The Open Road

I work with people half my age so my retirement plans seem academic to them, indeed they look wistful at the thought of retirement but they don't  quite see the thirty year gap that separates them from me. I was an adult before they were born. I've put in my time. 

My wife shocked me when she said she liked the idea of traveling in retirement and by traveling she meant not having a fixed abode. At first we figured we could go back to boating, and I suggested a slow economical trawler based on the West Coast of Mexico an area we liked very much when we sailed there, allowing excursions to inland Central America or US California as desired. But then we remembered the drawbacks of life afloat, dealing with dogs and the lack of land transportation which limited our ability to get to know inland areas, as well as hoping for the best for the boat when we rented a car for an inland drive. My wife suggested a home on wheels.

Frankly the idea of traveling in comfort, of not having to navigate reefs and do slow cold overnight sails sounded pretty good. Of not having to take Rusty ashore twice a day in the dinghy come hell high water or horizontal rain...that was icing on the RV cake. Plus our desire to go small and unobtrusive will give us a chance to park in urban areas to see life as lived locally up close. Street parking in Key West would be complicated so I am glad we have friends we shall be able to stay with for visits.

So my wife has signed up for her retirement package which she cashes in from the school district in June 2021 and her retirement planner said I can retire from the city of Key West around the same time so I have figured my last day, tentatively as July 6th 2021, 17 years after I started in dispatch. After a life spent hopping around and working here and there with no real career to get this settled job at 45 I felt very lucky. Especially as it comes with a pension and now the end of this phase of my settled life is in sight. I am looking forward to the next chapter even as I enjoy the chapter I am living right now.

I am starting to look at the end of my life in some detail so I can start to let go of many of those preoccupations that have held my attention till now. "By 2070 global warming..." I figure I will be lucky to see 2035 so the long term is quite nicely foreshortened as I start my 59th year of life. Rusty has been a boost to my exercise plan as he enjoys longer and longer walks when I get home from work. I am happy to indulge him but by the time we leave he will be ten so I have high hopes he might be slowing down by then. At least a little. 

I suppose if we wanted to we could afford to retire in Key West as we have no family obligations but I don't see myself being content to do nothing much for the last part of my life wandering from bar to bar and playing hail-fellow-well-met at local fundraisers and costume parties. That's not my style at all. I have enjoyed living here but I have a few corners of the world I still would like to see.  And when pensions bring mobility I wouldn't mind spending summers Up North and winters Down South, Mexico alternating with Key West.

It's early yet to implement any plans for retirement even though five years will pass quickly. However we have started forming ideas around what we need and more importantly what we don't. We used a mailing service while sailing and St Brendan's Isle in North Florida would keep our residence in our home state. My wife has been thinking about pots and pans just as she did before we took off on our boat in 1998 in San Francisco. She ponders storage and cooking techniques in small spaces based on our sailing odyssey from San Francisco to Key West in 1998. The vehicle itself will we hope, be a Canadian built RV and they sell for reasonable prices when lightly used.

My wife and I have a lot of experience of getting ready to travel and we have packed bags and loaded cars all our life. This time we will be storing some stuff, much less than in years past, and with a post office box we will be cutting ties with settled living. I think it's safe to say we are both ready for a change. I cannot conceive of living in Old Town Key West and never leaving. To me the internal combustion engine has liberated us from the restrictions of travel that had prevented working class people from leaving home. A hundred years ago most people never left their home counties. In Key West we find the same situation prevails for people who pride themselves on not having cars or never buying airline tickets. I'm not one of them, I have a lot of curiosity about the world about me.

My wife likes to tell the story of how hard it was for me to prepare to cut the ties as we set off to sail south to Mexico and traveling by boat was always for me, an exercise in faith. I had to hope nothing broke and if it did that I could figure out how to fix it. In the event we had a few minor problems but nothing I couldn't overcome and the few storms we sailed through were not powerful enough to overcome my sailing cunning. Doing the traveling by van seems like a piece of cake by comparison to me. No long night watches as we travelled at walking pace across the face of the ocean, no hidden reefs to avoid, no anchoring to rely on.

In the boat we preferred not to give in to risky impulses- traveling with your life packed into your vehicle will give you those second thoughts. On a day sail a mistake means the loss of a toy, on a journey it would have meant sinking our home. Similarly we don't see rock-hopping our retirement home like a weekend recreational driver might so four wheel drive seems excessive for us. Just as we tried to not run aground in our home afloat we will try to avoid hard core off road driving with our gypsy van. None of this: 

I suppose inevitably "Key West Diary" will become something else, a travel diary I imagine with more variegated pictures. I want to walk Rusty on the Argentine Pampas, and I would like to see the place where Che Guevara was finally caught and killed. Puerto Montt has fascinated me from afar and the deserts of Northern Chile beckon. Calling those roads a "Key West Diary" would seem a little odd, but these pages will remain as long as I am alive and paying to keep them here.   I appreciate the irony of many readers of this page who ponder a retirement right here in the Keys while I ponder a road trip as retirement. But I have made the Keys my home for a long time and I need some variety. Unlike many people my wife and I had a good life in California before we settled here. We were not fleeing unhappy trapped lives by coming to Key West; we were simply ready for a new life experience. 

In the meantime I plan to make the most of these years remaining in Key West. Stuff happens so I am not counting on anything changing necessarily. Money evaporates, health deteriorates or as they say, "man proposes and God disposes" so all plans may come to nought. In many respects I feel very lucky to be able to plan a retirement at all. Yet I also feel lucky that I get to live and work here for the next five or six years, so the idea of retirement isn't just a release from tedium or unpleasantness, I don't regret living here or working at the police department. Quite the opposite I feel very lucky. However I still hunger to see more and experience more before the inevitable end comes.  I have always been the family member among my stay-at-home siblings that travels and at this stage I see no reason to cut back. My sisters  have never left the farms they live on, I would hate to have spent the past 45 years in the same spot. I want to be at peace if possible when I die and peace will come knowing I left no stone unturned in a  search for experience. 

I think change is coming for a lot of us in Key West as money tightens its grip on the warmest slice of the US mainland you can vacation in. At some level taking off in a van to see South America makes it feel less like an eviction and more like a choice. Yet my wife says if we won the lottery she'd think long and hard about actually buying a house. She is grasping the concept of freedom with both hands. It's not you can't be free if you own a home, far from it, it's just that homes need attention and for carefree travel worrying about stuff is not part of the plan. My various scooters and motorcycle will be stored- that's not stuff I am willing to be without ultimately when our travels end and we have to come home  and be sedentary. I hope I will still be able to ride.

Key West has been good to us and we trust it will continue that way. But I can see an end just over the horizon, partly because the city is changing partly because I am asserting my nomadic inner nature. While part of me always dreads the saying of good bye, part of me - most of me, looks forward to the open road with a steadier head but just as much anticipation as Toad of Toad Hall did in literature.

I like the excitement of the unknown. I have set up a new domain for that future as a sign of my determination, perhaps it's a little too soon but four years and nine months will pass quickly. In the manner of John Steinbeck's story of a road trip with his camper and his dog (and in my case my long suffering wife) I plan to call this page Travels With Rusty (trusting we will still be alive and able to journey!) and travelswithrusty.com already redirects to this page. That's the easy part, now I have to wait and enjoy my time here as it passes and gets closer to the deadline for departure whenever that may be exactly.

It's not happening now or tomorrow but time is passing for all of us and we have to take seriously the injunction that life is for the living. And the photographic opportunities I trust will be awesome. I hope you will come along for that ride too wherever your retirement takes you.

Across Town

I have no idea what they tell each other. I wonder if the trapped dog tells Rusty he is envious, though I suspect envy is a strictly human emotion. Maybe not.

With a four year old on the end of the leash walks around town can range far and wide and I was surprised to find myself admiring the new City Hall supposed to be ready for occupancy by the end of the month.

There has been of course a round of complaints about the construction. The city is trying to be modern and install solar panels but they chose to have them serve double duty as a car port roof sloped to the south, away from United Street. That wasn't good enough for the peanut gallery and all sorts of angry comments have made their way into the newspaper, about how ugy they are.

We walked across town in the cool of the morning after some rain and i wasn't in the mood for controversy. I am taking a week to walk Rusty in the mountains of Western North Carolina, a break for the two of us at my sister in law's in Asheville before coming back just in time for Goombay and the madness of Fantasy Fest. 

That's more like it.

Dilapidated grimy and oddly angled yet quite delightful.

The promise of the outdoor life; not that anyone is actually living it.

I questioned whether the tree or the house was for rent. In Key West space to sling a hammock could be rented so crazy is the housing market.

Where this sign came from I'm not sure:

One could say banana leaves is life...

...and the cemetery is death. But it's also history and a quiet place to meditate (if you aren't walking with a dog).

New Town

It's been a while since I devoted several consecutive pictures to New Town, that area of Key West developed since the 1960s that was once dairy farms and open scrubby spaces.

There is an unmistakable air of something different, not just in the tropical foliage on these streets, even though they aren't obviously cute like the narrow lanes of Old Town.

I continue to be astonished by Rusty's ability to identify shapes of inanimate objects. He saw the plaster dogs sitting there and watched them intently.

I noticed the notice and felt pretty certain it was supposed to read "Residents" not "Residence" but they should have printed it with dictionary to hand I suppose.

New Town gives you room to breathe, to swing a cat were you so inclined, or to rebuild an old car.

Concrete block, bright tropical colors and a broad porch.  Add a large yard and plenty of parking and a price half that of an Old Town Conch Cottage and you can see the attraction of New Town.

What happened was that in the 1960s a wave of refugees from mainland America, including a  lot of gay men looking for sailors in the style of Tennessee Williams who bought a house in this Navy town, saw the potential in the run down wooden homes clustered around Duval Street. They offered to relieve the Conchs of their homes in exchange for cash money. The Conchs took it gratefully and left the new arrivals to build up their hotels in the run down part of town and good luck to them.

New Town will surprise you from time to time as it did to me when Rusty was leading me in a  circle where Patterson dead ends into a canal. I was chatting with a resident when a boat slipped silently by. My attempt to photograph it didn't go so well but you can see the canal is actually connected to open water, one end at the Riviera Canal and the other at Salt Run Creek near  Winn Dixie and Home Depot. Male sure your boat is small as there isn't much room but I have done it so I know it's true.

It hasn't yet started to cool off properly just yet. We will need a couple of cold fronts to do that, hopefully beofre Fantasy Fest at the end of the month. That seems a bit too soon at this point.

So the Conchs spread out toward Searstown which was built in the 1960s and they slowly filled in the fields and displaced the cows and built their American Dream ranchettes.

I've used this image (below) in another essay from the state archives I think. It shows Flagler's big new hotel for his railroad guests surrounded by empty fields and lots. For the first century and a half of it's life Key West's population stayed stable around 13,000 people. These days it's settled at around 23,000 with the entire island built up.

Ever since Hurricane Wilma flooded large tracts of New Town in 2005 I've seen a lot more stilt homes show up in this part of town.

That was the year Katrina wrecked New Orleans and I saw similarities between the two flooding events. In Key West the east winds flooded parts of Bahama Village and huge areas of New Town while the core of Old Town along Southard and Fleming Streets stayed dry and above the waters. In New Orleans it was the same story: the historically white urban core of the city, the French Quarter or Vieux Carre, stayed dry while all around the newer parts of town went underwater to disastrous effect.

But aside from the once in one hopes each generation that the city floods New Town offers a bit more breathing room for people and their toys. And for me and Rusty there are, if you know where to lok, a few grassy alleys as well running between the streets.

Plenty to explore.

Art At The Tropic: Passion Wallflowers

If you go to the Tropic Cinema you can expect to find some interesting artwork on display from time to time. This I was not expecting:

A massively intricate display of cut paper flowers, so abundant there was apparently a little left over:

From the Tropic webpage on the subject of tranquility and inner peace per the artist who says paper flowers remind her of her childhood in Lithuania where she recovered from a childhood injury making paper flowers as part of her therapy.  

Apparently too the artist reverts to paper flower making in times of sadness as she did when her mother died.

 Quite beautiful. Though one is forced to ponder what prompted an entire wall of paper flowers.

 The exhibit area is known as the Gallery at the Tropic...

 ...an imaginative use of a hall way off to the side of the main screening theater.

 It's actually quite the contemplative space when the lobby of the theater isn't jammed with people.

I managed to find a page online put up by the artist responsible for the flowers and it's worth a look as she makes some pretty wild face paintings.

 The evening was concluding for my wife and I with a screening of the new Beatles movie by director Ron Howard. It's a documentary about the early years of the Beatles when they went around the world performing live, before they got burned out on the crowds and the controversy of speaking extemporaneously to people who took them too seriously. It was not a well attended screening on a rainy night in low season. It deserved better.

The lives of the Beatles could never be summarized in one movie so one has to accept that aspects had to be ditched to make a coherent story focused on the live performances. The story showed brilliantly clearly how smart and self effacing and self aware the Beatles were. They had no plans, they were having a "laff" in Liverpudlian English and they laughed at themselves and their insistent questioners. Why is your music so popular? they were asked over and over. No idea came the glib reply. The John Lennon piped up with perhaps the best line in a movie that had several excellent quotations. "If we knew we'd form another band and we'd manage that." Clearly the working class stiffs from Liverpool understood the benefits of being in charge. There was no mention of Yoko Ono but the fresh faced lads transformed themselves in less than two hours into world weary musical mechanics with families and  responsibilities. Being successful is exhausting and it shows. Much nostalgia, much sadness not least because there is always a yearning for the fresh faced promise of the early 60s, gone and lost forever. 

Except for the excellent bits preserved here on film.