Houseboat Row

What you see here is a heavily laden man cycling along a seawall on South Roosevelt Boulevard, the eastern end of the rectangle that is Key West. The waters to his right are called Cow Key Channel. They separate Key West from Stock Island, the island where cows to feed Key West used to be kept.

Lean over the seawall and you see a neat row of small boats, dinghies, used to get boat owners out to the craft anchored in Cow Key Channel. These little boats are tied up where Houseboat Row used to exist.

As we shall see, Houseboat Row is long gone, almost two decades since people lived tied to the seawall. People still live on boats, what my friend Rick in California calls "hovel craft" but these days they are anchored in the channel: 

Not all the boats are inhabited but most of them look like fiberglass wrecks. Were they made of wood I doubt many would float, but fiberglass is indestructible.

I suppose one could argue they look picturesque, creating the island ambiance Key West is constantly striving for, but I am not a fan of flotsam on the water. 

One the other hand boats do offer refuge for working class stiffs in a town notoriously too expensive to house its workers.

These boats then are floating homes for poor people you could say, not sailors or boaters or maritime types.

Little wonder then they frequently resemble refugee camps afloat, or debris piles rather than trim sailing vessels:

You can tell when they are inhabited by the small boats dangling in the water alongside the mother ships.Not all are sailboats either. 

The houseboat above is, it turns out in the flight path from the airport under certain wind conditions. Here we see the seaplane returning from the Dry Tortugas:

 And now back to houseboat row a vibrant community of boats that were moved out and dispersed despite their value as a tourist attraction exemplifying the Key West zany spirit of the time:

They got their mail delivered and everything. Then the city agreed to allow developer Ed Knight to build some multi million dollar condos on the mangrove lands on the other side of the road and the rather chaotic nature of the houseboats was deemed detrimental to the likely success of the condos which were initially offered at near to two million dollars apiece. The houseboats were offered bargain spaces in the city marina at Garrison Bight and I still remember the procession of houseboats towed around the island to their new more regulated home. I was not unfortunately such an avid keeper of photographic memories in those pre-digital days. 

Nevertheless the signs of chaotic living still appear from time to time in the parking area alongside the Houseboat Row sea wall.

And the sidewalk winds around to the entrance to Key West in the direction the heavily loaded cyclist was pedaling from the first picture in this essay.

Cow Key Channel serves as  a waterway as well as an anchorage, and the channel runs on the Stock Island side of the water, where the jet ski was running:

 And to the south, the open waters of the Straits of Florida.

 The impressive bulk of Mount Trashmore dominates the skyline on the north end of the channel:

While South Roosevelt winds around the corner of the island toward the airport:

 And there is a street sign on the sidewalk:

 I wonder what it means?

Some small anarchic spirit may still lurk in the former Houseboat Row...

Mangrove Rusty

To live in the Florida Keys, this group of islands said to number 1700 total specks of land, you have to accept certain things as ineluctable truths, one of them being that the topography is never going to change. This isn't earthquake country, or earth slide country, nor will volcanoes spew more land into the ocean. Around here the only likelihood is that later this century rising tides will make these islands uninhabitable. Meanwhile we have this:

And we have dogs. Rusty doesn't worry himself too much about rising tides. When the land runs our or gets too wet he avoids the problem. He enjoys the cold the few times we have traveled into frosty country and he likes woods and hills but in the mangroves he runs like the wind.  Places that you think would confound a double jointed snake, my Carolina Dog slips through with ease.

I walk the trails and he criss-crosses my path occasionally allowing me to spot his big curved tail furry like a banner riding through the bushes. And these bushes are what constitute woods in the Florida Keys, lumps of limestone and coral that can barely support saplings never mind majestic stands of trees. And I discovered recently not everyone knows  what a  mangrove looks like.

These are the roots of the red mangrove, the creepy feral jungly mangrove that everyone I thought, had heard of or at least seen in the movies. They propagate by dropping seed pods into salt water or by walking their roots across the ground then drilling down as they go. Fearsome stuff because these roots will close the trail eventually:

I was at work and I got a call from a national crisis support hotline reporting a  client, said to be in Key West was thinking about committing suicide. It was one of those hours-long pursuits trying to figure out a location for the wandering lost soul and pairing him up with a searching police officer. In the end he was fine and the story went away like so many 911 calls do, into the vault of my memory. However one feature stuck in my head so much so I determined to write an essay on the subject.

One of the crisis counselors called back with an update to advise us the lost client told them rather vaguely he was on a beach on North Roosevelt in the mangroves. A beach? On the boulevard? In the mangroves?  Okay then, we sent officers off to hunt for the depressed man. Meanwhile the counselor on the line asked me tentatively: Does that make sense? Well I said there isn't any beach on North Roosevelt but there are clumps of mangroves. Mangroves she said interrogatively, I was wondering that they are... I wanted to package up some of the leaves of the red mangrove, the ones that turn salt water into fresh for the plant to use and send them to her wherever she was. Somewhere mangrove-free apparently.

There are times when I wish I had something other than mangroves and their cousins the buttonwoods to look at. I was looking back at pictures of our road trip to Quebec and Vermont, Rusty checking out the St Lawrence River...

...and running through the deciduous woods of the Isle d'Orleans...

I know he likes these wildernesses, these familiar South Florida landscapes:

But I wonder if he misses the lush landscapes of the north, like the cider orchards outside the City of Quebec:

There again beauty is where you find it.

And we enjoy our walks together even in these mysterious mangrove forests. Which as you can see are as flat as the proverbial pancake:

A well earned gin and tonic for the dog:

And cold tap water for me.

Big Pine Key Marina

There used to be a marina at the end of Big Pine Key nearest No Name Key. And there still is after a fashion. This place is up and running with a small office and above ground fuel tanks and room for a few boats. It never was a big facility.

 Hurricane Irma wrecked a lot of Big Pine last September and this marina was flattened. Completely razed by winds of a Category Four strength, somewhere near 150 miles per hour around here.

This is how the marina used to look, and I took this picture a decade ago. It never changed much, a typical friendly convenience store bait shop and fuel dock all roiled into one. I stopped by here once to refuel my boat. It was more conveniently reached by land if you had visited the nearby No Name Pub. It had a claim to fame once that had nothing to do with it being destroyed by an infamous storm.

   

The bridge to No Name Key, which sits next to the marina was the setting for a slightly odd movie which came out in 1994. The synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

In this quirky drama a trio involved in a self-contained world revolving around a remote tollbooth in the Florida Keys. Jack, an aspiring policeman, works in the tollbooth. There he dreams of his new career and of starting a new life in Miami with his high school sweetie Doris. She works at the Gator Gas fuel depot down the road. She daydreams about her estranged father Leon and takes care of her mother Lillian who suffers from chronic depression. When not caring for her mom, Doris sees Dash, a bait salesman. Leon suddenly returns. A new toll collector, Vic, comes to the booth. He is a suspicious character and soon the state police are carefully watching him.

And in the movie there are glimpses of this place as it used to be. Always changing in the Keys, all the time. Who knows what changes this next storm season will bring.

The Bridge to No Name Key from the seat of my Bonneville. This hasn't changed.

Rusty At Night

For some reason I had two nights off in a row  so naturally on Friday morning I woke at four in the ready to get up and behave as though I was a night person.  Luckily when I have these night urges I am not alone and my trusty Carolina Dog was ready at my side urging me out the door. We ended up in front of Turtle Kraals a half hour later, me with my camera, Rusty with his powerful nostrils. We were happy.

There was no one around. It was just perfect for the two of us as I pointed my FZ300 at this and that and Rusty trotted around sniffing and chasing chimera. There is a sense of easy companionship  with my dog on our walks and at that hour in the city that feeling gets exaggerated by the lack of anyone else in the metropolis.

Rusty never ceases to amaze me. He reads my mind, waits on the street corners, avoids people who don't like dogs and says a cheerful hello to the ones that call him over. He stood watching cavorting drunks half a block away as they struggled with the front door to their rooms, sitting between me and them, waiting for silence to return and calm to prevail.

When I was riding my scooter in Jacksonville recently several other riders noticed my key ring which displayed a Mile Zero logo on it, a scooter warming gift from my wife. I was glad to have it to avoid losing the only key  I have to my slightly used Suzuki Burgman, but the other scooterists were  awed by Mile Zero. Mile Zero is a potent symbol;  check it out:

Can you find Waldo at Front and Duval at 4:45 in the morning? There are not many people left in Key West who are young enough and wealthy enough to be obnoxious on the street after the bars close. Key West rolls up the sidewalks before midnight most nights.

Ambling down Duval behind my hound I saw a shop selling Conch Pearls. Never heard of them but the Jewellery Editor has:

Pretty and pastel-hued, a conch pearl is a calcareous concretion produced by the Queen conch (pronounced “conk”) mollusc, which is a large, edible sea snail. Most often pink in colour and normally oval shaped, the finest examples display a wave-like “flame” structure on their surface and have a creamy, porcelain-like appearance and unique shimmer.

Unlike pearls harvested from oysters, conch pearls – like other naturally occurring pearls, including the Melo and Giant Clam – are non-nacreous, which means they are not made of nacre, the substance that gives traditional pearls their iridescent lustre. Therefore, they are not technically a pearl and are not considered to be “true pearls”, although they are still referred to as such.

Then I came across the newspaper racks and in the middle of the tourist tat and the venerable Citizen struggling to stay afloat, the billboard of the Blue Paper stood stolidly blaring scandal. There had been threats of its demise (again) but money flowed forth and the Blue irritant to the people in power is here for a while longer.

There was a time when I was required to dispatch officers to Big 'Uns, a ghastly name for a bar which used a pair of oversize breasts on a blonde bats-woman as its logo. So one would find oneself sending officers to that grotesquely named bar and feel awkward while doing it. They closed and I was grateful. Now we have Wet Willies. Is there no end to it? 

I was surprised to find a new bike shop discreetly located downtown, the offshoot of a successful store on Stock Island, promoters of the infamous Zombie Bike Ride. It's on their website so it must be true, and here it is, the downtown shop I had never previously noticed.

And at the end of an hour and fifteen minutes Rusty was satisfied. So was I and ready for bed.