Everything Happens For A Reason

I  had been to my Broga exercise class yesterday lunch time and as I was riding home from Key West I came across a rather eerie accident scene on US 1 near my home. I turned off the highway on Cutthroat Lane and stopped to take this picture below. Looking North,  Key West is 23 miles to the left and Big Pine Key is six miles to the right. The vehicles involved in the wreck had been towed already and all that was left was road workers sweeping up the damage:

Here is a screen shot of the location, with My New Joint the upstairs tapas bar of the famous Square Grouper Restaurant. What made it all so creepy for me was that this was the exact spot where I wrecked last August 31st. At that time I was on my way to work and had just turned left toward Key West from Spanish Main Drive. I got to the intersection in a slow moving line of traffic and a car pulled out of Cutthroat lane just above the big red dot and tried to dart across the highway. In so doing she cut me off and I flew over the hood of her car, cartwheeling toward the line of guests waiting to have dinner at Square Grouper. 

This picture of my poor old Burgman 200 was taken looking north across US1 at Cutthroat Drive in the background. This was the scooter that three weeks earlier took me to Niagara Falls in 32 hours on my 1500 mile Iron Butt ride. I had wanted to see how long distance riding would work and it went very well, as I rode a total of 3400 miles that week without a problem. I got home and this happened:  

You'd think seeing this repeat action would have freaked me out and it did a bit, at first. Then I started to think to myself: Hey! Today it's not me...I get to go home... Which was a thought that quite cheered me up.

I remember most of what happened that afternoon as I hit the front wheel of the car I saw a kaleidoscope of  colors, the white paint of the car, the front wheel that the front of my scooter struck, being launched into the air and finding myself on my back unable to move. I thought I remembered what came next but after yelling at one guy to call my wife and another to call 911 I didn't remember this woman taking my hand, and even though I spoke to her I was already floating away.

I wondered what happened at the scene of this wreck, and later when my wife and I took Rusty for a walk up Cutthroat she asked me if crossing the intersection freaked me out as it did her. I told her it doesn't really, which I suppose is odd but what does freak me out is the possibility of cars anywhere along Highway One pulling out of side streets without seeing me on my scooter. I have always been alert to that possibility but these days I am hyper vigilant and always try to make eye contact with cars pulling out.

It's been a bad couple of week for accidents on the Overseas Highway. One dark night a pedestrian was killed trying to cross the highway in Big Coppitt at Mile Marker 9. There were a couple of serious accidents in the Upper Keys and  a ghastly pile up near Baby's Coffee. I saw several people comment on the four car crash on Facebook and apparently the cause of the crash, reported to be intoxicated, had been making a spectacle of himself passing recklessly while driving southbound toward Key West.

They ended up flying one of the occupants of the cars to a Miami trauma  center but several other people in the cars were also hurt. What made that accident reverberate in my mind was the news my wife passed on to me. This weekend she had met the Sheriff's Deputy who was first on the scene of my accident and in chatting with him, updating him on my recovery, he told her his family members were caught up in that wreck. I remember him at the scene of my accident; all I could see was his highly polished boot and the knife edge crease on his pants as he sorted out the accident scene around my prone form and made sure traffic avoided my wrecked body and the wrecked vehicles. He came to see me last winter and we talked for a while, when he told me that at the time he was actually going home off duty when he came upon the carnage in the highway. And now he ruefully told my wife on Sunday he has his relatives in the hospital with broken bones and the injustice of it makes me crazy. No one is safe, no one is immune, no one gets a free  pass. We are outnumbered by the drunks, the distracted, the incompetent, the under insured, the whole panoply of drivers who suck at driving and use us as their pin balls. Last year it was me, last week it was his people and yesterday it was some other poor unfortunate caught up in a shambles not of their making. Not everything happens for a reason, most of it is just bad luck.

Monday

I noticed the other day I am walking much better than I had been a coupe of weeks ago.  In Saturday's exercise class I was squatting much better than previously. I am not yet ready to walk thoughtlessly, and each step is noted as I progress on my much less wobbly pins. But I feel like I have reached a new level of recovery. I use no walkers or canes these days and I haven't for a month or more. I feel stronger and even though stairs remain awkward as do slopes and inclines I am now able to walk as far as I want  for as long as I want, as long its less than about two hours consecutively on my feet.

My swollen feet have shrunk and I can now wear Crocs and the shoes I was wearing before the Catastrophe. When I get in the car I can slide my right leg under the wheel instead of having to sit facing out while swinging my  legs under the wheel one by one. At the supermarket I don't  have to use the electric cart any more. Well except occasionally when  I have already been on my feet long enough to make me stumble when I walk. I can ride my scooter and push it around without falling over though I have to take care getting on and off as I am a novice at balancing!

They tell me I am recovering rapidly but the process feels slow to me. I had expected to be back to normal by now but I'm not quite, not yet. I can feel normal is within my grasp now. I hope when I see the surgeon in late August he will clear me to work at 100% so I can start accruing leave once more. At the moment I work 32 hours a week in four shifts and add my sick and vacation leave to pay myself a full paycheck but that means no vacations this summer.

I have been very lucky throughout this ordeal inasmuch as my employers have been amazingly supportive and my insurance has paid for the best quality care and my share of the bills has been only around $3500, which is bearable. Of course I have lost four months of my accumulated sick leave and so forth but life goes on much as before and many people wrecked as badly as I was by a distracted driver don't have such good fortune. It would have been nice had I been run down by a car with proper insurance and a driver who wasn't a deadbeat but you can't have everything and I have every prospect of 100% recovery. Lucky me in the face of so much misfortune. I don't  need charity or fundraisers and my misfortune is not going to force me to leave the Keys for less expensive housing.

One strangely topical part of this journey through the health care system that I have taken is in regards to the opioid epidemic as it is being described. Oddly enough I read a book while in the hospital that discussed the peculiar and sometimes fatal prescription of and addiction to powerful modern painkillers, Oxycodone and its derivative Percocet which I am prescribed. Dopesick follows several actors in the unfolding public health crisis and pulls no punches. We see how the makers of these pills pushed them to doctors and thus to patients creating a chain of addiction that has proved fatal to tens of thousands of Americans, many poor and isolated in medically under served communities in Appalachia, communities teetering on the brink of extinction. It is an appalling story and worth reading.

So I can't say I was surprised to find myself being warned all the time from well meaning people against the dangers of addiction to pain pills as the subject has spread like a poorly explained oil stain across the news. Yes there is a problem and there are public health solutions that are proving unpalatable to politicians who don't want to be seen as "soft on crime" that old bugbear. That is a subject among several dealt with cogently in the book. For my part I started taking Percocet twice a day usually in the hospital, one at night to sleep and the other in the morning before being wheeled to the gym for physical therapy.  I have continued my use of the drug in order to keep up my exercise regimen which has been effective enough that I am walking without a cane, never mind a walker while working 32 hours a week and walking my dog twice a day. I am well on the way to recovery and  I have been helped in that effort by my  circumspect use of Percocet.  I rarely take the pills now as I find I can bear  the residual pain with occasional over the counter pain relievers. Oddly  enough I did not find any hallucinogenic  or  addictive properties to the pills I took. The pain went away and I guess that was enough, mind you my doses were I am told quite modest, never more than ten milligrams.

I find it difficult to reconcile my experience with opioids with those reported in the press or in more detail in the book above, Dopesick, which is a compelling and fascinating read, especially if like me you know nothing about this medical epidemic. The suffering of opioid addicts is appalling and yet for me Percocet has been a brilliant tool in my recovery. And as I have continued to recover I have needed it less and less and I don't miss it. So why am I not addicted? Beats me. I guess the part that worries me is the fearsome reputation this drug has and I wonder if others in pain who might benefit will be too afraid to take it. I was in agony in the hospital, not surprising really considering the extent of my injuries and any consideration of future addiction was far from my mind. I wanted the pain to end. I recall one day I didn't take a Percocet before physical therapy and I could barely function when I tried to exercise. That was a lesson. The whole thing is a conundrum and I am not qualified to unravel it, but it has me puzzled, why some can't live without these pills and someone like me is indifferent to them once the pain recedes...Perhaps it's  something genetic, the answer for any insoluble problem regarding human behavior. 

Yes, life is good and I look forward to the day I can put one foot in front of the other without thinking about it. I want to be completely pain free. I want to be able to go all day and not need a nap to recharge my batteries half way through the day. I want no more pills in my life of any kind. But for now I'm pretty happy with the way things are as they could be a lot worse. Unimaginably. 

The Season

From 2017:

June First is a rite of passage in Florida and other states on the Eastern Seaboard too for all I know, as the date marks the start of hurricane season, as though the weather lives by the Gregorian Calendar. That the weather is not circumscribed by calendar dates became very clear this year when  a tropical type of storm developed in the Atlantic weeks before the "official" start of hurricane season. Nevertheless we were inundated with chatter about the hurricane season promptly on June First as we are every year. News outlets tend to ignore weather forecasters whose caution tends to blunt the nice crisp news stories that don't handle nuance very well. June First is hurricane season so Get Ready, is the message.

So now we sit and anxiously await November 30th which marks the end of the hurricane season, though weather forecasters do also try to point out that a hurricane in December is rare but not unknown. And despite the fact we live in a  climate change state of official denial we all know storms are getting nastier and more brutish as wind and heat patterns change around the planet. If you live in Florida your friends and relatives who live elsewhere delight in pointing out that soon - date uncertain - our delightful year round summer in a sub tropical climate will be drowned by rising oceans. Then we'll be sorry.

 Undoubtedly it is now a race between me (I take this all rather personally you might be surprised to learn) dying and Florida drowning, and hopefully I shall not outlive the Sunshine State. In point of fact we have all sorts of other more pressing challenges here than worrying about invasive tides which have already made themselves felt. Salt water intrusion is one delicious and invisible (thus not news worthy) effect of rising oceans and melting ice caps. The pressure from seawater along the Atlantic Coast is forcing saltwater into the porous rock that separates the south Florida Aquifer, the water supply of five million people including the Keys (Me! Again!!) which means we could all soon be stuck drinking seawater which will kill us or drive us out long before the state officially drowns. 

 But take heart, your favorite vacation destination isn't the worst hit place in the US. Tornadoes killed dozens of people recently in the Mid West. Tornadoes spawned by hurricanes wreak havoc but  because we have evacuation procedures ahead of the storm you don't tend to see many human deaths from hurricanes. California forest fires killed 130 people last year I believe and the state's response is to require the utility company to shut off electricity to communities when fire risk is high. Just like that: they will pull the plug to prevent arc-ing wires starting more wildfires in the future. What struck me about that piece of news is how hard Keys Energy works to keep the lights on right up to the last minute before the storms hit the Keys.

Oh and then there's flooding. I've seen the pictures of swollen muddy rivers all over the middle of the country with communities under water, homes cut off and farm animals drowning piteously as river waters rise. Yet the notion that Florida will be the first state to go under water is the image that seems to persist in the minds of people who think hurricanes are the worst possible effect of the weather. Villages on Alaska's tundra are being rebuilt inland to avoid the encroaching Bering Sea, seasons are haywire in the Far North yet Florida and hurricanes seem to grip the popular imagination.

How will you cope they ask breathlessly, with hurricanes? Rather as though they are asking how the village will fend off Frankenstein's Monster - an impossible task for peasants with pitchforks. I've lived through far too many storms to feel complacent about their ability to cause destruction. I saw plenty of that most recently in Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017. Yet I appreciate the fact that rebuilding in the Keys has been steady and effective for the most part.  The Panhandle has been and still is devastated while Puerto Rico is a mess that is off the news radar by now. Hurricanes are annoying but in the aftermath one doesn't freeze to death, nor is the destruction as comprehensive as that caused by a wildfire.

But the notion that hurricanes are proof that Florida residents are reckless is a story line that persists. And these days Congress is reluctant to spend emergency relief funds to help rebuild. Communities around Pensacola wrecked by Hurricane Maria aren't getting emergency federal help. That's scary. I fear for our future if we get hit again, and we will, if the Feds aren't going to be there to help recovery efforts. 

Insurance rates are high for Florida real estate and that's because insurance companies know how to figure out actuarial tables.  They know the odds are against them and we will suffer more damage and so they charge money in proportion to expected losses.  I rent and have no desire to own quite frankly. The stress of worrying about your home is awful, and I've been through that. Fixing up your home after a storm is a nightmare if you have to hire help because there is none and permits and red tape are headaches you just don't need when standing knee deep in rubble.

This year owing to my injuries and my long term sick status I am working dispatch part time. So if we do have an evacuation order I will leave with wife and dog for the first time in 15 years. However hurricane season peaks in September by which time I hope I will be restored to 100 percent healthy so I am not getting my hopes up that I will in fact evacuate. My wife the teacher evacuates the minute the schools are ordered closed for the emergency and she takes Rusty with her. We reserve a hotel room in Fort Myers as soon as a hurricane is on the horizon and she drives there as soon as she is released from work.

 If the storm veers or dissipates she drives  six hours back home, if not she heads north to safety. This plan works very well as most people dicker around and evacuate at the last minute which causes traffic jams and fuel shortages. Before Hurricane Irma she and Rusty were snug in Pensacola with a friend  well before South Florida highways turned into fuel- free parking lots. 

I suppose in the end every place on Earth is subject to the whims of Nature and all we humans can do is select which way we'd prefer to be destroyed. Earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, floods, landslides, volcanoes... you name it, this country has it. The best part about a hurricane strike is that when its all over and one is picking up the pieces of one's life you look around and this is where you live, under a deep blue sky and a bright yellow sun surrounded by turquoise waters. As you wander around surveying the wreckage, the inner consolation is a mantra that goes "It could be worse, it could be threatening to snow now." That works for me as I would rather be eaten by mosquitoes than be cold.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami is forecasting the usual vaguely disturbing prediction of worse than normal storm activity this year, whatever that means.

NOAA's outlook for the 2019 Atlantic Hurricane Season indicates that a near-normal season has the highest chance of occurring (40%), followed by equal chances (30%) of an above-normal season and a below-normal season. See NOAA definitions of above-, near-, and below-normal seasons. The Atlantic hurricane region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico.

The 2019 outlook calls for a 70% probability for each of the following ranges of activity:

• 9-15 Named Storms
• 4-8 Hurricanes
• 2-4 Major Hurricanes
• Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) range of 65%-140% of the median

The seasonal activity is expected to fall within these ranges in 70% of seasons with similar climate conditions and uncertainties to those expected this year. These ranges do not represent the total possible ranges of activity seen in past similar years. These expected ranges are centered on the 1981-2010 seasonal averages of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes. Most of the predicted activity is likely to occur during the peak months (August-October, ASO) of the hurricane season.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1st through November 30th. This outlook will be updated in early August to coincide with the onset of the peak months of the hurricane season.

Hurricane Irma aftermath:

Mangrove Dawn At Home

After a weekend away Rusty was delighted to be home as was I.

 Pictures without words. None needed today.

Briny Breezes

Briny Breezes is a tiny beach town in southern Palm Beach County and when I say tiny its just a few blocks square and much of it is a giant mobile home park in the old fashioned style, a last piece of affordable housing:

The only reason I know Briny Breezes exists is because I have a friend who bought a little house there. Denise is a native Floridian whom I have known since 1981 when I first came to the Sunshine State and saw Key West. Her home is what she craves in her nostalgia bank remembering old Florida: 

Denise stayed behind when my wife and I went to see Haitian Art in NOrth Miami an hour south as she didn't want to ride Memorial weekend traffic. As it turned out the traffic on I-95  was  quite light and we flew.  However when you look at how isolated and laid back Briny Breezes is on its little barrier island you can see why it might be hard to get motivated to travel.

Rusty and I walked around the town quite a bit in our two full days at the beach house across from the trailer park that constitutes most of the town:

 The trailers with hurricane shutters up are most likely winter residents' homes:

 Lots of prohibitions around here:

 This is the waterfront but the beach areas are closed to dogs and the fenced area is reserved for local residents:

I noticed later I caught his dog in the act which was unfortunate as I had my choice of  dog walkers studiously ignoring each other walking everywhere:

Rusty was none too certain about the pottery lions. He recognizes shapes and he was cautious around these unknowns:

 Salt air plantings:

 The coast road is already in the neighboring town of Ocean Ridge:

 Ocean access (but no parking to make it difficult to use):

 And this could be construed as scooter country too:

State Road A1A which runs down the barrier islands of the east coast where Federal Highway One is a four lane highway on the mainland. The speed limit here is usually around 35 mph and it is considered a scenic route.

 Memorial weekend it turns out was  banner weekend for people in spandex pedaling velocipedes:

The bicycles approached with a weird whirring sound like a hive of angry hornets and Rusty was fascinated:

It got silly with the streams of middle aged people wrapped like Christmas presents heads down legs spinning like mad:

My kind of silly people:

 Hunched and determined it didn't look much like fun:

 This is better:

 This is best of all:

 Old Florida Architecture:

 Sandy back roads like Florida used to be:

 The colors of Fall:

And a huge new development coming up next to Denise's house much to her dismay:

Rusty made himself at home sprawling on the lawn enjoying the grass and sunbathing: