Lunch Break

I have been trying to adapt to getting up to the merry sound of an alarm clock waking me before dawn every work morning. It's not easy even though the pre-dawn ride into work is fun as there is very little traffic on the highway at five in the morning. By the middle of the day I am ready to get out of the dispatch center and enjoy some of that sun and air I can see through the office windows.

I am reading an omnibus edition of three Aurelio Zen mysteries by the late Michael Dibden, who wrote a series of novels about an Italian detective working in late 20th century Italy. The English author has captured the feel and politics of the country like none other, and I really enjoy the travel stories combined with the murder mysteries. So I chose a picnic table at Rest Beach to sit in the shade, breathe fresh sea air and read my book. Except people kept passing by and distracting me.

Rest Beach is next to Higgs Beach on the south side of the island, thus it's a fair distance from Duval Street, and only the hardiest visitors make it out here. That it's not far from Sandy's Café and all those Cuban coffees and sandwiches can be an advantage or not depending on your ability to resist caloric temptation.

Rest Beach technically isn't named for putting your feet up. It's named, of course, for a local notable, but what the guide books will tell is this place used to be a slaughter beach. The cows which were kept on neighboring Stock Island were brought here by boat and sent to their reward so islanders could eat beef (we'll skip the gory details). The guide books will also tell you people find bovine jawbones on the beach as a souvenir of times past. I think that's rubbish by now. If anyone could find a semi-submerged jawbone it would be my constant companion, but Cheyenne has never settled into the dead seagrass to gnaw happily on a bone from along dead cow. That piece of history is history.

The Rest Beach story is a bit like the wild chickens of Key West story. They say the chickens are descended from fighting cocks brought from Cuba. Which begs the question: how did they reproduce and become the citywide plague they are today?

These are imponderable mysteries and far too complicated to unravel on a mere lunch break. Back to work for me. My wife sent me a picture on Sunday when I was at work and she wasn't. Apparently Cheyenne spends her lunch break quite differently from me.

I don't wish I was a dog. Cheyenne spent 8 years being unhappy for no fault of her own. It's a bit different now but she was just got lucky two thirds into her blameless life. Every day I feel lucky I know her.

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The People Of Duval

I have said the streets of Key West tend to empty out in August after family summer vacations end, but that is not to say Duval Street is completely empty.

By winter standards when most people see this famous street these crowds are pretty thin. People have time and space to check street side menus and coming attraction boards:

Lunchtime in the Bull has seating to spare...

...and there's plenty of room on the sun drenched Conch Tour Trains:

I was intrigued by this couple taking their pictures with their backs to the iconic landmark. I actually posted this picture on Facebook where GarytheTourist immediately noted the irony.

I hear people say it's "too hot to ride" a phrase that fills me with wonder. Sometimes it's too hot to ride comfortably but that is an entirely different thing.

Key West is where people ride two wheels to get around, usually rented wheels, bicycles or scooters, and they go home and resume maneuvering their tanks around town and forget the joy of freedom.

I have had a Young Person explain the concept of Coyote Ugly bars which started in New York where being rude is de rigeur because Coyote Ugly was where the schtick was for employees to be rude to patrons. It's surviving in Key West where it adds nothing much to my quality of life. Nor does it detract either.

People watching; I do it walking while some do it seated.

Water adventures on a 90 degree afternoon sound good.

Not too many people to watch just now.

Lots of time to pause and catch up. 23,000 people on a four mile island have lots to talk about.

have you noticed how people attract people? One stops to look, which doubles and two are stationary then four and pretty soon Conchscooter is at the back craning to see what's what.

This is a permanent display offering raffle tickets for a classic car or a Harley Davidson I believe in an effort to somehow reduce drunk driving. The offer is real, one of my colleagues was once the proud winner of the motorcycle.

Sun worship has its side effects. I'm not sure the picture captures the full leathery effect. He looked like a turtle without its shell, God knows what it feels like to have skin like parchment.

Studying the map, rubbing over-heated feet, a typical day's walk on Duval in August.

I went back to work. Day time is not my favorite time to be working but it does have its advantages for photography. I will do this again.

 

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Summer Signs

I confess I have never darkened the entrance of the European Village Cafe, but I am sure this fine establishment on Green Street, next to Kermit's does excellent business. What struck me about it was the giant TIPS jar on the counter at eye level for an incoming customer. It turns out not to be quite so apparent in the photograph...but thats rather the theme this time of year. Its when tourism is at its slowest and people who work in the industry tend to fall back on their savings to get them through to Fantasy Fest.

"High Quality Water" seems such an odd idea to me. I have no idea who to trust with what when it comes to mass produced anything. Food is routinely contaminated, transported thousands of miles and sold to us and the vast majority of us don't get sick. So they sell us expensive water. That makes me ill. I have no great fondness for aqueduct water as it tastes a bit chemical but paying through the nose for water seems like it is the fashion even before the transnationals buy up all the world's water rights. We have anticipated them and got ourselves used to buying water in expensive plastic bottles, or even more expensive glass. The mind boggles.

I'd like to think that this sign really means vehicles marked as city vehicles, not city employees on their own time. If I'm wrong I may have found myself another downtown parking lot on my days off.

Here's another one...a motorcycle would be high efficency (relatively) you'd think. I expect its really meant for hybrids and Volts and stuff like that. There's actually free motorcycle parking around the corner at the Half Shell anyway.

I wonder how this scooter ended up here, poking up like a rock surrounded by the kelp of daily wandering trash washed up against its wheels.

The mud pile on Caroline Street is part of the new hotel development planned for the old trailer park that used to lurk there, close to the water and relatively inexpensive in a Key West where trailers were okay. Now its hotels and resorts and so forth. The trailer court on Simonton Street is also slated for demolition soon. The diocease owns the land and the idea is to build housing there. I'd like to think they wouldn't forget the people who live in the nasty unsanitary trailer park but who knows.

Fine lodging is always an interesting proposition in a town like Key West. Being close to Duval is every tourist's heart's desire (check Trip Advisor if you don't believe me) but the drawback si that then you are close to Duval and people who drink lose their sense of propriety all too early on in the evening. Dumping bottles and glasses at random is a citywide pastime.

There is always delight in my heart when important signs slip on the banana skin of grammar, syntax or intelligibility. Shouldn't trespass be qualified in some way? Trespassing perhaps? of acts of..? You'd think the fence alone would be enough to deter all trespass.

I saw and I was ready to scoop, indeed I always am. I find that when I own a dog I tend to step far more often into than when I am dog-free. I guess my dog follows theirs and they don't pick up. When I lived in marinas I used to pick up everybody's obsessively for fear that dogs might otherwise be banned. For some reaon picking up other dogs crap is gross, Cheyenne shits vanilla ice cream it turns out. And lots of it I might add for she is a big girl.

In October and rapidly approaching the voters of the city get to decide whether or not they support a plan to study the effects of a plan to possibly dredge the main ship channel. Supporters of the plan call it widening. If the voters approve the plan businesses in the city under the aegis of the Chamber of Commerce would pony up the city's share of the study to be carried out under the direction of the Federal Government. Opponents say if they approve the study the widening is inevitable and will allow the giant cruise ships that many residents don't want crowding the city. Supporters of the plan say its just a study. Personally I wonder why anyone would want to spend that kind of money without a high hope of success. I doubt the study will say coral is at risk from the extra debris. Besides that line defenders of the status quo say Marine Sanctuary rules prohibit creating new channels without an Act of Congress, no less. So the rhetoric will doubtless intensify as election day draws near.

I don't vote on this as I live in the county. Lucky me, I get to watch from the sidelines and let my neighbors agonize over the vote!

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Dog Days Of August

They call them the dog days of summer and because I have a dog, and because the heat finally seems to be on, this seemed to be the moment to contemplate heat and humidity and summer in the Florida Keys.

I was on Curry Lane after Cheyenne and I left the car not too many blocks away on Southard Street. And though my fur coated friend looks half dead she was having a grand time, sniffing back and forth, the sidewalks all to herself and no rush to be anywhere at all. Then she found the air conditioning drain and sat in the puddle, in the weeds, to cool off. Dog days indeed.

The funny part about the "dog days" is they have nothing to do with terrestrial dogs, rather the star constellation that looks like a dog whose brightest star is Sirius. Romans correlated the hottest days of summer with the appearance of the dog star Sirius so they called them the dog days of summer, and we and our dogs are stuck with it.

In any event the dog days of summer have finally hit the Keys. I have to say the weather overall has been unusual from last winter till today. We had almost no cold fronts and none of any great severity last Winter, while Spring was fresh and cool and pleasant and quite dry. Summer then never seemed to be ready to kick in until finally the rains came and then in over abundance of course followed by unseasonably strong wind and the heat and humidity and mosquitoes seem to have been kept at bay for the most part. Until now, and that makes this a summer delayed in the Keys.

And so, as schools open and the traditional summer harvest break ends, as people Up North starts to look for leaves to change color soon, as the prospect of frost starts to permeate the conciousness, that is the time Key West starts to bake in earnest. Geographers tell us heat builds in August owing to the fact that the sun, already starting to dip, has been steadily baking the northern hemisphere and that heat stored in the ground is being released by the time August rolls around and it takes a few weeks for the stored heat to be released. So it gets hot in defiance of the dog days stuff.

I incidentally still lack any botanical skills whatsoever but I did like the little purple berries that look like small pale grapes or large pale blueberries. Identity as always unknown. I offer them up to confuse or titillate or simply the way they struck me as rather pretty. When i was a child picking and eating grapes off the vine was my sign that summer was almost over and school was on the horizon.

It is said that a good parking space in Florida is any space in the shade, not always available and not often available for residents. I value my parking under my stilt house more for protection from the sun than from rain. Getting into an over heated car can be a trial especially at this time of year.

Walking sidewalks anywhere in the city it's a good idea to look for the shady side of the street. I keep an eye on cheyenne to make sure she isn't burning her feet. Sometimes you'll see people standing in the sun with an anxious dog on a leash pacing around, comical looking but actually an effort not to burn its pads. Humans should be required to go barefoot to appreciate the dog's point of view.

You'd think that the Keys in summer when heat and humidity clamp down would be unbearable and that's why the snowbirds flee, but it really ain't so. Heat is relative and many people say they can handle a hundred degrees of desert heat and good luck to them. Around here it doesn't often go above 90 and hardly ever hits an actual hundred, which makes me wonder about the whole theory of fleeing the heat of summer in the Keys. But there again I prefer it when people leave so one doesn't want to foster the belief that it's not that hot.

Nevertheless people flee in droves in the Spring in time to see their families for Easter, and then the influx is families for summer vacations, and now they are leaving and for a couple of months the streets should look like this:

The eyebrow house design has been made famous in Key West, the overhanging roof is a vestige of a design theory that upper windows could be kept open in the rain and thus help circulate air in the house. Apparently it doesn't work as the overhang traps rising hot air. Better to have functioning air conditioning.

I have lived without air conditioning in the tropics. I spent several weeks on a boat in the Panama Canal one rainy summer living and panting with my dogs, all of us breathing by fans alone. That was my toughest time without air, but even during a power outage things get pretty sticky. It can be done but I am not a purist in a world of energy convenience and i like my air. I really like my artifical cold air especially in the car. I figure having a blast of cold air in the car makes me a better driver especially when traffic is stopped, patience comes with coolness...

The fact is that air conditioning breeds inefficiency, we build to accomodate the energy consumption instead of building to conserve energy. Every time you see a cubic block of apartments roasting in the sun you have to wonder how people lived before air conditioning. The answer is they built homes that were suited to conditions. Old Florida homes had "chimneys" on top, vents that sucked the air through the house and out of the roof through a gabled arrangment on the roof line. Decking was covered by roof overhangs that provided outdoor seating that was weatherproof and cool, so the interior could be vented without rain or direct sunshine penetrating the house. All these techniques are lost in the rush to build cheap housing for millions of migrants who end up spending huge amounts to cool their boxes.

Check out the side of this old house, the cement water cistern with the downpipe directing rain water into it. I have the same arrangement at home because my house was built in 1987 before there was piped water on my street. I run my entire house on filtered rain water, I drink it, shower in it, flush it and feed it to my dog who prefers it to the chlorinated brine (4% seawater) provided by the aqueduct. When my cistern runs dry, twice in six years, or when I am doing a load of laundry I am grateful for the switch that enables me to access the piped water, but rain water tastes good, doesn't leave calcium in my kettle and doesn't drain the South Florida Aquifer. Yet cisterns are no longer permitted. Such is the madness of modern life.

While I acknowledge and understand the shortcomings of the eyebrow homes, every time I see one I am made aware one more time how people adapted to their enviornment in centuries past. People lived in Key West before air conditioning and got through summers just fine. If you look at pictures of people in those days they wore suits and ties and top hats under the Florida sun...Look around today and see how fashions have shrunk even as our energy consumption has grown.

So that is how we survive the summer heat. I admit I am looking forward just a little to the second cold front of October when the grip of oppression is broken and we start to enjoy cool breezes, dry weather and open doors and windows- "good sleeping weather," and the rumble and drone of air conditioning is slience for a few weeks at least. Posted with Blogsy