Blue Hole

I forget sometimes how obsessed with alligators outsiders can be when it comes to Florida.There are a few things people associate with Florida, with varying degrees of revulsion. They are: 1) Hurricanes. 2)Humidity. 3) Bugs. 4)Alligators. Well you can get a pretty good slice of all four at Big Pine Keys' Blue Hole. The Blue Hole isn't blue, the one in Belize is because its out in the Caribbean Sea, this local hole is actually the product of some rock mining and it would be hard to expect a quarry to produce water of a hue comparable to the Western Caribbean; so it doesn't even try:Green Hole would be more like it, if one lived in a less charitable, less visitor oriented world. But part of the expectation for the keys is blue, turquoise, azure waters, and fresh water holes must conform, in name at least.The Blue Hole gets a mention in every guide book, not because it's buggy and humid but because it has alligators, and fearsome animals they are too.The sad fact is that like sharks, alligators are much more at risk from humans than vice-versa. A notorious court case concluded last year with two young men going to the slammer for torturing and killing an alligator they plucked from this very spot. This dinosaur was just lying there, showing but one tiny sign of life, the nostrils opening and closing rapidly as it breathed.There used to be a bunch of turtles sunning themselves on the logs, and whether they ended up as alligator lunch or turtle soup, a Conch delicacy, I don't know. Perhaps they were off enjoying a less threatening area of the hole that evening. Alligators are fresh water creatures and when the Blue hole flooded out in the hurricane season of 2005 the alligators had to be rounded up from neighboring islands and dumped back in their hole. They, unlike American crocodiles, don't do well in salt water. Unlike crocodiles, alligators are more aggressive and they don't back off when humans show up. Plus they run extremely fast on land. I am cautious around them as I find them less predictable than sharks. There are thousands of alligators in the Everglades and you can canoe among them on the Myakka River near Sarasota. That is a creepy experience I shan't repeat for a while.Less dramatic are the white dots across the water in an inaccessible area of the Hole. They may be herons or ibis, depending on the shape of their beaks and the color of their legs, which just goes to show I will never make the annals of the Audubon Society though one day I may bestir myself to visit the Audubon House in Key West. What I learn there I shall promptly forget I'm sure.

Like Audubon himself the Blue Hole takes a rather human-centric approach to the Great Outdoors, fencing in the visitor at every turn: The Blue Hole is, in my estimation a modest little attraction, though it is a peaceful spot to contemplate the glories of Nature. In this one is not helped by the abundance of fencing and the absolute dearth of benches. For some reason the short paved trail round half the hole has nowhere to sit to allow for contemplation.Which means visitors tend to gravitate to the observation platform and one ends up contemplating Nature rather as though one were waiting for a bus in a municipal bus shelter which tends to spoil the effect:Rather than invest in benches and the adornment of relaxing vistas with seats, the Wildlife Sanctuary has decided the Blue Hole needs a more complex parking arrangement than a simple pea rock parking area:The Blue Hole has long been ADA compliant with a cement parking space and cement walkway to the observation deck for visitors in wheelchairs. Despite all this construction busyness the Blue Hole is what it is, a quiet spot just off the busy road. And even if forced to stand, one can take a moment to enjoy another splendid Keys sunset in the woods:And, lest there were any doubt I paid my latest visit on my favorite form of carbon creating locomotion:Parked rather sneakily at the back, unmarked, "entrance" to the Blue Hole. For locals who know, only, I fear.

The Greatest Show In Town

Visitor: What time is the sunset?

Shopkeeper: About 7:45 this evening.

Visitor: Oh we can't make it at that time. Do they do it more than once?

Quick Witted Shopkeeper: Oh yes, the second sunset starts an hour later.

In Key West "sunset" isn't what the sun does each evening, sunset is an event, a circus, a parade where all are invited to show up at Mallory Square and supposedly watch the orb make its descent hopefully into the ocean, or at least across the roofs of Sunset Key, more prosaically known in history as Tank Island owing to its former incarnation as a storage area for the Navy. And boy, do the visitors show up, because sunset nowadays is big business and lucky for everyone the sun itself doesn't charge residuals on its appearances. This dude was making his home movie with but one object in his lense, I'm sure.I have mixed feelings about people en masse, but it would be churlish to mention my phobia in light of the fact that sunset at Mallory Square is a crowd. That's the point of the gathering, to draw in tons of people to mill around in a small space at the waterfront. And then sell them things. Oh and to look at the sunset, though people will wear their hats:Quite the Roman profile.

The story goes that the sunset celebration started as a bit of an ironic joke. It was the nice Mr Williams who came down to the docks, which in those days consisted of a bunch of rotting, collapsing warehouses on the western edge of town, and toasted the sun's bravura performance, as in all likelihood he himself was toasted, as it were. Because his first name was Tennessee he collected a bit of a following and in between meeting interesting sailors around town, he and his entourage started a Key West habit that has turned into this:The habit apparently got hijacked a bit in the flower power era when young travelers stopped by to sell their wares. A fond memory of a friend in California, a very proper attorney in Oakland, remembers wandering the Sunshine State in a van making a living trading trinkets. She gets a lost, misty look in her eyes when she tells the story of her hippy youth... And then there's the modern trader, doubtless checking the Citizen's Voice column. He's an old hand at sunsets apparently, and enthusiasm isn't his stock in trade.It is quite lucrative working Mallory Square, for some of the performers and traders. So much so there is a committee that runs the sunset celebration and assigns the spaces with some kind of a lottery, I believe. The acts are quite a mixture, some funnier, some more serious, a few are very capable and there are those acrobats that have managed to buy themselves a home and send their kids through college based on their takings at Mallory Square.People grunt all the time about how Key West isn't a family destination though you wouldn't know it from all the small persons littering the square:There's lots to see at Mallory Square and it's not clear who comes to see what. The Coastguard swinging low in a helicopter to check the crowd out got lots of attention from the grounded tourists:And for some tourists, local winged rodents merit attention when they are pecking the ground like their more famous fowl counterparts, the Key West chickens:Everything is new, exciting and different in Key West.

From the first picture it's clear the sun, even in Spring sinks barely to the south of Sunset Key, and in summer the orbit moves more to the north. Which means that if the objective is to actually see the orb sink into the sea there are better options, as Sunset Key will obscure the moment of impact for much of the year. A sunset cruise might be the better option if a view of the actual sunset is what is desired, or even a cocktail at the top of La Concha which does however, charge admission (for sunset! the nerve!). A visit to Mallory Square isn't quite on the scale of Piazza San Marco in Venice, or a visit to "see Naples then die," but it is I reluctantly grant, something a visitor should do once. I like sunsets on my own island, and that's my cue for a gratuitous motorcycle picture on my street, on Ramrod Key:Home sweet home, and be it ever so humble this is sunset just the way I like it:And yes, the opening lines do come from the mouths of babes and innocents and have been recorded from the mouths of Key West tourists, so I hope the joke can be considered my contribution to the saturnalia of April Fool's Day.

Changing Season

My neighbors at the end of my street hitched their Jeep up to their RV the other day and took off north on the Overseas Highway. I've never spoken to them, but their comings and goings mark the season as sure as the swallows at Capistrano, and now that their canal front home is padlocked and shuttered I know the winter season is coming to an end and summer approaches.Summer time in the Keys is the "other" season, not exactly a time of mellow fruitfulness to quote the poet, but a time of higher humidity, longer daylight, and calmer ocean waters, laid flat by an absence of wind, and overpowered by those magnificent Florida mountains known to outsiders as thunderheads. Florida this far south has only two seasons, broadly speaking, dry winters and wet summers. Summers are the time people go North to sweat in sweltering Mid Western brick homes in places where, I'm told temperatures easily top a hundred degrees on airless wet afternoons. Down here by contrast it rarely gets over 95, and the sun though hot and white is reflected by the waters which also produce a lot of the time, the tiniest of breezes. be they ever so small the summer winds are always welcome.This is also the time of year I get home before the sun comes up, bathing my house in golden light, but those days I do stay awake past seven, after a long night at work, I am rewarded by the transformation of gray skies that hold the promise of nothing good, into crisp blues and whites and the deep golden yellow of the dawn.I took this photo a while back at Geiger Key Bridge when I took a dawn deviation on my way home. It put me in mind of summer, with the flat waters, the fresh pre-sunshine air and the hum of swarms of mosquitoes. People will often, in the midst of a litany of things they dislike about Florida (Bless their hearts! Stay away!) include the fanciful notion that this is a climate without seasons. Like I need a snow season, a mud season, a green season and a stinking hot season. Some people do and the subtleties of the sub tropics are too slow and too indistinct for their eyes. Summer is obvious: less traffic on Highway One of course! Pretty soon the Bonneville and I will be rumbling back and forth almost unimpeded. Its not that cars are too fast in winter, its that oncoming traffic is too thick and frequently one has to pass a wedge of half a dozen cars lumped together on the highway, like a gaggle of slow moving geese, so one gives up and waits for summer to ease the congestion. Summer is the time for smooth moving traffic, another plus...This is a picture of Southard Street, home of the future gate, uncharacteristically untraffic'ed in mid winter:

But summer is also the time for hurricanes, those phenomena that stick in the memory of those that have experienced them, and shrugged off by those that have yet to taste the joy of widespread destruction and disruption of our warm, still summer months. Its an axiom of hurricanes that the fewer you have experienced, the less regard you have for them. Many many people gave up on the Keys after eight storms in two consecutive seasons. Another weekend, another hurricane read the wry bumper stickers of the period. Wilma culminated that run with a mass drowning that sank seventy percent of the city and killed no one. It was a time of triumph and total post traumatic stress disorder. We were shattered, collectively, but we kept soldiering on, no riots no looting no fighting. It wasn't all bad though it was pretty awful. Even though residents had to be rescued from their roofs there weren't the dramatic headlines seen in New Orleans. The Keys plugged along. There were casualties though and even today you will see empty houses, shells of their former selves with the telltale dirty bathtub rings around the walls:It looks just a bit down at heel from across the street in New Town. Closer up:And closer yet shows the abandonment and its cause, rising waters, followed by mold and exhaustion, flooding really does suck:I never really appreciated stilt homes till Wilma left my home untouched. There was a move to build stilt homes in New Orleans' Lower Ninth District, but city planners objected saying they look ugly like "olives on sticks." Maybe but they stay dry, like this precariously balanced olive on Flagler Avenue, one of the few stilt homes in the City:Not architecturally striking, but fear of flooding has been a powerful motivator for those that still remember Wilma's waters in the city.

I have come to like living in my little tree house, my windows are on a level with the mature tree branches that surround it, and my decks give me splendid views. And waters will have to rise a long way to reach my bamboo floors...The sun reaches inside easily enough in the early morning and every day I am grateful my little home is still there, the sun shining through my wife's flower arrangement on the dining table:Stoicism is a fine quality in hurricane season , but there are a few months yet before things heat up and I've got some riding to do, on those roads that at last should be emptying out as the weeks go by.

Empty Nest

I have never understood that joke where men talk badly about their wives. The old "ball and chain" jokes... I hear it all the time and I say "he-he" politely when some loser who's lucky anybody cares whether he's alive or dead, bangs on about the trials and tribulations of living with a woman who even cares that he has a pulse. Well, my wife's gone...for a whole week to Santa Cruz California, 3308 miles away, and I am losing the will to live. She took the Maxima to the airport, in order that her convertible can get a check up at Monroe Tire on Big Pine. With the Nissan sitting in Fort Lauderdale for a week and the Sebring getting its engine light checked (what does "check engine light " mean anyway? I'd freak if the Bonneville had one) the space under the house looks awfully empty. She's a teacher, its Spring break and she has friends that need the benefit of her company. I'm hoping she'll be off the wrist brace when she gets back and we can return the Vespa to her workplace in Key West so she can ride it around town. But for the moment that's all the motorized company the Bonneville gets, and upstairs I'm wandering all 800 square feet like the ghost of Hamlet's father, disconsolate and facing the prospect of microwaving all by myself for a week. I plan to be more than usually grumpy. Don't knock self pity until you've tried some, it can be quite bracing.

Key Haven

At about Mile Marker Five, the area where the urban agglomeration of Stock Island ends as you leave Key West, when heading north, there lies a gas station, and that would be the Key Haven Shell.

And it is, in all respects unremarkable, not least because it doesn't sell Dion's Fried Chicken, nor is it open 24 hours (though the flag is lit up all night). But it does mark the entrance to one of Key West's supposedly fancier addresses.

This is the neighborhood that lies within 5 minutes of the city but lies apart from it far enough to make it suburban. I can't help but feel that the island's name was some marketing tool used in the 1960's or 70's to sell a "lifestyle" away from the urban decrepitude that was Old Town when the Navy was scaling back and the economy appeared in terminal decline.

There is a large swath of open space across from the gas station, an area known locally as the "Key Haven Truck Stop," a place where yes, truckers stage before entering the city, but also where people park vehicles for sale, boats on trailers and all manner of stuff, much to the annoyance of residents who don't fancy a truck stop as the entrance to their community, even one labelled in jest. Across from the truck stop is more open space, filled with Australian pines, trash, and from time to time the odd motorcycle...it may be cold, 69 degrees in the wake of a cold front, but the Bonneville is running again after a few days set aside for car driving.This stretch of abandoned waterfront overlooking an almost entirely enclosed lagoon has been slated for development, which is hardly surprising. Even less surprising is the fact that people rose up in arms to complain about the plan to build some 43 homes around the seawall.But what surprises me is that this area has been left to its own devices for as long as it has. My wife and I used to meet here occasionally and take Emma for walks, taking advantage of a soon to disappear open space. Perhaps not, at least not for a while, will it disappear. So far so good, with no signs yet of construction.

Key Haven itself is a curious community, lacking in amenity, devoid of personality and neither sparkling with architectural gems nor flourishing with botanical abundance. Its just kind of flat, and many of the houses lack any kind of tropical flair:I think its relative old age (50 perhaps?) gives it a rather dated feel, like some of those Miami suburbs built outside downtown as experiments in urban planning with an emphasis on concrete order and cement block bungalows.It's not a community that invites exploration and side walks are not seen in abundance, though there are elderly, peeling bicycle lanes painted on the main roadways, which surprised me:The island reminded me of nothing quite so much as Grand Cayman, flat and subdued and begging a reason for a second visit. The fact is much of Key Haven is treated as a public parking lot for quasi abandoned boats, trailers and trucks: And when I stopped to photograph this alluring display of urban decay I attracted the irate attention of a nearby homeowner who came out and stood, silent but belligerent in the street while I turned out in the dead end, took a picture... ...and came back out past him. He stepped back as I smiled breezily and rode by. The last I saw in my mirror he turned around and stumped back indoors as I disappeared out of his street. I guess he has attracted some unwanted attention for his sprawling public abandoned trailer lot...and must have wondered if I were documenting his lack of public spiritedness for some nefarious purpose. No such luck, I'm just a a wanderer with a camera.

Part of my actual self imposed mission, far from working as an outrider for Code Enforcement, was to seek out the home advertised on the real estate flyer that landed in my mailbox recently. I found it easily enough and it was as promoted, brand new looking in "move in" condition. I liked its multitude of sloping metal roofs:And it sits on just one of several crowded canal front streets that eschew the eminently sensible notion of raising your precious home on flood-proof stilts. Which is not to say new homes aren't sprouting on Key Haven bringing with them the architectural motifs of McMansions from Up North.I'm sure you can find any number of homes like these huddled round golf courses from Pensacola to Port Saint Lucie but they have always struck me as somewhat unsuitable for tropical construction. The lovely terracotta tile Mediterranean roofs for a start are just perfect for hurricane force winds to lift up and peel off in one hundred mile-per-hour winds. Steel roofs make sense. Then I wonder how you attach hurricane shutters to their abundance of nooks and crannies and half hidden windows...Fortunately there are a few quirky homeowners even in Key Haven and this one I liked with its absurdist airplane parts front gate (Beware of the Dog and No Trespassing...just to add a touch of class) and this grotesque mishmash gateway to purgatory, begging for a touch of varnish and a pet for the guardian lions:Key Haven enjoys the mixed benefits of canal frontage ,open water and easy access to the city, but its not a place that invites serene reflection, even in its most open viewpoints:And the tiny urban park has a most unfriendly sign announcing it's for Members Only. As if this might be just the sort of magnet to attract hosts of undesirables, people just like me, bikers, or worse, if the gate wasn't posted Keep Out!Key Haven doesn't speak to me, doesn't make me wish I lived in a low lying easily flooded home, right under the flight path of Navy jets just five miles from the fleshpots of Key West. It does have a couple of nice curves on the main road through the community which is nice,but not enough to make me pine for the delights of this funky little neighborhood. I doubt they will miss me, or my motorcycle any more than I shall miss them.