Night Commute, Overseas Highway

Sometimes driving Highway One  by  day is not the sunny  bright, daylight  filled experience it is most of the time. Summer thunderstorms descend and the roadway plunges into unnatural darkness brought on by the fury of nature. Great  stuff.

Then again as I prepare for work I usually get to see at least a  bit of the setting sun, depending on the time of year. Then it's off to work I go. Tuesdays though are different. 

I work three twelve hour shifts every week and make up the full forty with a four hour shift each Tuesday. I work the most complicated schedule in the world to explain to an uncaring uncomprehending audience but suffice it to say everything I do on Bravo Nights my corresponding shift Alpha Nights does the opposite. Thus one Tuesday I work 10 pm to 2 am and the next Tuesday I work 2 am to six am. That is the most hated night shift of all. There's nothing quite like getting out of bed at one in the morning. pulling on shirt and pants in a silent dark house (the deep rumblings of a snoring Labrador count as silence in my home) and tip toeing out into the night. Were there snow on the ground or fog shrouding the trees I'd probably quit and find another job. Happily around here its usually just another hot sticky night in summer and occasionally cool night in winter.

I rarely take the car, unless I am feeling under the weather or tired and unfocused; I always ride. I carry waterproofs in case of a sudden downpour but I'm most worried about getting wet going as I don't want to sit in air conditioning for the night in wet clothes...coming home I usually just press on and laugh maniacally as the cold water seeps into my armpits and up my trouser legs. So, Vespa or Triumph? The Vespa is more fun as it tops out at 65mph in a tailwind and requires much more finesse to pass slow moving cars, but it does have the bonus of making car drivers weep with vexation when they get passed by an old hairy hobbit on a moped. The Bonneville eats zombies in cars for breakfast - no fair.

Loud mufflers are never a bonus in my world where I prefer to move unobtrusively without pissing off my neighbors at1:15am and without warning the constabulary of my impending approach. The notion that loud mufflers save lives is akin to expecting zombie car drivers, focused on anything but their driving, to notice you in high visibility clothing. My formula is to pay attention and expect them to behave idiotically and unpredictably. So far, so good. Oh and stop at the stop signs and use your turn signals. 

 The thing about commuting the Overseas Highway is that this one single cause way is the sole connector between islands, communities, jobs, dog parks, restaurants and the post office. For some people its a lovely scenic amble as it crosses expanses of turquoise water under bright sunshine. For others it is a the vital connector to get to work and ambling is about as far from their consciousness as to be indiscernible. Therefore one can get quite frustrated by drivers who think island time is real. Island time would be fantastic when I get to work and tell the frantic 911 callers that we'll get to it when we find time, thanks for calling. Its about that time, or when waiting for food to be served, that visitors remember they are in the US dammit, and service is #1.

The Overseas Highway is the least demanding road to drive anywhere, frankly. It's mostly straight with easy curves, long sight lines, clearly marked road stripes and reflectors (mostly), not many cross streets, not many animals outside of Big Pine and the deer, few pedestrians and  though there are cyclists the smart ones that deserve to live use the bike lanes. The spandex covered ones that compete with internal combustion in the travel lanes are simply God's way of culling the herd and increasing the average human intelligence quotient.

Merge lanes are an intelligence test and a source of constant vexation. The idea of using them to slow down out of the travel lane, to pause in them prior to turning, or using them to achieve parity with the speed of the traffic flow as you come out of a side street are apparently not concepts taught in driving schools. Or if they are they are ignored or forgotten. I love merge lanes but dawdling drivers who observe my intent of speeding up and inserting myself into the gap they have created get vexed sometimes and tail gate. My advice is simply to pay attention and keep up with the car in front. Or get a motorcycle and enjoy the ride.

The only good part about getting out of bed in the middle of the night is the ride to work, alone, in the dark on an empty highway. Of course its never actually completely empty but bowling along in one direction passing cars going the other way does not interfere with my pleasure.  Mangrove Mama's restaurant on Sugarloaf Key is three miles from my home.

A mile further at Mile Marker 19 (descending numbers toward Key West, Mile Marker Zero) the flashing yellow light denotes Sugarloaf School at Crane Boulevard. During rush hour the light works as a traffic light to let anxious parents and commuters get into the flow of traffic on the highway. The rest of the time it flashes yellow on the highway and red on Crane Boulevard.  

The Saddlebunch Keys between Sugarloaf and Big Coppitt are a relatively long stretch of complete darkness, a 55 mile per hour limit with passing places, their frequency reduced in the most recent re-paving as is the way with the irritating Department of Transportation in the Sunshine State. A lovely place nonetheless to bowl along and enjoy the warm night air, the moon or the stars and the big gray night time clouds. 

Some travelers fret about finding gasoline in the Keys as though these peninsula islands are a desert outpost far from re-supply. Unless the highway closes thanks to an incident gasoline is readily available and every  thirty odd miles at least you'll find a twenty four hour station. This one in Big Coppitt is the last one for ten miles until you find the 24 hour Chevron on Stock Island  and at five that I can think of in Key West itself. That the gas here is  thirty cents a gallon more than further up the islands doesn't alter the fact that it is  at least available. Just like at home.

 By the time the four lane section of Highway One pops up, just five miles from the outer fringes of Key West I'm ten minutes from my desk, at this hour of the night. The four lane highway that runs past the Boca Chica Naval Air Station is a small chunk of mainland driving, with bill boards, exit lanes and one overpass with on ramps just like a real freeway. 50cc scooters ride the shoulders here, an act of derring do that is not allowed by rental companies. Bicycles have a separate lane and you'd be surprised home many fit people commute from Big Coppitt to Key West.

 Boca Chica Bridge is illuminated by orange streetlights, open bodies of water on either side. In the afternoon ride to town I'll often see jet ski tours carving curly wakes here, and fighters practicing aircraft carrier landings come in low over the roadway. At night it's me and the Bonneville's headlight.

By now the impetus to arrive gets softened by the encroaching civilization, speed limits drop with every traffic light until by the time Stock Island is left behind the limit into the city is 30 miles per hour, only picking up speed to 35 on North Roosevelt Boulevard, now a delight with properly timed traffic lights which so far have kept traffic flowing nicely.  

Then I'm at work with only the prospect of riding home in reverse, a 35 minute flight through darkness to look forward to. At the beginning of November when the time falls back an hour I will start to see the sunrise once again as I leave town on my home. Photographs to follow no doubt.

Sukkah On United Street

One of the unusual aspects of knowing nothing about Judaism and then waking up one day married to a Jew is that you discover tons of stuff that much to your surprise is the root of your own Christian religion. They never taught me in school that habits and usages of the Catholic Church are based in practices of Judaism -keeping a light burning in the sanctuary, covering heads (men in Judaism, women in Catholicism as was) odd dietary restrictions and so forth. Building temporary shelters to celebrate holidays is not one of them. Jews do that and there is the one such symbolic shelter at the synagogue on United Street in Key West.

I'm not hugely familiar with the customs of assorted Jewish holidays as my wife counts herself a cultural Jew and she also married a non-Jew which is not viewed any more kindly by her lot than it used to be by mine. We had a religious wedding and finding a suitable rabbi was beyond us so we used an ecumenical priest who managed to get into trouble with his Bishop for marrying us. That negative experience put the last nail in the coffin of my Catholicism. My wife had kosher grandparents (separate fridges which sounds like a lot of work for a butter fingers like me) and she can recite the Hebrew prayers, which when translated sound remarkably similar to the Latin mumbles I grew up with, but we are two people straddling two cultures viewed askance by the hardliners on each side. From a distance I do enjoy the inexplicable rites and habits that are never questioned by their adherents. And you are looking in these pictures at the oldest organized Jewish community in Florida which is noteworthy for Key West, once Florida's wealthiest city and Perhaps stillmost integrated.

Sukkot is variously translated as the Festival of Tabernacles which is apparently inaccurate as this isn't a traditional "tabernacle" in the Christian sense. The alternative is Festival of Booths which sounds accurate perhaps but decidedly odd for a religious get together. A booth is, yes, temporary, as required here but Festival of Booths sounds like a gathering of temporary dust catcher merchants on Whitehead Street. Far better the experts explain in astounding detail and more than one language: Judaism 101: Sukkot

And this point leapt out at me:

Many Americans, upon seeing a decorated sukkah for the first time, remark on how much the sukkah (and the holiday generally) reminds them of Thanksgiving. This may not be entirely coincidental: I was taught that our American pilgrims, who originated the Thanksgiving holiday, borrowed the idea from Sukkot. The pilgrims were deeply religious people, living their lives in accordance with the Bible. When they were trying to find a way to express their thanks for their survival and for the harvest, they looked to the Bible for an appropriate way of celebrating and found the fall harvest festival of Sukkot. This is not the standard story taught in public schools today (that a Thanksgiving holiday is an ancient English pagan custom that the Pilgrims brought over), but that story doesn't fit with the Pilgrims' strict biblical views.

Lovely isn't it? The older we get the less truth we find, smoke and mirrors, deception and speculation. If I get too old and spend too much time wondering about what else isn't as we always thought it was, my head will explode.

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Ambushed On Front

I read some profoundly gruesome news in the paper this week, and it had nothing to do with Ebola, rather it had to do with Fantasy Fest, the witches' brew of nudity and drunkenness and financial largess that starts next week. As usual the bacchanalia is filling up the hotel rooms in town except this year there are about 500 fewer rooms than usual as the chain hotels on the Boulevard are still under reconstruction. According the tourism folks all the overflow is spilling up the Keys toward Big Pine. Fantastic! I will be sharing my Fantasy Fest commutes with a bunch of over excited intoxicated nude zombie car drivers all next week.

These sorts of considerations don't interest my dog one whit, especially when some brain dead consumer left a paper bag full of last night's dinner on the ground in a parking lot. Clean up was gross but fortunately the dumpster was but a few paces away. Which prompts the question: why was the bag left on the ground in the first place? Key West has the capacity to be stunningly beautiful, but somehow the people here manage to let the place down.  Cheyenne doing her part to clean up this town:

 Lazy Way Lane is closed for the nonce, which news is about as welcome to the businesses on that little street as the news of hotel guests commuting highway one is to me.  Cheyenne was tugging the leash so the photo is not as crisp as I'd have liked but I think the sense of it is abundantly clear: please come and spend money.

Pritam Singh's latest parking lot-free development is well underway, a resort of magnificent opulence no doubt going by the curious name of "The Marker" as though a building in the tedious "Key West style" in any way resembles a navigational buoy. 96 rooms and parking for two dozen cars is a style that will leave it's mark, no doubt about that.

 Lazy Way Lane has rather lost its own "Key West Style" as seen previously on this blog:

Nowadays its more an extension of the construction site. Doubtless the former eccentric glory of the waterfront lane will return, though I wonder how this place and  Schooner Wharf Bar will make out with this hotel looming over them. 

The world was backwards: looking west and seeing a gorgeous sunrise over the Galleon Resort?

It was broad daylight by the time Cheyenne got us all the way to Mallory Square. She loves this walk and has a routine she likes to follow, criss-crossing the streets, checking her favorite spots, And she comes across a coconut vendor. Hmm. Nothing edible, time to move on, nothing to see here.

People ask if Cheyenne is friendly and when I say "NO" the judgement is that, de facto, she is therefore aggressive. Not at all, she is simply not friendly, not interested in you or your dogs or anything. She is interested in what she is interested in. Which is not to say others aren't interested in her. She amassed a following of very interested chickens in Mallory Square, did my fierce Labrador.

She ignores mockingbirds when they dive bomb us so chickens don't stand a chance of drawing her attention. A puddle on the other hand is a thing of beauty, a fatal attraction for an overheated elderly Labrador on a long walk.

"Hey! Is that Cheyenne?" Well you have to give the man kudos for running me down and confronting me on a public sidewalk. He was actually very friendly and said he was Bob from Connecticut who after years of hanging at out the Galleon (not with the louche GarytheTourist a loiterer at the Galleon of ill repute) decided to set up house in Key West. August is too hot for a temperate man from New England so only the hardiest of us  can apparently live here year round. 

He blends in rather nicely wouldn't you say? A red backpack on Front Street and not a snowbird.

And we end where we started, with Key West's cozy relationship with trash. This time in the water.

Not the sort of crystal clear waters you ache to swim in, are they? I pick up after my dog, but who picks up after the people?

The Fuel Dock

It's that lunch break thing, finding myself with my Bonneville downtown at 2:30 in the morning, the Bonneville purring sweetly and me not sleepy enough to want to lay down on a cot for an hour in the storeroom. So I take myself and my motorcycle down to the waterfront for the best breezes to cool the 84 degree night.

It's October and it must be cooling off Up North. I know this because a selection of northern tags is showing up on the front of vehicles around the Lower Keys. Down here in the murk of a sub tropical endless summer it remains warm and occasionally muggy despite the strong easterly breezes. Sleeping on a boat without the hatches open would be trying for me, but this Catalina 30 was buttoned up with only the companionway wide open.

I keep thinking sudden summer squalls are done but they aren't; I got drenched riding home Sunday morning as I had left my waterproofs at home and I greeted my dog, impatient on the deck, soaked from head to toe. She was hopping around like a puppy while I slowly got changed into dry clothes for her walk. Then she got even more indignant when heavy rain stopped play and we had to go home. I got wet a second time sheltering her with my umbrella as we climbed the stairs under a torrential downpour. In fact she wouldn't step out under the rain unless I offered her the cover of my umbrella. I get the feeling Cheyenne never had it so good.

In the South Atlantic and in the West Indies there is some hurricane activity which is not surprising as the season for cyclones doesn't end until November 30th when tropical waters are supposed to have cooled off a bit. However at this stage it looks more like heavy rain for the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico and Hispaniola but no disturbances for us. Suits me.

I like the absence of drama on still waters, no waves, no crashing surf, no white frothy spume bursting over cliffs and rocks. Limpid, mirror-like flat water suits my taste. These harbor waters are considered historic because they were once the center of trade and maritime traffic in Key West. This was part of the coastline from Mallory Square where ships dropped off their cargoes. In the 20th century Key West Bight was the place where commercial fishing boats docked. The term "bight" means an indentation in a coastline with suitable protection for anchoring. Nowadays it's a place where the leisure industry makes a living serving amateurs and party boats and sunset cruises and the like. The shrimpers are banished to the working class docks on Stock Island.

Turtle Kraals overlooks the dinghy docks where boaters park their "station wagons" that bring them to shore from their boats anchored far out in the harbor. I don't miss those days as much as you would expect. A motorcycle is more efficient and arguably more fun... The restaurant's name is derived from the delightful practice, now happily banned of storing turtles in these watery "corrals" (known in South African Afrikaans as "kraals") until they were pulled out and butchered horribly while helpless on their backs. Our ancestors were not always charming people. And why they used the term kraal instead of corral I couldn't say.

Nowadays the stores that serve the Bight sell dust catchers and more useful things like bait and bottled air for divers and all the sundries needed by temporary boaters.

The Half Shell Raw Bar much enjoyed by visitors...

...and my Triumph Bonneville much enjoyed by me.

Can't wait for my ride home. Darkness, zombie cars to pass, a happy Labrador to greet me.

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The Meadows Dawn

Next month we go to winter time when dark mornings are rolled back a bit and dark evenings are rolled in as we fall back onto standard  time. Bummer. Cheyenne has been enjoying cool breezes and lower humidity but during the day highs still manage to get into the mid to upper 80s, so early morning walks are her preference. Princess rides on her throne in the back of the car.

Its at times like these, as a full moon hanging provocatively over the city that I wish I had a telephoto camera. The little white disc doesn't convey the full emotion. Of course underground wires would help too.

I have never been moved to be an Elk or a Shriner or a Moose so I am not completely sure what goes on inside these clubs but whatever exactly it is they have a great deal of room in which to do it.

 Early morning is the time to be out, and not just if you wear a fur coat. Clear skies, cool winds, no traffic on Ashe Street.

On seeing this sign in The Meadows I wondered if my Labrador might get consideration from incautious drivers...

Motorcycles, glorious daily riders of all shapes and sizes. Another reason to enjoy living in this year round riding climate. Even given the absence of twisty roads.

 The Key West commute, or the school bus variant if you prefer:

Power walking is more of a winter activity around here when people show up from more energetic parts of the country and stride about waving their arms and wearing suitably energetic clothing. They make me feel inadequate ambling around following my slow paced dog. 

 The Metropolitan Community Church on Petronia Street. God has a lot of adherents in Key West you'd imagine from all the churches. I sometimes wonder if their deity is rather more slack than the one I grew up with who eschewed gluttony and sloth and all those noisome vices that seem to thrive here alongside all the many churches. Perhaps its just a noisy few propagating vice and the silent majority populating the churches. I live in the county so I am exempt on both counts.