Mobile Surgical Tent Marathon

It was not a picnic to be in Key West after the storm and have no hospital. No running water meant no medical facilities and that was odd to say the least. Well in Marathon, a city of about 10,000 there is no hospital after the catastrophe. But there is a tent:

The old Fishermen's Hospital, seen here in a  picture from my blog in 2013 was wrecked by Hurricane Irma and an emergency medical tent from North Carolina is in it's stead for the time being. The irony is that Baptist Health bought Fishermen's a few months ago to add to their South Florida collection, bringing a sterling reputation and wads of cash. Now they have the prospect of basically starting from scratch....Thank you Irma for one more irritation.

The tent is the scene of my wife's latest medical mishap earlier this week when she sliced open a finger so these pictures are from her iPhone. I was at work at the time and asked her to get me pictures... It was a silly accident but she was happy to know the ER tent is open 24 hours with beds and services and everything. We live halfway between Key West and Marathon which is also where my wife teaches so we have the option of not using Key West's Lower Keys Medical Center and we are glad to avoid that place. Lower Keys is a run down facility with crazy billing practices and shady management so Fisherman's has always been our choice. 

Even now with this sort of makeshift arrangement we prefer to come here than Lower Keys. In fact there was an effort to get Baptist to take over Lower Keys but the owners make too much money off the place to sell it, despite the habit of selling assets to make ends meet. Lower Keys is stuck in its rather dire rut. I can't wait to see Baptist get the new building done frankly.

It's pretty cool to see this kind of things functioning in our blown out community. In some parts of the world this would be more than local people could hope for, and right now the Middle keys need this as much as any undeveloped country might.

 Fishermen's lacked operating cash and was as run down as you like, shortcomings compensated for by the cheerful staff and willing attitude. In 2013 we arrived in the middle of the night to discover the air conditioning had broken. Bummer. The good news was there was no line to get in. There are horror stories of spending whole days waiting to see  a medical professional at Lower Keys. Not in Marathon. Never.

The inside of the tent looks pretty much like what it is: an emergency room. With air conditioning!

 Finger bandaged my wife came home. I had the best medicine after I got home from work: Rusty ready to greet me and snuggle before the inevitable walk.  

Good dog.

Fantasy Meets The Weather

Fantasy Fest  2017  will have to go down in the history books as one of the unluckiest of all time. And considering it is under new management from whom one expects good things, it is excessively unfortunate.

That I am using pictures from Locals' Parades past speaks to the unhappy fact that I got called in to work early and couldn't stroll through the crowd with my camera. Grr. Anyway I am feeling more sorry for Fantasy Fest this year than I am for myself. On top of Hurricane Irma throwing everything for a loop we now have a tropical disturbance threatening to pound the grand parade with inches of rain, as the latest storm, currently labeled Number 18 sweeps north from Nicaragua.

Still, the show must go on and we shall see what the weather brings at the moment the parade begins... and who knows perhaps a dousing of rain will cheer everyone up by its total unfairness and lack of consideration. I mean what else could go wrong? At least its been a relatively uneventful affair thus far, ytoo bad the big event faces 50 mph winds and four inches of rain...

Duval Street Fantasy

Glorious weather prompted me to take an early afternoon stroll on Lower Duval, not the best time to see costumes and crowds. I wanted to try and get a feel for the tenor of Fantasy Fest this year, its first under new management. They are promising more fantasy and less nudity which I think a lot of people might like. Hurricane Irma hasn't helped, no doubt but I hope 2017 can be the start of something good for Fantasy Fest.

I am not a bar hopper but Rick's certainly went out of their way to get colorful. If fantasy and costumes are the theme they seem to have got it right, to my untutored eye:

There are lots of booths along Duval offering the usual: braids, henna tattoos and body painting which has to be carried out behind a screen. There are a few rules for the "Fantasy Zone" which stretches the length of Duval and the side streets for one block to Simonton or Whitehead streets.

Basically one  can wear body paint only but your privates and your bum must be covered up but otherwise wear nothing or a costume or be like me and wear street clothes. Frankly yesterday's cold north wind might have worked for a nudist from Michigan but it was a bit brisk for my delicate skin. I'm taking a week off in November to visit family in the mountains of North Carolina and I expect it will be cold. Properly cold not like this, even though it has been windy.

The TV people who were writing off the Keys six weeks ago were at the obvious place, the Key West cliche, for this event that might never have happened had it been up to them.

A not crowded Duval Street, no nudity but not much in the way of costumes either. Apparently the parties have been well attended so nursing hang overs may be the order of the day. Me? I'm at exercise after I  get up, but I work every night this week just about.

I found a stray bra outside Captain Tony's, a bar well known for it's display of underwear. So a  refugee perhaps?

The new Fantasy Fest sign at the Custom House museum has drawn a fair bit of attention. The Citizen had a nice profile of the artist in chief in the paper this week.  Seward Johnson's statuary is still in front of the museum surrounded by the Fantasy Fest stuff swirling around. They had  music yesterday spreading the festival off Duval Street I suppose, which is a nice idea.

"Free cold water...." I could have used a hot cup of tea but I was alone in choosing to wear a sweatshirt trying to stay in the sun and out of the breeze. It was 74 degrees but the wind chill is real when you're not used to it.

The conch trains are circulating all the time too. A good way to learn about Key West in 90 minutes for around 22 bucks as I recall.

 Some street scenes taken around lunch time yesterday under cloudless blue skies:

Disaster Tourism

I am very relieved we are not Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, from whom nothing much is heard anymore. I did read that on St Johns they still have no electricity at all.This is Florida and be it ever so tenuous we are connected to the mainland. Yet this, after six weeks is how my street looks:

I have electricity, internet and air conditioning and running potable water from the faucet. Fantastic! My driveway is clear, my street is a mess. We call it Beirut-by-the-Sea, a jumble of trash, broken homes, wreckage and and rat infested piles of debris worthy of a civil war. The main road that connects our subdivision to the Highway is called Spanish Main, and here they pick up some trash and pour more in it's place:

US One, the Overseas Highway shown below as I was driving into Summerland Key is a mess. The trucks hauling wreckage spill stuff as they go and you are as likely as not to come across bits of RV parts, appliances, sheet metal wood and tree limbs as you go on the main road. Riding at night requires total alertness, even more than by day.

What makes it all so bizarre is that there is a three way public argument between the Florida Department of Transportation, responsible for highway debris, the county contractor responsible for side streets and the county. The state stays aloof and does its job meanwhile the county contractor can't get the required 200 trucks to clean the sub divisions along this hundred mile mess. He says FDOT pays too much and he can't compete with the state pay scale. He has but 78 trucks working. None have showed up on my corner of Cudjoe Key.

Imagine: this debris field stretches more or less from Mile Marker Ten a hundred miles north to Key Largo. In the newspaper county officials say they have removed 400,000 cubic yards of wreckage, as much as was generated by the hated Hurricane Wilma and its floods in 2005. They estimated there are 2 million cubic yards to clear this time around-  five times as much. And the county contract says my street should be clean by next weekend...No chance.

It just doesn't end. there's always something going wrong. There are no working gas stations on Summerland or Ramrod and only one in Big Pine. Think about this: cable television has been absent from much of the Keys since the storm. My neighbors got their first technician visit from Comcast last Saturday. We've had AT&T internet in my house for three weeks (we watch streaming TV) so we are lucky. Things just aren't getting done in some areas and as much as we cannot blame we cannot feel good about this chaos. I have seen societal collapse and I did not like it. Losing water, electricity, phone and medical services, fire protection and law enforcement all at once was  a lot to handle.

This Mount Trashmore on Ramrod Key is the scene of multiple trucks and excavators loading up every single day but the pile never shrinks. There's a bigger one at Summerland Key and a vast such pile in Marathon. It's endless. We have to give up the pretense that this lot will be cleared in anything less than months. Meanwhile it rains and smells mature.

I am not one of those who cares if people come by to photograph our misery though I have seen posts on Facebook protesting disaster tourists as though they should refrain. I understand the fascination but I would like amateur photojournalists either to not slow down or pull completely out of the way as they photograph our precious trash piles. I am so used to driving past wrecked homes and exploded RV trailers and piles of garbage I barely notice them. But I do notice people slowing me down as they crawl by fascinated by the detritus of lives upended by a Category Four storm.

There's plenty of crap to stare at too. And I'm not showing the houses torn apart, the subdivisions submerged in mud. Here is the refuse of all that destruction. This trash represents workers who can no longer live in the Keys and do their work. People living in FEMA hotels kicked out to make way for better paying tourists. 

They say flying the flag upside down is a symbol of distress. Well, we have lots of streets signs doing the same thing. I hope someone with authority to do something notices.

FEMA trailers, expedited housing permits, and those tourist dollars we crave being spent to rebuild our local small businesses. That would be nice.

Tutu Tuesday

It was a lovely afternoon yesterday on Duval Street, a little warm perhaps but that's to be expected as a cold front is predicted for tonight with temperatures plummeting well below  70 degrees (19 Canadian degrees).  However the hub of Fantasy Fest appeared to be a bit underpopulated, possibly owing to hangovers or something.

The weather forecast is pretty good for the rest of the week. A nice breeze, turning north Wednesday night after a few showers, typical of a cold front. Overnight lows Wednesday and Thursday should be a brisk 67  degrees with a warming trend for the weekend back into mid 70s overnight and upper 80s by day. However this is the first measurable cold front of the Fall and by the time the next one blows through hopefully we will see summer end and with seawater temperatures dropping an unofficial end to hurricane season before November 30th. That would be nice.

After my exercise class and lunch with my wife I was ready to go for a walk with my camera and hunt for tutus. After all it was Tutu Tuesday, and though I couldn't attend the tutu race nor would I wish to attend the tutu party I like looking for creative tutus.

A skeleton on a rental car looked slightly promising (most Mustang convertibles are rentals)... 

...but there were too many people not taking tutu tuesday seriously. Grr.

An original Vespa GT200, not strictly a tutu but I like it.

Much cooler (but not my style!):

Mind you with so few tutus in evidence I might as well have taken pictures of whoever else was cruising Duval:

And a rather nicely painted old Honda scooter labeled a "Conch Cruzer:"

These two were in tutus but they were actually on a scavenger hunt as well which seemed to give them at least as much joy as their clothes, but they smiled for the camera:

This picture might give you the idea that a life lived in Key West may not be the best thing for your physique, but I'm sure I couldn't say.

And I accidentally parked next to the scooter responsible for clusters of people dressed in pink wandering around looking alternatively furtive and happy:

Some people were busy doing Important Stuff.

Others wore makeshift tuts as they worked:

This year Fantasy Fest is being driven by a desire to be creative according to the newspaper, not nudity so respectable people are being drafted to help support this expression of artistic populism. It might work too:

But some nudity seems inevitable too:

It will be interesting to see how the week develops.