One Hot Bonneville

It was Hot as Hades Friday afternoon. My wife and I had planned a take out meal at home to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary and I had spent my day off doing the laundry, vacuuming the house (all 700 square feet of it, which made that a quick chore) and generally spiffing the place up so she could come home from work and put her feet up. As a reward for my industriousness I took a ride to see what I might see out in the world of the Lower Keys.

I stopped here and there to take some pictures and by the time I got to the Seven Mile Bridge some thirteen miles from my home I was hot and sticky and ready for some shade. The sun was burning down and my thermometer was reading just about 102 degrees (39C) which is a tad bit hotter than one expects among these islands where a breeze almost always blows. Last year I lamented the passing of a summer in which the wind seemed to blow every single day and the flat waters one comes to expect between June and October never materialized. Every day was a ruffled day on the Straits of Florida. Well, this year I got my wish and every day is a furnace, off the water and on:I stopped at Bahia Honda State Park and used my annual pass to get inside and buy a cold soda at the concession stand, which had closed fifteen minutes before my arrival. There wasn't a Coke machine anywhere to be found and I had change in my wallet for a ...change. I took some pictures to justify the stop and pulled my open face helmet back on. For riders over 21 who enjoy the benefits of having a health insurance plan (seriously!) Florida is a helmet-optional state, but on a day as hot as Friday putting my lid on brought relief from the heat. Some people think a white helmet is going to radiate more heat away from the rider's head than a black helmet. However if that were the case the helmet would have to have no insulated lining at all. I like black clothing as it shows the dirt less, which is a consideration for a pig-pen like me. I attract dirt, grease, oil and debris like a magnet attracts iron filings and I marvel at people who have the nerve to buy white clothing of any kind.My plan, such as it was, had started out as a visit to Veteran's Park, a sliver of beach at the southern end of the Seven Mile Bridge. So after I left Bahia Honda, panting for something cold to drink, I stopped at the inconvenience store at the RV park on Ohio Key (August 9th, 2008). The lady in the store seemed grumpy and took my $1.44 with nothing approaching a cheerful demeanor, so I hope whatever was bothering her, gets better. I use Anti Monkey Butt powder for those annoying tropical irritations and I considered for a second mentioning it to her. A quick glance at her scowl and I took my well ripened banana and ice cold can of Coke Zero and fled back into the heat. She had the television on behind the counter and I am proud to be able to tell you she was ignoring a program called Everybody (except Conchscooter) Loves Raymond. I am totally hip to the culture, dude. Which comes from long hours standing in line with gossip magazines in the grocery store. Veterans Park was disappointing. Instead of being hard at work on a summer Friday afternoon hoi-polloi were swarming the place, the parking spaces filled with their vast spacious heffalump mini vans and extended cab gas guzzling Saudi Arabian economic support vehicles. What was even more irritating was that they seemed to be enjoying the shallow waters and the shady ramadas and clearly I was going to have to come back some other day to get my pictures. Humph. My coke was warming up nicely in my saddlebag.
Being a resourceful sort of elitist I knew how to implement Plan B. I crossed the Overseas Highway and rode down to the launch ramp parking lot on the north side of the main road. This strip of asphalt is shadeless and was burning hot so I rode the Bonneville illegally, past the barrier onto the grass and parked in the shade of what appeared to be some sort of buttonwood tree, though it probably wasn't. I drank my Coke and ate my banana, feeling all that potassium flooding my corn syrup filled veins, and started to feel right with a very overheated world. I had forgotten to bring reading material for once in my life so my camera was my friend and my entertainment.Fishing was over for the day for this crew and I watched as they retrieved their boat at the ramp. My phone rang and my wife announced she was done for the day, her classroom was organized for the little tykes' return on Monday. She was stopping at Square Grouper on Cudjoe Key to pick up dinner.
I struggled to get vertical and realized my legs had sweat their way through my riding pants and large ovals of damp were riding above the knees. My wristwatch was bathed in moisture that ran rather disconcertingly down my arm, and my shirt collar was plastered to my neck. It was time to get home. Had I brought my mesh jacket I would not have worn it as any extra clothing would have given me heat stroke. My lightweight leather gloves felt like damp neoprene mush on my hands. It was way too hot at six o'clock in the evening.
Fish was on the menu for me too. We had Crab Rangoon made as only Square Grouper knows how to fry this excessively familiar, and slightly bizarre dish, followed by sliced deep fried eggplant (aubergine) rounds. Eggplant is my wife's favorite plant and these crisply coated vegetable slices came with discs of goat cheese squished between them, combining her favorite flavors. The main dish was a fish stew also done Square Grouper style so it was a creamy chowder tomato bisque type of thing with bits of octopus and calamari and fish chunks floating beneath the surface . Leftovers went into the fridge to chill.Rather to my surprise we sank an entire bottle of Vincent Arroyo Melange between us and before I knew it my wife had slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep on the couch. All I had left to do was download the pictures and reflect on how good a day can be with almost no conscious effort.

Knowles Lane

I was quite disappointed when I showed up at Knowles Lane on Catherine Street and found some officious person had bothered to paint a street name on the pole. In the good old days (snore) this tiny alleyway was unmarked at both ends. You had to look for it deliberately and I'm sure the residents, like this mother parking her vehicle...and her child... ...would have preferred it stay anonymous. One slow night when I was at work Sergeant Blasberg who was the watch commander that shift, came by dispatch and for some reason we got into a discussion of obscure Key West places. His candidate was Knowles Lane, which I couldn't quite place, but whose location I had a vague idea of, thanks to a chase I had dispatched once early in my career, following a hit and run on United Street. It's not a bad alley to use to run away from your responsibilities. Blasberg said most people would never notice this lane "because it's unmarked." Well, that was challenge enough for me and my camera. He forgot to mention it is full of stuff growing like crazy:The window unit was rattling like it was in its death throes, working to keep the heat and humidity of August at bay, and inside the lights were burning brightly in late afternoon sunlight which was shut out thanks to all the bushes and stuff covering the little cottage. Outside the sky was burned a dark shade of blue, where a snowbird had closed up the house forgetting to put away the bath tub for the summer:And some other paraphernalia a lot of people would probably not leave lying around outside for all to see. A mattress? A hot tub cover? An implement of bondage? Probably not but whatever it is I doubt it will be much use for anything come winter, after six months moldering outdoors:In a world comprised of wide, post industrial streets it may come as a surprise but Knowles Lane is a two-way alley though it's not easy to picture a Chevy Suburban and a Hummer passing side-by-side here. Two Vespas might have difficulty if their riders weren't confident.This lone cyclist managed to pass me with feet to spare, but I'm almost certain he was quite sober:

Hurricane shutters, and a muscle car protected by a cover; what more does the active snowbird want to find upon a return to Key West?

Remembering my flame tree essay from early June, a few poincianas are still blooming, in this case above the rather irritating TV cable, which is another reason to abolish the boob tube culture.A person's home is their castle especially if they have a decent fence and imposing gate between themselves and the harsh, unforgiving world outside:

Cats get everywhere and this particular specimen did not look impressed by the human encounters he'd had that afternoon. I adjusted my collar and looked away as soon as I decently could, sorry to have let him down:
I was greatly tempted to just open the gate and let him in, but somehow I felt that might be intrusive no matter how imperious was the cat on the mat:Knowles Lane is only one block long, and come out on United Street next to this old style Conch house with bars on the windows and a cement brick wall in classic Key West style:
You probably could pass Knowles Lane a million times speeding by on United Street sparing hardly a glance at what looks like just another driveway:

Looking east on United toward Glynn Archer School:And even on the United Street end the city stencilers have been busy where before the lane enjoyed perfect anonymity:

I think Sergeant Blasberg had a point, because even with the name printed at each end this is not an alley that sticks out and makes a spectacle of itself. Not that is until Conchscooter and his Bonneville and pocket camera comes by to destroy the peace and quiet of a summer afternoon.

America's Sweetest Town

Highway 27 is my preferred route across Florida, with a speed limit in rural areas around 70 mph (112km/h) you make miles through the orange groves and past small towns. Plus you get to see Florida the way it sort of was before the Turnpike and the Interstates. And as we have seen in the Grand Florida tour of 2009, bits of central Florida are hilly, almost nosebleed hilly, like this:One of my favorite photographer is a Californian who settled in Florida and took to photographing the wildlife in the state, particularly well known for his massive black and white portraits of the Everglades. If you have ten grand to spare you can cover a wall with one of Clyde Butcher's magnificent pictures. He coined the phrase "Florida mountains"to describe the huge puffy summer clouds that build up over the state in the heat of summer:Highway 27 takes a turn to the East around the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee, which is the largest body of fresh water in the continental United states second only to lake Superior, and is thoroughly uninteresting despite that. I have sailed across the lake from Clewiston to eastern lock and it has nothing to show all the way across. However on the southern shore nestles the city made possible by Big Sugar, the US Sugar Corporation, formerly known as Southern Sugar. Eleven billion of your tax dollars go to the sugar industry so every time you eat a candy bar you are swallowing five cents of your own tax dollars. Weird huh? Big Sugar has supposedly made a deal with the state to sell their lands and turn them back to wilderness to clean up the flow of water into the Everglades and restore the waters to the south of the state. Meanwhile Clewiston remains an agricultural town with a large population of Latin fieldworkers and a monument to the good old days of Big Sugar, the corporation's hotel, called the Clewiston Inn: It sits alongside Highway 27 where the road enters the town from the west, and from the front, despite the garish BBQ sign, it looks the part of the fine southern mansion. The rear of the hotel has a second, less well known entrance and being as how I am a Floridian my idea of a good parking spot is somewhere in the shade. So I parked the Maxima under the Royal Palms and in we went through the unobtrusive back door.
The interior of the hotel is everything you would imagine a 1938 building should be, all wood paneling and chandeliers:
This being the 21st century the idiot box had to be turned on in a corner, sucking every ounce of intelligent thought out of the room, so we went on to the lunch we had been looking forward to since -ahem!- breakfast in Lake Wales.
Aside from the propaganda machine the room looks much as it always has done:

This incarnation of the hotel replaced the original 1926 building which burned down. Nowadays with fire codes and government supervision we tend to forget how prevalent fires were in the days of candles, kerosene and uncertain wiring:As hard to imagine as it may be, the Clewiston Inn was a fashionable place to gather, play tennis and wile away a long cold winter, like these fashionable folk, captured by Mr Kodak's invention in the prime of their young lives:The corridors of the hotel are lined with pictures from the Inn's past and I wanted to photograph them all...instead I took a picture of the enormous menu in an effort to remember what was offered:The dining room itself was quite delightful in the same vein as the rest of the hotel, just as we remembered it from previous visits. The room absorbed the conversations from the neighboring tables and as we waited for our food I found myself pondering a surprising thought. Considering the tables next to us were occupied by a trio of Latino businessmen, a group of African-Americans, my wife who is a Jew and me who is an immigrant, I figured none of us would have been allowed to eat in the Colonial Dining room when it was re-built in 1938. Thanks to the Federal Government's enforcement of President Johnson's Great Society legislation we were all there enjoying our meals without a second thought. And very good the food was too.

I mean, who among us doesn't like fried okra, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, sweet potato casserole, meatloaf or fried chicken? Throw in a couple of sodas, tax and tip and you are stuffed for thirty dollars.

We waddled back out into the sunshine to admire the clouds and the matching paintwork on the hotel. We failed to spot the "friendly female ghost" said to haunt the Inn, not surprisingly as she, like most apparitions of popular myth seem to prefer the hours of darkness. Anyway spirits are allergic to my robust sense of mistrust and you can be sure if I am around they won't appear.

There are advantages to touring in a car; two that I can think of: One being air conditioning, another the ability to take more or less gruesome pictures from behind the wheel of the car, of passing monuments like this plough. A hearty reminder of the richness of the soil that used to be Everglades marshland before the US Army Corps of Engineers efficiently organized it's transformation into cropland. We have since discovered that the drive by private industry to commercialize the Everglades is a Bad Thing and now the Corps is patiently trying to supervise it's return to it's original format:And for a technophobe like me there is the advantage that you can talk to your passenger without the use of electrons. which is useful when home is six hours away across more flatlands and rather uninteresting urban messes like the rest of Clewiston:And these rural clapboard houses that put me in mind of small homes on the prairie:I have no idea what this was named after:And back, on the road again...Highway 27 toward Homestead:Toward the islands we call home, the only place worth living in Florida.