Key West The News

Blue Paper Editor Naja Girard Calls it Quits

Dear Readers,

Unfortunately The Blue Paper has not been able to reach its financial goal and I have decided to step down as the Editor in Chief.

A heartfelt thank you to the 99 people who have pledged monthly support to keep this important mission going. Thank you to those who have contributed through one time donations, large and small, over the years. Without you we would not have been able to continue our efforts for this long.

I also want to thank those of you who have contributed to TBP’s mission with articles, letters, poetry, photography, and your own important investigative journalism work.  We have greatly appreciated your contributions and are proud to have shared this platform with you.

There is, of course, still much to be investigated and reported on: affordable housing, hurricane Irma recovery, school safety and discrimination, hospitals and health care, overdevelopment, immigration enforcement, animal welfare, accountability and transparency in government…

Arnaud Girard is still exploring the possibility of keeping TBP alive.  Arnaud welcomes any support and creative ideas that would help him to keep the mission going. You may contact him directly at 305-731-7299.

[Patreon billing will be halted [no further auto payments will be incurred].  I will contact Paypal patrons individually to ensure their billing is individually shut down. Anyone who feels they would like to receive a partial refund for their most recent [April] monthly donation [since we are halting publication mid-month] please contact me directly at editor@thebluepaper.com.]  

My best to you all!

~ Naja Girard

The Blue Paper in it's latest incarnation, electronic, was the last survivor of the era of ferocious journalism in the Lower Keys.  There is still the six-day-a-week Citizen that just underwent some rather tight pruning of upper management presumably to restrain costs by giving the publishing family direct control, but the Keynoter, the local edition of the Miami Herald publishing empire recently folded it's print newspaper and is operating electronically with two reporters. The Herald itself stopped home delivery not so long ago and the Citizen has expressed concern about it's inability to find delivery people. Of course in a true capitalist economy wages would be increased but in the Keys lamentation increases in inverse proportion to the wages offered.

In the good old days the weekly Solares Hill was a paper I enjoyed with its irreverent look at the week's events and its occasionally odd obsession with the President Kennedy murder and the tentacles of  corruption that spread through Cuba and Miami and...Stock Island. The Blue Paper was a feisty piece of journalism even then at the hands of the irrepressible Dennis Reeves Cooper who either blasted the locally powerful with recent scandal or lacking any ammunition he would fill his pages with repeat performances of past scandals. No one read the paper but everyone who was anyone knew every word it printed and hated it. Now it is pretty much done. 

From distant November 2007 this essay I wrote about the publications of the time:

When I travel I like to pick up the local paper to hold in my hands the daily goings on. At home where all the print is available online, I still cherish the pleasure of messing my fingers with newsprint, connecting to a 250 year tradition of formalizing gossip and word-of-mouth on a properly printed page. My face isn't online- its in the broadsheet!

As small towns go Key West has lots of papers to choose among for information. I've assembled a modest selection which I like to read each week, and though there are others, the only publication dedicated to gay goings on has gone out of business (in a flurry of predictable accusations of non payment etc among the principals. Small town scandal on the front pages).

The Key West Citizen has focused on local news and does a decent job of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, as the saying goes. Page Two features the Citizen's Voice, a column of anonymous call-ins from usually upset neighbors. Page Three includes my all time small town favorite feature the "Citizen of the Day," fully dressed of course.The Citizen is the only daily published locally, which is delivered in the early hours to my driveway for $102 per year. It is the paper of record and Cooke Communications, an independent publishing family, has assembled a modest empire in the Keys. They also have an interest in 104.1 US One radio in Big Pine which has a modest local news operation including interviews with local bigwigs (Very Important People Only!) at 8am with the local voice Bill Becker, an interviewer who wouldn't know a hard question if it forced itself down his throat.

The Citizen isn't a bad paper with its steady diet of local news from around the Keys. From time to time it'll avoid offending VIPs on particularly touchy issues, so sometimes its more a matter of observing what they've left out rather than included, to get an idea whats going on. The Citizen's Voice is the source of irritation among Important People, and the anonymous comments are the first place we all go after we open the paper. Each Thursday the Citizen also puts out a harmless Arts supplement called Paradise! which I find rather bland and generally goes the way I send the daily sports section- into the recycling bin. But that's just my taste.

The other outlets from Cooke Communications include a Marathon- based free weekly, the Free-Press, which comes to Lower Keys subscribers each Wednesday.Its a way to fight back against the inroads of the Miami Herald which sells and delivers all around the Keys. The Citizen does a much better job of covering local news, not least with the Friday free offering of Solares Hill.

This paper started out as an alternative weekly aimed at irritating the powers that be and sounding an irreverent voice against the all powerful Citizen. It was a paper that barely made economic sense in a town where people fished or drank as expressions of intellectual activity. When Cooke bought Solares Hill its imminent demise was widely predicted, but that never came to pass. Now under Nancy Klingener's leadership Solares Hill has flourished as a source of in depth prickly commentary and real arts news. It is the highlight of my newspaper perusal, arriving every Friday, carefully wrapped inside my Citizen delivery.

What to say about the Blue Paper? More properly known as Key West The Newspaper, the free weekly that describes itself as the home of "Journalism as a Contact Sport"? This is the critic that anybody who is somebody in Key West wants silenced, even more than the Citizens' Voice column in the daily paper.

Dennis Reeves Cooper is seen around town wearing a ragged beard, as every rebel should, accompanied by a black Labrador who rides alongside him in his silver convertible. Cooper is an old school style of yellow journalist, always criticized, though never do critics succeed in proving that he gets his factswrong though his idle speculation often falls wide of the mark. For instance when he wrote that a past police chief had had a previous sexual liaison with a juvenile boy he was never shown to be wrong. When he publicizes the embarrassing sources of funding in election campaigns everyone involved screams blue murder but they can't show he's wrong. He exposed to all and sundry a tawdry sexual affair the mayor got invovled in, and no one could contradict him because it was true, apparently. He's not someone I'd have round to dinner, he's rather too abrasive, but his paper is a must read in Key West, and one prays never to find oneself the object of his scorn.These days the current Key West Police Chief is his target, and Cooper's attentions make life for the rest of us inside the police station a fair resemblance to hell on earth.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the good news paper, a sickly publication called Conch Color,published by Tom Oosterhoudt a well known Conch:He wants to spread good news which generally means kow-towing to the rich and powerful and filling the broadsheet pages with lots of color pictures in the style of a social diary. Its pretty saccharine stuff, harmless were it not responsible for yet more mulched trees, and easily ignored.

I'd rather read Key West, another all color publication that comes out monthly, features excellent photographs and a decent attempt at literary journalism even though it describes itself as a lifestyle publication.Its the sort of magazine I thumb through in doctor's offices and the like, as it has lots of pictures of hip people being hip, in hip island homes. From time to time it features people I can claim a passing aquaintance with, which I find shocking.

The Miami Herald has a bureau or two in the Keys and attempts a few column inches of local news. those efforts are supplemented by the twice weekly Keynoter a paper that bulges with classifieds but is of limited interest to a Citizen subscriber, who gets updates daily, The Keynoter comes out afternoons and can sometimes publish events the same day they happen, thus scooping the Citizen.I like the Keynoter on our streets mostly because it shows that the two paper concept is struggling to stay alive in the Keys where most American cities can't claim that anymore. Its not an even struggle and as long as the Citizen stays hard on the heels of local news it remains an indispensable read to keep a finger on the pulse of local affairs- literally and figuratively.

And they are all presented on the Internet, because the modern Keys live and die online. And for some strange reason people everywhere want to know whats going on in the island chain.

I love my news when it comes in print, so many words to fuss over.

Spirit Gureghian

Spirit died April 14th after 14 years riding the roads of the US in Ara Gureghian's sidecar. He was an another of those  unloved abandoned dog that found a home and second chance and made the most of it.

I never met Spirit though I communicated early on with Ara who quit his life's work as a chef in Naples five hours north of here and took off in 2006 to ride around the US in a BMW sidecar outfit. His travels are recorded on his blog filled with pictures and commentary, a place he called his Oasis. More precisely the Oasis of his Soul. Spirit was his relief.

Like any man who has completed three score years and ten Ara has had his share of difficulties coping with the very premature death of his son Lance, then his mother who made an appearance in his blog and now Spirit, the throw away dog who proved once again that dogs abandoned by humans always have the capacity to overcome given a chance and thrive. I see so much of Rusty in Spirit.

What a great dog. I can't imagine continuing suddenly without your constant companion. Check Ara's page to see how it's done because Ara even with only memories of Spirit is unstoppable. I feel a tremendous sense of loss that I never met Spirit and now it's too late.

Irma's Gifts

For someone like me who works night shift and frequently finds himself riding through Big Coppitt in the hours of darkness the lights of the Shell gas station are an island of respite on the road.

And that is especially true when going home, passing this gas station just before taking the plunge into the unlit blackness of the Saddlebunch Keys to the east.

By night, by  day, they sell fuel here.  By day the gas station is fully staffed but by eleven at night the place closes. However with a credit card you can help yourself to gas as the pumps remain open for automatic delivery.

I took this picture, below, September 11th 2017 the day after Hurricane Irma blew through with 140 mph winds. The store is still closed, supposedly being restored, but only imperceptibly slowly like so much around here.

The fuel pumps which were wrecked were not blown over. Most of the pumps between Key West and Marathon were physically torn from their pediments. This, below, was the Shell station  in Big Pine Key last September.

For people living around Mile Marker 10 the Shell station was a shopping center not just a convenience store, one of two in relatively isolated Big Coppitt. Now it is reduced to a tin box offering chips candy sodas and change between the hours of 6 am and 11 pm. As you can see they kindly offer a porta-potty and hand washing station as well as trash collection.

Behind the other loo there is the compressed air station which I didn't use but seems to be working by all appearances. The wild chickens survived the storm and appear to be flourishing. I'm not sure how I feel about that but I don't have to live with them and their noise and their mess.

 Oh and there is ice, that staple of fishing expeditions and picnics.

The gas station office closes each night but as I said the pumps are left on for customers with credit and debit cards to use self service. So it's not exactly Puerto Rico around here but the makeshift nature of the place is a healthy reminder that it takes time and money and patience to overcome natural disasters.

I know many many people who are still struggling to get their homes fixed, to get insurance payouts, to get promised help from the federal government even as local governments are attacking the Feds for not forking over promised cash for the clean up efforts still underway. Hurricane season starts June First. Happy memories with they say, more to come:

As one of my neighbors pointed out last September in Big Pine as they doled out fuel from a tanker truck beginning a week after the storm: "At least it's free. My taxes at work..." That's the way you have to look at things sometimes through the lense of a glass half full.

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.