Wrist Surgery

Monday is the day my wife gets her wrist cut open at Miami Baptist, and as this is a mirror image of surgery she had on the right wrist last year we know exactly what is in store, and it ain't pretty, not even when she is pumped full of brain-dulling drugs. She'll murder me when she sees this post-op picture taken last year. I crushed my thumb years ago and learned to my cost that doctors have a really hard time numbing extremities, and even though my wife, like many women, is tough when it comes to pain management this coming week will be brutal. We've done the pre-op, we've met the surgeon, we've got the paperwork under control, and we're braced for our share of the cost, not covered by insurance, which last year amounted to something over $6,000. Gotta love free medical enterprise, pity we couldn't have surgeons bidding for the job, but there it is. The week upcoming doesn't look great for me either but I'm just the care giver so I will fade into the background, dispatch style, while all her friends gather round and cluck with her over her misfortune. Its a great thing to be a woman sometimes.

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On a better note there was some sad news for Santa Claus this week. He was scheduled to land by seaplane at some gathering of young people in the Upper Keys and the float plane crash landed and sank just off the beach. A rather soggy Santa waded ashore to do the job and the pilot rather ruefully told the Citizen reporter he doubted he'd been good enough lately to merit a new plane. Apparently the kids thought differently- they figured he'd rescued Santa from a watery fate. No word on the fate of the reindeer.

Last week there was a picture of a hard working Santa at Bayview Park, the portly retired KWPD Sgt Bittinger, heavily disguised. So heavily disguised in fact he was in danger of passing out in the eighty-one degree heat. The picture showed Santa panting in the blast of a small portable fan.

Let no one says life's just a beach at 24 degrees north.

Paving Paradise

Key West continues, inexorably to change. The changes aren't sudden and God knows they are planned far enough in advance, but the paving of paradise continues apace, like it or not. Its Old Town that takes the brunt of the cement attacks, focused on two stretches of waterfront. The old Atlantic Shores resort at the southern tip of Simonton Street is a large hole in the ground at the moment. It used to be a pretty cool place, straight friendly, dog friendly offering open air movies every Thursday night with free popcorn. Next door the old Sands beach resort is also gone, paving the way for some new monstrosity. That's the bad news on South Beach, and more on that later.

The focus of controversy I rode by earlier this week is around Waterfront Market an overpriced food store offering key West's widest selection of organics (Publix is in close second place). The owner of the Waterfront wants to quit but locals want the institution to remain so there is a move afoot to sell shares and keep the place going as a coop. Buco Pantelis was notorious for low low wages and its hard to imagine a coop will be able to pay the sort of money that will keep experienced staff.

Just next door to the Waterfront Market is an older Key West institution that may also survive as a public entity. Historic Tours of America abruptly fired the crew and put the schooner Western Union up for sale last summer. With hurricane season over (notwithstanding Caribbean islands getting a drenching from Hurricane Olga this week), some civic minded citizens popped up and decided to try to sell shares for the Western Onion and raise 1.5 million to keep it on the Key West waterfront. So far so good. But I did think it odd when organisers showed Deep Water as a fundraiser to save the boat. The film is about the suicidal Donald Crowhurst and his doomed attempt to sail around the world in the 1968 Golden Globe race. But I went to the Tropic Cinema anyway and yielded my $25 to watch one boat flounder to save the other.

These public minded attempts at preservation are bookended by two major housing developments that bode little good for the mostly city owned waterfront. To the north is the old Steam Plant, the electrical generating station that spewed its effluent into the harbor at the "toxic triangle" off Trumbo Road. That thing sat unused for decades, a brooding castle of Transylvanian proportions, that has now been reborn as 3 million dollar exclusive apartments (one left!) with a dozen affordable units built in its shadow (none left!).

Once Ed Swift, owner of Historic Tours of America, is done with the Steam Plant we will shortly thereafter witness the birth of another set of condos popping up on top of the old Jabors RV park which sat across the street from the Waterfront Market. This development is being created by another development company that is convinced this is the best way to make Key West a hot tourist destination. Despite the glut of condos in south Florida these ultra expensive units, also on offer at around $3 million, are selling briskly. Everyone wants a slice of "Old Key West" even if they kill it in the process of buying it. The Watermark took a lot of effort to permit as the developers wanted to violate just about every zoning regulation but steady citizen opposition got it within city zoning requirements and now construction has begun.
Watermark, a name discredited by the zoning fiasco is known as Harbor Condominiums in its latest incarnation, and will soon tower over the little bar that likes to call itself "the last little piece of old Key West," Schooner Wharf Bar. Bar aficionados are sounding the death knell of the funky, musically off beat and always loud joint, even though current plans call for the Schooner Wharf to be treated as a charming attraction, for the multi gazillionaires who plan to live next door. I doubt that will last. All new residents bitch when they start to reside here, about the funky charm that attracted them here in the first place.

And this has been going on for decades in the Keys. Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum, and we just can't find any decent local leaders to elect who will change our headlong course into middle class mediocrity.

Flying Dreidels

I was rushing up the stairwell at work, the ends of my motorcycle jacket flying, my hands encumbered variously by my man purse and my lunch box. I was minutes away from being late for work, the first time in a couple of years and blam! Who should I bump into on the stairs but the Great Gawd Almighty City Manager himself. He's smiling cheerfully and its 4 minutes to six in the am. I am not smiling, I'm gasping, and with a brief "goo..mo..ning" I'm gone down the corridor motorcycle boots thumping on the carpet as I skid into the doorway of the 9-1-1 call center. What the bloody hell is he doing in the police station at this hour of the a.m.?

"I'm never usually this late," I wanted to shout over my shoulder, "but I was nearly knocked off my motorcycle by a flying dreidel!" As if he would have believed me. An excuse worthy of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin indeed. The manager was cruising down to the briefing room to meet the troops, who were no doubt equally enthusiastic as I was to meet him for the first time.

The morning had started off well enough, with a brisk alarm ring at four minutes past four, followed by an instant leap out of bed and into my t shirt and shorts cycling gear. A pair of crocs on my feet and the bicycle is downstairs illuminated by the harsh glare of the outside lights. I am properly awake.

The ride was excellent, a half hour whizzing through the mangroves, past the dormant Cuban Deli, under the harsh orange glare of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority pumping station's street lights, and so back home in a tingling lather. I am an unfit suburban rider far from the world of spandex, tour de France and racing ten speeds. I pedal sedately upright on my three speed automatic. Very refreshing.

My commute started less well after I pointed the Bonneville south on Highway One. Four smooth gear shifts and we were purring along at 60mph on an empty highway (speed limit: 45mph). Up over the 40ft Nile Channel Bridge things got sticky, stuck behind a 50mph truck with a Proud to be American sticker (I'd like one that reads Cheerfully American, or Grateful to be American on my Triumph) and a large flag decal on the tailgate.

We purr through Summerland Key under the streetlights (45mph zone continues) at a respectable if timid 55 and in the glow of the street lights I can just make out the time: 5:25am. I'm on target if not ahead of myself. It's on Cudjoe Key that things become unglued. Were I not wearing heavy gloves (its 74 degrees) and a full face helmet (its 74 degrees I say) I'd rub my eyes in disbelief for the Proud American in the full size pick up in front of me has slowed to 38mph (45 zone continues) and peering round him I see a car with a stalk on the roof and a red light on top of that. Absurd, I think to myself, that can't be right.

Can it? Anything's possible in the Keys. But why so slow? Argh!

Sure enough, we take the wide sweeping corner at Square Grouper and there in front of the car I see two more cars also equipped with red light poles on the roof and a slow work truck towing what appears to be an elaborate outhouse. By now I can barely bring myself to wonder what the hell is going on so slow is the parade. Further up ahead I can see more illuminated masts riding on cars and an RV and some sort of machine between them with what appears to be a billboard on the roof.

Then the penny drops -it's Christmas! This must be some peculiar traveling circus of strange religiosity coming to Key West to offer season's greetings to the southernmost hedonists. I've never found eternal salvation to mix very well with 20th century advertising razzmatazz.

And to make things worse, they are driving slowly and by the light of the lamp over the Sheriff's substation I see its gone 5:30am. Time's a-wasting as the red lights wobble on the carefully proceeding cars.

Finally we crawl past the traffic light at Sugarloaf School and just as I am about to open it up (45mph zone continues) and zip past the Proudly American truck and the illuminated mobile roof ornaments a car crests the bridge ahead and I have to wait. Then, past the bridge, Mile Marker 20 opens up a long sweeping stretch of roadway with a gentle curve to the right, it takes a flick of the wrist I'm hitting 75 (45mph zone continues) putting me past the truck, the three cars and the rolling outhouse. Up ahead the billboard is illuminated and visible beyond the other three cars with lighted poles on their roofs.

The outhouse was weird. It had writing celebrating Hanukkah on it and the walls were painted like faux New England brick work. This is a Jewish caravan? Curiouser and curiouser muttered the motorcyclist into his helmet. Especially as New England brickwork, I'm pretty sure never was seen in pre-Christian Palestine. But what's a little historical inaccuracy between believers?

The cars up ahead met their fate when finally we were all free of the 45 mph constraints and entered the highway beyond Sugarloaf Lodge. Here the limit rises to 55mph and I jerked the Bonneville out and beyond the illuminated poles tucking in behind the billboard to avoid oncoming cars.

It was a dreidel, illuminated from within and twirling gently from one side to the other in the slipstream of the car beneath. It looked delicate like rice paper and fragile enough to flip backwards, cutting its bonds to the automobile and toppling onto the Bonneville behind. I throttled back.

After a decade of pootling through the Saddlebunch Keys we finally trooped through Big Coppitt where a few startled dog walkers paused to check out the mobile-museum-cum-illuminated-RV trailed by a flying dreidel and a motorcycle outrider. I was aware the time was 5:45am and I was at Mile Marker 10 with eight long miles to go and a current speed set at a divinely inspired 37mph. Soon though we crossed the bridge to Rockland Key (Mile Marker 9) and the Highway turns gloriously to four lanes (55mph zone) and a straight shot to Key West and the police station.

The final insult as we dropped off the causeway onto the four lane was when the dreidel meister and his cohorts, instead of slipping politely into the right lane took up station in the overtaking lane. Argh!

I like to think the Jewish God is a forgiving sort (my wife assures me He is) because I was ripping His devoted followers all sorts of unmentionable orifices as I dropped two gears and gunned the Bonneville to an embarrassingly high speed in order to pull past before they spread like locusts across all available lanes at a stately 37 mph. I'm pretty sure my rapid fire swearing combined with the slipstream of my angry passing wobbled that dreidel worse than it had wobbled all the way from wherever it originally came.

And that is how I nearly mowed down the City Manager on my to work. Not quite late, but entirely out of breath cursing a group of sweet defenseless Hanukkah lovers out to spread the light of good cheer across the land.

I am a brute and I am sorry. I could have just left the house five minutes earlier and avoided putting my immortal soul and the spirit of the season at risk. I am humbled.

A Midnight Clear

Once upon a time on an island long, long, ago a crisp clear night fell across the land and the residents trembled. For they had no heat; there was no heat upon the scraps of land and over the water neither was there heat. And the residents trembled for they saw temperatures had dropped to an all time recorded low of 41 degrees, and across the islands there was bugger-all heat. That was the coldest low ever recorded and the residents noted it, and it was not good. Absolutely no good at all.The Christmas Season in the Florida Keys is different. Obviously there isn't any snow on the ground and never will be, but there's more to it than that. Christmas comes not with attitude, like there comes across the rest of the land as normally level headed people become ravening shoppers, but these islands enjoy a leavening of humor. The three homes on Sugarloaf Key ho ho ho'ing always make me smile as I ride past Mile Marker 16 on my way home in the dark of evening.

I don't much care for Christmas and I never have. When I was a child Christmas was a time of extra family tension and when I left home all that got left behind as well. Then when I got married I told my wife I had an aversion to Christmas and she replied by pointing that she was a Jew, so that solved that. And then we moved to the Keys nearly a decade ago.

The first few years one lives in the Keys it is a constant source of amazement to see people dressing warmly for winter- long pants, boots, fall fashions are everywhere, and then slowly one acclimates and a sudden plunge to 72 degrees finds oneself also covered in long sleeves and long pants, Just like the Conchs. Luckily the temperature plunges don't last and one can tentatively resume short sleeves and short pants when out and about. And those warm winter nights between cold fronts are perfect for wandering the neighborhoods looking for: It surprises me but I like Christmas in the Keys, not least because there is, against the odds, a community down here and holidays are holidays and if your's is Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, its all the same thing. Key West is the first place I've lived where tolerance and diversity make halfway decent bedfellows, so if someone else's Christmas tree is my wife's Hanukkah bush that's okay too. Of course this is America so the consumer frenzy that is modern Christmas is in full swing, catalogues worn thin by thumbing, UPS desperately looking for fill-in help, all the usual high stress rubbish. For some of us its a great time to have a second childhood, and make it a really good one this time around. Happy Holidays to the mainland under snow ice and drizzle, but I've got to go ride my Bonneville.

Duck Key

The Socialists are coming! The Socialists are coming...on a Triumph Bonneville? Its a terrible thing but places like Duck Key make me crazy, so naturally on a beautiful Fall day like today with 85 degrees of sunshine and a cooling southeasterly breeze it was a perfect day to drive myself crazy. Duck Key sits south of Highway One at Mile marker 61, across a short causeway decorated with columns and signs that don't actually say Keep Out but that's the theme. You can't keep a good Bonneville out.Duck Key was the creation of Pritam Singh, the hobo turned Sikh developer born in Boston and settled in Key West who famously drove himself broke buying the Navy Base that became Truman Annex. He made a fortune ultimately and turned his hand to making Duck Key just north of Marathon, Paradise in the Middle Keys, as it were. This wide spot in the Highway is a shared paradise, half occupied by a mixture of elderly cement homes, in the raised style of the sixties. These are being taken over by Money and turned into Palm Beach by the Keys. I love these massively expensive homes tiled with Mediterranean roof tiles that'll blow halfway to Tampa in a hurricane. Actually these objects of conspicuous consumption irk me to death. I see no value in making expensive exurbia of a Florida Key, a place traditionally reserved for scrounging a living, not lounging a living. I suppose a traditionally inclined Conch sponge fisherman might sneer equally at my level of indulgent living, a weatherproof home equipped to excess with air conditioning, running water and a low flush water closet. The height of bourgeois excess no doubt. My little island has no Mickey Mouse bridges across the canals. On the other hand Duck Key, the half that isn't Singh's exclusive Hawk Cay Resort, could never be described as plebeian. I mean, one has to wonder a little bit about this opulence doesn't one? Especially considering that most of these homes are unoccupied. These are the homes of people who show up a week or four every year, and the rest of the time they are the domain of electricians and plumbers, gardeners and Mexican weed whackers. Some idle people fish off the canals, for fun: but that's too close to life in the rest of the Keys, I think. So the anglers are a lone breed far from the majority of elderly housebound millionaires, yet hardly close to the world of commercial fishing.

Duck Key is not a serene place, the few empty lots are lined with Realtors' signs looking almost disdainful that someone might want, or worse need, to profit from these small squares of open spaces wedged between the homes and pools and canals. The air is redolent with the sounds of small motors buzzing as the industrious Mexicans clear away leaves, whack impudent weeds and apply coats of paint to slightly worn exteriors. I ride through this world and wonder why people feel the need to own more than they can use. Its a terribly European sentiment, I admit and I try to shake it. But I cannot be like my American neighbors who feel only a warm glow of satisfaction when they see people who have managed to make vast fortunes and can think of nothing better to do than to add to them. I think its a very American sense that its possible for anyone to accomplish given industry and luck in the proper proportions. Europeans have a nasty sense that to be successful demands a hook between the shoulder blades and a sharp tug back into the mire of ordinary living.

And then I ride home and revel in my quiet neighborhood of small houses, unadorned canals and empty snowbird nests. Just like Duck Key, only less so. We have met the enemy and he is us. My kind of Socialism I suppose.

Gridlock

"I can't believe it!." Noel was flummoxed and outraged by a new disaster in his young life. He threw himself down into his chair at his console and dragged his headset on. he spent the rest of the workday grumbling about "some people," and one got the impression his co-workers at the Key West PD were part of his problem. His brand new black Nissan Altima had just received its first scratch, a jagged white stripe across his bumper. "Ruined!" he declaimed, a tad melodramatically. "My car will never be the same again!" I empathised with him, because owning a brand new car in Key West is a trial.

During the multiple evacuations caused by eight hurricane threats in 2004 and 2005 authorities in key West came to the conclusion that there were about 8,000 of 25,00 people in the city who had no cars. Municipal evacuation plans now call for a constant stream of buses stopping at the High School during an evacuation to ferry thousands of people to Miami. One of the things that people love about living in Key West is the lifestyle that allows them to get around by bicycle or at most by 50cc scooter. The horrors of car ownership are not for some of them. The majority though have a death grip on their automobiles despite all drawbacks on a small island. This is a town with narrow streets and way too many cars already so for up to 8 months out of the year finding parking is a drag and people shove and squeeze their cars into excessively small spaces in an effort to create a space where one might reasonably be assumed not to exist. In New Town, the more expansive outer two thirds of the island, parking spaces are more reasonably proportioned by collective madness seems to take over local drivers and they ding and bang each other's cars as though they were in the narrow confines of Old Town. The net result of all this mainland attitude meeting the island reality of limited space means that there just isn't a really good reason to own a cage unless you have off street parking and like to drive to the mainland from time to time (I qualify in both categories). Nevertheless when seventy percent of the cars on the island drowned following the Wilma inundations of 2005, almost everyone I can think off went out and bought new SUVs to replace their lost transport. The net result is crowded streets, as badly clogged as ever.

Then we get a city employee questionnaire asking about our driving habits. The City of key West, under a new manager is trying to join the 21st century with a recycling program (at last!) and suggestions to help make commuting less carbon intensive. However the questionnaire was prepared by a zombie who wasn't paying attention to Key West. Nowhere in all the exhaustive questioning was there room to admit to commuting by moped or motorcycle. Bicycles, cars, SUVs of course get a mention but the option of two motorized wheels isn't on the radar. Still scooters and motorcycles make sense on the streets where we ride. My mainland vehicle is a 5 year old Nissan Maxima and it has its share of scratches and scrapes, though it runs perfectly and is a fine 3.5 liter machine for passing slow pokes on Highway One. My wife is girding her loins to replace it, as it approaches the 100,000 mile mark, with a convertible. She's hesitant partly because she hates spending the money (she doesn't mind buying me a motorcycle though- women!) and partly because she knows that if she gets a glossy Sebring or a Solara it stands an excellent chance of getting dinged- bright clean cars attract scratches in Key West's Old Town. By contrast our "Conch cruiser" a ten year old scarlet Geo Metro is crisp and clean and completely scratch free. I figure its just too modest a car to attract the attention of the sociopaths who feel compelled to put scratches on strangers' cars. I guess if I lived in the city I would not bother with a car, its easy enough to rent one, and off street parking is rare as hen's teeth in Old Town. Even in New Town, land of suburban styled American homes, garages are usually converted to living space, so cars end up where kids can egg them, drunk drivers can sideswipe them and disgruntled pedestrians can key them. But you can't separate most Americans, even emigres to island living from their cars. Its a tribute I suppose that around one third of city residents have chosen to deprive themselves of their cars.