This was not what I expected when we turned off the main road, and started driving confidently into the narrow valley off the main road from Gorazde. We were on our way to Sarajevo, but my mind was full of the civil war that had ended 12 years ago and I could clearly see a narrow winding strip of white on the map, a road that led to Pale, the former capital of the breakaway Republica Srpska,the homeland desired by the formerly genocidal Serbs.
Gorazde, seen above, was a Bosnian-Muslim outpost surrounded by Serbs in the civil war, but nowadays bolstered by European Union money it is a prosperous little town on a sunny July afternoon. The road we were on was not following the dictates of the map and it was deteriorating rapidly into little more than a goat track. We climbed up the valley on a narrow twisting road. The sun made itself visible shining on the greenery high up the granite walls of the valley but down on the road we were deep in shadow.
We came to a steel bridge crossing the river, a fast flowing, boulder-strewn cut through the mountains. The bridge had seen some rough use and the metal plates were buckled in an abstract, interesting way. I plunged onto it lest we start thinking too hard and the heavily laden station wagon bounced as the wheels dropped into a cleft between the plates.
"Er, " Layne gurgled as the car lurched. I kept driving, it was too late now. We scrambled off the end of the bridge onto the roadway and I focused on the fact that other vehicles must use this structure too...
We passed a logging mill, wood piled up outside a classic stone and brick Balkan house with a pointy red tile roof and the road that wound close past the front door. A boy sat on a stack of fresh planks, a dog licked its paws and ignored us as we droned past. The trees closed in and the road waggled its way along the edge of the river. Until we reached the gate.
Somehow we had found some sort of power station, possibly a hydro-electric plant or something, nestled in the woods, guarded by a lonely man in a sentry booth. He let us turn around and when I asked : "Pale?" (In the local lingo pronounced "Pah- lay?") he replied in rapid fire Bosniak and I understood nothing except his hand pointing backwards.
It all came clear as we turned in the parking lot of the power station and headed back to the mill. There we noticed a little cardboard sign, hand written: "Pale Something" which I took to mean "Pale this Way" in cardboard English. We looked at each other and, saying nothing, I turned the wheel and our eager Ford Fusion scrambled up the bank onto the narrow dirt road.
At least, it looked like a road, at first; then we met this...
And then the penny dropped. This was a railroad line and apparently long disused by the trains but still in use as a road. Weird! Cool! We're on the road to Pale. Not waiting for my wife's radiating disapproval to slow us down I kept my foot on the gas and we rumbled into the tunnel.
The first one was a short one and that made it easier to get into the second one which also was short and we could see daylight seconds after starting into the gloom. The third tunnel was much longer, and darker and damper. It gave me shivers as we penetrated the darkness with tendrils of damp sliding down the walls, potholes large enough to reduce our speed to a slow walk and barely enough width to allow us to open a door and get out. that I figured would be a killer if we got a flat...
"What if we meet someone coming the other way?" my wife asked with a half giggle.
"Buggered if I know," I muttered, swinging wide to avoid a hole of particular dimensions. "Lets hope they know how to back." We kept on rumbling, the diesel engine growling in low gear.
"What's that?" she said, cocking her head.
"What's that?" she said, cocking her head.
"That, " I said with a sinking feeling , " is our opportunity to figure out who knows how best to back up."
Suddenly their headlights were upon us. A moped lurched out of the darkness and without waiting for me to engage reverse streamed past my door and buzzed out of sight towards the light. Like we weren't even there. Which would have been okay if there wasn't a compact car following close behind him.
I sighed and twisted in my seat and started backing.
I must have gone 50 yards and I'm proud to note without faltering. We pulled to one side and the graceless hulks inside the car flashed us a glare that said if looks could kill we would have been incinerated, and in a flash they were gone, my friendly wave frozen in mid air as though petrified.
And so we gave it a second shot, this time with complete success we popped out at the other end of a tunnel that curved in the middle and must have been 200 yards long, at least. maybe more. it felt longer, I will say that.
The road to Pale came out of the tunnel and coasted alongside the river for a distance, dappled sunlight playing on the trees overhead, the mountain looming over us and still cutting off the lowering sun, for it was close to 6 pm as we drove along the railbed.
"Does this seem like a good idea?" My wife asked after a couple of minutes of silence.
"Umm," I replied. The thought had been occurring to me that we might not be headed towards anything good. Pale had been home to the gruesome killers of Ratko Mladic, the "hero" of the Bosnian-Serb militias. These were the people famous for the slaughter of Srebrenica and the torture by sniper fire over Sarajevo. Pale was their headquarters where they planned the reduction of the Bosnian Muslim capital city. As we bounced along the railroad track with no end in sight ( another quick tunnel) I was mulling over the wisdom of following this trail to nowhere.
I imagined us arriving in some Carmen-like bandit camp high in the mountains and stepping out of our Austrian registered car with weak smiles on our faces and then being lost forever to the rest of humanity. Just two more mounds of dirt in a country littered still with mass graves. It was not a pleasant picture.
"Do you think we should turn back?" I asked.
"Only if you do," she temporized.
"Um, " I temporized.
This trail had probably been pressed into service during the war to connect Pale to the rest of the Serb-held Western Bosnia. Now it was probably just a short-cut across the mountains for a few hardcore people who really want the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina split into two, or three parts.
In any event we stopped, we took pictures, we turned around. I was ready to not keep going, we knew the rail bed went somewhere, and we didn't want to arrive in the dark, or get stuck in the dark and Pale was there somewhere ahead, on a proper paved road, I was pretty sure. This track led to Pale but through God knows who's back yard.
The relief in the Ford was palpable as we back'ed and forth'ed and got facing the way we'd come.
"I expect those guys who passed us called ahead and now the bandits are waiting for us."
"Long wait," I said. We passed the long tunnel, and two more and finally found the sawmill, dropped onto the pavement, crossed the funky bridge , went back down the valley, turned left on the main road away from Gorazde and took the long way round the mountain.
Pale was easily accessible by main road and a drab, down-at-heel town it was too, about as threatening as a page from a history book. 'The banality of evil' was all I could think as I checked the Soviet style apartment blocks and the hurrying hunched pedestrians on their way to nowhere. We drove through, not stopping, and went on our way to Sarajevo and a night in America at the Holiday Inn. We wanted service with a smile and a pretense that outside the door lay midwestern suburbia in all its unthreatening glory. We got a Lego building inhabited by surly Slavs instead. The good ole USA was still a long way away.
We were a little tired and stressed by the Balkans at this point.
And when on a mainland road trip I am an advocate of leaving at least some of the route to chance, a concept that GPS cannot compute. Which is a rather long way round explaining how I found myself here and not at 
I followed a brown sign into the void of South Florida agriculture. "Biscayne National Park" it said, an organization that had yet to penetrate my consciousness. It sounded rather watery and I was game so off I went, leaving behind the four lane madness of pawn shops, car dealers and Latin hairdressers lining the highway. And indeed there is a marina next to the National Park, and for some unaccountable reason this large sub tropic spider got caught up in the web of my lens: 
I am quite fond of spiders and bats and any creature that eats insects, though I like to leave them to their habitat as long as they leave me to mine. It is generally an easily digested agreement.
It was a hot overcast humid morning but there were a few cars in the parking lot, transportation as we shall see for some hunter-gatherers with fishing poles and a couple of other 
There was a massive imposing visitor center, but I wasn't in the mood for statistics (Biscayne National Park comprises x number of tennis courts if you stuck the bay end to end, that kind of thing) so I went for a walk instead,
and took a look around at a National Park out of season, and thus peaceful:
...out of the post-consumer recycled plastic planking: 
A playful conjunction of natural and not. All overseen by the heavy summer clouds promising more rain later:
Where we would be, I wonder, without the tradition of open spaces and parks instituted a hundred years ago by the Federal Government?
I envy the anglers their patient ability to sit and stare out at the waters of Biscayne Bay while waiting for good things to 
This fisherman was dangling a delightfully old fashioned cigarette holder:
Camera-less tourists. I think they were foreigners which may explain that eccentricity.
Then I got inspired to walk all the way down the causeway that sticks out into the bay. I crossed the path of the camera-free tourists here and he gave me a decidedly Francophone "
Up close he was actually fishing with a younger Latino, quite possibly his son. They nodded amicably and kept their eyes on their lines. I stared out at the empty waters for a minute and pondered the meaning of this sign:
Far to the landward side lay the magnificence of the visitors center and the footbridge out to this causeway:
I have been hunting for manatee desultorily for some time and I have no doubt I will try again this winter. This was the best I could do here in summer: 
Small town America is loaded with repositories of local arcana and culture, and Key West has it's own Museum of Art and History too, and of course I think its the best small town museum around. Certainly its in a splendid building, an all-brick genuine US Custom House, designed with snowfall in mind and built to a standard specification.
The Art and History Museum has several permanent exhibits on offer and rotates several of its rooms for visiting shows. Seward Johnson a sculptor backed by the Johnson and Johnson family fortune has been a favorite for some time. He likes to make mind bending sculptures rendering three dimensional that which we consider familiar in the world of Art. American Gothic, the grumpy farmer, his pitchfork and his daughter is an icon. So naturally the sculptor needs to mess with people's heads:
They are enormous, the statues:
But Johnson also has some more life sized statues for people to play with, possibly familiar from art class:
The Art and History Museum has its own display chronicling its long era of neglect but the place has been brought back from near destruction and has become a lovely Victorian to wander around in, unusual in Key West, brick and wood and everything:
It's ten bucks to get in, with a whole ten percent discount for local ID, better than nothing I suppose, and there he is, at it again, Seward Johnson:
It looks like nothing more than a copy of the Mona Lisa, the enigmatic smile and all, but walking along side the picture it becomes apparent this sculpture has its own story to tell. Playing on the obscure origin of this painting Johnson made a sculpture following the theory that La Gioconda (as she is known in Italy) was actually a version of the artist's male lover and "her" legs have been sculpted to reflect that notion:
Elsewhere in the room we have women with pearl earrings and skirts flying, all familiar images rendered in three dimensions. Last year Johnson had an exhibit of impressionist art in similar style and it had quite an unexpected effect on me walking among the life sized diners I'd seen for years and taken for granted in two dimensions.
The History part of the museum is preoccupied with one incident in particular, the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. The battleship blew up in spectacular fashion and the US took this as a sign of Spanish hostile intentions and promptly went to the assistance of Cuban rebels, ending up in possession of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Speculation is that possibly the coal in the Maine's bunkers got wet and produced explosive gases, as coal will, and the less gullible take it upon themselves to suggest the US may have been responsible for the explosion that took the lives of US sailors. Rather in the manner of people nowadays who suggest the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Be that as it may the killed and injured were transported to Key West, the dead buried in a plot of land famous in photographs of the city cemetery, the injured cared for at the Navy hospital. The museum got a bunch of artifacts after it was all over:
The other big deal in Key West history was the arrival of Ernest Hemingway and there is a fair bit of him in here:
Killing fish, slaying babes...
...drinking, traveling and killing more animals. Fighting in World War One, as well:
He wrote a few books in Key West and one about Key West, he drank with Sloppy Joe Russell, at Captain Tony's, and was fairly miserable at home by all accounts. In the above photograph there are souvenirs of his time in Italy and a picture of his first and (they say) only love. All terribly romantic but from what I can figure he fled Key West when the highway arrived and spent many years at his favorite home which was in Cuba, Finca Vigia ("Lookout Farm") which from what I have heard has been perfectly preserved by the general fossilization that has taken place in Cuba over the past 50 years.
And he got his own portrait painted too, by Paul Collins:
His intaglios are much prized these days and he made quite a name for himself. I happen to know reproductions are on sale on Duval and I think its about time my wife got me one for my birthday.
The originals that are on show at the Museum tend to leap out at you:
The Museum celebrates the history of wrecking and Porter's anti-piracy squadron, which cleared out all pirates in less than a decade after the city was founded (much to the discomfort I'm sure of all the irritating pirate lovers who want to make out the keys were all about pirates). Porter didn't think much of Key West and left as soon as the job was done. But wrecking was quite the business for decades:
And it was legitimate too. It made fortunes for it's practitioners, and brought a level of sophistication to Key West which was decorated by ship's cargoes from all over the world. Then came the lighthouses and that put paid to much of that. The museum has a couple of large maps of 19th century Key West on display. This one show Fort Zachary Taylor as a separate island, before the harbor was filled in around it:
Alongside that is a rather corny but cool diorama for Key West's waterfront at the same period.
Key West really was isolated back then, and its population of 12,000 stayed pretty steady over the years. Nowadays we have double the numbers but we also have double the area as the city has spread over the whole island. What was scrub lands is now New Town. History appeals to me because it gives depth and meaning to the present. It gives me perspective when people moan about modern day changes. And there are news paper reports about the arrival of the railroad that express the fears and reluctance of many about how the island would be irrevocably changed. I ask people now about the notion that perhaps we should cut the bridge link and they look horrified. Change isn't always good but sometimes it has its good points!
"Your most honest..." ? No worse than today at least.