Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz

It used to be that Santa Cruz's main street was called Pacific Garden Mall after the original Pacific Avenue was beautified and brick planters were laid out with benches and a walking park of native trees started to grow into a downtown forest. The original concept has been retained with wide sidewalks and lots of trees and a whole long list of don't's is tacked up on every lamp post.The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 knocked it all down and in the 1990s the city drew up a plan to rebuild and make the downtown visitor friendly but much more business friendly. The benches and planters went and supposedly with them went the spaces that would encourage bums to hang out. This summer when the wife and I took the dog back to Santa Cruz for a cross country drive to visit friends we spent not much time on what we still call "The Mall." No dogs? No Cheyenne! But if you need weird and wonderful shops, Santa Cruz supplies the goods.The old County Bank facade has remained behind a decorous planting of boring plane trees. The original plants were wild and indigenous, thick leaved and bushy creating a true garden feeling. Nowadays the sidewalks of our old home town are wide and encourage walking. The struggle for some in Santa Cruz is to keep national chains and box stores out of downtown and out of the county if at all possible. There was much opposition to a national book chain coming to Pacific Avenue, but Santa Cruz is home to University of California Campus so the local bookstores have a devoted clientèle. Coffee houses abound to provide competition for Starbucks and local chains like Noah's Bagels and Peets Coffee.Carbon footprints are a big deal in Santa Cruz these days, the new eco mantra, along with the notion of eating locally, or being what they call a "locavore." To be a locavore in Key West would require eating grits and grunts and drinking rainwater. Not a popular menu for the warm weather transplants who expect world class menus at local southernmost restaurants.Despite the cold wet winters bums have landed in Santa Cruz for as long as I can remember and they still do, hanging aimlessly on Pacific Avenue. Violence too has come to downtown Santa Cruz with drive by shootings and stabbings and robberies on a scale that makes me blanch. Of cops walking a beat? Not a one strangely enough even in the middle of tourist season.

I don't miss the gray foggy summer days, and the gods must have been smiling on us because the ten days we were there saw a week of bright summer sunshine, an opportunity for people to get out and work on their paper white skin. There is of course a multiplex art house theater as well but seeing the Regal on Pacific Avenue and the Nickelodeon around the corner on Church Street reminded me we have nothing less in Key West with the Tropic. Much of what I left behind in Santa Cruz I have found in Key West- including high cost of land, an appreciation for alternative cultures, though Santa Cruz is much more white majority than Key West which has lively Cuban and black communities.The architecture of downtown Santa Cruz took a hit with the Loma Prieta quake (which killed 6 people in Santa Cruz, far more than have died in hurricanes in Key West). 30 percent of downtown was leveled in the quake and it took the city a decade to recover with businesses operating out of tents and bitter debates about the future of downtown.Alternative transportation in Santa Cruz is represented by bicycles rather than scooters. However unlike Key West's numerous bicycle racks which a re overflowing with bicycles, Santa Cruz's aren't. Distances are greater, the weather is colder especially in winter and there are enough hills to make people think twice about how they get around.

Of course California has a helmet law too.

And there is a strong local vocal group that thinks that cyclists should wear helmets too. I used to get yelled at for going helmet less on fire trails.

Santa Cruz lies just an hour and a quarter by motorcycle from San Francisco (known locally as "the City" and no other abbreviations will do), facing the ocean on Monterey Bay backed by a ring of redwood covered hills and for people who have found this place it is much a love affair to live here as it is for many people who happen across Key West.
Santa Cruz has easy access, perhaps too easy with the advent of telecommuting, to Silicon Valley just across the mountains, a place that is hurting economically but has always provided some well paid jobs for anyone willing to drive. For people who don't want a material lifestyle Santa Cruz, like Key West, requires dedication and numerous jobs."What about hurricanes? Or the humidity?" anxious Californians ask when we explain we chose to move to Florida."Yup," I reply, they exist and while I don't mind the humidity and hurricanes can be a nuisance, what about flat warm ocean water to swim in? Warm winters and dramatic thundery summers? And the most spectacular sunsets anywhere. Oh and aside from that I can walk Cheyenne in a State Park in Florida if I want to or even, amazing to relate, right down Duval Street. Try that on Pacific Avenue!

Bridle Coconuts

I wonder if I have overdone the scenes of blue skies, blue water and sunshine this week. In case I haven't here's one more.A cyclist riding the bike path along the southern shore of Key West would do well to stop and admire the scenery. You can't see Cuba from here, 90 miles to the south, but you can see fishing boats.The oil spilled (and some say still spilling) in the Gulf of Mexico has not reached these waters. Cheyenne is a land dog. She has learned to enjoy streams and puddles but grass and shrubs are more her speed and swimming is out of the question as she has never been trained to enjoy the water properly.The sandy bridle path alongside South Roosevelt Boulevard gives her lots of opportunity to root around.
As usual wildlife can wander unmolested in the presence of my pacific dog.The salt ponds are not suitable drinking water.The plans for the renovation and refurbishment of North Roosevelt call for the elimination of non-native coconut palms, not least because falling coconuts harm people and vehicles and coconut palms take a lot of maintenance to keep tidy. In the spirit of being good stewards of the public monies the city is asking the state to replace them with less labor intensive trees...Well, this attempt to be parsimonious with the public treasury has got the critics' panties all in a wad because they say, tourists expect to see coconut palms in the city, and damn the public expense...Tourists can come to South Roosevelt to see some coconut palms looking suitably tropical.

On the beach side there are mounds of dried seaweed that need to be ignored to enjoy the view properly.There was a time when someone figured out that you could pitch a tent on the Bridle Path and no one would bother you. No one did until a whole long line of bums in tents sprang up and the city promptly declared an emergency, designated the salt ponds an environmentally sensitive wetland and banned parking, camping, and hanging out in the bushes of the Bridle Path. The No Parking thing is rather annoying because you have to park in the street and walk your dog across four lanes of supposedly 30 mph traffic to get to the path. But that perhaps limits the attraction for everyone and makes it more peaceful than it used to be.It is waterfront property with exceptional views.There used to be a few homeless guys who made a quiet home for themselves in the bushes and trails of the Bridle Path but they got swept away in the general clean up. It is a good spot to hang out, criss crossed with trails and shady nooks.

The salt ponds that lie behind the bushes stretch out to the airport and they are a home to wildlife of a more...natural sort.There is an old pier structure that used to jut out over water but the area seems to be silting up and even though it's the rainy season it was dry enough for Cheyenne to explore.

They call it the Bridle Path because it's where Key Westers used to be able to exercise their horses. Some people misspell it and call it the Bridal Path which is a double entendre worth a smile.Looking east toward the airport.

Another picture of a dog resting in the summer heat.One more summer dog walk in the bag.

Cudjoe Heat

I got out of the deliciously cool car and my Canon SX100 went into fog mode. Spain Boulevard off Blimp Road is a small subdivision of homes on gravel roads in the middle of north Cudjoe Key's back country. I am very happy to bring my dog here and spend an hour wandering in the peace and quiet of a weekday afternoon.It seems like an indulgence to live out of town and be forced to ride my motorcycle on a carbon wasteful commute by Bonneville instead of living in one of North America's most easily cycled cities. But I do enjoy the backwoods of the Lower Keys, and their vistas of woods and water.
I read somewhere that being out in Nature is a good way for humans to reduce their stress, as though this were some unusual discovery.Cheyenne and I figured that out a long time ago. Indeed, I don't any humans that enjoy this sort of meandering as much as my dog and I do.A private tennis court is one of those amenities I would never even consider. Probably because I don't play tennis. A decade in an English boarding school convinced me all sports involving balls are the work of the devil.

Key deer must like bananas if human residents have seen fit to put an electric fence around these examples.

The Spain Boulevard neighborhood rejoices in a variety of geographically suitable street names.These red headed Florida wood peckers make a loud tapping noise when they are at work. It makes them hard to miss, even for a nature photographer as blind as me.Cheyenne's tastes run more to puddle water.I loathe iguanas not least because they trash my vegetables. They need to be exterminated, not helped across the streets. This is my dog resting, not an iguana.

This is also the spot where they keep horses, don't they?Apparently they do. When we were in Santa Cruz, California, I wanted to walk Cheyenne in a county park in the mountains and I met a rather snotty park employee who told me dogs weren't allowed on the trails. "Why not?" I ask, incredulous. It seemed like the ideal spot to walk a dog...

"Because thre are other park users," the man said, looking down his nose at me and my dog. "Besides there are horses and how does your dog do around horses?"

"Umm, " I said, "therre aren't many horses where I live."

"Exactly," the snotty Santa Cruz county employee snipped, firmly closing the gate to Quail Hollow Park to me and Cheyenne. That was typical of California, totally unfriendly to dogs.Mind you Cheyenne wasn't particuarly impressed by my equine friend and she did bark when I spent too much time petting the horse. Then she ignored it completely.We walked on in the heat. These berries are a mystery to me, as is the name of most vegetation."Save. No Cut." We should all be so lucky."Culebras malas." Bad snakes. I appreciate the work snakes do keeping down pests but I am just as happy if they do it in the privacy of their own spaces. Aside from the levity of the guard-snake-sign, I met a neighbor of mine out exercising on her bicycle early one morning while Cheyenne and I were doing our morning constituional and Linda said she had come across a small rattle snake in the bushes. Linda is a nurse and told me the eastern brand are known for poisoning the nervous system, unlike the better known western diamondback which poisons the blood. Or some such. In any event Linda was worried for Cheyenne, and me I suppose. I have yet to see a snake but...This thing look fearsome enough up close.I was glad to see some blooms still on the poinciana but the pods were enormous.I am getting quite a collection of pictures of Cheyenne resting comfortably in the shade, this summer.And in accordance with the sign it is, quite likley, time to......this essay.