Signs Not Portents

I have noted previously that Key West is a noisy town, it could be no other way with 25,000 people crammed onto an island four miles by two (6 kms by 3). Add to that all the noise of modern living, engines, planes, electric appliances and the curse of amplified music and it will be clear why I like the peace and quiet of my suburban island. Some people seek the peace I crave on a city sidewalk:Some find eternal peace at Dean Lopez Funeral Home on Simonton Street, which puts me in mind of the joke about what do you call a man wearing a suit in Key West? Answer: "Defendant!" Or in this case the nattily dressed gent with the bright red tie turned away from the viewfinder is I guess, an undertaker:The chickens don't care about the funeral parlor, which I have visited twice this year to observe the traditional wake with the dead sleeping in monstrously expensive coffins. I have instructed my wife to box me in pine and burn the whole mess before expelling my ashes at sea. If God can't reconstitute me for Armageddon, too bad I guess, though skipping the Apocalypse has its appeal.Don't let's forget the living need somewhere to live, and despite all the gloomy economic news, with worse I am sure to follow shortly, finding a bed in Key West remains absurdly expensive if you were thinking about Old Town in particular:FLS means first month and last month's rent along with a security deposit so I'm guessing this shoe box will need $4,000 to move in and that doesn't count money to hook up utilities or to buy beer. Or this, which needs $200 a month more but does include the cost of gas which should be miniscule as there will be no heating needed this winter:Renting in Key West is as gruesome for the landlord as it is the tenant, and horror stories abound of drunks and drug addicts inviting people in and getting stuck with unwanted roommates. Landlords get stuck with unreliable tenants too, and they all of them end up calling the police to sort out their domestic arrangements. Another reason I like working dispatch as a civilian rather than being on the road with all these fruit loops. Perhaps as I am so indifferent to the human condition I should have been a cat, though perhaps a cat with a head, unlike this one:Cats neither buy nor sell homes which puts them in a league of their own as the city is overrun with feral (wild for those of you not steeped in Latin) cats. Another reason not to live in the city. You will be sharing your yard and eventually you soft hearted thing, your food bill with the neighborhood strays.

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Somebody wants you to buy their hideously expensive mansion and if you happen across a motorcycle cluttering up the front yard, don't take it amiss, they just skipped the chapter on Presentation, when they were boning up on How To Sell Your House Quickly:"Preferred Properties" indeed. At least park a Triumph in your front yard if you want to attract upper crust punters, I say. Or here is a commercial property on Simonton at Fleming, offered apparently by the Addams family:A lick of paint perhaps, in a tough market? They aren't quite aware it seems to me that we need to try a little bit harder now, than in the heady days of no document loans and the like. The dude at the Carriage Trade on Eaton street sits in front of his place unperturbed by life's vicissitudes. He has the Key West thing down pat by reading the paper right on a busy street while he pretends he is far away and quite alone:The Carriage Trade keeps eccentric hours for lunch and occasional dinners and though I haven't eaten there for years I loved the prix fixe one item menu served on a delightful shaded patio during the winter months only. Meanwhile I spotted a family of tourists at one of my favorite people watching places in Old Town. I know it's fashionable to despise Starbucks but they have street-side windows in air conditioning and the coffee is delicious to a man that doesn't feel moved to drink his coffee at industrial strength. I did not grow up to believe coffee and battery acid should be indistinguishable, as some people seem to insist these days:Further up Duval (towards the southern end, that is) I saw a rather evocative painting in the store that calls itself Cuba!Cuba! which illustration focuses on the elderly autos Americans fondly believe are still cluttering the streets of the Forbidden Isle. I believe the Japanese and Europeans have been assiduously filling the void created by our extravagant embargo but I like the picture nonetheless:Key West's history is linked to Havana and no doubt will be once again when the family tiff between Castro and the Diaz-Balarts is mended. I look forward to that day. Meanwhile I look elsewhere for signs of history and they are everywhere, little placards, placed by the Historical Society and frequently with no explanation of what they are about:This next one celebrates Key West's first private hospital in the city that had the State's first public library though it is unclear if blacks enjoyed the same access, and in this case private almost certainly means whites only. It's the sort of thing one thinks about as one reads the bigotry in public noticeboards online in the Keys on the subject of Barack Obama. Is that name even American as one indignant bigot asked on the Coconut Telegraph recently!Or one can take the whole historical thing with a pinch of salt, as seen on Peacon Lane at Eaton Street:I have noticed a slight chill in the air though I don't think the few visitors in town feel that way. Autumnal breezes are cooling either the Keys or my overheated imagination. though I am sure I spotted my first Christmas Tree of 2008. This is I think a Yuletide tree, oh pagan object:I am not fond of Christmas, and surely that comes as no surprise, as I view the holiday (Holy Day, no?) as a massive advertising campaign and I get thoroughly exhausted by the incessant repetitiveness of the season. Besides I don't like snow and that is an insipid symbol of Christmas visible even on this excessively early tree. On the subject of holidays I saw this splendid advertisement at Blossom's Grocery for a forthcoming essay on Elgin Lane. It looks like a joke but this town has a sizable Cuban population, remember:Cubans celebrate holidays by doing a luau, however in Key West they have to do it their way as digging a hole in the ground is next to impossible and entirely unproductive as the water table is far too high. So they put their dead pigs into metal lined boxes and cook 'em whole. If you want to adopt this aboriginal practice now you know where to go to get yours. Dead goats I don't much like and yes, I resent the whole goat cheese fad that has swept North America. Why anybody wants to eat cheese that tastes of goat I'll never understand. However this is America and if you want to eat cheese reminiscent of barnyards you are free to do so. In that spirit I saw this bumper sticker on a car. It made me rather sad, observing the rust stains seeping through the long since faded message, and it's bedraggled state struck a chord this difficult year:Personally I prefer the sentiment I've seen expressed elsewhere, God Bless Everyone, No Exceptions. But that I have to admit is as close as I can get to cloying sentiment of the sort better suited to Christmas. Besides if God did bless everyone, no one would know they were blessed, now would they? Can you see what a burden it is to be me? I toldyou I have too much time to think because I ride a motorcycle...

Rainy Days

I'm not complaining, really I'm not, but the rain and clouds we have been forced to live with are getting old. After all the big yellow blob on the National Hurricane Center map could soon turn orange and then red and then become a tropical something, whirling about and ruining lives. Instead the yellow fuzzy blob (low likelihood of becoming a tropical storm) stays as a blob and limits itself to dumping quantities of rain on the Keys. And making our skies dark and foreboding.

Rain is a passing phenomenon for the most part, a heavy downpour followed by sunny spells and blue skies, which makes it all bearable. However I decided after my second drenching to put my saddlebags back on the Bonneville owing to the fact that I need them to haul my waterproofs around with me. Which gives some idea of how insistent the rains have been. The old Chodzin Roofing art deco building on Eaton Street is now a moped rental agency but the original clock still shines bright on a dreary dark afternoon:

The other thing about rain in September, or October, is that it isn't particularly cold though temperatures might well drop to 75 degrees (24C) which feels cold to someone used to warmer temperatures.

Until I got my saddlebags out of the closet I found myself driving the Maxima much too much which did give me opportunities for photography from inside the car, looking out at the mess of traffic on North Roosevelt:

One thing I did discover from the frequent car trips, was that the long touted NPR station has finally been set up in Key West broadcasting a clear signal across the Lower Keys. WLRN in Miami had been operating a series of translators down the islands but they were a sketchy way to listen to Morning Edition and All Things Considered and they finally set up a subsidiary station in Key West at 91.5FM, which means my wife will have to subscribe. She has resisted because she always lost the signal in the Saddlebunch Keys on her way to and from work and that made her crazy. The fact we have a strong National Public radio signal doesn't make me want to commute by car....I'd rather get wet.Water tends to puddle rather easily in Key West, even though the city has installed improved storm drains in many of the worst spots:

But not all fire plugs are boring old red things. I've been randomly photographing the plugs around town that have been doctored by some kids art program, like this one at Garrison Bight:

On the subject of odd things I spotted a chimney on a roof in old town. I would guess that in an average winter one might want heat in the house once or twice, possibly for a few days during a particularly cold spell. I suspect a brick chimney was a status symbol when the house was built eons ago. I know some weird people crank their air conditioning sometimes because they want a fire in the grate. I'd rather buy one of those ridiculous CDs that show a crackling fire. The owner of this chimney found a better use for it:

I take pleasure from time to time wandering under awnings and overhangs of which there are lots in the commercial areas of Old Town. This one is at Key West Aloe on Green Street,where someone else had already paused with a beer but couldn't quite get the empty into the trash can just feet away (public recycling bins, I hear you say? Are you crazy, this is Key West: we don't do no stinkin' recycling...):

Nearby I spotted what looked a little odd to me, a half wet tree trunk, even though it was raining fairly heavily only the upwind half of the tree was getting the moisture:

When I lived in places where rain was needed to keep crops growing people used to annoy the hell out of me by muttering how we "needed the rain..." I never needed the rain then and I certainly don't need it now. Well, I've plenty of water in my cistern at the moment at any rate. To keep the Florida Keys Aqueduct in business we need lots of rain in the Everglades and around Miami to keep the South Florida Aquifer well supplied. We do have shrubs and stuff and gardeners to keep nattering on about needing the rain and if its not that heavy a thickly wooded sidewalk can keep one dry:A little patience under an overhanging bush and soon enough the sun comes out:That's the paradox of life in the Keys, winter, the coldest months are the driest months generally which is an arrangement i can approve of, if it has to rain at all.

Motorcycling After All These Years

I have ridden motorcycles all my life. My mother loved them and before she died, somewhat prematurely at the age of 49, younger than I am now. She bought me my first, a bright orange Vespa 50 in 1970. Since then the longest I went without a motorcycle was during a few years of being owned by a couple of dogs, which was ironically enough a time of upheaval in our lives. We were traveling by boat for part of it so not having a motorcycle was hardly an issue. Having dogs was, but they came everywhere with us, sailing doggedly to Panama from California and back north to Key West.

I like riding my Bonneville up and down Highway One. I've ridden the road for thousands of miles and I find it endlessly enjoyable, the variations in the colors, the clouds piled up and visible for miles, the glint of the sun on water and boats that come and go. My Triumph has just passed the 16,000 miles (25,000 km) mark and the engine seems looser and faster than ever perhaps because unbeknownst to me Pure Triumph removed the air injection system! I just noticed that the Trumpet has more get up and go than ever which must be due to the removal of the air injection system. Now the fuel/air mixture is as it should be for the benefit of the engine, if not the environment. Weirdly enough my fuel consumption has improved by about ten percent which might offset some of the negative environmental effect of the AI removal.I took the saddlebags off for Tropical Storm Fay thinking perhaps that a slimmer profile might make the machine more manageable and less bulky to park in some out of the way spot during the storm, and I like the slimmer profile and I'm seeing if I can cope with reduced storage space for my commuting needs. One day I was dawdling along the road, the only road and I met one guy fighting the heat with his lightweight packing. I think he looked jealous when he saw my ride:It was hot, hovering around 90 degrees (32C) up to perhaps 95 (35C) with lots of humidity. My wife found me pottering around under the house polishing the Bonneville, vigorously scrubbing the rust spots on my mirror stems and started panting just watching me. "Aren't you hot?" she asked. I just shook my head and she retreated upstairs pursued by the mosquitoes that don't seem to like my blood. I seem perfectly adapted to life in the Keys, immune to heat and mossies. I like the look of Mangrove Mama's on Sugarloaf Key, especially with a motorcycle, a Harley, out front white and shining in the heat:Further up the road is the only traffic light between Stock Island and Big Pine Key. They put it in to help school traffic at Sugarloaf Middle School on Crane Avenue. We asked the state to have it blink yellow at non peak hours, but that request went nowhere so all day and all night it sits and changes and ignores motorcycles. Need to turn left onto the highway? Too bad.Sugarloaf School, next to the light takes kids from kindergarten through 8th grade (about 14 years old I think) and also provides an elevated haven for cars when a storm threatens. In order to reduce flooding the school was built up a bit, especially as parts of Sugarloaf Key seem more like water than dirt. The thing is when a storm threatens , people in the area who remember getting wrecked by Hurricane Wilma (a recurring theme in the Keys) bring their cars to the school for safety and park up here. They did it for Fay and then more recently for Ike. I would bring the Bonneville here if I lived on Sugarloaf. In fact I saw a couple of Harleys up here during Gustav, or Ike, or Fay or one of those storms:

On a less tragic note this is rainy season and we are getting cloud bursts from time to time and with very little warning. The stretch of highway from Mangrove Mama's at Mile Marker 20 to Big Coppitt at Mile Marker 9 doesn't have much cover. There are park benches at Bay Point, behind Baby's Coffee to shelter under and put on one's waterproofs but I have lately been noticing this solitary gazebo along the bike trail near Mile Marker 14. I have no idea why people in Authority decided to build it. If it's part of the bike trail system they need to work on paving more of that. In the meantime there is this: On some mornings when I'm heading home absolutely exhausted I've given consideration to the idea of laying down in here for a nap; as though I were a homeless dude. I haven't given in yet but some days it seems I am sleepy enough it might be safer to stop and snooze rather than keep on riding...

There's a sign at the entrance to Big Coppitt that I thought related to the new sewer system we've been promised. It didn't seem very clear to me, as it's described as the Main Force Project which sounds sinister and conspiracy related. I expect a military checkpoint to appear soon. I wonder what main force means? So far it just seems to mean they have to tear up the highway and make it rough. The Bonneville flies over it all, indifferent as long as I wash off the road dirt:They have been murmuring about sewering the Keys since I first came in 1981, but the plans never got off the ground. In the bad old days there was money for public works but now that the costs of sewering has become astronomical the State is all tuckered out financially speaking. Selling bonds in a state like Florida is akin to auctioning off your first born so we are under a state imposed mandate to have all homes connected to proper modern sewers by 2010 and no one has a clue how to pay for it. So, I hear you wondering what does happen to the sewage generated by 75,000 permanent residents. Well that's an interesting question. 25,000 people in Key West have a tertiary system already installed, that cost years of torn up streets but it's done and makes sewage potable so clean is the system (no one actually drinks it, don't worry). The rest of us, 50,000 people plus visitors use septic tanks which, built into porous rock are not the best filters in the world. And our county leaders furrow their brows and wonder why the reef is deteriorating. You would too were you eating so much crap. It pains me to think this could have been done and paid for twenty years ago when the reef was much more vital.The exclusive, gated, private community of Shark Key pictured above from outside the gates, wants to have Keys taxpayers pay to sewer their private island too. Given the total lack of backbone among our leaders doubtless I will end up paying for their crap as well as mine. Individual hook ups may cost each of us directly more than $10,000 depending on which alarmist you listen to. They think to relieve the pain by saying they will add a monthly assessment to each home until the bill is paid.

Enough of sewers. I don't even know how I got on the subject. Pornography; there's something vaguely related to sewers. We have several stores that deal in the stuff in Key West and I am too weedy to go into any of them. But I got close, in a manner of speaking. When I was riding the bus on my most recent excursion there was a guy sitting upfront and I couldn't help but notice he looked like the assassin from the French movie Diva (which I highly recommend though it has nothing to do with the Keys). He was short stocky and his head was shaved. He sat silently in the bus staring ahead listening to his earpiece. In the movie it was a Walkman apparatus playing French accordion music. In this case the earpiece must have been connected to the ubiquitous Ipod. He sat still and silent until we reached this spot, at about Mile Marker 8.

He nodded solemnly to the driver as he descended from the bus and said not a word. He walked up to his job, a little figure dressed in black hugging the shade as he went. Before the bus had pulled back into the four lane traffic I saw the door swing closed behind him, sucking him into it's vortex of novelties and toys and DVDs. I'm told that porn shops do well near military bases and this one has done fine for several years. It used to be a welcome center and that closed. Then it was a restaurant and that closed. Now it's Island Spice and it even advertises on a large expensive billboard just up the road. There's money in them thar DVDs close to Boca Chica Naval Air Station.

Some people find the Overseas Highway endless and boring but for me every mile is different, every corner has something to see. It must be because I ride a motorcycle; I have too much time to think.

Russell Lane

This is hardly a lane at all- it's more of an extended driveway off Elizabeth Street one block west of the Library on Fleming Street. I came across it pretty much by accident and I thought why not? Obscurity deserves it's place in the sun too:

While the lane itself is probably no more than half a block long what really marks it is the magnificent if slightly tired old mansion at the entrance. It features all sorts of nooks and crannies:

And includes rather disappointingly a set of aluminum letter boxes on the porch indicating it's owners have succumbed to necessity and turned it into rental apartments. Did the renter who got this in their apartment pay a premium? I would!I rather liked the side view of the enclosed bay windows through the shrubbery, the barely visible reading lamp hinting at long evenings split between a book and glances into the street:On the subject of shrubbery there were a couple of some type of blooming shrubbery overhanging the lane. I shan't embarrass myself by even trying to pretend I have a clue what they are. One is purple, one is red, that's all I know for sure:I grew up in large houses, my mother inherited a fifty room home and her husband wanted to live in big houses so spacious living was all I knew as a kid. Rebellion came to me in the form of not owning a car and living on a boat. For years I enjoyed living in a space small enough that I could reach all my worldly possessions while sitting under a reading lamp.

Looking back I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to live in a space far too vast for my needs because it knocked out the desire or the need to buy implausibly large homes now that I am an adult:

This summer my wife and I got one electricity bill that just tipped over $200 and we freaked out, now I remember to set the thermostat at 82 degrees (28C) when I leave the house and all the fans are turned off. Which helps me sympathize with the need to cut up a beautiful old home like this. I have no difficulty living in 800 square feet.Russell Lane reminds me that there are innumerable alleys around town, lanes that rarely lead anywhere, and quite a few aren't even marked.

I learned years ago from a Conch that the easiest way to navigate around town is by landmarks. She came to work one day grumbling about a home on a street corner that got remodeled, and I wondered why it bothered her so much. "They changed the color of the wall and i missed my turn," she said. Like most Conchs she wasn't fond of driving and going an extra block threw her off. Russell lane is close to the library and it's marked by a porch and a very bushy fence line:

I failed to click in time on the inevitable dog walker stomping along the sidewalk, but as I left the area i spotted a couple of humans braving the gray damp afternoon hanging out chatting on a porch around the corner.I doubt they knew or cared about the existence of Russell Lane but they seemed emblematic, through the palms of what people should be doing on the magnificent porch just around the corner.