Panama 1999

We transited the Panama Canal on our sailboat Miki G in the Fall of the year the US finally pulled out of that operation.I doubt the Autoridad in charge these days would be too impressed were we to return and expect a transit for our 34-foot catamaran through the canal. These days its a self funding operation and every transit has to pay for itself and sailboats are very low on the totem pole. Our buddy Anna rode through with us to check out how she and her husband Ian were going to cope with their boat Joss. We had a minor crash later when the tug we tied up to left us in the lurch and we were slightly beaten up as we were dragged through the lock sideways by the currents. Damage was minor but we stared death in the face for a few awful minutes.Days later Joss made it through fine, though I was always worrying about what had happened to us as we locked through on their trip. Ian confided in me later that he couldn't get the image out of his mind of Miki G swirling helplessly through the lock like a leaf down a drain.

We were weeks ahead of the hand-over to full Panamanian control of the Canal, but years later I did meet the skipper of the last boat to be issued a US transit permit as the seconds ticked up to the noon hour December 30th 1999. Ghost, a suitably elderly wooden sailboat that I believe was shipped back from Marathon here in the Keys, to the owner's home in Marin County California.

When people find out we sailed our Gemini catamaran from California to Florida they are always fascinated by our transit ($500, two days, and the dogs behaved impeccably!), but we remain fascinated by the country of Panama at large.Miki G moored for several weeks at the now defunct Pedro Miguel Boat Club, next to the Pedro Miguel locks on Lake Miraflores. The marina used to be a Canal Zone perk, but during the US Administration it was also an excellent place to tie upto make repairs and rest from the culturally arduous business of cruising Latin America. Pedro Miguel was an English speaking, boater friendly, oasis even in the years after the Zone was ended and Americans only stayed on to help transition to Panamanian Administration. However the Autoridad del Canal de Panama has shut the place down after a long legal battle and pictures such as this can no longer be taken because the club is gone (plus we sold the boat to a friend in Key West who isn't interested in cruising right now!). One of these days I'm going to write an entry about all the place I've been that no longer exist. A depressingly long list, indicating an excessively long and well traveled life I think, even though the places themselves weren't that great; the USSR and East Germany high on the lackluster destinations I Have Known.

Panama started for us when we rounded the cape separating Costa Rica from Panama one dark and windy night. We blew into Panama full tilt and never got over how much we wanted to be there. The river trip to the second largest city in the country David ("Dah" with the emphasis on the "i" ) was an amazing maze to navigate. Non sailors often think rivers are refuges but we found that jungle river to be a pain in the ass with massive tides, floating debris and low overhanging branches, not to mention sandbars and few places to anchor.I keep this picture framed in my office to remind me of our mad cap adventures trying to find places to walk the dogs away from the prying eyes of the officious Customs agent who was determined to enforce Panama's 'no pets ashore' rule. Emma, our Labrador stuck close to me while Debs, our Husky dived into the bushes like the little explorer he always was. Everyone in the rest of the country ignored the quarantine rule and we took the dogs everywhere with us, into Panama City, into Darien by rental car, and up into the mountains in the middle of the country.

We really got to enjoy Panama among the Pacific Islands that dot the uninhabited coast. There are beaches, palm trees and crystal clear waters in an immense 300 mile playground where sailors can play Adam and Eve for months and not see the same place twice. We washed up on Isla Contadora in the Perlas Islands, which has an airstrip, hotels, some stores and fuel supplies. A walk was de rigeur through the ritzy neighborhoods where rich Panamanians keep weekend homes. I like this picture, it inverts the usual stereotype of Latin Americans being the gardeners for wealthy white Americans. "Mow yer lawn, guv?" After we got through the Canal we spent several more idylic weeks in the more famous San Blas islands on the Caribbean side of Panama. These Kuna indian islanders practice a low tech medieval lifestyle in their own autonomous province known to them as their Kuna Yala, with their own system of justice and social pecking order, similar to, but more idylic than, a US Indian Reservation. These islands resembled the Keys somewhat, in as much as they had coconuts, narrow sandy beaches and lots of scrub vegetation. We sailors gathered in calm anchorages and hung out barbequing under the stars, telling stories, swimming and playing cards until our supplies ran out and we had a private plane fly us out the fixings for a massive Thanksgiving dinner in November 1999. Believe me, we were absolutely bulging with thanks that memorable desert island holiday.Teaching kids to pet the dogs (with treats of course!) on the Rio Diablo/Corazon de Jesus footbridge in the Kuna Yala. Kids are kids in the most remote places and Labradors do like their treats.

Panama was a hell of a place, far more varied and interesting than Costa Rica with a greater percentage of land given over to parks and all the benefits iof a money laundering economy with excellent banking (they use the US dollar for their currency) and superb medical facilities. Retirement? Who knows!

1421

Bob agreed to wander through the bookstore with me, which came as a surprise. Bob had been retired for a while and he prided himself on being a doer not a reader. We had met while sailing the coast of Mexico en route, in our respective sailboats, to the Caribbean. Bob was a good friend and he and his wife Barb were excellent company, inveterate card players and excellent hosts. A retired electronics engineer he loved to fix things, and found my love of reading amusing but impractical. He told me he read perhaps one book a year. In this California bookstore Bob prodded me towards the shelves and started telling me I should read this and that. I nodded dumbly, astonished by his fervor. "This," he said. "You have to read this, it will blow your mind."

Well, I have to admit I was a bit dubious. He had previously recommended to me a book and in my opinion he got the thesis all wrong on that one. It was a good book, though, titled "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which posited that Indo-Europeans had received environmental advantages that helped put them ahead of rival cultures. Bob wasn't at all sure that other ethnicities could have profited from the advantages that Europeans used to get ahead. Europeans were the greatest, he said at the time. Not any more, nowadays Bob was reading voraciously and his world view was expanding, and he wanted mine to do the same.

The author of 1421, a retired Royal Navy Captain, spent 17 years researching a detective story about who actually traveled round the world first. The author's conclusions, beautifully detailed and meticulously researched, are absolutely devastating. He claims China sent fleets to all corners of the world where many of them crashed and sank and left behind colonies of Chinese sailors and concubines who created outposts of Chinese culture, genes and agriculture everywhere including Australia, South and Central America, Africa and of course to us most astonishingly, the United States.

The author is levelheaded, thoughtful and precise. His story is unimpeachable as far as I'm concerned and reminds me once again how little we can believe the stories told us by our elders and betters. Everyone believes in self preservation first and truth second. So while his theories are scoffed at by professional academics, the author employs common sense and an understanding of sailing more complete than a land based historian or archaeologist could bring to the subject. I have sailed some of the seas he discusses and everything he says about them makes perfect sense to me.

I found his explanation of the famous Bimini Road, a strip of carefully placed underwater stones off the beach on North Bimini, obvious and simple once explained. Others have concluded the stones were placed by aliens or were part of the myth of Atlantis or some other rubbish. Menzies figures, with lots of research that the Bimini Road was a pair of slipways to haul the Chinese Admiral's junks damaged in a recent hurricane.

His explanation to a sailor is obvious and simple. I believe his other explanations for anomalies in the history of exploration merit serious consideration. This book has turned my world upside down. There are 500 closely reasoned pages, a superb read, a fantastic detective story simply told and easily understood and packed with details. I recommend it highly to anyone with a mind open enough to accept that perhaps Columbus sailed West with a Chinese map in his hand, after lying to the Spanish monarchs about his plans in order to get money out of them for a chance at adventure, fame and fortune.

This is not history as one learns it but it makes the extraordinary a matter of common sense. My mind is reeling.

Vignettes III

When I was a sailboat captain taking cruise ship passengers sailing in Key West Harbor they used to ask me anxiously "What about hurricanes?" There we were sailing small catamarans around Tank Island and Christmas Tree Island, beautiful blue winter skies, crystalline waters flashing by only inches from their bums and all they could ask about was storms. Everybody wants drama. As far as I can tell since the Annus Horribilis of 2005 there have been monster floods in the Mid West, killer tornadoes in Tornado Alley, power outages in the North East, hellfires in California and outlying satellite states, and epic mudslides in Hawaii. Don't cry for the Keys, America, we're doing fine down here in balmy 80 degree days. Our biggest problem I predict is the Canadian loony at better than par with the US dollar and we probably are going to drown in (non-tipping) economically smug Canadian snowbirds all winter long. Luckily for us they have to go home every spring to validate their Free National Health Service cards.

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Boot Key has been formally cut off from the United States this week, making it a minor outlying island in the tradition of Conch Republic craziness. Boot Key is a small lump of scrub and mangroves on the Atlantic side of the city of Marathon (Marathon "Key" despite the best efforts of tourism promoters does not exist), and its partially occupied by a road, some commercial fishing docks leased to the fishermen by the owner of the radio station that operates out of Boot Key. The State of Florida in all its majesty this week ordered the City to shut down the drawbridge because it isn't able to support it's own weight let alone cars and humans. The radio station is now having its personnel ferried to the island courtesy of the City, which has to scrounge up at least $10 million dollars to fix the bridge to nowhere, or $1 million ( estimated) for the Corps of Engineers to dismantle the bridge's opening span. Which by the way still requires an operator to open the bridge to allow masted boats to get into Boot Key Harbor. The theory is that if the span is left open it might blow over in strong winds. As one might surmise there is a good deal of heated debate going on about what to do with this problem. After the parties involved solve this issue, they promise to head to Jerusalem and bring peace to the Middle East.

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This was the summer that I never made it out to Tarpon Belly Key, a place where I can put out a recliner on the beach and take a quiet read. Even though the beach is more rocks than sand, this can be viewed as an advantage as it attracts fewer visitors. I can't remember a time when I found someone else sunning themselves on the pebbles when I wanted to be there. Indeed I read in the paper this week that Tarpon Belly had a visitor who really would rather have been elsewhere. Silly man. He took off from the ramp at Blimp Road on Cudjoe and paddled his kayak out into the wind blown waters. It doesn't look far but he was apparently stuck. The brisk breezes dragged him out and washed him up on Tarpon Belly. There's not much there for a castaway but he was apparently in good health when the Marine Patrol found him the next day. Having failed to make the 40 minute boat ride even once this summer, through flat waters, I rather envy him his stay on my island.

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Gratuitous motorcycle picture.

Because I like the picture and its my blog.

The Big Smoke

Miami 2007 is not London 1850 (which used to be known thanks to its coal generated smog as "The Big Smoke" to country bumpkins), but after a few blissful weeks without having to go up to the big city, today was the day. The wife had to visit the surgeon for a pre-operative check up as she is scheduled (thanks to the succesful check-up!) to get her wrist sliced and diced and repaired in ten days. She had the same surgery last year on her other wrist as her arthritis is causing bone spurs to threaten the tendons that control her hands.

Its a form of Hanukkah gift to herself at this time of year, combining some sick leave along with pre-Christmas school closure so she gets three weeks off to recover. It also means that for the six weeks she's in a cast she won't miss swimming as the waters are too cold for us for the rest of winter. She knows the awful pain she will be in starting December 17th which makes her a bit jittery. I drove to and from, as per usual and I tried to find some joy.

The traffic up was reasonably light and speedy on Highway One and the Maxima was in fine fettle though I didn't need to do much passing as even the slow pokes managed to hold 60mph in the 55mph sections of the Overseas Highway. The bummer was that our regular pit stop in Marathon, 30 minutes from home was shut down, and permanently by the look of things. Its a Pepto-Bismol pink hut by the south side of the Highway serving cheap and cheerful Cuban food, slowly its true, but hot and delicious cheese toast in a huge wedge. perhaps the wedges were too big or the curvy Cuban babe who operated the espresso machine got whisked off her feet by one of the burly construction workers that lurked around the place every time I stopped there. nevertheless we had to hold out to Denny's Latin Diner in Islamorada for con leche and cheese toast.

There's another weird thing, Starbucks, which has had an outlet on Duval street for about three years, now has a store in Islamorada, right next to Denny's Latin Cafe, the only decent coffee shop in 80 miles, and Starbucks has to stick another location right next door to try to drive them out of business. I like Starbucks drinks but their predatory construction practices suck.

It was our last stop before the mainland madness, 90 mph on the turnpike, crowded traffic lights and lots of hurry-up-and-wait at Baptist Hospital at the University of Miami. So we sat at Denny's table, listened to loud salsa music over the speakers and indulged in the 78 degree sunny morning.

The hospital, buried near the tip of the lush Coral Gables Golf course was where the pre-op check was done, but the surgeon operates out of a gruesome clinic in North Miami, a stark cold place with angry staff and cruddy facilities, so we had to cross the entire city on the turnpike to get there. Not without reason are Miami drivers rated among the most aggressive in the nation- all those Cuban, Colombian and Venezuelan exiles drive like they are back home. But in a powerful car the stream of urgent traffic gets you there in a hurry!

Coral Gables by contrast is one of those leafy cities, a suburb within the boundaries of the larger metropolitan area, Atherton in Northern California might be comparable or Lake Forest north of Chicago where one of my wife's aunts lives, all trees, large urban homes, in Coral Gables on Spanish named Avenues (Granada, Pilarcito etc...) with huge ficus trees, sweeping driveways and pink tiled roofs, the sort that spew tiles like chaff in a hurricane.

Finally we got to go shopping after all the doctoring and my wife had time only for a short tour of the huge South Miami Target with its vast multi-storey parking lot such as doesn't exist in the Keys. Target is the store she most misses in the lonely fastness of Key West, and of course Costco, where we went later, for those essential huge boxes of bananas and 144 count tubs of sponges and barrels of liquid aminos and I don't know what.

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Once again I felt like a country bumpkin, admiring the huge rows of clean orderly shelves in Target, the vast acres of al fresco parking at Costco:

We came home, a quick three hour drive, to the sounds of the NPR Presidential Debate from Iowa on the Sirius satellite radio with a bundle of white roses we bought from a street vendor, too late to light the evening candle for the first night of Hanukkah. The light burns bright inside, now that we are home amidst the stillness of life in the Lower Keys.

Atosha in Paradise

The building was clean and bright and new inside, the wood floor smooth and shiny, and yellow was the theme. The owners and employees of the new fitness center wore yellow t-shirts, the walls were painted bright yellow and the paper napkins and plates were yellow as well, in case we missed the point. Key West's new gym and massage center is all yellow, bright and sunny and new. For those of us invited to inspect the new place, there was an abundance of food and alcohol, the fitness theme notwithstanding, because in Key West free booze guarantees a good turnout, no matter what. We mingled, sipped soda and scarfed sushi.

David Horan was mingling with the best of them and bumped into me. We met a while back in his offices on Whitehead Street as I was exploring business options for my sailboat, and he is a well known Admiralty lawyer in Key West. He's rich as Croesus too as he was a major side kick in the crew that discovered the Atosha galleon loaded down with hundreds of millions in gold and silver. It turns out he's a tad bit deaf, which is awkward in a noisy gathering.

"Fitch?" he asked me quizzically. "Why do I plan to get fitch?" He started a conversation with me with that wary look a man gets when he knows you from somewhere but can't quite place where. I had asked innocently if he planned on getting fit. He does not carry himself like a man who indulges in rigorous exercise.

"Oh," he roared over the background chatter, as the penny dropped. "Fit?" he looked at me as though I were mad. "I'm here for the booze," he announced. "It's free." Obvious ain't it? Like I said everyone in Key West will show up to anything if there's free Bud Light no matter how unlikely the event may seem. Later I saw him tentatively prancing on one of those treadmills where you walk up and down on the spot. His wife stood to one side looking bored, as though tending a wayward infant.

We got back on the Bonneville and rumbled off to take a tour of the south side of the Island en route to the next Big Event of a culture packed weekend. Never mind the gathering of women Thursday for Comedy Night at the Red Barn Theater, or the Christmas parade Saturday down Truman and Duval, the kiddies Fantasy Fest with all bodies thoroughly covered and Tootsie rolls flung instead of beads; Friday Night was Nutcracker Night.

Ugh! I hate cultural pastiches and I wouldn't be seen dead at a Christmas performance of the Nutcracker any place. I'm sick of Tchaikovsky's divine music ending up as elevator dreck in department stores, I hate toy soldiers and crap performances oooh'ed and aaaah'ed at by doting parents. So imagine my surprise when I found myself actually looking forward to three hours of treacle and saccharine at the Tennessee Williams Theater at the Junior College, a palace renovated recently in green and blue.

It was a night to revel in the pleasure of living in Key West, of being local. I care not a lot that I have the determination required to live here, nor that my wife's arthritis makes living this far south pretty much a requirement, I enjoy living in a small town with large world attitude. And when I get to see something like the submarine Nutcracker Joyce Stahl put on for Key West I hug myself in pleasure that I get to be one of the chosen few that calls this place home. The Nutcracker we few, we happy few got to see was a divinely inspired Key West creation. The first act was set in the back of the Mayor of Key West's Conch cottage, a garden filled with palm trees luxuriating under a dark tropic sky, aquamarine waters shining through the foliage. The mangroves that descended as Clara slumbered represented true understanding of the vegetation one comes to love when one lives surrounded by water.

The dance especially in the second act looked superb to my untutored eye, and when I spoke of it the next night at the Christmas parade a professional former dancer assured me they were world class performers leading the troupe. We were treated to a submarine garden of brain and elk horn corals, the hull of the Atosha (copyrighted to read "Atoshu") spilling jewels with Clara and Drosselmayer's nephew observing the proceedings from a diving bell suspended over the stage.

My wife and I had reserved seats at the front of the mezzanine far enough to enjoy the superb costumes as they were meant to be seen but close enough that we could enjoy the expressions on the little chickens faces as they did battle with the toy sailors marching 'neath the Flag of the Conch Republic.

Our seating also allowed us to observe the passage of patrons eagerly seeking a refreshing glass of wine to bring back to their seats after the intermission. My neighbor, a text messaging moron during the first act brought back two glasses to restore her for the second act. In passing I saw my former employer wandering by with three glasses, which I was glad to see he distributed to his two friends. On the way he nodded vaguely at me, a la Horan, and I was glad to see he, like me, never forgets a face even if he can't quite place it's provenance...

Alcohol and Art in Key West, when combined are quite enough to lead to blissful oblivion. In my case, however, I shan't soon forget our evening of ballet, a performance that took me out of myself so far that I forgot completely I was even watching the long despised Nutcracker. Even when the cracked hull of the Atoshu hove into view shimmering amid the corals on the ocean floor at Tennessee Williams. This wasn't the Nutcracker, this was Key West.

Big Pine Key

There's trouble among the pine trees and its spelled development. The county commission is running out of money, partly because of mismanagement and spending on commissioner's pet projects ( sinking ships, buying restaurants, not maintaining reserves) and partly because state lawmakers in the middle of a massive fiscal downturn in a state that gets most of its money from the value of property insists on rolling back property taxes. Capable local government is feeling the pinch. Cretins similar to the majority of the Monroe County Board of commissioners are leading us down a terrible path.

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Anyway the majority of the board is contemplating putting a development fee on any buildable lots found within the confines of the National Key Deer refuge, which encompasses Big Pine Key and Little and Middle Torch Keys. The idea is to recoup some cash by charging owners of lots to build on them which is a not totally crazy idea. However the figure the Board has been recommended to impose is a one time go of $100,000 which as one might imagine has more than a few people up in arms. I call the majority of the Board cretins for good reason.My Vespa GTS "parked" on 16th Street. This "street" and many others like it are the target of the new development fee.

Attorneys and accountants are among those lurking in the rural fastness of the island. But most of what you see from Highway One is like this:

Open space and huge ugly buildings- welcome to downtown Big Pine Key!

The fee's going nowhere and I'm pretty sure its just another not so clever way to send a message to Tallahassee to remind state lawmakers why they continue to exercise oversight over development plans in the Keys. Local lawmakers have been deferring putting in a proper sewage system for twenty years while allowing unbridled development up and down the islands. The result is predictable- everyone is totally pissed off and nothing gets done.

Shopping in fancy footwear after some rain? No paving or landscaping here!

Big Pine key is crying out for development. This the largest island in the lower keys, hence its name- the pine trees that grow on the ten by 3 mile island are actually quite puny, but there's a ton of land here, covered in scrub, thorns, pines and palmettos, and in between the scrawny flora pop up the odd human habitations, always surrounded by "No Trespassing" signs and a general refusal to engage with one's neighbors. This island is the rural retreat for people who prefer guns dogs and trucks to subtitled films, vintage wines and far flung vacations. This is Salt of the Earth country and its under siege.I think of places like Naperville in Illinois, San Antonio in Texas and Baltimore's Inner Harbor among I'm sure many other illustrious places, as examples of communities that have made an effort to create urban order out of decay. Big Pine Key sure ain't one of those. I am conflicted as to whether it should be. On the one hand I rarely go to Big Pine unless its for a specific purpose. On the other the island seems to be doing fine without me!My wife grumbles all the time about how she would like a Publix grocery instead of the struggling Winn Dixie, or the more yuppie Walgreens chain over the chaotic CVS, but she is firmly in the camp that wants Big Pine made "nice."

And they have a point. Big Pine is a wide spot in the Overseas Highway plagued by extra low speed limits to protect Key Deer and the businesses along the highway are a mess. This is not a place the appeals to the eye and says "shop here!"

The best use of Highway facing lots along US 1 in Big Pine Key is boat storage? After Scotty's left no one else could figure what to do with this dump off US 1.This place has been a mouldy eyesore since Wilma, now possibly coming back... Hurricane proof poles may be necessary, but the decorations are a mockery.Traffic lights hint at urban agglomeration but not necessarily civilization.

There again many of the people who live in the hinterlands of this island want to keep it that way. They've got themselves a home, possibly a trailer or a ground level concrete block structure relatively inexpensive, even if flood-prone, and they've got woods, room to shoot their guns and no neighbors peering into their yards. This place is the refuge from the urban yuppiness of Key West. And yet, I look at the flea market, a huge open space filled with junk, run by a mad preacher (no, really!) who hates his neighbors and I think to myself this place would be ideal for a Publix with a Target to attract shoppers from Key West and Marathon.Maybe we could even have a decent little restaurant of which there is none currently that encourage me to leave the comfort of my home for a culinary adventure. For good eats we head south a few miles to Square Grouper or Coco's, both on Cudjoe Key; never Big Pine! BPK Restaurant's cusine stops at eggs and burgers- curb appeal? What's that?

And then I start to imagine the extra traffic, the nagging about parking, the need for expansion, blah blah blah. I must be crazy. Leave things as they are, all messy and confused and unappealing. If I want urban civilization its just 30 miles down the road and I know all about the squished up feeling people in Key West get. God knows they complain about it loudly enough!

We are our own worst enemies, sometimes, and though I pride myself on moving to the Keys not to change them the crappy environment and lack of facilities in Big Pine has stuck in my craw. I need an attitude adjustment, really I do.