he's rather too abrasive, but his paper is a must read in Key West, and one prays never to find oneself the object of his scorn. These days the current Key West Police Chief is his target, and Cooper's attentions make life for the rest of us inside the police station a fair resemblance to hell on earth.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the good news paper, a sickly publication called Conch Color, published by one of Key West's more bizarre public characters. Tom Oosterhoudt, a plump, fussy momma's boy, who never appears in public without a thick layer of foundation on his cheeks, once managed to get elected to the City Commission in a moment of collective public amnesia. Now after electoral defeat, he wants to spread good news which generally means kow-towing to the rich and powerful and filling the broadsheet pages with lots of color pictures in the style of a social diary. Its pretty saccharine stuff, harmless were it not responsible for yet more mulched trees, and easily ignored.

I'd rather read Key West, another all color publication that comes out monthly, features excellent photographs and a decent attempt at literary journalism even though it describes itself as a lifestyle publication. Its the sort of magazine I thumb through in doctor's offices and the like, as it has lots of pictures of hip people being hip, in hip island homes. From time to time it features people I can claim a passing aquaintance with, which I find shocking.

The Miami Herald has a bureau or two in the Keys and attempts a few column inches of local news. those efforts are supplemented by the twice weekly Keynoter a paper that bulges with classifieds but is of limited interest to a Citizen subscriber, who gets updates daily, The Keynoter comes out afternoons and can sometimes publish events the same day they happen, thus scooping the Citizen. I like the Keynoter on our streets mostly because it shows that the two paper concept is struggling to stay alive in the Keys where most American cities can't claim that anymore. Its not an even struggle and as long as the Citizen stays hard on the heels of local news it remains an indispensable read to keep a finger on the pulse of local affairs- literally and figuratively.

And they are all presented on the Internet, because the modern Keys live and die online. And for some strange reason people everywhere want to know whats going on in the island chain.

I love my news when it comes in print, so many words to fuss over.