I was walking Cheyenne pretty much at random, in town for an event we were going to later, when the advertising phrase preferred by Schooner Wharf Bar sprang unbidden into my mind.
"A last little piece of old Key West" is a superb slogan for a bar which wants to sell itself as a spot that claims to be funky, old time, down at heel, anything goes etc...in the spirit of a fondly remembered Key West that may or may not have existed. I find these kinds of slogans a bit vexing because I know damned well not many people alive today would be the least bit happy to be transported back to the Key West of Hemingway's To Have and To Have Not, a place of no money, little charm and lots of hard graft. But I digress, Key West has always been charming and I am just made grumpy by advertising slogans. Aeroplane! Remember that life in Old Town consists in putting up with lots of noise from various sources. Old time Key West might have been a lot quieter at least.
I am not a great fan of the food at Mangia Mangia, I like my Italian-American food to resemble what I think of as Italian food, but I am alone in this. The restaurant building qualifies as Old key West and very pretty it is too.
Electricity in old time key West was a rough affair, coming and going pretty much at will. I remember outages used to be much more frequent, but in those days electrons mattered less, I had no computer and land line phones worked independent of electricity. Nowadays Keys Energy has installed big power poles made of cement and things seem much more reliable. I photographed this scooter ridden by a man who saved walking five feet by occupying one of two handicapped spots. The other one was available but it seemed rather chintzy of him, especially as his scooter has no placard.
This sign looks rather silly like this but it is intended to keep the door free of parked bicycles when it's closed. Finnegan's Wake used to be a much nicer Irish pub before they went all sports bar and installed millions of TV screens. That's just the sound of me grumbling again. Life in key west is all about change.
I do not have the imagination to take some old colored glasses and turn them into garden ornaments, but I do like them when I see them.
This next sign cracked me up...."circa 1925." Circa used to be used to measure a span of time in antiquity, "around the fourth century," or some such. In Key West where history is buried in an alcohol induced blur 1925 may as well have been when Athens and Sparta were at loggerheads it is so remote a date.
Now here, further down James Street we have a true piece of old Key West. This shed is now fenced off where once it was open to anyone who wanted to bed down in the grassy area in the back. And they did bed down there with their beer and their bedrolls- hence the fence.
My accountant doesn't have a bird cage in his window and he certainly doesn't have one with a dead fish inside. I'm guessing CPAs in Kansas don't either. But in Key West this one does.
This car might be pretty old considering it's got shrubbery growing out of the back door. An old time piece of Key West? Maybe. 
Old Key West is cute. That's why there are so many visitors filling the city coffers.
Cheyenne loves the old homes propped up on rocks instead of being built modern style on a cement slab. There is food lurking somewhere under here, old unconsidered trifles of mouldy cat kibble.
More old Key West. This is not the first time i have photographed this divine shed on Lopez Lane but I really like the way it looks. This would be a perfect man hut with naked women calendars and a fridge filled with Boddington's and Yuengling and Smithwick's and a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir. You could sit in here sweating and listen to the rain dripping down of a summer's afternoon. 
The old sponge market on Fleming Street looked pretty in the crisp sunshine and the dark blue sky in the background.
And the figurehead appears once again on my blog. About as much nudity as that crass old toad riepe will ever see here. The more he grumbles the more I dig my heels in.
Whoa! A new sign! Change comes crashing down about our Key West ears once again. Silly billies, just about every street in Key West is a bike route. I wonder what it means.
We were having a great walk and Cheyenne wanted more and I was happy to oblige, but those pictures will have to wait till Monday.
One more picture, I liked this one. "Active member" means get out of speeding ticket free, perhaps?
It seems a bit blatant to me but what do I know? I have an Iron Butt tag holder on my Bonneville, "world's toughest riders." Hardly, but hyperbole comes in all shapes and sizes doesn't it. "A last little piece of old Key West..."
"A last little piece of old Key West" is a superb slogan for a bar which wants to sell itself as a spot that claims to be funky, old time, down at heel, anything goes etc...in the spirit of a fondly remembered Key West that may or may not have existed. I find these kinds of slogans a bit vexing because I know damned well not many people alive today would be the least bit happy to be transported back to the Key West of Hemingway's To Have and To Have Not, a place of no money, little charm and lots of hard graft. But I digress, Key West has always been charming and I am just made grumpy by advertising slogans. Aeroplane! Remember that life in Old Town consists in putting up with lots of noise from various sources. Old time Key West might have been a lot quieter at least.
I am not a great fan of the food at Mangia Mangia, I like my Italian-American food to resemble what I think of as Italian food, but I am alone in this. The restaurant building qualifies as Old key West and very pretty it is too.Electricity in old time key West was a rough affair, coming and going pretty much at will. I remember outages used to be much more frequent, but in those days electrons mattered less, I had no computer and land line phones worked independent of electricity. Nowadays Keys Energy has installed big power poles made of cement and things seem much more reliable. I photographed this scooter ridden by a man who saved walking five feet by occupying one of two handicapped spots. The other one was available but it seemed rather chintzy of him, especially as his scooter has no placard.
This sign looks rather silly like this but it is intended to keep the door free of parked bicycles when it's closed. Finnegan's Wake used to be a much nicer Irish pub before they went all sports bar and installed millions of TV screens. That's just the sound of me grumbling again. Life in key west is all about change.I do not have the imagination to take some old colored glasses and turn them into garden ornaments, but I do like them when I see them.
This next sign cracked me up...."circa 1925." Circa used to be used to measure a span of time in antiquity, "around the fourth century," or some such. In Key West where history is buried in an alcohol induced blur 1925 may as well have been when Athens and Sparta were at loggerheads it is so remote a date.
Now here, further down James Street we have a true piece of old Key West. This shed is now fenced off where once it was open to anyone who wanted to bed down in the grassy area in the back. And they did bed down there with their beer and their bedrolls- hence the fence.My accountant doesn't have a bird cage in his window and he certainly doesn't have one with a dead fish inside. I'm guessing CPAs in Kansas don't either. But in Key West this one does.
This car might be pretty old considering it's got shrubbery growing out of the back door. An old time piece of Key West? Maybe. Old Key West is cute. That's why there are so many visitors filling the city coffers.
Cheyenne loves the old homes propped up on rocks instead of being built modern style on a cement slab. There is food lurking somewhere under here, old unconsidered trifles of mouldy cat kibble.More old Key West. This is not the first time i have photographed this divine shed on Lopez Lane but I really like the way it looks. This would be a perfect man hut with naked women calendars and a fridge filled with Boddington's and Yuengling and Smithwick's and a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir. You could sit in here sweating and listen to the rain dripping down of a summer's afternoon. 
The old sponge market on Fleming Street looked pretty in the crisp sunshine and the dark blue sky in the background.And the figurehead appears once again on my blog. About as much nudity as that crass old toad riepe will ever see here. The more he grumbles the more I dig my heels in.
Whoa! A new sign! Change comes crashing down about our Key West ears once again. Silly billies, just about every street in Key West is a bike route. I wonder what it means.We were having a great walk and Cheyenne wanted more and I was happy to oblige, but those pictures will have to wait till Monday.One more picture, I liked this one. "Active member" means get out of speeding ticket free, perhaps?
It seems a bit blatant to me but what do I know? I have an Iron Butt tag holder on my Bonneville, "world's toughest riders." Hardly, but hyperbole comes in all shapes and sizes doesn't it. "A last little piece of old Key West..." ====================================================================
Post Scriptum: On making the Friday rounds I find myself filling in endless word scrambles. Is mine the last blog comment page that doesn't require you to spell out nonsense in order to tell me I make no sense? Comments on entries older than five days get moderated which is how I eliminate the spam. I just filled out a word scramble that spelled "balls." And it wasn't on riepe's blog. I need a strong cup of tea.
Cheyenne and I spent a happy hour around here a few afternoons ago, helping me get though a long weekend at work, a weekend that more closely resembled winter than summer in the Police Communications Center. Someone called in a woman sleeping on the sidewalk, she wasn't sleeping she was dead. So often people call in dead people on the sidewalk "...not breathing , " they whisper urgently and they are just sleeping it off in a town where the bars close at 4am. I have never understood how someone can get so drunk they lose track of where they are and simply lay down to sleep on the sidewalk. Around here people do it all the time, yet sometimes, just sometimes they aren't sleeping, they are dead. The good news is we never presume to know what is urgent and what isn't so we always send someone out as quickly as possible to investigate. No call is ever written off, no request for help is ever ignored by us.
Also I can hardly believe that the last twelve months have seen two people killed in our fair city. Neither of them left unsolved which is a nice statistic but if you think like I do you have to wonder if the stresses of our imploding economy are going to push more nasty people into being extra nasty. I hope 2010 is just a statistical anomaly, an aberration in a town that rarely sees two murders in three years. Then there were the kids just up the street from my house who found a skeleton at what appeared to be a homeless refuge in the bushes of Little Torch Key. The paper says the body was mostly a skeleton dressed in clothes, gnawed by wild animals, a forgotten human who died alone in the shrubbery just off the road. 
I was reading the diary of a Finnish woman who joined this website,whatever that means exactly (
Of all the people who live on my street four wave as I ride by of whom two stop to talk when they meet me out gardening. None of them would be concerned were I to die upstairs at home. Only Cheyenne howling might prompt an investigation. The odd thing is I don't mind that notion, not nearly as Zella, who lives alone, seems to dread it. Lying on your back staring at the ceiling waiting for the grim reaper seems like a much worse way to die than simply keeling over with a sudden heart attack. I got a call from a caregiver who found her elderly charge in just such a position after waiting three hours for someone to hear her cries for help. The young woman on the phone was lackadaisical to say the least, almost chatty with me. We were short staffed and I was struggling to run the main police channel while Belen answered the phones, ran warrants and dispatched Fire and Rescue so I was rather curt with the caller. I had the information I needed, I had calls on hold and officers needing attention and I needed her to hang up. She almost refused to hang up until she got the message (I'm not allowed to hang up 9-1-1's by protocol) in my tone. Finally she paused and then said tartly: "You're very rude!" Click. Grrr. Belen was sending an ambulance already, I could hear her across the room as I thought to myself, what's the matter with a caregiver who doesn't care? And will she ever learn the difference between being curt and being rude? 
"The good thing about working nights is that you get to deal with lots of hot calls," Belen said as we paused between mayhem for a while. The radio tends to go quiet while the officers are investigating. Then the power went out. Blam. All across the city it went black outside the circle of lights powered by the huge generator at the police department. Belen came to nights for a few weeks to help out our short staffed situation and it's hard to adapt to sitting up when you are used to being asleep. She was jolted to complete consciousness by the string of calls that came pouring into our dispatch center. 
One of the reasons I enjoy working nights is that I get up around lunchtime and have the afternoon to myself, and my dog, before I have to ride into work by 6pm. It's a time when I can get out into the fresh air and clear my head and wandering the backwoods and neighborhoods of the Lower Keys is good for me. It's good for Cheyenne too.
It could be worse. The City Commission decided Tuesday to change ambulance companies in Key West next April. They paid some people to study the issue and the result was they went with the low bid and it's all change. The employees at American Medical Response are pretty gloomy expecting a pay cut in a town that doesn't cost any the less to live in. I wish the city had amalgamated the ambulance service with the city Fire Department and cut the profit motive out altogether. I don't think any patient facing an $800 ride in an ambulance is better served knowing there are profit hungry share holders to feed. But that's just my proclivity for looking at the larger picture and right now the city chooses to pay less for ambulance service, which isn't all bad as I depend on the city to keep it's budget balanced, as much as anyone does. . 
I guess while I'm at work I'm helping to clean up after people, and God knows they need help. While I'm out walking Cheyenne I'm out helping clean up after dogs. 
Dispatching is an odd job, stressful and satisfying, awake when everyone else is asleep dealing with the odd situations in life, such that it's important to take the time to remember that not everyone is an emotional wreck, not everyone is wasting their lives drinking and fighting and creating drama. Some people go through their entire lives without calling 9-1-1. Most of us aren't victims of the assholes who suck the living out of life. Most of us are lucky to be living ordinary lives of no great and sudden moment. Walking Cheyenne reminds me how privileged that status is. 
Another walk successfully concluded.
Three miles gets us into the heart of the biggest island in the lower Keys and at that point I have to decide where our walk will take us. Cheyenne usually sprawls on the back seat happily chewing her rawhide leaving me to decide how to keep her happy. It's a heavy burden.
We spend an hour, sometimes two wandering the back woods or the beach. After a while she flops in the shade and looks at me so I sit next to her and unfold the battered paper that I found in my driveway. She looks around and I read the Voice column, anonymous comments critiquing daily life in the Keys. These days the School District is in the news as two new school board members took their seats on the Board yesterday. I didn't vote for either of them but I don't think they need my validation. The paper has been rather critical of the new regime in the district after last year's superintendent drama and there has been some finger wagging at Superintendent Joe Burke for not being as accountable as the paper thinks he should have been. Locals have dubbed him "Super Joe" in the way Key Westers are notorious for giving everyone a nickname, but the Citizen doesn't seem to think he's too super. And then Cheyenne shakes herself to her feet and looks at me- time to move on.
The skies have been lovely and wintry lately, though I do miss the puffy white clouds that are created by the summer moisture. these days the air has been dry and clear and the sky looks empty and vast, just like the void it actually is. the effect is to make everything sharp and finely etched in the crisp sunlight.
As long as we are out of traffic zones Cheyenne enjoys her freedom, off leash and free to wander at will. The deal is that when I call her she has to come immediately but I promise not to call her unless there is a reason. I get the feeling her first eight years weren't spent like this because gives a strong impression of making up for lost time. I hate seeing dogs dragged along with no time to sniff and smell; the ability to pause and think is a privilege that not many humans seem to want and not many dogs seem to get.
Someone appears to have dismembered what looks like a nurse shark out here in the bushes. there is a rank smell of fish for a second and Cheyenne perks up. The tail is drying in the sun like some Asian aphrodisiac delicacy. the head looks like the rounded snout of a nurse shark but there are what appear to be bones in the head. Perhaps it is gristle shaped like a bone, perhaps nurse sharks have bones of some kind? Perhaps it's not a shark at all.
It sure looks like one, and Cheyenne is interested though happily she doesn't have a mad desire to eat this nasty stuff or even roll in it. A comprehensive sniff and she's on her way.
A lung full of fresh air and a sweep of the horizon. 
If ever a Keys resident looks back to the "good old days" a glance at these Gambusia channels would remind them that life was tough in the pioneering days in the Florida Keys. And consider this: people used to die in droves from yellow fever, the disease carried by mosquitoes. Furthermore Key West was about the only city of any size south of St Augustine owing to the fact that it's island location made the mosquito problem somewhat bearable in the 19th century. These channels look quaint but the insects were a real issue to early Floridians.
The elections have abated some of the furor over the Mosquito Control District which is run by a headstrong director who doesn't much like taking orders from elected Board members. they however, are taking grief from voters who are feeling the economic pinch and are slightly staggered by the lack of economic good sense exhibited by this stalwart band of spenders. A couple of new directors have joined the board and the hope is that the old time spenders are on the run and a sensible budget can be worked out. A lot has been made of the fact that the director earns (a term coined loosely here) $185,000 a year, more than any other public official in the county and more indeed than the Governor himself. The State Attorney is investigating a suspected case of illegal cell phone use that was swept under the carpet by his predecessor. The newspaper makes for interesting reading some days.
As long as Cheyenne is perky we keep walking. The newly dry flats were a source of fun for a while. She sniffed and I took a picture of this red mangrove rising up out of the rock and mud. Mangroves are quite astonishing when you see how they take root in the most unpromising places and turn saltwater into freshwater for their use. their roots are pretty elaborate too.
Then I open my eyes, put away the newspaper and find myself in a stand of pine trees that look more like saplings than umbrellas. It's amazing they do as well as they do in the arid oolite rocks of Big Pine Key.
Then it's time to stump back to the car, puffing all the way as even the winter sun can get the air up to a toasty 80 degrees (28C) on a still and windless afternoon. A girl in a fur coat can get pretty hot and panting. Me? I'm panting for my long delayed pot of caffeine at home.