Minimalist Recycling

The paper had reported recently that recycling rates in the Keys had shot up from seven percent to 27 percent. Which number must be Keys wide because a more recent article mentioned a rate in the city of Key West of barely ten percent. There seems to be a culture of willful turning away in Key West sometimes that makes it seem as though connections with the outside world are as tenuous as they may have been in 1828 when the newly founded city depended on the shipping trade for word of trends and tastes across the waters. I read the city of Madison, Wisconsin's Recyclopedia and I was astonished: Wisconsinland: Study It I was astonished by the tedious nature of it, but also by the embarrassing lack of education on the subject in the Southernmost City.

The city has made half hearted efforts to get people to recycle and some public recycling bins have appeared around town but it turns out the big obstacle to recycling is the color of the bins. I kid you not. Trash cans are green, thus:

Household recycling bins have yellow lids and the newspaper quotes city Commissioner Clayton Lopez as a brave pioneer in accepting and using these yellow-topped bins to recycle his household waste. The new bins we are promised, will be blue. Well that's a relief I'm sure.

The real insurmountable problem is a lack of education on the part of leaders and a lack of interest on the part of followers. Single stream recycling it's called but it doesn't necessarily mean mixing recyclables and food. Take a look in any recycle bin and see how little the concept is understood. Does this mess below count as part of the ten percent?

My understanding is that plastic bags gum up the recycling machines and should be put in the trash. Also bagging slows the ultimate separation of recyclables. None of this poses a problem to people in Key West who throw whatever in whatever recycling bin and call it good and give themselves the wrm fuzzier for doing their bit. Some radicals argue recycling does nothing to reverse the wasteful over use of natural resources and it's just a feel good program for wasteful consumers. Who am I to argue? I don't know the intricacies of the issue but it seems to me we have to start somewhere and recycling should be the first step on a long path toward more mindful use of the natural treasures of our only habitable and therefore exploitable planet we call home. For some people it's all or nothing; I am not one of those.

The city has even put out public recycling bins around town, and that's a step in the right direction. However if they came with instructions it would be better for recyclers of good will. I don't know of any recycling program that accepts pillows, in Seattle or Madison they might disown me for such ignorance but in the Keys we are still struggling with the concept of proper recycling being a common good. A few years ago an entrepreneur tested a bottle crushing recycler for bars and restaurants, the major sources of reusable glass in the city. All the employee had to do was drop a bottle in the $5,000 machine which would crush it to powder reducing space consumed by empty bottles and putting the powder back into circulation as a potential future bottle. Brilliant, no? Rejected of course by Key West bars that happily fill the city with empty smelly bottles by the thousand. That rejection has led the lazy and uncommitted to argue that recycling their modest twelve packs is a wate of time. Fair enough I suppose, yet I would privately hope for better from my neighbors. Where we lead the bars and City Commissioner Mark Rossi will eventually follow. He owns the ten bars inside the Rick's complex and has about as much commitment to sustainability as anyone in authority in this city. He should be out front, for this city has done him proud over the years.

Let's face it, drunks drinking on the streets will have grave difficulty recycling. We can find them having difficulty controlling their bladders on city streets and people's yards so what to do with their bottles and cans will likely be beyond them. So our public recycling containers end up looking like this:

Some people prefer to put their household surplus on the streets, often the subject of my photos, which could be construed as art or recycling I suppose, yet...

...in this town so close to our struggling oceans, to North America's only still living reef, a town likely to be drowned by climate change or whipped to matchsticks by hurricanes of increasing severity it seems odd to me that something as simple, as fundamental as basic as recycling, is simply out of reach. When I lived in Northern California I never felt up to snuff, I always felt a little behind the politically correct curve whether it was on foreign policy, feminism or the waste stream. In Key West some days I feel like a positive pioneer, far out ahead of the field. And that thought saddens me, as I know I don't know much.

I clean my containers, cut up my cardboard and keep any styrofoam (they still sell coffee in unrecyclable styrofoam ferchrissakes in Key West!) and plastic bags out of the boxes I use. I don't even find it that hard or taxing, but I've been doing it for years. Thirty years ago I remember a friend telling me about eccentric New Zealanders required to clean and crush cans before committing them to the waste stream. How odd I thought! Never imagining it would fall to me to do the same. I was also sceptical when a well meaning friend told me aerosols destroyed the atmosphere, but that too came to pass and be changed. Perhaps one day leaders around here will remember their grandchildren and act to do what's right, what may help, what may require discipline and thought in a culture devoted to neither, at least superficially.

Years ago while visiting a Key West friend I remarked on the trash In the bushes and the gutters when I lived in a town even then devoted to private recycling plans in the community. Oh he said, this is a transient town filled with tourists and no one has a commitment. Wrong I thought at the time and still do. Yet that belief butts up against a community dedicated to not just not recycling, but screwing up the little we do have that tries to work in that direction. If it's proper place is in doubt, toss it in the trash and leave recycling to the odd few of us who want to give recycling a proper chance.

This is the week my 34 year old Vespa goes to Pennsylvania to be "recycled" and restored into a re-creation of my youth. Thanks to my wife for supporting this endeavor that ended up costing more than it's worth. This fall I hope to commute on my P200 and as I ride I shall think of it as the ultimate and most fun expression of the reduce, reuse, recycle ethic of the 21st century. Well, a little bullshit is allowed surely isn't it? I'll ride my elderly two stroke 230 pound lump of metal at 65 miles per gallon and call it recycled alongside the brand new SUVs and massive pick ups that sport bumper stickers advocating "energy independence." In the end we do what we want and damn the consequences, let's be honest.

 

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Boca Chica Beach

Turn south off the Overseas Highway at the Shell/Circle K at Mile Marker Ten in Big Coppitt. Drive to the end of the road. If you have forgotten your insect repellent turn around and go home.

Cheyenne has kindly agreed to enjoy this beach after several years of turning her nose up at it. These pictures were taken over two recent visits. No words are needed to enjoy the views.

Key West Diary: Boca Chica Beach 2008.

Key West Diary: Boca Chica Beach 2010

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A Night Out In Key West

My wife is the social secretary, and I find as I get older and more set in my ways I am as happy to be at home as I am to be out and about. Perhaps it is the lack of roads to entice me to ride, perhaps it's Cheyenne's minimalist requirements, perhaps it is the comfort of a shaded deck, but in any event I wouldn't show up for jazz and wine at the Gardens Hotel unless I got an uxorious shove.  

 Its a nice enough spot on Angela at Simonton, The Gardens Hotel.

 And most Fridays Michael Robinson plays the piano in this ancient and elegant registered historic place. Actually the mansion boasts quite some history on it's website, a quarter city block cleared by the original hotelier to make up a garden around the home. There are some extraordinary details including a  friendship with the Cuban dictator Batista who permitted removal of artifacts and plants from Cuba. All to the benefit of what eventually became the Gardens Hotel. 

My wife likes Michael Robinson a school district employee she respects but we had plans for an extended evening in the city so after a taste of plonk (they have this peculiar but effective self serve wine bar in the hotel. You put credit on a card and help yourself to wine by the ounce. Its actually very cool) we had to move on from the serene luxury of The Gardens.

So I discovered this was the night to check out Solo, a relatively new place on Greene Street, open about six months and from what the wife had heard is quite the in spot. Prissy in Paradise liked it too, Donna Reviews Solo. We had appetizers only, the fritters with two sauces and a flatbread, which is rather like a thin crust pizza and as tomato sauce is ubiquitous on American pizza the flatbread makes a pleasant change.

I liked the place though I thought the tables were a little too deep, meaning you seem to sit a long way away from your fellow diner. There weren't many diners when we were there so I spun the table on its axis and we ended up much closer, within talking distance, at a wider table. I hope Solo makes it and summer is always the test. Happy hour foods were reasonably priced, my wife got  a melon martini while I got myself a healthy pour of a decent glass of wine and though not extensive they had a reasonable range of draught beers. I enjoyed my glass of Portuguese white, dry and spicy and interesting. Solo has been quite a few things over the years and I hope this place stays as is.

Then we trotted off to the Tropic, ducking crowds on Duval by the expedient of being lazy and riding the Bonneville across the few  blocks filled with drinking amblers on the main drag. We had elected to see The Iceman, a film about a killer for the mob who lived a double life racking up a hundred murders while living the life of a devoted husband and father. I thought my wife, the former public defender, might not be too keen but she stuck it out. It was a long movie and the turn around was timed so close that we walked in on the titles at the end of the previous show. A movie about a psychopath is a tough row to hoe principally owing to one's inability to get inside his head. I don't much like people but not to the degree I want to kill them, chop them up and  freeze them before dumping their bodies.

 It was an evening much like any other across the fruited plain, dinner, a movie and so to bed to prepare for the day of work the next day. As tropically exotic as Key West usually gets for me.

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A Walk in the Rain, Tea and a Bizarre Letter

I hate rainy weather. In theory I like the idea of being tucked up out of the weather listening to the wind howling through the palms and watching the rain pounding the window panes, but in reality I hate feeling cooped up.

It rained yesterday as I left Key West, gradually drying up as I went, such that by the time I got home my waterproofs were dry even though the motorbike was covered in road muck. I tried to walk Cheyenne but the rain caught us after twenty minutes and we beat a retreat. When I got up after lunch it was...raining.

Hard. I could see rain pelting the waters of the canal underneath the house. I looked at my dog, and as you can see she had no hesitation about getting out, rain or no rain. Well bugger, off we went.

Summer downpours like this, which has lasted two days and seems reluctant to peter out tend to cause chaos in the Big City. Key West floods at the least provocation and streets routinely go under water. It's tedious stuff as the least water covering strikes terror into the hearts of the stoutest drivers, even those driving trucks that are "Ford Tough" and equipped with huge tires and four wheel drive. All for show no doubt. As a result the pace of urban locomotion is reduced to a pedestrian crawl.

In the tough outlying communities further up the Overseas Highway we pride ourselves on our self reliance, well not really but one would like to think so. Happily there are fewer cars on the side roads so things are easier away from the main artery. Some days a man wants to go for a bit of a drive especially when trapped in the home by rain and it's on ay slime these that one might want a slightly greater reach along the side roads. In any vent we reached the red diamonds on the very end of No Name Key twenty minutes after leaving the house.

She was happy and wandered at will while I tried to make my phone camera work with wet fingers and an equally damp screen. You'd be amazed how quickly the phone ceases to operate at the slightest appearance of rain. So there I was standing in the downpour cursing my electronic Swiss Army Knife which was about as useful in the rain as a brick in my pocket.

I was quite jealous of my dog, I standing there watching her while she had fun and I had none trying to ignore the opportunities for picture taking that were beyond my hopelessly damp phone.

I dried out a bit in the car as we slowly made our way back to Big Pine. I was thinking about hot tea and melting honey on toast to fight off the chill of a 73 degree rainy afternoon, but Cheyenne was not yet done torturing me.

I spotted his Pashtun hovel on the No Name bridge and stopped to fiddle with my camera. A face popped out and I whisked him good luck as he eyed me eying him. I reserved for myself the thought of how mad for fishing the must be to squat in this unutterably miserable spot while waiting fr a fish to impale itself on their hooks. Tea and toast sounded better than ever, but my dog would have none of it.

It's not at all like Key West where it seems most streets could be rated "low lying" but flooding is inevitable everywhere when the rain won't stop.

These days new houses are required to be on stilts to keep them above the flood plain which makes sense when you see the waters rising.

It doesn't take much water...

A sense of humor helps, which is easy enough to maintain as long the waters stay away from the front door.

The duck may have been a decoy but the Key Deer weren't. As usual Cheyenne paid no attention to the curious creature, she was much more interested in the smells emanating from the securely planted trash cans.

At home with tea water heating, and the rain starting to ease up I made a trip to the mailbox and found a hand written note addressed to me. Jim Phelps? Never heard of him, and apparently he hasn't heard of me as I live on Ramrod even though the post office is on Summerland which confuses strangers, and fortunately doesn't faze our letter carrier. In this case I'd have been fine if the misspelled hand written note had got lost. That the postage was a freedom stamp added a small layer of irony.

Who knew? I want to sell my house. Not actually. In some way I cannot quite explain I found this letter to be remarkably intrusive. I restrained myself from calling this guy and giving him a piece of my mind but what happened to the notion of hiring a realtor to announce my intentions when and if they arise?

My wife suggested we tell him yes for some absurdly high amount but naturally these weird sharks aren't charities and I decline to play the fool for some evanescent amusement. Years ago I had a colleague at work who used to respond to solicitation letters, the ones that came with postage paid return envelopes by filling them with lead foils from the tops of wine bottles. By making the envelopes as heavy as possible he wanted to create the highest possible cost for the irritating senders. Perhaps I'll call Jim at two in the morning during my break from work and see how he enjoys intrusion, after all he did solicit me!

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