The Open Road

It was a lovely day. I stood there while Cheyenne sniffed around. I took pictures and cropped them and I realized they told a story, or several stories. Two wheeled travel, by bike scooter and motorbike. One picture is a duplicate, cropped differently. The first picture was me driving Cheyenne home, about to embark on the forty foot tall Niles Channel Bridge and marveling at how unusually empty the highway was.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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State Road 939A Closed

I haven't been down this road recently principally owing to the fact that Cheyenne isn't particularly fond of it. Wasn't I surprised to see these signs closing the road.

This will be no more Key West Diary: Paved Road Ends . Well, bugger.

Cheyenne is pretty clear about what she wants and what she does not want. When she is tired or bored she stops and we turn around. It's her walk, her time so she calls the shots. And she called an end to this walk almost as soon as we started. Thus proving my earlier point that she is not fond of walking this old state road.

Which makes me wonder how and why they, whoever they are decided to close this state road, a public roadway, to traffic. People liked to drive it so I guess that was reason enough to close it. It was easy enough to share with cars as speeds are slow giving walkers and cyclists plenty of time to get out of the way. A little driving adventure had to be shut down. What a boring sanitized world is closing in on us. I like walking but not everyone does. Too bad for them.

There are plenty of low flying bugs around here too, and forgetting the chemicals is a capital offense. Death by insect injection.

I remembered to apply my own before I got out the car. Fat load of good it did! The bugs seek out the tiny strips of skin not actually sprayed. I saw one trying to probe under my fingernail...

There's a big old compound at the end of paved section of the street, past the KOA camp ground. A multi million dollar mosquito breeding ground, poor buggers. Mind you they likely only use this vast spacious residence for a few weeks in winter so that solves that for the most part.

Cheyenne is a tough old bird and she gets more annoyed at me for brushing insects off her nose than she does at the mosquitoes for landing there.

It turned out to be not much of a walk. Cheyenne ate some grass then went and stood by the car door. I got the hint.

We stopped at the junction with the Overseas Highway, across from Mangrove Mama's Restaurant and we took off on a second attempt at a walk. This one I knew she'd like, looking for bait fish left on the old Flagler footbridge. To get there we had to walk through the construction where they are digging to install sewer pipes covered with a new bike path.

It was muddy and hot and mosquito free. Cheyenne was happy and that dissipated some of my grumpiness about the road closure.

 

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Dredging Key West

This October 1st City of Key West voters get to decide whether or not to get their city involved in a study to consider the possibility of widening the ship channel in such a way as to accomodate the latest generation of huge  cruise ships. As  you  might imagine this issue has got more than one pair of knickers in a twist and rightfully so. I have the rather distinct feeling this study, if it is approved will certainly lead to actual widening and dredging of the harbor channel at an initial cost of tens of millions of dollars with an endless future of endless dredging to follow to keep it open.  And if that happens I believe the nature and future of Key West will be irrevocably altered.

The issue of cruise ships in Key West always brings on heated debate among residents. there are many interests in town that want expanded cruise ship visits using the argument that cruise ship vistors tend to return for longer andmore lucrative stays later, however those not directly invovled complain the cruise ships block the views across the water, crowd Lower Duval to an intolerable degree, and bring no visible financial benefit to anyone outside the few blocks surrounding Mallory Square. At the same time they say cruise ship visitors lower the tone of the overall tourist experience and make Key West a less desirable, less sophisticated tourist detination. 

The picture above I found on the Italian ANSA website on a story about cruise ship protests in the city of Venice where residents want to keep the Most Serene Republic less crowded with cruise ship visitors. Venetians, unlike Key Westers tend to make their oppostion less cerebral and more...physical. Perhaps they are more emotionally involved than we are in the future of our respective cities.

It has long been my contention that Key West has lacked vision about its future. Lately Mayor Cates seems to have been working towards some more coherent plan not least with his determinatuion to make the attractive and centrally located Glynn Archer School the new city hall, over numerous  objections. Key West as a whole has never been a leader, or even a follower, in many of the civic struggles across this country as communities have sought ways to make towns more livable and more centrally focussed on how to attract populations to live work and shop in downtown. The flight to the suburbs of the second half of the twentieth century has been reversed in a  few forward looking towns, but Key West has been content to rest on its civic laurels of fortunate architecture and 19th century urban planning left behind by an extensive and largely accidental network of lanes and streets in Old Town. Indeed plans are in the works to open a shopping mall at Mile Marker Nine in defiance of current trendy trends to rebuild city centers as places of commerce.

I myself won't vote in the referendum on the study, not least because I don't live in the city where I work. On the whole I am opposed to channel widening and increasing the girth of ships and the doubling the number of passengers they carry. On the other hand I do work in the city and for the city and loss of income would be obviously an issue. On the face of it the problem seems simple: how to increase income or at least not lose  money in an uncertain economy with or without thousands more cruise ship passengers.

Looked at dispassionately I am not directly affected by the sudden influx of three thousand  cruise ship passengers of a morning from say the Westin Dock or the Navy Pier at the Outer Mole. They swarm the end of Duval Street and go home with an obscene t-shirt or the ability to say they had a drink at "Hemingway's favorite bar" in Key West (whichever one that may be these days!) and for someone like me living thirty miles away, why care? Yet I believe there could be assorted negative impacts on this city if  cruise ship traffic increases, and increased income may not be compensation enough. Indeed there is a question of how much increased income mega cruise ships will bring as opposed to lost income from upscale visitors who will be put off by Key West's loss of exclusivity to numerous massive cruise ship  visits.

Environmentalists argue there are inherent dangers to the reef already massively stressed out by human impacts. They say bigger ships with more dredge spoil will cloud waters even more and kill off  more coral, thus wrecking more fish habitats and reducing Key West's tourism appeal... to anglers and boaters and birders.

The thing is, this is a city that rolls on habit. People who make money off the status quo can't imagine making any changes for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of monied older people who come for the winters, families who come in the summer cruise ship passengers who come all year round and assorted special events that attract disparate groups like motorcyclists, swimmers and various authors and artists. To switch gears in any major way is to have to think really hard about how to sustain a new and possibly more challenging balance of incomes in a town that doesn't manage the "vision thing" very well at all. Too many opinions shouted too loudly leads to a civic inability to make plans and follow through on them. Things tend to get done by guess and by God and devil take the hindmost.

Gentrification is another buzzword that freaks people out. There is that notion that catering to wealth leaves the workers and the families and the ordinary among us out in the cold. In a town that by many measures is among the most costly in the state, adding to the burden of the working class seems grossly unfair and likely counter productive. So we eschew the lower class mass tourism of cruise ships; then what? Do we turn Key West into Naples, or Royal Palm Beach and seek out the one percent crowd who provide work for gardeners maids and pool cleaners? Ultimately they are the kind of residents and visitors who don't particularly want to mingle with hoi polloi off cruise ships.

Its the curse and the blessing of Key West that it is an actual living livable town, filled with people from all walks of life, with ratty houses next to mansions and crappy t shirt shops nudging upscale art galleries. Visitors who expect a more rarified visit can leave feeling disappointed yet visitors who keep coming back want to stay in Key West because it is such a peculiar mixture of the urbane and the slothful. I think of that gruesome bar called the Chart House which is such a dive yet it is located, struggling apparently in its new guise, in the hoity toity grounds of the Pier House resort.

So if voters decide to vote against studying widening the channel tour ship operators predict financial Armageddon, and their opponents predict environmental and social Armageddon if they vote in favor. Which conundrum makes me glad I live in the county. It has also been noted that the rather odd date of October First means a fair few voters will be out of town as October tends to be very quiet and locals like to take vacations when there is no money to be made. Conspiracy? Probably not as the Governor in an effort to boost his relection chances next year has to popular acclaim reinstated absentee and early voting in full force.

In the end though the vote has to go one way or the other and one way or the other things will change around here, once again, inexorably and inevitably. And this vote will give residents of the city a chance to decide which way to go. Good luck to them.

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Beach Walker And Watcher

It puzzles me sometimes to think how distant we are from basic stuff like agriculture. Homestead and all its fields and farms lies perhaps 130 miles from where this picture was taken at Higgs Beach, but for a child living in Key West a  tractor, if they are up early enough to observe this scene is a machine designed to clean a beach, not sow  a crop.

 If you want to smell fresh mown hay, or watch birds chasing seeds dropped into a ploughed field, or watch dust billow up from the threshing of a com bine harvester, you have  to go a long way from here. This is  a place where suntan lotion grows on trees, metaphorically speaking and  cocnuts threaten to brain sunbathers if the nuts are left to grow and mature in peace.

 They may ban alcoholic "beverages" -quaint word!-  but that doesn't mean they don't find their way to public spaces and their presence may also explain the presence of a belt, necessary clothing sometimes which was left behind inconveniently in this public place. Some other kind soul apparently felt moved to hang it in plain sight perhaps to help the owner to recover it with it's gaudy decorative motif. I just took the picture. 

The road through Higgs beach has been considered for removal over the past few years. Planners want to move it away from the waterfront and open up this area, currently limited suppposedly to 15mph, to beach goers. Moving the roadway would crunch the dog park and predictably that has made the planners no friends. So far, no change...

Higgs Beach is a county park in the middle of the city and they have introduced opretty new signage to the park. However n ot everyone notices:

Cheyenne keeps her head down and from  time to time scores a hit. Bait fish is like mother's milk to this hunter: 

I tend to think of squads of unsmiling joggers and power walkers in electric bright clothing as a winter phenomenon in this laid back  drinking town with a tourist problem, as they say. I am a little too depenedent on outdated stereotypes I guess. This need to march in public is year round in these public parts:

My belief that certain ungainly human activities are best kept to the darker and more private spaces in our lives is not universally shared. 

I limit myself to ambling in public, trailing and always hunger furry yellow bear of a dog. I call her Pooh Bear sometimes but she pays no attention to people when is out hunting fish. grizzlies have their wild salmon, Pooh Bear has her bags of bait fish. I am caught in the flow armed only with a telephone.

                                                                

And then later, across the city she decides she's had enough and find a comfortable spot from which to watch the world go by on Eaton Street. It's a dog's life and I stand there to one side with my phone and keep an eye on her, unseen, unneeded.

A Walk, A Read and A Loss

It was a hot morning in Key West and Cheyenne was ready to go home. She likes to end her walks with a little sit down, watching the world go by, getting her breath back and thinking those profound thoughts that only dogs know. I find less peace meditating on a public bench early in the morning when the street activity is such that I can even get bored observing nothing very much happening.

On the bench under the awning in front of Finnegan's Wake I happened to see a familiar face. For some unaccountable reason she had tried training in my office to be a dispatcher but hers is another path and she, a young Conch with talent it seems, got an internship in France learning fashion for her career in design. My rather pedestrian outlook requires me to think that a secure government job in an uncertain world is the better path, which is absurd for if that were everyone's path invention and accidental advancement would vanish from the Earth.

In this same world where everything is available online a paper magazine has to offer something that grabs your interest off the page and weekly magazines in Key West have passed their zenith with the passing of the age of easy money. They are for the most part vehicles to stroke large egos in a small town and to display advertising, they are not for the most part designed to display words or pictures that grab my interest. These days health "tips" and "lifestyle" advice and so forth substitute for wit and information and that interests me not one jot. I have novels on my pocket telephone, a tool that gives me access to the newspapers of the world, which is amazing to me. New York Times Review of Books or Konk Life while I wait for my dog to catch her breath?

On my blog pages I have a long list of Key West blogs that are still around but they come and go, mostly go, when it becomes obvious that in a world fed by fame and fortune blogs produce neither. The author of his column that caught my eye in the discarded weekly used to have a blog celebrating the stereotypical Key West "lifestyle" Bitchin' Paradise but as you can see it died a while back. But here it is in print., and it so happened the topic caught my eye. The corporate owner of La Concha wants to replace its iconic rooftop bar with a spa and salon and the bitch in paradise correctly thinks this is a bad idea. I like her vision of The Top as an indoor outdoor space, a comfortable space that might encourage people to gather to view the city by night rather than simply to get drunk on Duval. I has completed mourning the passing of The Top as when once money talks city planners walk and I don't expect anything to change that. The author apparently hopes public opinion can change corporate lust for money. Very quixotic!

The cause of all this fuss is Key West Diary: The Top. It's open at three pm while the bar opens at five. To get there take the elevator inside La Concha and hit the clearly labeled button. Do it while you can and meanwhile, keep smiling.

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Tim Egan New York Times Obamacare

A friend of mine has an adult child with cancer, a young man just old enough to be beyond the age of coverage under his parents’ health care plan. After nearly killing him, the dreaded Hodgkin’s lymphoma is in remission. But he’s still a pariah in the eyes of the insurance industry, which means they can deny him a policy that might save his life.

Not for long. In six months’ time, the heartless practice of refusing to let sick people buy affordable health insurance — private-sector death panels, the most odious kind of American exceptionalism — will be illegal from shore to shore.

“I can’t wait for Obamacare,” my friend gushed the other day. And she’s not alone. About one in 10 people with cancer in this country have been denied health coverage.

The cartoon version of the Affordable Care Act, that much-loathed government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, is now moving from Beltway gasbags and caricaturists into the hands of consumers. Its fate will be determined by the countless anecdotes of people who will apply the law to their lives.

The early indications are that most Americans will be pleasantly surprised. Millions of people, shopping and comparing prices on the exchanges set up by the states, are likely to get far better coverage for the same — or less — money than they pay now. The law, as honest conservatives predicted, before they orphaned their own idea, is injecting competition into a market dominated by a few big names.

What will happen if, in the end, Obamacare really works?