Havana Lane

Blame Garythe Tourist who wants more pictures of the quiet streets of Key West. This one is a block long between Truman Avenue and the cemetery. Last photographed in 2011.

It is the sort of quintessential Key West lane, brimming with bicycles, no room for cars you'd think, though local drivers ignore those sorts of fears.

My colleague JW has told me some stories about one side of his family that operates the plumbing business. Stories of customers forgetting not to flush on the heads o the hard working plumbers downstairs, stories of the dismal smells of failed plumbing, stories that convinced him a work life behind a computer might be more salubrious. 

Four years ago I remarked on a  rather nice little Yamaha parked on the lane. This year there is one of the new generation Harley Davidsons, the Street 500 which you might imagine ideal for buzzing around Key West and the Keys. I rode one in North Carolina earlier this year and I quite liked it. I like most motorcycles and even though this is lacking in personality a bit I think it's  quite practical. In the land of motorcycle exaggeration a practical motorcycle that doesn't set your hair on fire...may not be great.

A Key West style break room:

The habit of depositing unsightly trash is ever present. I usually stick my large trash on my little trailer and pay a visit to the dump for a modest fee. I'd rather do that than see this stuff outside my house moldering away every day.

Cheyenne found it intriguing, as she always does.

Old Florida louvers to allow air to circulate and keep the interior shady and dry when raining. I am fond of air conditioning but I like the look:

And then I found myself immersed in a  jungle. I wish I knew how to grow stuff like this. And keep it looking nice. It would be dead inside a week at my house.

Open to vehicular traffic:

Veterans Memorial Garden

Today the park is officially dedicated, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

 I went by early today on my lunch break to check out the newest memorial in Key West.

 I thought it was well done and I expect it will look good over time.

Not much to say really, except this was probably long overdue. The place is good and I'm glad there is somewhere to sit and contemplate. This town has a terror of bums occupying public spaces but he saddest part is many of these homeless are vets, we are told.  A memorial is better than nothing but it seems more like a start than a final goal.

The Eleventh Hour Of The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

Of all the days in history the one that resonates with me is Armistice Day, now known as Veteran's Day, and when I saw Canadian politicians last week celebrating the elections I noticed the poppies on their lapels...

Armistice Day was created to mark the millions who died in World War One in the poppy fields of Flanders in Belgium. They said the earth was as red as poppies with all the blood spilled on it. So through the English speaking Commonwealth people wear little paper poppies to remind themselves of all who died.

I grew up in the shadow of World War Two, food rationing was only just ending after years of suffering to pay off the endless debts of war. And now we live wars by proxy, people who died in Iraq weren't even allowed to be shown on television lest the national drama have its political story line disturbed. Veterans who deserve medical care, who were promised medical care, don't get it and no one these days promises "never again." Pearl Harbor, D Day, Bataan, and even one dare say Korea and Vietnam are becoming historical footnotes in scholarly texts in a country with the attention span, collectively, of a gold fish. If it didn't happen on Twitter and doesn't expose breasts who can remember it?

For me Armistice Day celebrating the peace treaty that took effect at 11:00 am on November the 11th 1918 remains the  day that makes all the forgotten dead and wounded and lost and missing and sacrificed for political reasons that no longer make sense. Think of all those millions who died to avenge the murder of the Serbian Archduke in Sarajevo...

And to take us back to the new bright hopes of Canada's government pictured above, it turns out the last soldier recorded to have died in the war that ended at 11:00 am that November day in 1918...was from Nova Scotia.

From Wikipedia:

On November 11, Pte George Price, Canadian Expeditionary Force, was part of an advance to take the small village of Havré. After a crossing of the Canal du Centre into the town of Ville-sur-Haine under German machine gun fire, Price and his patrol moved toward a row of houses intent on pursuing the machine gunner who had harassed their crossing of the canal. The patrol had entered the house from which they had thought the shooting had come, but found the Germans had exited through the back door as they entered the front. They then pursued into the house next door and again found it empty. George Price was fatally shot in the chest by a German sniper as he stepped out of the house into the street, against contrary advice from a house occupant, at 10:58 a.m., November 11, 1918. He died just 2 minutes before the armistice ceasefire, that ended the war, came into effect at 11 a.m. 

That's some serious dedication to duty. That's why Armistice Day is still worth remembering. No poppies around here but that doesn't mean one has to forget.

Downtown Washed Clean

Summer is having a hard time letting go and I don't just mean temperatures. Heat is present all winter long in Key West, coming and going as cold fronts blow across the islands and bring muggy weather in anticipation, then cool weather temporarily as the front blows over town and then warm sunny days reassert themselves. The pattern goes all winter long though it has been longer than I can remember since the last dip below sixty degrees.

Rain is supposed to start drying up now as we approach the end of hurricane season at the end of this month. But as you can see the city is sill getting sprinkled enough to give the streets a clean shiny appearance. Dry season is not quite upon us.

Cheyenne's fascination with the USS Maine Memorial at Mallory Square has less to do with an appreciation of the Spanish-American War and more with a hunt for left over crumbs ignored by the stray cats that get fed hear daily. Cheyenne isn't proud: cat food will do fine for her, espceially if it is found food.

I caught her in a  cute pose at Captain Tony's where I found an abandoned bouquet- story unknown but easy to speculate upon... Below coincidentally we find one of the late Captain Tony Tarracino's most quoted saying printed on the t-shirt worn by a residentially challenged stroller: once your reputation is ruined you can live quite freely. In his case I suppose entirely true if poverty can equal freedom.

My advice to people who see bad parking habits and think they can do the same is to not presume. The other night a rental car got towed from a city street because it was blocking a driveway. It's starting to be that time of year. Sidewalk parking isn't allowed and if you see it being done presume it's a local with special ,permission, perhaps by where of where they work, and leave this sort of parking to them. I seek out motorcycle parking spaces which are city designated and free. What better!?

A bus stop space doesn't count as motorcycle parking and this renter can count themselves lucky if they didn't get a hefty ticket or even have their scooter towed, for which the rental company charges, and towing ain't cheap. Luckily the city bus drivers are a patient lot and they made allowances for this one.

Scooters are a good way to get around but for ease of use and simplicity some people argue bicycles are the only way to go. Looks good doesn't it?

Living in Old Town Key West can I am sure feel like a fishbowl, which is one reason I live 20 miles away on Cudjoe Key. But this city also allows for some creative decorating for the year-round outdoor lifestyle.

Clinton Square Mall, the old brick building basking in the sun. It once was a warehouse backing up to the Mallory Square dock area.

A Conch Train on Front Street waiting for passengers. The early morning light was exceptional. I love winters in Key West, the only place I have ever not minded the end of summer.

It's not really winter if your elderly dog overheats on a brisk 40-minute walk around town...She is not as young as she was, but she had fun.

I Love Key West

Most of my life, and I have just entered my 58th year, I have never felt a sense of place. It is disconcerting this late in the game to find myself feeling connected to a place, especially a place as demanding and unforgiving as Key West. It is also irritating that my sense of place finds me connected to a spot that so many people find themselves attracted to. Were I to find myself drawn to a small windswept village in the Bolivian Altiplano say, it could be a village to call mine own. If a pimple on the expansive frigid tundra drew me and demanded I called it home, me and my huskies would live unmolested by reasonable people in the outside world. It would be unnecessary to find myself worried about sharing where I lived. But everyone and his brother likes Key West. Even people who despise tacky Florida and hate mosquitoes and fear alligators can be pleasantly surprised by Key West. For me to feel connected to this spot requires that I stand patiently at the back of a very long line. I hate what Key West has done to me.

With love comes fear of loss. I want to leave Key West when I am ready, not when circumstances require it. The thread that keeps one connected is thin and tenuous and relies on work and money, patience and desire, and the willingness to give up so many other things, material and mental, that one finds oneself questioning the value of this attachment. I know of several young Conchs who have left, who will be leaving and who scheme daily to get off the Rock. Some want lives away from family interference, some have ambition, and some want to prove they have what it takes. Others want seasons, some crave cold air, some think snow and hunting in the woods are better than palms and fish-filled turquoise waters. Most are bored living with less in the land of excess and abundance and choice and vast landscapes.

I have seen Conchs and incomers leave and come back, their tails between their legs, glad to get a second chance eager to prove themselves. I think of them when I crave change or see potential for life elsewhere. And yet I find the livable landscape outside the Lower Keys is shrinking. As a place to live and work Key West is exceptional. I know this theory goes against the common perception but given a couple of requirements there is no better place to live. You must have good work at adequate pay. Abundant pay is unavailable but a living wage is attainable with some skills, dedication and a readiness to abandon ambition. Given that and a willingness to see beyond vacation town stereotypes and you can have a good working life. You avoid traffic jams, you have job security if you don't threaten established workers with ambition, you don't have to justify having a personality and your car is never snowed in or covered with frost, your wardrobe can be modest, you can find yourself working with people who understand why you are where you are. I think of retirement in Key West as a problem. Life without structure here leads to a lot of difficulties for people who are used to it and suddenly find themselves free and surrounded by idleness, drink, and no accountability.

Key West liberates me from conciousness of self and that is a tremendous gift. To live in these islands means not that you avoid judgement which is unhappily the human condition. But it means that judgement has no meaning, that life requires you to set your own standards and to live by them. You are your own judge and jury and if you fall short you let yourself down. The consequences are yours to deal with and that freedom can be devastating. It's like reveling in the freedom of the adult university learning environment after the curfews and restrictions and supervision of high school. In Key West you are an adult and if you lack grit and self discipline this town will spit you out. Which is not to say you can't be an alcoholic or lazy or incompetent but if you are you have to find the strength to compensate. No one will judge you if you spend the weekend puking drunk as long as the hangover doesn't prevent you from showing up to do your duty whatever that may be at the appointed time. They may not want to be your friend, or maybe they do, but if you can hang on to your grip on the Rock despite all, you will have their respect as a fellow survivor. If you cross dress or live in a broom closet or don't have a car or wear used clothes your choices are yours.

This attitude of live and let live is endangered and more so every year. Native born residents of Key West would prefer everyone leave and allow the somnolence of a long deceased fishing village off the map to be resurrected so they could get back to Brigadoon in the Tropics. Given that the past is another country Conchs live a separate life, a private world of connections habits embarrassments rivalries and vendettas out of public view. They are grateful for the money, resentful of its source and wish fervently for as little disruption as possible to their freemasonry of the past.

The greater difficulty comes from incomers who love the place so much they buy dirt and own their place with all the pride and self assurance of those who form snap judgements and who know best. It is an odd phenomenon to see people who love the Keys appear for a few weeks or months a year and then demand change to make this unique spot resemble more comfortably the unsatisfying place whence they came. It happens all the time and the rationale is that they bring wealth in their wake. It is too bad they don't bring a sense of joy, or a sense of community with their expectations. This is not a place where money buys you respect.

When I first saw Key West in 1981 I was not impressed. I wanted city life, access to the arts, excitement, not a dusty life on the margins which I had had in abundance by the time I was in my early 20s. Today in the twilight of my active years I, like the Conchs, would be delighted were we to turn back the clocks and sweep way 30 years of progress and change. However I have spent my adult life in pursuit of sensation and experience, and have failed spectacularly to live a proper life of responsibility, routine, family and child rearing. So for me Key West is not at all the refuge for the empty nest responsible adults who seek freedom from the shackles of routine and responsibility. For me Key West grounds me in precisely the values of work, reliability, routine that have escaped me for the middle years of my life. I am respected at work, an environment I love, and which offers me a pension of all things. It won't be enough to live on in Key West but in retirement I plan to be busy seeing the corners that have escaped me thus far on the planet. I look forward to living cheap under palm fronds in various places that will have me reminiscing about my years in America's Paradise. So now, as in my past, I live everyday in the present as much as I am able. That is just another gift this extraordinary place gives me.

My formative adult years I lived in California where I learned to try to live sociably, I had lots of adventures, true stories with uncertain outcomes. I tested myself outdoors, I traveled, I worked at a series of improbable jobs, I saw war and human misery as a reporter, I wrote about injustice and hope and tried to tell other peoples' stories from their point of view. I observed politics and watched the erosion of community values I believe in. I never quite felt at home in a state that sets too much value on appearances and status symbols and one upmanship. My wife, a native Californian resents my characterization of the Golden State as glib and unfeeling but I fear I never felt, nor do I now, feel hip enough to justify my life among people who take life very seriously and will adopt any passing fad as Truth as long as it promises health and vitality and enlightenment. My natural scepticism makes me wearisome company among people who value wheatgrass juice and incantations over strong genes as precursors to a long productive life. In Key West mumbo jumbo or Mary Jane or too many mojitos will get you to the same chakra of societal acceptance. And because I reject all, this is where I deserve to live. I am on my own astral plane and no one really gives a flying duck. Least of all me.

Years ago I set out to explore America on my Vespa and I essentially by-passed Key West and was seduced by redwood trees Sierra Nevada mountains and university students, old movies and wildly varied exotic California cuisines never before seen by me the European country bumpkin. Lucky I did else I'd have got resentful and thrown Key West over like so many young people do, treating it as a temporary stop on the road to better things. As it is I am here now, coming to terms with the fact that the search for a better home really is over. I have spent as long here as I did in Santa Cruz and it is absurd to think that I should still be wondering if there is some other Shangri La, some Valley of Eternal Youth more suited to me than this irritating, run down, pedestrian, overly sunny, isolated lump of land, too small, too crowded, too flat, too boring, too expensive, too monotonous, too close to Miami and too closed to Havana, too too too...

The worst thing about falling in love is fear of loss. Well then, there is something else to worry about.

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The Selfish Rider

                     

Why I ride...because I can? Because I want to ?  Because it feels good? 

                     

A quick run to the grocery store seven miles from my house is just another excuse to go for a ride. A top box and a cargo net, a cloth bag and it's easy enough to make a modest load on two wheels. I'd rather ride than drive any day that its not too cold, and that's pretty much never in the Keys. Rain is no problem, because as the Norwegians say (I am told) there is only bad clothing, not bad weather. It takes minimal rain suits to ride through rain in South Florida. Hypothermia is a very low risk factor in the sub-tropics. 

I don't usually wear all the gear, I ride with a helmet and gloves which is more than most around here, but I decline to offer advice or judgement about how others ride or what they ride. I grew up riding motorcycles in a world where protective gear was newspaper in winter to stay warm under a leather jacket and jeans usually ripped over work boots. I feel for people afraid to ride around the block in pants and a shirt just as I feel bad for people who can't leave their homes without a gun in the glove box. Life is pretty good out on the road sometimes...just riding, not worrying.

I have driven all kinds of different vehicles in my life, but I am convinced two wheels is best. There is a dynamic in riding a machine that by its very nature is unstable. It's a machine that requires training to use, practice to use well and thoughtfulness to use safely. Yet it is also a machine that encourages risk, invites the rider to seek the sublime experience of being alone in a world, overpopulated and loud with activity. I travel for the pleasure of travel, for the joy of mastering the medium, for pleasure.

The machine itself is of less moment if it runs well, a scooter, a motorcycle its all the same to me. Big or small I'd rather ride than drive, though I generally prefer medium sized in the world of motorcycles. Driving a car is a matter of adjusting the climate, the seat, the radio (or the Bluetooth for people who are Modern) the cup holders and finally the steering wheel. Cars are mobile homes, not machines for travel or excitement or tools for feeling something. They prevent you from feeling discomfort because God forbid you should feel uncomfortable.

The fact that you will arrive on time and only slightly creased when you drive a car is a given. That you might possibly be one of 40,000 people killed each year on US roads (if you are in the US) seems impossibly unlikely. But were I to undertake the same journey I would be expected to arrive crumpled and exhausted and filthy were I to survive and not join the ranks of the 4,000 riders killed annually on the same US roads. Yes but I would be grinning ear to ear, not frustrated by the hassle of modern car travel on crowded freeways. Which joy is a paradox for those that don't share the pleasure of two wheels.

There is romance associated with motorcycles, frequently a combination of the movies and ridiculously outmoded images of motorcyclists as outlaws, the one image feeding the other. But for most modern riders the ride is simply a way to make some private space in this increasingly crowded world. It is still acceptable when riding to be out of touch. Sure modern technology will keep you on the phone if you so desire with Bluetooth and a helmet microphone but one is not expected to answer the phone while riding. Thank God sez I.

                                                                                               Loading the Auto Train

I don't even like to listen to music while I ride, though that is technically possible of course these days. When I was sailing I used to spend hours sitting on the edge of the boat looking out over the waves while the boat steered itself I'd get hypnotized by the movement of the water under the hulls of my catamaran. On the motorcycle I do the same thing, I write letters that will never get sent, I compose the finest possible essays for my blog, I plan a bright shining future as I ride. I live inside my head in the moment and it's lovely.

But riding is also about the magic of managing traffic, of assessing the road, checking for hazards, planning turns and anticipating traffic patterns and passing zones and traffic signals and slow trucks and finding the best way ahead. It's as active a way to travel as driving is passive. Riders know they are better drivers thanks to the development of the skills required to ride. Riding is an adventure, an exploration, the pursuit of new inner horizons. A motorcycle need not be expensive, it will be useful given the parameters of climate -two wheels in snow is beyond my desire- and it makes the mundane fresh and new and interesting. It is a wonderful gift and I treasure it. It is my daily escape and even today I look forward to the ride home from work as much as I did a decade ago on the same highway. When I drive my car to work my colleagues know something is up.

Difficult to explain the pleasure of selfishness. People ask me what would I do if my wife asked me to stop riding and my answer is I would never marry anyone who imposed such a condition. Riding a motorcycle is that good.

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