Wandering along Truman Waterfront pondering the future of these thirty four acres deeded to the city by the retreating Navy I noticed some changes already taking place.
The city has decided to make a park out of the land though the exact terms are somewhat obscure, as is the way. There is a possibility of a marina which has been offered up and roundly criticized by some vociferous city residents as excessively ostentatious and aimed at the luxury set. Meanwhile the formerly open space now has fencing all around. I wondered if it might have been installed for the power boat races but such was not done previously and the purpose defies logic. I expect it is the first step on the path to transformation of the land.
The newspaper also reported the Navy might be seeking to relinquish control of the outer mole, the long cement arm that forms the basin and separates it from the open waters of the harbor. There is an agreement between the city and the Navy that came about when Truman Waterfront was ceded to the city. That took place around September 2011 and the attack on the Twin Towers prompted the Navy to reserve the docking facilities for themselves, and simply allowed the city use of the pier to dock cruise ships as needed. The beauty of the arrangement is that the city gets the full docking fee there instead of sharing the fee with the Westin at the neighboring Pier B. Now the Navy may be seeking bids to take over the Pier and the city is pissed inasmuch as it may lose the cozy relationship.
Nothing stays the same in this busy evolving little town. Except the sea.
These reflections were prompted by the sight of the smiling face of outgoing state representative Ron Saunders' legislative aide who has won the seat in her own right as her boss was term-limited out of office. That she is a Republican taking the place of a Democrat is only slightly less odd than the fact that her victorious visage was unceremoniously dumped in the trash after the vote. Would that every candidate had followers as efficient. Truth to tell almost all signs have evaporated in fact. I did notice the day after the election that Sheriff-elect Rick Ramsey had a big Thank You added to his billboards before they disappeared. Now it is time for all the newly elected office holders to get ready for the start of their new jobs next year. Out with the old and in with the new in the next few weeks.
It is an inconvenience to live twenty five miles outside Key West when your dentist is in the city. Perhaps but another way to look at it is that living outside the city gives me the opportunity to go for a ride on my motorcycle. Which can be an inconvenience as there is only one road between islands and those of us with places to go have to share the highway with people who think "island time" is an invitation to force everyone to slow down to their vacation languor. As it happens the Triumph needs a valve adjustment so I am borrowing my patient wife's Vespa 150 which I actually enjoy riding. Soon I hope my own refurbished Vespa will arrive from Iowa, but that's another story. This is an essay about living the dream - ahead of schedule.
I had an easy ride into town behind some rather slow cars so much so I arrived early for lunch with my wife on Stock Island. The Vespa's top speed is around 65mph on level ground and while that makes passing an iffy proposition unless cars are excessively slow, it also means riding the Vespa doesn't take any longer than driving a car. Buzzing along on a 70mpg 150cc scooter alongside full sized trucks and huge SUVs puts the cry for "energy independence" into perspective! Home Depot did not have the peculiar lightbulb I was looking for, nor did Keys Electric, nor did ACE Hardware on Summerland. Check the Internet was the best advice I got. I tried to shop locally.
However I can't brew my own con leché on the road so I bought a two dollar non-recyclable styrofoam cup of coffee and picked up the Blue Paper to read Rick Boettger's reflections on the elections. You can read them online http://www.kwtn.com/ if you have the patience for the download. Republicans are out of touch he says and have become so by bowing to the radicals on the right who have dumbed down their message to persuade unlikely allies to get together to vote Republican and exclude the majority who don't like radicalism.. Jolly good and next week we find out how Republicans can claw their way back to power. Now why would I want to read that?
My whole day was running ahead of schedule so I decided to try a barber's shop/hair styling salon on Southard Street just around the corner. I had an hour and I expected I might need half that to get my shaggy head shorn.
I walked onto a room that reminded me of my teenage years in an English boarding school when I was senior enough to get my own room. There was a stars and stripes pinned to the far wall with 45rpm album covers pinned next to it. A TV screen on the far wall played inconsequential images to a room that was busy ignoring the message. A tall thin blonde dressed in black was wrapping a seated woman's hair in tin foil while two languid men, possibly employees, studiously ignored me. I sat. "Haircut?" the older man asked as though I might have wandered in to buy a loaf of bread. He approached me with a pair of sheep shears and attacked my excessively long hair with a ferocity that actually made me nervous. Usually I figure the hairdresser is the expert and I tell them simply "not too short, please," and let them get on with it. I worried this guy might have misunderstood and I braced myself to appear in public shorn like a sheep. Bald is fashionable I am told.
Even after a helmet-free ride across town I thought the new look was quite good. All I had to do now was find my dentist and get the old tooth scrubbed. Still ahead of schedule I took a ride around and about chasing Waldo. The Vespa is a lot of fun in town, light and handy and with lots of pep it squirts through everywhere. Truck blocking the lane? No problem! Traffic jam at a four way stop? A quick squirt of the gas and leave the zombies to figure out their own mess. The 150 rides the way the uninitiated expect a 50cc scooter to ride. Seen here on little known Calais Lane, a short cut behind First State Bank on Simonton.
A small cluster of badly parked scooters marks the guest house across the street from my dentist's office. My scooter is the one parked properly with rear tire facing the sidewalk. Sniff.
I breezed in expecting to see the same receptionist I've seen for years at the office. Boy, was I surprised by the frigid reception from a total stranger, and instead of the cheerful young Conch I met the steely gaze of an irritated middle aged wo,an. Oops. My tooth cleaner was the same as usual, a cheerful Mom looking forward to Thanksgiving. We passed a pleasant twenty minutes as she cleaned my ivories. My genes gave me good health and strong teeth so I left ahead of schedule once again.
A nice ride home under the sun over the water on the Overseas Highway. Cheyenne was glad to see me and I took advantage of my early return home to give her a long second walk of the day. No better way to use the time saved than to walk my Labrador.
The streets of Key West really don't need any more congestion but nothing deterred here's another tour through town and it's not a bunch of Eco-cyclists. It's a duck, and it's bloody enormous.
These contraptions drive through Old Town starting at the Conch Tour Train stop at Front and Duval and they launch at the ramp next to the Eco Discovery Center on Truman Waterfront. The idea is to take an amphibious bus and see some of Key West on land and a whole bunch more from the water.
There is a history with these contraptions that makes their appearance on the streets not just controversial for some but positively ironic for anyone who knows. It happened about a decade ago that a dude figured an amphibious tour of Key West was just the ticket offered by no one and thus unique. Well, it was a little too much for the established tour company in Key West, Historic Tours of America whose principal ("principle" for the grammatically challenged) is the ubiquitous Ed Swift. He used a monopoly clause in his contract with the city to have the Duck Tours eliminated. They were shut down and sued the city for damages.
It took about a decade but finally the city lost the suit and had to pay damages totalling as I recall eight million dollars. The tour operator said his amphibious tour only took place on the water and while on land the duck was simply transporting the passengers to the water where the tour itself began. No one disputed this statement and thus he was not violating an already dubious monopoly granted to HTA. In the picture below you will see, ironically enough HTA's "First Mate" giving a tour speech as the duck trundled down Fleming Street from Whitehead to Simonton.
Indeed because this is the city that has different rules for different businesses, it means the on land portion of this trip can certainly be a tour these days. The duck suit not only cost the city (HTA got out in some settlement whose details I cannot recall) but also opened the door for Swift's disgruntled son-in-law and former employee to open a rival tour group using gray colored trolleys to challenge the HTA orange colored tour monopoly. Thus we get even more tour vehicles in a never ending spiral!
I found the picture above on the Internet of the original Duck Tour which used an original WW II DUKW built by GMC. As a point of interest the word DUKW stood for the year the vehicle was built (D= 1942) U is For Utility, K means front wheel drive and W for two rear driving axles. Weird huh? And this is a designation dreamed up by corporate America, not the much maligned government. The new machines are much more vast and imposing, naturally ideal for the narrow streets of Old Town.
I don't know what to think of these contraptions on the water but following one on my motorcycle (on the street) was a noisy protracted experience. The exhaust goes straight up the back, you can see it in the second picture where it appears as a silver cylinder, which is good but it is a slow lumbering vehicle to trail around behind. There is no mercy in this town for any opinion that suggests perhaps enough is enough. Channel widening is on the agenda as a way to get more cruise ship passengers into Old Town and apparently the pace of tours around the city isn't letting up either. I am amused by all this as I reall the dreadful fuss made about some guy and his group of bicycle tours around Old Town. He was considered so disruptive they put limits on his groups of a dozen cyclists, pedaling. Weird but true once again. What is it the Good Book says about removing the splinter in your own eye before trying to remove the log from your neighbor's? Bicycles no, but amphibious tanks yes?
I was walking Cheyenne on a quiet residential street in Fort Lauderdale a week ago when we were in town to put my wife on a flight to San Francisco, and on this street where nothing was happening and no one was to be seen I saw an odd thing.
When I saw the sign tacked onto a pole I was put in mind of the old readers in cigar factories. Rolling cigars is boring manual labor they say, and to pass the time a worker was hired to read edifying books to the workforce and the reader would stand at a lectern in front of the cigar tables and read all the work day to the other employees, it's the sort of job that has vanished and in retrospect seems ludicrously inefficient in our world of electrons and no unions. The sign was in Spanish and its message was simple, and from another era in another world.
We read letters. Ten dollars. Bloody hell, I thought, there's a fortune to be made exploiting the illiteracy or the lack of English in this immigrant population. And then we heard the news that Latinos and Asians had voted Democrat in droves this last week. One commentator I heard on NPR suggested, rather interestingly I thought, that it isn't immigration policy that drove the vote, rather it is the perception among many immigrants that the old white Republican code that All Government Is Bad doesn't correspond to the immigrants' reality. Perhaps because that is the case for me, I believe regulated government has a firm place in society, I like to think it is the same for other migrants as well. It was an interesting idea and I have no doubt those migrants anxious to learn to read English will also expect an education for their children who with them, seek a better life under the flag of the US Government.
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