Seminole Country

Traveling North on Card Sound Road one comes to the intersection where the left turn goes to Florida City, the road straight ahead leads to the exclusive and gated Ocean Reef Club and traffic mostly goes that way. The plebs, gardeners, housekeepers and maids, that keep the community operating tend to commute from Florida City in the morning, so leaving the Keys this way is against the traffic for the most part. The toll to get out of Monroe County is a dollar, unless you have a pass from Ocean Reef Club issued to employees to give them free passage. They give change at the booth but Sunpass, The Turnpike automated system doesn't work here.From the Toll Booth at the county line Dade county stretches dead due north for ten straight miles through the southernmost Everglades.

I stopped for coffee and a sandwich in Homestead and admired the new billboards reminding drivers that tolls in Dadecounty are now human-free. If you run the Turnpike in Dade without a free Sunpass transponder you get charged 25 cents extra per toll booth plus you get a monthly two dollar and fifty cent surcharge if they charge you by reading your license plate.

The booths are now no longer staffed but traffic isn't allowed through the booths yet so all traffic has to squeeze into the Sunpass lanes, as a result there is no advantage as previously and all traffic slows horribly. One day soon perhaps things will flow more freely.By the time I got off the Turnpike in Boca Raton, four hours after leaving my house it was painfully obvious i was no longer in Key West. These kinds of canyons make me feel like a country bumpkin. As soon as Icould I left the confines of the big city and headed west, as all young men should, this time on the Sawgrass Expressway headed toward the wilderness of the Everglades. First time visitors often think of the Everglades as being a cypress forest, dank and gloomy but it is in fact the famous River of Grass, a prairie fed by semi submerged waters flowing south.

From the expressway I took Interstate 75 also known as Alligator Alley, a $2:50 toll road to Naples on Florida's west coast. After an hour of droning around on multi lane highways Cheyenne and I found ourselves in the heart of the Seminole Indian Reservation.Snake Road is said to be the twistiest road in Florida though this may be an exaggeration. It does meander with some wide curves, though the speed limit is a modest 45 miles per hour and the Seminole Tribal Police tend to be rather active in these parts. Wild motorcycle rides are fraught with the possibility of speeding tickets.

Snake Road does meander nicely north from the Interstate toward the Seminole village.

My goal was to find a wide spot in the road to give Cheyenne a chance to stretch her legs, her first walk since Dagny Johnson Park early in the morning.

This is Florida's Big Sky country and it was quite beautiful with a light breeze and no humidity and temperatures hovering in the low 80's. Cheyenne took off, nose down along the grass alongside the road.People don't think of south Florida as cowboy country but there are cows here and up near Lake Okeechobee there are genuine cowboys too. The Seminoles have rodeos and stuff so I shouldn't be at all surprised if they didn't have horses and cowboys and all that as well.

The gate barred entrance to the nearby Seminole Village. Privacy is a big deal for the tribe and their homes are fenced off and out of sight to curious passersby. The casino operations in the eastern edge of the large reservation has funded modernization of the tribes facilities as evidenced by this communications tower:Seminole and Miccosukee homes (they are a tribal subset of the Seminoles) are built in this style on slightly raised land to minimize flooding.

Back at Interstate 75 the Miccosukee operate a gas station and souvenir shop/general store and gas prices are quite reasonable compared to other South Florida stations. Of course when Saudi Arabia joins the other revolting Arab states and goes up in smoke all bets will be off as to prices.

The Miccosukee have their own logo...

...flag......and police cars which were quite active ticketing speeders on the highways through the large reservation.Alligator Alley (I-75) goes on and on...

...and what looks like a hill is just a clump of tall trees on a dry hammock of land in the middle of the River of Grass.

Florida has a speed limit plus five law which allows some speeding latitude, though 80 miles an hour doesn't feel too fast on this long straight flat road. Signage is all terribly modern even in this wilderness. Highway 29 was my exit, the only place to turn south and join the Tamiami (Tampa-Miami) Trail, also known as Highway 41 which runs parallel to the more modern freeway.The Florida Highway patrol were out, though helping a stranded motorist here:Highway 29 is another long straight highway.The panther crossing signs are more of a warning to motorists not to kill the endangered cats, rather than as a warning against carnivores prowling.

My plans had been to turn back east on Highway 41 and take the Loop Road but I got diverted to a place I had never previously explored properly: the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve and State Park.

Dagny Johnson Park

It has been a while since I stopped at Dagny Johnson State Park on Card Sound Road, but when I recently had reason to drive to the mainland I planned a stop here with Cheyenne for a walk.Florida's robber Governor has announced several ways he plans to improve the quality of life in the state, not by closing loopholes on the state sales tax laws but by cutting services to all and sundry. The state faces a budget deficit of less than four billion dollars, peanuts compared to the crises facing equally large states Up North and now we are supposed to lose all sorts of services that irritate Republicans- health benefits, medication supervision, clean water and boring stuff like that. Oh and several state parks have been targeted for closure too, including this one.Gold medal winners? Yeah well, not for long apparently. Saving money here seems odd as this park isn't even staffed. I stuffed a five dollar bill in the honor box, twice the going rate, as I lacked $2:50 in smaller currency. Dagny Johnson is an unusual place in that it is a strip of land cut down the middle by a large paved street, one lane inbound and the other out, a massive freeway effectively for pedestrians, dogs and bicycles. The shrubbery on either side is amply labelled too. Cheyenne was enjoying the park.I was enjoying the sky and the rising sun.
The road leads to a sort of traffic circle with an arbor in the middle and I have no clue where this came from or why.Unlike the Governor I'm not at all keen to do away with it, whatever it is. And then I ask myself, not being a botanist, where else might I get this wealth of information, if not here? The bark didn't look particularly strong but I'm glad it wakes up tired Bahamian men. I have no doubt that the lack of TV and other diversions made Bahamian women exceptionally ferocious in decades past.

The park is a rather narrow sliver and one gets the feeling the neighbors aren't entirely friendly.The morning light was lovely, and it was fairly late too, around seven thirty. I am quite looking forward to the summer time change in ten days. Dark mornings are my friend, not least because my neighbors aren't awake when I get home from work.

The useful labels came fast and furious:

Lacking any women around to lift their shirts obligingly I plunked myself down on the nearest bench after lifting my 85 pound Labrador up next to me.

By then it was breakfast time so we strolled back to the car where I fished out supplies.If, on rolling down Card Sound Road, closing in on Highway One, you see the famous arch, stop and check it out. If nothing else the loo is open apparently at all hours and that could be a handy thing. The Governor needs to re-think his strategy and weirdly enough Republicans in the state's part-time (!) legislature are asking him to do just that. Dagney Johnson is a hundred miles from my home and rather too far for frequent visits. I hope it will still be open when next I stop by.

Lovely Card Sound Road looking north toward the Ocean Reef Club and Alabama Jack's, a long way away but in that general direction.

Seven Mile Bridge Memorial

I read in the Citizen today that this is the anniversary of March 2nd, 1981 explosion on the Old Seven Mile Bridge that killed the tender in his booth. The top of the new bridge (built a year later) has a memorial plaque for anyone driving slow enough to spot it. For those who don't drive slow enough I took this picture:The old bridge had a lift section to allow boats through and the story goes an aqueduct truck with a back hoe on the bed passed under the booth and wrecked the propane tank which supplied the bridge tender with gas. The explosion blew a hole in the old Seven Mile Bridge which was filled only temporarily until the new bridge was built a year later.The old bridge, built by Flagler's engineers still serves the trolley that runs to Pigeon Key from Marathon, and the southern piece is now a fishing pier. I rode the old bridge in 1981 but as I was on two wheels it was not all scary as it was for many drivers, and trucks were required to fold their mirrors so they could pass each other on the narrow roadway built over the original rail tracks in 1938. So the next time your drive the famous bridge you might want to spare a passing thought for the late Peter Fancher who died a grotesquely unfortunate death 30 years ago today.

For my complete essay on the Seven Mile Bridge from three years ago:

http://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2008/05/ninth-wonder.html

Niles Channel

My own skiff is in mothballs this time of year as my wife and I use the boat at our dock to get out on the water and swim. Our motorized platform is a lot less fancy than this center console:Visitors don't find the local waters too cold for swimming and fishing is high on many people's urgent vacation agendas.
Cheyenne was restless so I took her for a short walk close to home that ended up burning an hour of our time and a few more camera pixels on one more lovely summery evening last week.

This ketch lives at anchor south of the Niles Channel bridge and manages to stay looking trim and ready to travel despite never moving.

Soon we will switch to summer time (March 13th) and sunsets will get considerably later, and that is fine by me. Morning rides home from work will get darker but long evenings will be a reminder of the imminence of summer.

Let's not exaggerate here: at twenty four degrees north latitude we are close enough to the equator to mean the lengths of days versus nights is never very different, but with the change to daylight savings sunset will come after 8:30 in June and July and that will be a treat.
While I am clearly not one of those adapted to life in the frigid north, I am like most people who live in temperate climes fascinated by the life of those that deal with long winter nights and long summer days. I cannot imagine five hours of daylight nor yet living where darkness hardly falls at all. In human mythology Paradise in all it's various cultural forms is represented by continuity, the sameness of Eternity. I think it must be in response to the wildly varying annual climate change in those places where most humans have lived traditionally. Yet here is the sameness of Paradise and the comment I get most often is that people like their seasons. Is this sloop at anchor in summer or winter? Who can tell? Cheyenne got away from me for a while sniffing around in the bushes at the end of the Flagler Bridge that does retirement duty as a fishing pier. I strolled to the parapet and looked down. I was glad to see that some kind soul had plunked what appears to be a bicycle wheel into the crystal clear waters, giving me something to photograph. If people didn't dump their trash there would be nothing to look at. Before anyone forgets that Irony is my middle name, here's something I prefer to look at if I have to look at human intervention in the natural world.

Fish killers wandering home on a February evening that looks like an February evening in the mythical hereafter. Eternal fishing will be Heaven for some, and damp heaving smelly hell for me.

We humans do love our geometrical shapes, don't we? The modern Niles Channel bridge has a certain flair about it arching up into the sky, where the old Flagler Bridge, solid as a rock after a hundred years looks rather...pedestrian.

No snow covered peaks here, just the western shore of Ramrod Key, privately owned, and thus mysterious.

The local pigeons are fearless. They hopped slowly out of Cheyenne's way but I think she hardly even noticed them.

Two anglers caught my eye, too busy fishing to say hello and mutter platitudes about the weather as one does in the Keys, (I am still trying to be nice to strangers though the game hardly seems worth the candle). They spent a lot of time leaning over the bridge like this and I wanted to tell them that fish don't, as a general rule, speak very intelligible English but she was wearing pink Crocs so I gave her some slack. I wondered if any fish shouted anything back but it was clear they were caught up in their world. As I walked back he was doing the same thing, leaning over the side peering down at the water. I sat down on the parapet to enjoy the view and tried looking down to talk to the fish. All I saw were my feet...
...and some cormorants holding a club meeting.It was all too gorgeous.

I snapped the photo above almost by accident but it illuminated the scene, looking west to Summerland Key so I chose not to erase it. The picture below I took as I dangled my feet over the parapet. I fancied I could see the curvature of the Earth looking toward the southwestern tip of Ramrod Key.Cheyenne really likes bridge walking for some reason and she tired herself enough, running back and forth that she took a rest in the shade of the parapet next to me.

By the time we walked back to the car the sun was much lower on the horizon and everything including this Ducati was bathed in the golden glow.

Or this V-twin of the usual Harley Davidson sort.

While Cheyenne sat by the car watching the world go by...

...I burned a few pixels watching one more Florida Keys sunset.

And in fact by the time we had driven the five minutes back home the globe had just about disappeared as I pointed the camera due west from my deck.

And that I think would be another wrap, from Ramrod Key.