Power To No Name

I love industrial electrical power. Not everyone shares my joy in the convenience of unlimited electrical power available at the flip of a switch.


When a group of people gets an idea in their heads that money is to be made the idea won't die and such is the case on No Name Key, where a vocal group is demanding the arrival of remotely generated electricity.


No Name Key is famous as the place where Cuban exiles trained to fail at the Bay of Pigs, it's also famous as the only island in the Keys where homes are not supplied by the electrical utility. Now that seems bound to change.


Driving Cheyenne out for a walk there was a utility truck ready to plant a cement pole. It must have been lunch time for no one was working but the equipment was ready.


It looks like they mean business even though the legalities of powering up the island have been and are being debated by the county, the state, the utility, conservationists, and two groups of residents. One lot say leave things as they are and the other lot, widely rumored to be speculating that power will increase the value of property exponentially say it's time for change.


When we were looking at homes in the Lower Keys we checked No Name even though it's more than an hour's drive from the jobs of Key West. Also the homes seemed no cheaper than homes on the grid elsewhere in the islands. Fresh as we were off life on a sailboat, powered by the engine and a solar panel, I was reluctant to engage in a life ashore dealing with diesel generators, solar panels, batteries and home maintenance on an industrial scale.


So we went mainstream and I don't regret it. I have a small portable generator for prolonged outages and I have a cistern that supplies my house with drinking water, but I like the silence and ease brought to me by power lines.


There are plastic fences marking presumably the locations of power poles to come along Watson Road. The plans are coming to fruition which strikes me as odd. I mean, it's no secret there is no power on the island, though they do have buried telephone and cable TV (!) utilities wired to the homes. So why buy here if you want to have your home on the grid?


So why is it that a bunch of people who did buy here without utility power decided to screech for it's installation, if not to speculate on the value of a home attached to the grid? And here are the first two "test" poles installed by Keys Energy last year. I guess they are solid enough for expansion to continue. It is coming and it can't be stopped, it seems.


If I have out of town visitors keen to see Key deer I bring them here because they are always on view. Some say power poles will upset their rural seclusion though I doubt that.


Rainwater cisterns have fallen out of favor for some reason and many people are afraid of the purity of such reservoirs even though their widespread use would help preserve the South Florida aquifer which is being depleted and salt water intrusion is an interesting problem facing our not very distant future. I have been drinking filtered rainwater for years with no problems.


The thing is homes on this backwater are not any less suburban than those across the bridge on remote Big Pine Key.


They have solar panels, as we all should, but they don't deprive themselves of any modern conveniences here to live a simpler more frugal lifestyle, which I think is a little odd.


I mean if you want to live off the grid it's usually as a statement, not necessarily as a member of the tin foil hat brigades but simply in pursuit of a less involved lifestyle. Around here that stereotype doesn't apply, everyone is fully involved with maximum possible energy consumption.


This is a community that males little sense to me, it seems so incoherent. That said I see no reason why these homes shouldn't continue their eccentric trajectory.


I shall be sorry to see the island connected to the grid as seems inevitable.


Its nice sometimes to remember what the skyline looks like where utility poles and wires don't interfere with the views.


Of course there's a reason No Name Pub is on the Big Pine end of the bridge and not on the eponymous island. It would be hard to run a business without the grid. And maybe that's the point.


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B.O.'s Fish Wagon

My wife wanted to see one of her graduating students in town to say hi, but the kid had swapped her scheduled shift and we were left to order fried fish sandwiches.


They offer more than that on their menu.


The good bit is that this rough assemblage of planks and junk allows dogs. Cheyenne stayed home as it is getting too hot for her to be hanging around outdoors in the middle of the day.


It was white hot outside and the fans inside were the bare minimum needed to stay comfortable lacking windows and air conditioning.


Our neighbors over ordered and offered us their extra order of conch fritters which the nice lady pronounced "konsh" which confused me for a second.


I woofed them, to show appreciation and because I am a pig. Essentially konk fritters are hush puppies with bits of mollusk buried in the batter. How bad can a fried dough ball be even with conch in it?


Thank you ma'am, I enjoyed them! And off she went studying her street map.


It's a shambolic place, is Buddy Owen's restaurant.


Key West funk I suppose, whatever that means.


People come by and take pictures.


After 20 minutes our fried fish sandwiches arrived. I used to work across the street at Fast Buck Freddie's shipping warehouse and we could smell the French fries wafting across Caroline Street. It was nice to get to taste them and remember the 'good old days.' Ah, nostalgia!


At $13 apiece I figure these are downtown tourist prices.


What the hell it was fun playing tourist for an afternoon.


The sandwich was okay but Sandy's sells a similar sandwich with no fires and more fish for $7, with limited outdoor seating and easy access to waterfront picnic tables at Higgs. Still I had a good time at B.O.'s and once in a while it's worth it.


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BS

Clearly a well thought out policy position for the new millennium, and I wondered if this might be the format for post-modern pamphleteering, like the publishing made famous by Paine the voice of the Revolutionary War?


I like the idea of everyone lighting up and smoking away the national debt and modern strife. Damn, what if it really were that simple?




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Bye Bye Freddie

The words have been written and the decision taken and change is coming to the 500 block of Duval.

I've heard some say Tony Falcone failed to adapt to the Internet era, that he should have cultivated the locals, that he should have adjusted his mark up after the 2008 economic melt down. Etc...etc...

I on the other hand have no idea what he should have done differently if anything as I have no head for business. What is clear to me is that everyone in Key West has a thought and an opinion about the end of the quirky department store that is now sinking out of sight into our collective memory.

Tony Falcone and his business and life partner at the time helped initiate Fantasy Fest three decades ago in a desperate attempt to give life to a moribund city in October when tourists were long gone and snowbirds were nowhere to be seen. His roots in the city go deep enough that he, like the big developers, oversaw the transformation of the city, it's modernization.

Lime all transformations the risk here is that Key West may be going too far, success brings with it deep seated and permanent alterations that change the essential nature of that which is being modernized. No one wants to live in a commercial fishing town, not many people want to life without modern conveniences, but by creating a year round economy and sucking in wealth, Key West has changed and changed so much that one of the authors of that change has changed himself out of his own business.

Fast Buck Freddie's walked a fine line between bad taste and fashion statements. It was homo-erotic home furnishings made palatable to the wealthy old snowbirds eager to prove their social advancement by showing off their wealth through fruity over priced furniture from the home town store. There was not much room for working Conchs and retail employees with three part-time jobs and barely enough money left over for a six pack.

It was a walk through retail fantasyland when one went to the store with a meager budget and an intent to buy a few seasonal knick knacks for gifts. The store was bursting with dust catcher fantasies, over wrought china, exotic Indonesian rattan, penis pasta and joke books.

I remember the Lee County Commissioner who returned to Ft Myers and handed out boxes of penis pasta to her fellow elected officials on the daïs. I think she lost her job thanks to her terrible Key West taste.

I had a job at Fast Buck's for a summer in the shipping and receiving department. It was a happy time for me, I was off the water tired of being a boat captain and enjoying driving round the city delivering furniture. I went into lots of different homes, an invisible worker on Sunset Key driving a truck where no one drives. I liked working there and wanted to stay. It was John that hired me, a veteran of the early years of the store, recently retired, shortly after I took this picture of him opening the store as he had for 30 years:

And after retirement with his house sold I am told he retreated to Costa Rica.

I remember this little mannequin which was sold in front of me to a grinning new owner. We the employees used to look at the child's horrid scowl and with the best will in the world the dressers despaired of ever making the child look appealing in the store window. Check him out, he looks positively demonic.

Eventually I was offered a job as a police dispatcher making a few dollars an hour more, and I tried to negotiate a raise at Fast Buck's but the private sector failed to see my worth. I went to the police department and now more than ever I am glad of that choice.

I will miss the place as we all will, and when a chain store that offers no challenges and presents a bland familiar shopping mall face to Duval Street opens in it's place we will mutter about the good old days.

Some say the good old days were after World War Two when the Depression was put to rest and optimism swept the land. Other say they were in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s and you will find the gold old days were when the speaker first set eyes on Key West. For some, in the not too distant future, these will be the good old days.

When I was shipping furniture out the back the Blue Paper published from the little shack at the top of the stairs. I once met Jimmy Buffet back here, he shares the building with Falcone and often hung around here. I had no idea who he was and only discovered his identity when the trembling women in the store pointed him out with awe in their voices. I saw first hand what wealth and fame and a reputation do to the rest of us.

It wasn't all good, I suppose, but that's the beauty of nostalgia, and it's curse




Everything looks better in retrospect.



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Honda CBR 250

One of the annoyances of living in the Lower Keys is that you only ever get to see a stream of assorted Harley Davidsons mixed in with the odd BMW looking badly out of place in their layers of all possible high impact gear.


And then one of my anonymous neighbors gets the bright idea to go and buy a modern motorcycle like a Honda 250.


This isn't a tired Nighthawk 250 or the diminutive Rebel which has a seat that is knee high to a grasshopper. It's supposed to be female friendly but it's just dead boring. This Honda 250 is most decidedly not boring.


Check this little boy racer out. Automatic Braking System and all on the front disk. The oil gets changed every 6,000 miles and the four valves in the water cooled single cylinder get checked every 16,000 miles.


The instrument panel is modern and complete and the riding position doesn't look to be as ferocious on a middle aged back as you might think.


The finish is lovely and considering these machines are made in Thailand (where Bonnevilles are assembled) these machines will be sold around the world at bargain prices - four grand in the US gets you one.


This owner cleverly installed a couple of color coordinated bungees to haul his/her lunch to work in Big Pine. I expect this bikes are that popular someone soon will create some useful accessories for the little CBR.


On the other hand not many people buy an 80 mpg little racer to carry luggage so perhaps innovative bungees are as good as it will get. That and the usual throw over not waterproof saddle bags.


I like this bike.


Of course I would look like an overweight middle aged pratt riding it so my choices are probably a Suzuki TU 250 or a Cleveland Cyclewerks 250 both of which I also like a lot. Small bikes are so much more interesting than oversized penis enhancers.


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