Webb Chiles in Tonga

Webb Chiles is a remarkable man now busy sailing the Pacific in an entirely unsuitable boat, a Moore 24. He has a history of being unsuitable, sailing an open boat most of the way around the world, trying to commit suicide by sinking his boat and changing his mind -too late! - and thus struggling to survive. Too often these days we find ourselves reading people doing silly things and justifying them as being the best thing anyone could do with their lives. I prefer people who travel for pleasure, for the challenge not as a fundraiser to increase "awareness." I like the unvarnished truth, not jollity in praise of the improbable. If you read my blog you know my Key West is unlike anybody else's, warts and all. Treasure Webb Chiles and his legendary sailing:

self-portrait in the present sea journal: Neaifu, Tonga: pounded: A distressing trend has emerged from my immediate post-passage entries. Instead of reporting how great the sail, I repo...

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North Roosevelt Boulevard

Today is supposed to be the day that the bigwigs come to town and open the Boulevard officially, a couple of weeks past the due date. It's hard to imagine that traffic will be back to normal, whatever that is, after two long years of chaos on the main road into Key West.

The $45 million dollar construction job has been a nightmare for all concerned, principally the business community that has lamented the loss of business as the four lane road has been torn up and rendered into a version of a nightmare ride into the city. For a while the Boulevard was two lanes inbound only rushing traffic past the stores that line the state highway for two long dusty miles. Then the business community protested and they changed the format into one inbound and the other outbound, which seemed a lame idea to me but it actually did okay. Nothing has been great about this street since they started tearing it up but the work did have to get done.

Flooding has been the problem, not climate change induced flooding though higher tides won't help. Heavy rains reduced the road to two lanes, and the weird camber of the old road forced huge lakes to form all along the edges. The renovation has supposedly installed new high powered storm drains to remove the water: we shall see. The bike path/sidewalk has been rebuilt and the state was restrained from ruining the view by not installing the world's ugliest aluminum railings. However the high maintenance coconut palms are back by popular demand. The plans had called for low maintenance, native palmettos and thatch palms but that wouldn't do for the peanut gallery...

The de Moya company that won the contract have been utterly gruesome to our little city. They have much larger contracts on the mainland so after they won this modest bid they tore up the entire road and buggered off leaving the city with a wrecked road for about four months. Finally city officials contacted the state department of Transportation and some ineffectual representative from Tallahassee came to town to lament with the city leaders and eventually the bozos from Up North got back in gear again, not before a few businesses closed their doors.

Lately of course the construction company has made a perfect nuisance of themselves frantically trying to complete the contract in order to win a bonus and i certainly hope they missed that deadline. However knowing how the good old boy network operates I don't doubt they will be rewarded for the chaos they have brought us. What's worse is they tore up the entire road all at once and kept it all torn up all the time. They never finished one piece of it and then moved on to the next bit. The whole thing was a shambles from beginning to end. I hope they never come back to the Keys.

There is also going to be one more set of lights at Searstown, but the engineers told me that if traffic flows at the speed limit the lights will be in sequence. Fat chance, as Key West specializes in wasting time at red lights with no cross traffic.

Honestly, my hope is most traffic will return to The Boulevard next week returning Flagler and South Roosevelt to the bucolic emptiness I remember so fondly.

At night the absence of traffic is a lovely thing, another reason I enjoy working nights ( parking my motorcycle out of the sunlight is another...):

Already the new Boulevard is backing traffic up of course:

And waiting endlessly at traffic lights with no cross traffic is back!

In winter it will get worse of course but I will be happily buzzing down Flagler at speed limit plus five. Everyone else I hope will marvel at the billiard table smoothness if the flood-free North Roosevelt Boulevard, where hardly anyone knows how to use the median lane to make turns without blocking traffic while integrating into the flowing traffic.

Bearing in mind the tourist attractions in Key West are to the left in the picture below, and the sole entrance to the island is the bridge on the right, the importance of North Roosevelt becomes obvious. That it is lined with businesses that are less tourist oriented but vital for locals adds to that sense that this project took too damned long.

But now it's over, they say and everything gets back to normal. That this job worked we'll know after heavy rain with no flooding. Ho hum. We'll see.

 

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From The Archives: To The Lighthouse 2008

Last Thursday was National Lighthouse Day so to mark the day I resurrected this elderly essay from 2008. The Key West Lighthouse  revisited:

Lighthouse

An hour to burn of a Spring afternoon so why not check out the lighthouse on Whitehead Street?
The first thing people remark on about the lighthouse is how far it lies from the beach. There is method to the madness because the original wooden structure was washed off the beach in 1847 so they then decided to build the brick one a little bit inland. And here it is at the corner of Whitehead and Truman in the middle of Old Town. The tower is supposedly somewhere near 90 feet tall and the light inside still works, powered by a solar panel, but it is a tourist attraction these days:Its a ten dollar admission fee (10%off for local ID) and with that you get a chance to go shopping for gee-gaws You get to peer at the old Fresnel lense that sits inside the admissions building looking very glassy and fierce:
The lighthouse museum complex is quite the little compound, a grassy, tree-covered complex of buildings which includes an 1887 lighthouse keeper's house:Its a wooden home with luscious honey colored tongue and groove paneling all round inside:There's the usual audio-visual presentation along with a ton of knick-knacks from the period, including clothing, household items and the like to illustrate the life and times of 19th century residents. The dark interior contrasts nicely with the sunburned exterior:There are 88 steps to the viewing balcony at the top of he lighthouse, and it comes as something of a surprise to me that the place is wide open and anyone can stumble all the way up to the top. There is a sign advising children under 16 need an adult in tow, which isn't a prospect I would relish, what with all those steps winding their way up the tower, keeping up with a youthful bundle of energy:
The copper hose next to the stairway was installed when the light converted from kerosene to acetylene which must have seemed like an improvement to all concerned. I took the steps by storm, and happily didn't meet anyone half way up. There is no room to pass, it would be an intimate affair and these people are tourists so they have no clue how to alleviate social discomfort with small talk in awkward situations...But in the fullness of time one reaches the top and there one finds a fresh breeze and safety wires strung everywhere:

I lucked out on the day I chose to climb the tower as there was a fresh westerly breeze blowing and the air was cool and invigorating. It was on the west side where one can see the lump of La Concha Hotel rising about the little houses of the city. I took a picture of a cute Conch cottage......a church (with La Concha bigger in the background)......and this amusing guesthouse that used to be a gay hang out and when I was a boat Captain I used to recommend families visit the lighthouse forgetting there were scads of naked old men all over this building and its pool. Oh dear, but these days its gone straight so the excitement is gone.
There is a fair bit of greenery all around the city even after the heavy hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 wiped out a number of trees, but there are spots that show a lot less trees:And in the distance always the beautiful blue waters around the city. Back on Earth after a harrowing enough descent even without meeting anyone down below, there was shade to enjoy in the grounds:And a little traffic watching on Whitehead Street:

This week the city is celebrating Conch Republic days, a lighthearted end-of-winter celebration that in some measure remembers the wilder days in Key West when wrecking was a legitimate way to make a fortune. The lighthouses pretty much put paid to that as they helped keep ships off the rocks. As a sailor, I still appreciate the role of lighthouses in helping find one's way at sea though a lot of people think GPS has put paid to the usefulness of lighthouses. And so the world turns.

Anniversary Dinner

My wife had had a bee in her bonnet about a place called Roy's which is supposed to be some sort of Hawaiian fusion eatery. She's been to eat at one in Bonita Springs with a friend and I was none too sure about this idea. In my head I was imagining a Hula themed Gilligan's Island feeding us spam and sticky rice "sushi" and drinks with umbrellas in them. I was a tiny bit off the mark. And we had a reason to celebrate so she had to be obeyed.

I about died when we walked into the restaurant in Naples and the waiter wished us a Happy Anniversary. I hissed at my wife that I was about ready to kill her as she knows I hate a fuss and the idea of waiters gathering round singing Happy Anniversary and blowing out candles would kill me. She smiled an angelic smile and told me to get stuffed. Opening the menu didn't help:

But you know what? This place is actually very cool. The chef came out and handed us an amuse bouche in this case a scallop garnished with tomatoes and ginger and it was delicious, full of distinct flavors and textures. Hmm, I had to admit this was not looking tool bad at all. No Spam anywhere.

To mark twenty years of struggling to make sense of life together we bought a $90 bottle of Pinot, which oddly enough I had just been reading about in Wine Spectator that day. They really liked the Monterey Marinus and our bottle of the 2009 vintage lived up to billing, smooth peppery and perfect for the meal we pulled together.

I have never had fried calamari in a kung pao sauce but if the idea sounds odd the execution was excellent. Peanuts and squid make a great combination.  The red curry chicken samosas were also nicely done though the curry sauce was more creamy than sharp and I wouldn't have minded a little burn from it.

August in Southern Florida is low season, with families back in school and a few Europeans on vacation taking the sun. It was a quiet evening midweek at Roy's and that was fine by us. I figure this place must have lines out the door eight months of the year, but this time iof year is for locals. 

The main course normally we would share but to mark the occasion we had a steak which was an unusual choice for my wife and I wanted meanwhile to try the ossobuco, a classic Italian dish of meat on a marrow bone. This assemblage was unlike anything seen before (a theme at Roy's apparently) with tender, almost shredded beef clinging to the bone with the Brussels sprouts and potatoes underneath this volcanic creation. It was odd, different and delicious. The steak was perfect of course and naturally we had to bag half our main course for dinner at home the next day.

 We reminisced about the past two decades, marriage in a friend's garden in Santa Cruz, California which should have been a hippy affair but instead turned into a great party after a ceremony composed of Jewish components officiated by a Catholic priest. John Hester was a wild man in some ways. "Next week I'm marrying a Catholic and a pagan" he said after our ceremony. Then of course I got my itchy feet and dragged us off on sailing adventures. We actually honeymooned in the Caribbean renting a sailboat in Grenada for two weeks and cruising the Grenadines  which gave my wife a taste of the cruising life as we got rained on, had to walk miles for groceries, bought jugs of moonshine from shady grocers, and got lost after dark in a rental car (the first of many throughout our lives) on a goat trail somewhere in St Lucia. We survived that and other driving adventures later in life.

Over the chocolate souffle we remembered driving for three weeks round Eastern Europe shortly after the end of communism and getting lost on a foggy night in Poland. We bought wine by the jug in Eger in Hungary and flew home with it in a manner no longer permitted in our strait jacketed world. Then there was the time I got stopped for speeding in Croatia (I get stopped everywhere for speeding, I've lost track in how many countries) and my wife got out of the car and brought my police id with her. Why didn't you says so? the officer with the radar asked.  Because I was embarrassed I said. I rather fancied seeing what a speeding fine looked like in this alien place.

Then as we demolished the souffle further, along with the raspberry sauce decorations my wife wondered how we managed in Bosnia in another rental car, and with no map, we got lost in the Republica Serpska where the Serb rebels smiled like protoypical toothless bandits in the Yugoslav mountains and  we drove through a National park wonderland abandoned after the civil war, that we came across quite by accident in a chasm reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, on a much smaller scale. 

We have had some remarkable journeys together over the years, driving across country in a two door compact car with two giant dogs and no air conditioning.We took turns driving the Geo Metro hatchback, the driver with one dog on the passenger seat and the other sleeping in the back with the second dog, Labrador or Husky. At a gas station we swap and the driver would get out and release the passenger and the second dog from the hatchback. That got us a few odd looks from passersby all the way from Santa Cruz to Key West.

We had a great evening at Roys, attentive staff but not intrusive, great food and we left with our doggie bags and a framed photo they took of us at the table. No candles no singing and no fuss. I was happy.

Cheyenne  got her walk in this rather peculiar artificial development reminiscent in some ways of the fake plasterboard theme park hotels  found in Las Vegas Nevada.

I tried to be generous to my dog but thirty minutes in this spic and span world yielded not much of interest which would be good news to the residents. It was not exactly the rough and tumble street life of Key West filled with scraps of interest for my shameless dog.

 No, this is a land of Venetian lions, fountains, brick paths and not so much as a blade of grass out of place.

I rather liked it. No smell of stale beer either and that's not all bad.