Truman Avenue is the main drag into the heart of Old Town Key West. Before President Truman decided to make Key West his preferred winter base of operations, the street was called Division Street, and in those halcyon days most of Key West was crammed into Old Town with Division separating that heavily populated part of the island from the outer reaches. The fact is these days Truman is an arrow pointing straight at Duval Street, the hallowed goal of the motorists chugging down the Overseas Highway. Yet along the way I find the odd side turning for my own amusement.
Pohalski Lane is a block long and is easy to miss, even though for a change this short street is well marked. As I recall the brown building used to house Hornes, the last Harley Davidson dealership in Key West. He decided to retire and no one took up the flag in his place.
Considering Key West is almost entirely swamped by Harleys I find it surprising, though you can rent one at Hurricane Hole on Stock Island, and Jiri at JK Motorsports also on Stock Island does a land sale business repairing and maintaining them :
For a half hour or so, this is Bonneville country, just behind the Chevron on White Street:
And I found a Conch cottage in a rather nice shade of sky blue for a back drop:
I was pushing the Triumph up the alley, stopping to take pictures as I went and somewhat to my surprise I got into a lost tourist situation. I had taken an empty car spot while I tried to photograph this Dade Pine excellence:
When a blue car, driven more tentatively than the width of the lane demanded, pulled alongside. I gestured and offered to move the Triumph out of the spot thinking they were looking for a stopping place. Instead they were tourists with a map who had rather enterprisingly turned on Pohalski to find Ashe Street and their guest house. So I managed, unwittingly to help some not quite lost tourists. My good deed for the day. My other good deed, for myself, was to be out and about enjoying an extremely pleasant breezy afternoon. It's extraordinary how late the cold fronts are this year, and even though they are weak they freshen everything up one more time, including the vegetation: 
Pohalski Lane invites life to be lived outdoors, with lots of plants and enough activity, bit not too much considering how close to the main artery it lies:
The architecture is the usual mish mash about which I can never get blase. It is my misfortune I cannot stand the crowded life that Key West requires, but these homes have an appeal that cannot be denied. Even this rather plain facade was made amusing to my jaundiced eye by the color coordinated car:
The porch on this house actually faces Olivia Street which is why the sun is setting on the unused outdoor furniture. It looks across Olivia Street to this home which has nothing to do with Pohalski Lane except that I liked the look of it!
And it's for sale, though probably not at a price the rest of the country would consider reasonable. I would be remiss if I left Pohalski behind without checking out it's greatest claim to fame.
The Coffeemill Dance Studio, made of corrugated iron sheeting puts me in mind of reclaimed industrial spaces I've seen in other cities, usually large warehouse districts not single buildings (!). After my wife came home to tell me she had taken a Zumba class on Cudjoe Key, not here, I observe this activity must be a new exercise fad because it seems to be poping up everywhere. Are Pilates passe, I wonder? Like I have a clue about any of this stuff...
And to my delight I discovered an alley within a lane, which I had not previously noticed. It runs behind the Chevron Station to White Street, and because I am a collector of such minor oddities here is a picture:
And thus we come to the Olivia Street end of Pohalski:
Taken from Ashe Street, where I trust, the tourists found their bed for the night.
When she got back the report of a night spent on a friend's boat at the Dry Tortugas should have filled me with envy, instead I felt just a twinge because I too had been out and about on the water creating adventure for myself. I decided to leave home with a bottle of water and no cell phone. Were I to need help I was going to have to find it on my own. I did leave a float plan on the kitchen counter for burglars and my wife to find: Gone to Tarpon Belly Key via Niles Channel, alone. I figured that covered all that a rescue party might need to know, so I swiped some sunscreen on and got going:
I have always wanted to live on a canal with a boat at my dock, and now that I do and have done for half a decade I find myself still marveling at my good fortune that my canal on Ramrod Key is overflowing with mangroves and the houses follow no distinct architectural models:
And then a pause for incoming traffic:
Finally up onto a plane, 20-something miles per hour out into Newfound Harbor. My boat, a 14 foot (4 meter) Dusky, has no lights or instruments, as simple a machine as I could find after years of struggling with systems on my sailboat, but it tracks true across the water:
My idea was to buck the light south wind for a mile and take a short cut to Niles Channel where I will head north with the wind at my back. The day was hazy and the water was hard to read but the bubba sticks made it easy to find my way: 
Past the boats anchored near the Niles Channel Bridge; these are the waters I stare down upon from the crown of the 40 foot bridge as I pass over on my Triumph:
The ability to be down here from time to time makes it entirely pleasant to be up there commuting, knowing that with ten minutes in my boat I can be down here. Some days I'm up there and the weather is foul and I'm glad I'm not down here, being tossed around. Beyond the bridge are the open waters of Niles Channel stretching to the Gulf of Mexico:
With the small matter of a shoal area in the middle marked by two mangrove islands. the northernmost one was I believe called Money Key, until a wealthy musician bought it and changed the name to Melody Key, though the chart shows it as Howell Key. The island is a couple of acres in size and has a house on it:
It seems an inconvenient place to live, a fact that has occurred to the current owner apparently, because for the unattainable sum of four point five million dollars, reportedly, this lump of mangrove could change hands. The views aren't bad if you, like me, enjoy flat waters:
Because I was alone, footloose and fancy free I decided to bugger about a bit off the main channel and explore the mangrove passages. I cut directly to the west across the top of Knock'em Down Keys, a spot that seems godforsaken enough that no one would be there yet, lo and behold, an angler:
Travel between mangrove islands in areas where the charts (if I'd had one) show shallow water is easy enough if you have a grasp of the basics. First read the water, and you need sunlight from behind you to do that. The ditty goes: Brown, brown run aground; white, white yes you might; green, green nice and clean; blue, blue straight on through. Which may or may not be helpful in determining water depth. I try to keep an eye on the vegetation because it's easy to slide too close to one side or the other of a channel if you aren't keeping your eyes open. Luckily the bottom in the back country shelves pretty uniformly in most places and it's unlikely you will go from four feet of water to none without warning. One hopes. If all else fails wave to the military at the blimp base on the northern tip of Cudjoe Key. Maybe they will take an interest in your welfare.
You'd better believe they'll take an interest if you stumble ashore on their heavily protected base. And as one turns and heads north again to open water there they are again, anglers feeding the fish all over the place:
And then finally, about 45 minutes after I left my dock, the object of the exercise hove into view, a long line of mangroves, from a distance a dark patch on the water, one island among many. Except, this one has a beach:
Tarpon Belly Key has the distinction of being an actual island with dirt, pebbles, a very little sand and trees of the casuarina type growing above the waterline. There is also evidence of human use on the island with large blocks of cement lying around as though tossed carelessly aside. Tarpon Belly was once used to farm seafood, shrimp as I recall and my friend Robert remembers when there was a functioning truck sitting on the island used to haul materials around. Now all is in ruins and very picturesque it is too, overgrown and deserted. Except I had forgotten this was Easter weekend and everyone and his brother was out splashing around at Tarpon Belly Key. It looked like an RV Park:
I figured this was neither the time nor the place for a meditative swim off the beach so I got back up on a plane, and made like a leaf and blew. Back out on the water buzzing along, the wind in my hair and the sunscreen bubbling under the sun, it could have been worse. They'll be gone soon, I said to myself, and I'll still be here. And presumably Tarpon Belly Key will be there too.
And so back to Niles Channel Bridge. I was pondering so deeply on the injustice of other people getting time off at the same time as myself that I managed to take a wrong turn and found myself once again blundering around in mangrove channels unfamiliar to me. This time it wasn't fun because I wanted to get home. It's amazing how invisible the Nile Channel Bridge can be when there is a mangrove island between you and it, for all that it rises to the giddy height of 40 feet above the water. Eventually I got my bearings and got going again. I wonder how people will ever recall the peculiar feeling of being lost, even if for a moment, in a time when people turn on their GPS receivers even when driving even on Highway One, the only road available to them.
I slowed down for a bit and played with the camera and the Old Flagler Bridge and the new arching Highway bridge.
And then, off I went to park the boat and take a walk..
...but that is another essay for another day.
I enjoy the heat of a summer's night, the smell of salty water which for some reason reminds me of watermelons, all sweet and sticky. I like the quiet noises of a Key west marina,gentle creaks, minor sloshings of boats loosely tied to docks. When I lived on my boat tied to a floating dock in Santa Cruz's Small Craft Harbor, the night was punctuated by waves slapping hard underneath the dock and the bearings creaked and groaned in agony as the tide rose and fell. It's all much calmer in Key west, much less dramatic once the drunks have gone home and tumbled into bed. But as I walk the boardwalk at three in the morning I can spot the little telltales that indicate someone tucked up below decks. A cable television wire for instance, like a rat tail slipping into a port hole:
I have listened to the President and the Chairman of the federal Reserve try to reassure us that the worst is over and our economy has turned the mythical corner. Frankly I don't believe them, I find it hard to imagine a strong economy rising up out of a blasted heath of unemployment, false accounting and endless support of insolvency with public monies. So, despite the sighs of relief I hear from the top, I remain a financial sceptic. In my gloomier moments I wonder if things will force us back to a boat, a floating home, not exactly a fate worse than death but...I like our life ashore for now and I would be annoyed should I be forced out. Yet my wife admonishes me, she says we could easily move back onto a boat if we had to, we know how to live with less. We two could even live without a rubber duck between us:
My wife and I have lived off the grid as we sailed, we lived without schedules, without work, stretching our money. We bought ourselves a couple of years afloat by selling her convertible (my hated Honda Goldwing was long gone already, I hated that overweight monstrosity once I got over it's overwhelming power). It was easy enough to adapt to life without certainty, to sleep without air conditioning, to live with a new horizon constantly in one's face while paradoxically surrounded by one's own familiar home. Yes, I figure, we could do that again, live on 5 gallons a day of fresh water, on 30 amps of 12 volt electricity, on a dozen gallons of fuel in a busy week. I've done it once I guess I could do it again, and I sigh at the thought.
Thinking about an empty Schooner Wharf Bar before dawn reminds me of my wife's indignation when I proposed sailing away. "What?" she said, "give up eating out at restaurants?" she was incredulous. She laughs now, thinking back to that yuppie world we left behind and we laugh at me worrying so hard I was fit to be tied before we cast off. Once done it becomes easy and easier as time goes by. If called upon again we could live by our wits instead of our routines. Perhaps that's why I'm drawn back to the waterfront, for reassurance, for a reminder that as someone wrote in quoting Tom Wolfe, the past is prologue. I hope not, but I suppose it's entirely possible dinghy butt my be sooner in my future than I think.