Light And Shadow

I keep photographing the Southernmost Peace and Prayer Church on Fleming Street and it keeps yielding new perspectives.

A stranger walking by asked where Rusty might be and I had to admit he was at home as I was  between appointments and he was better off not being in town on a  hot day. 

Halloween beckons in the garden behind the library:

In the front of the library I met Gordon taking a rest. He was quite tickled by the idea....

....he might be sleeping with his own chicken. I like seeing people enjoying uncomplicated life in Key West.

Smiley roof face or frowning?

I didn't want to know how much this Elizabeth Street house might be selling for.

It may technically be Fall but there is still plenty of bright sunlight on the metal roofs of Key West.

I enjoy bright sunlight and the shadows produced even though most photographers are not fond of bright sunlight. 

By the time I got to Duval Street sunlight was catching the barest edge of La Concha the tallest building in town. My photograph reproduced on Instagram garnered the comment that it is also pretty ugly. I like the symmetry and the imposing bulk:

Peace Fantasy For Rent.       Perfect!

Stained glass reflections taken during a pause inside St Paul's:

And one more shot of shadows and light slanted across the side of a house:

The Perfect Anchorage

When I was living and traveling on a  sailboat I liked to explore coastlines which makes me a pilot not a navigator. Webb Chiles describes himself as pelagic inasmuch as he enjoys the open oceans while I am  contented to poke around coastlines. However a funny thing would happen every time we found the world's best anchorage and it happened to me and my wife and may have happened to the dogs too for all I know, though they couldn't communicate with us on that level. 

Inevitably we would pull the boat into the world's best refuge, away from pacific rollers crashing on land, far from noise and light pollution, close to a lovely beach and an easy dinghy landing and we would settle in to our new found paradise. And then aft a  day or two or a week or some unspecified amount of time my wife and I would look at each other and say quite firmly: "It's time to go." The anchorage had worn itself out in our minds. 

It may have been because the novelty had worn off and exposed the fatal flaws in what had seemed perfect or it may just be that we were in nomad mode and eager to keep traveling. Whatever the reason, when the time came to get moving we knew when we were ready. If we left before the feeling enveloped us we would leave with regrets and in some anchorages the feeling of relief and pleasure at being in the anchorage was fleeting because we weren't really enjoying what was on offer. Some refuges are just that and are not places of paradise where  a weary coastal sailor wants to put down roots..

It has become obvious to me this nomad instinct is alive and well even when I am not technically traveling. Of course one is traveling through life and time is fleeting and all those panic-inducing feelings. However while I have been traveling through time I have not been traveling through space. I have taken trips, small journeys here and there, but my home has been Key West and I have not been a nomad. This anchorage has after two decades worn itself out.

I remember pounding down the coast of Nicaragua in the Spring of 1999 blissfully unaware of the war in Kosovo and the US intervention which I heard about later. I was busy trying to figure where we might stop to let the dogs ashore as we tried to navigate the long featureless coast from El Salvador to the southernmost coastal village in Nicaragua, more precisely known as San Juan del Sur (St John of the South). We saw no suitable anchorages, no patches of flat water with easy beach access to let the dogs ashore, so we pressed on overnight and arrived in the dark in the open roadstead off the curving semi circle of yellow sandy beach that makes San Juan a vacationers' paradise ( that word again!). It was pitch black and we edged our Gemini catamaran into the bay getting confidence from the chart that showed no submerged obstacles, though spotting the unlit fishing boats at anchor was a trial.

Eventually after nudging our way in we reached flat water and I dropped the dinghy into the water. with outboard attached I got the dogs in and we went ashore where I found a massive cement launch ramp that made beaching the dinghy easy. I walked the dogs around the harbor, their first walk since Puerto Corinto 36 hours previously, and stayed inside the fence to avoid irritating authorities with whom we had yet to check in. At 2 in the morning there was no one in the office anyway but I'm sure we had been spotted unofficially so we stayed in the harbor limits. The dogs were happy to walk and soon we were tucked up asleep on board secure in the knowledge we had arrived and the anchor wasn't dragging in the calm conditions in the harbor. 

We stayed in San Juan for several weeks where we met an American expatriate businessman who ran a hotel and with whom we are friends to this day. But the day came when the day trips to see the sights, the long walks in the woods, the zip line tours, the sumptuous meals in the hotel overlooking the bay, the long drunken conversation's in Marie's Bar all faded away. We looked at each other and we knew It Was Time. A few days later we were pulling into the perfect, completely protected anchorage offered by Bahia Santa Elena in Costa Rica. There were wild mangoes ashore, parklike forest walks for the dogs, seclusion and solitude. We could stay there forever! Well, not exactly...

Key West was the perfect anchorage. We never intended to stay as we put the anchor down because we had to, as money had run out and we needed to find jobs. Our intention was to return to Santa Cruz California and figure out a way to pick up where we had left off two years before. Then life intervened and my wife's arthritis responded well to the warm humid climate of the tropics, work fell in our laps and  my wife's long held ambition to enjoy a pension in old age came true in Key West when she got a job as a teacher with the promise of a funded retirement. 

Paradise found no doubt about it.  Even at the turn of the century Key West was rated poorly by people who come to live here twenty years before, as they saw gentrification  over taking the city and ruining the come-as-you-are attitude of the city. For us Key West was as close an environment as we could find on the East Coast that resembled life in our pleasant little California town that we had enjoyed previously. So we put down our anchor and settled in for the log haul. My wife the native Californian was quite startled to suddenly find herself holding a Florida driver license but she could use her hands freely and that made up for a lot.

Now as we start planning retirement on the road we realise living in Florida and having that retirement in  tax free state means we will save a lot of money and effort driving around in a Florida registered van. With pensions from the state we won't have to prove we have a right to claim residence in this desirable retirement haven! California by contrast makes even Key West look affordable by comparison. 

Beyond all those dreary but necessary financial considerations which are propelled by my wife's good sense and not my pie-in-the-sky dreaming the fact is we both gave each other the look a couple of years ago and agreed the anchorage has grown stale.  At first we tried to rationalize it y thinking we could travel part time, then we figured we could do a snowbird retirement and spend summers in California among friends, or in Europe among family or something. Then reality set in and we knew we needed one more adventure before we die.

One thing that bugged me to death on our sail through Central America was my wife's vagabonding history such that everywhere we went she had been before. Indeed planning to drive South America she has visited half the continent already...but there are a few laces I have been where she hasn't and a few more where neither of us has journeyed before. They are now on the agenda. With the Promaster van scheduled to be delivered sometime around March the pressure is on the figure the design details we want for the interior. By next summer we hope to spend vacation time breaking in the engine, transmission and interior appointments on a road trip. Then we will know we have done this right. 

The fact remains the anchorage is constricting us right now. I wonder if  a boat in Key West might be suitable after Rusty goes to his reward, but right now I want to take full advantage of being here because who knows what the future might bring. The past couple of years have shown beyond a shadow of doubt the future is not written and nothing can be known in advance. I might not be pelagic on the water but I have no idea even now how far offshore my van meanderings might take me if one thinks of this speck of land as home and everywhere else out there as distant oceans. 

Rusty of course has no idea what he is in for but I hope and expect the broad horizons will appeal to the wild dog adventurer that burns in his domesticated heart. This will be his journey as much as ours, though he shows no sign of being bored by his current snug anchorage.

tOPSY tURVY

Not what you expect to see when you stop off at Miami Subs for lunch during a long day of answering calls for service at the police department next door. The odd thing was the ghoul with poor dental hygiene was  in the restaurant for the same reason I was. Fantasy Fest requires fuel whether you are the sinner or the sinned against, or in my case a bystander helping tamp  down the excesses.

He was one of eight people including visitors from Miami who not only wore real costumes but together formed a barber's shop octet. At least that was what they sounded like when they burst into song.  

 The fantasy fest lunch started with me sliding into my table across from my wife who arrived before me and ordered lunch as she the teacher was off on Saturday and I the dispatcher was making money on overtime at work with a limited lunch break. I was not best pleased when the freaks ext door leaned over and asked my wife if they could sing her a song...and then the nightingales came forth full throated and as sweet as could be. Color me astonished and my wife delighted. The best moment of Fantasy Fest, hands down, totally unexpected and perfect.

2019  will not go down in my memory as the best year for the annual street carnival one way and another. I just did not gel with event and found myself spectating in the wrong places at the wrong time. The Locals March on Friday night started in a  downpour and I was not  in the mood to wait it out after twelve hours answering the police radio. The weather is hot and sticky and frankly I am ready for a proper cold front after an exceptionally long sticky summer. Climate change may be a fiction or not human caused or whatever the latest line of denial may be but it looks pretty real in a place where tides won't go  down and heat won't go away and hurricanes are ripping things apart everywhere they go. Rant Over; but it's hot enough at the moment to destroy the will to live.  

So as I wandered Duval Street looking for costumes I didn't come across much on Friday. Perhaps they were reserving their splendor for the Masquerade March as the locals' parade is known, now that it isn't populated solely by local residents having some non-tourist fun. On Duval I watched people walk up an down and it was not that interesting. I looked at feet for a while wondering about a thread online I'd seen asking for photographs of footwear on the street. Sounds weird but they had an interesting variety. I didn't.

 Do I sound like a tired old grouch if I say almost bare breasts in public this week are overrated?  I am not interested in getting into a costume myself but I always hope for fantasy, variety, wit and maybe a statement about local politics or issues delivered with humor and good cheer. Instead I get women of all ages who think wit is airing their chests. Perhaps it is in a society as repressed and fearful as this one on this subject, so check out the reaction to these two women embracing a stranger who wanted a different picture for his vacation album:

I can only imagine what a French tourist would think of it all. I saw women topless on French beaches forty years ago when I was in a better frame of mind to appreciate them. On viewing some of my past Fantasy Fest pictures my Italian nephews, farmers by trade, were quite interested in Key West suddenly. I had to give them a reality check about the other 51 weeks of the year. This town is not the Bohemian retreat it once was.

This crowd of costumed revelers were on break between runs cleaning up the streets, maintaining the trash cans and barricades and keeping Duval Street bearable. They were pretty cheerful considering the heat and their physical labor. Which is just as well as their work is indispensable on a crowded street with lots of trash generated.

For me the routine continued through the week. I had managed to snag a lot of overtime thanks to my colleagues' indifference so my routine proceeded mostly unaltered. Rusty is a wonder dog of course with a  few limitations. Heat and crowds don't do much for him so I usually take him for a walk around 4 in the morning before I gird my loins for work which starts at 6. It is always a relief to spend time with Rusty  away from the politics and stressors of work. 

I have been contemplating the fact that after this Fantasy Fest I will only have to work through two more if plans go according to ... plan. The idea is to leave town well before Fantasy Fest 2022 and with my luck that will probably be the best and coolest and most fun carnival of them all. 

Oh and among those delightfully fully dressed troubadours at the beginning of these pictures there was one who called out to me by name. Even looking at him I failed to recognize Joe (and his girlfriend Destiny). Some paint, a wig and a smile and you are someone completely different. One day I shall try it when I am tired of being myself.

Of all the people I saw in public these two cheered me up the most.  Proper costumes:

It's  all in the name of commerce in the end and one supposes the money changed hands and in the end one hopes everyone went home as happy as they could. At the police department the hundred or so officers from our department and support from around the state get a day of rest but the work goes on filing reports about lost stuff, stolen stuff and fractured relationships  and alcohol fueled misunderstandings and poor parking and all the social debris that gets left behind after a blow out party. 

Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears

That old Fiddler on the roof got a few things right: swiftly fly the years indeed. Some years you want them to fly in a hurry, others not so much. Or if you are  a dog you wait on the couch for the boss to get home.

Water Lines

The brown stripes on the road mark the limits of the high tide. That's how high the King tides wash over the roadway.  Interesting for Rusty with all those smells annoying if you dive and don't want salt water spraying up under your car. 

Those red dots which I illuminated with my camera flash, mark the end of Blimp Road which ends in a launch ramp for boats.  They put the reflectors in the roadway because more than one person has driven off the road. Most notably last year a tourist spent the night in her car after she drove off the end of the road afraid that if she got out of the car she would drown. That the water was only two feet  deep and she was one car length from the ramp never occurred to her  and she spent a wet night in her car afraid she was going to die. They found her in the morning and gallantly walked her up the ramp to safety.

Blimp Road has a thirty mile per hour speed limit for its entire two mile length which runs dead due north for its two mile length so you'd think there would be time to slow down and come a stop before hitting the water. Most people do manage it.  

Blimp Road is lovely at night.  The flats on either side are wide open and the breeze blows across the road just enough to keep the mosquitoes away. When there is a moon it's unearthly with moonlight reflecting off the salt ponds on either side of the road. 

And there's a reason they call it Blimp Road.  They fly Fat Albert from a pad behind locked gates at the end of the road, and from high in the air the blimp looks for smugglers coming across the Straits of Florida. Standing by the launch ramp you can hear the almost silent hum of its stabilizing engines  high in the sky at the end of it's rope.

Visible from miles away at all hours. After dark it carries flashing red lights:

The flat waters north of Cudjoe Key all the way out to an island on the horizon which looks heavily wooded but most likely is  a tangle of mangroves with little or no dry land at all. Not dog walking country then.

We have had a long dreary wet summer and autumn is going the same way with sudden storms and rain here and there. Beautiful to look at though: