Flooded Nature

The story is that twice a year the sun and the moon align and pull the tides strongly together. This effect is known as creating "King" tides. Boaters are used to the phenomenon of high high tides twice a lunar cycle, "spring tides" and low low tides known as "neap" tides. King Tides come but twice a year and this year seem reluctant to depart.

So for me to go take a relaxing after work walk with my dog, or to go wander off into the wilderness on an afternoon off is becoming a problem. Everywhere is under water.

I brought Rusty to the very end of Sugarloaf Key to walk a disused back road that sits higher slightly than the surrounding waters.

It was not at all above water so we wandered up the main road a little to see what we could see (and photograph). Winter cyclists are back it seems.

There were some birds in the branches of the trees killed by Hurricane Irma.

And debris floating in the flood making pretty reflections:

A butterfly, the hardest  creature to photograph.

The trail we came  to walk wasn't very appealing to Rusty and I was so confident it would be dry I was reluctant t walk in wet shoes and socks.

There was plenty of water flowing:

I keep hoping this elevated tide nonsense will shrink back to normal. Still waiting on the remaining narrow slivers of dry land.

No Loitering

The usual hot sunny morning in Old Town Key West with an hour to burn waiting for my wife's lunch break so i found myself looking for boats and water and sunshine scenery and landed instead in the middle of a Busy Place. People picking up mail...

...and dropping off mail. The air conditioned van looked good even though the docks in the marina were swept by a strong east wind which kept things bearable.

 I saw a beach dinghy forlorn and abandoned sitting by itself at the entrance to the Bight marinas. That's Turtle Kraals in the background. 

On the other side we find the Half Shell famous for oysters and fish and yet that was not enough to entice them to dive straight in. They paused and pondered their options. I would have said check Off the Hook round the corner but it was none of my business.

A man after my own heart taking his ease all by himself checking out the boats, the breeze, the turquoise waters. 

 And as he sat a couple came by just as tarpon came swimming into view. She lost her mind flapping around like she was on the set  of Jaws and she did like to draw attention to herself. 

 The cause of the disturbance which I photographed a few yards away after the fish lost interest in being stared at:

For everyone else life continued as normal, charter boats waiting for clients who wanted to go fishing (tarpon are catch and release game fish in case you were worried). Housekeeping under the sun:

I was having fun looking for a little irony to inject into my unplanned, unsupervised break: 

Requiem for a Dinghy I thought to myself as the pigeon flew away and the procession hove into view:

They were actually hauling it carefully out to the mother ship to put it back into service, neither dead not abandoned.

The sign offered no caveats for loitering even with a  camera so I took myself off for lunch before the police came and busted me. 

The Hot Sauce Of Life

To mark my sixty second birthday, the day I am at last eligible for a  social security pension, three years from being eligible for Medicare,  I thought I would ponder some words of wisdom. My friend Bruce in Arizona (below, when he lived on a boat in Key West),  turned me on to a blog by a man in Philadelphia called Don Springer, who writes Tales of the Streets and illustrates it with his black and white pictures of street photography from his hometown. 

All I know about Springer is what he writes about in his periodic essays, his time in Vietnam, his tremors that require him to use a stabilized camera (technology! Yay!)and the lessons he gives to street photographers. His discussions about photography are grounded in common sense and decency which I find thoroughly refreshing especially after I came across the usual crowd of nasty navel gazing poseurs on of all things photography forums -DPR leads the pack for cruel vociferous gear heads with nary a photo between them. Springer by contrast posts his pictures and discusses the meaning of life much as one might around a coffee shop table. Very refreshing. Check it out even if photography means nothing to you:

Tales of the Streets, The Hot Sauce Of Photography

After my accident last year I was determined to get back on my scooter and ride again and that I have done. However larger issues loomed and my life has  taken a turn in a  new direction. Motorcycling all my life has been a solitary pursuit, and for fifty years I have ridden alone all over the place. However my future is charted in a direction that at the moment doe snot allow for solo travel. Were my wife the stay at home type that would be one thing but she wants to be involved in all the risk taking and excessive travel I have mapped out for us. And in light of this can do attitude a motorcycle is not going to be the vehicle of choice. Not with a sidecar, not with a tent trailer, not as a solo ride. It will be a van to accommodate the three of us in comfort because we are old and grumpy and don't like to sleep on the ground. 

However this fine plan has cut me adrift from my solo riding hobby a bit. With limited time off I am bound to be more inclined to travel together in the van than take off by myself on the Burgman. We will have two years to get the van just right for the off and when I'm not working overtime to pay for it we will be testing it in various configurations and locations to simulate where we plan to travel and camp as we go. So I need some other hobby to occupy my fertile mind. I used to enjoy taking photographs in the days of film but terrible automated processing combined with high expense and too many shoeboxes filled with useless prints pushed me away from recording my life in pictures. I don't have many left from those days in mid 1980s when I wasn't quite 30. I always did like night work. I cleaned movie theaters for a while to get free tickets in the age before videos.

  

I used to go out at night with my Minolta and take pictures much as I do now of Key West, fighting the cold on the foggy California streets on my way home. Photography only came back into my life when I reluctantly bought an Android phone to replace  a outdated flip phone.  That phone soon taught me the fun of taking and sending pictures as electronic postcards. And the phone slowly convinced me to get a camera even as digital picture quality improved and put the last nail in the coffin of popular film photography. Nowadays I very much appreciate the ease of taking and seeing pictures instantly while storing them in Google's cloud and enjoying them whenever I want. Plus I get to select some of them to post online at Instagram Flickr Facebook and here as well of course. Once you have the equipment photography costs nothing and as I have discovered there is a ton to learn about digital picture taking that wasn't  a possibility with film. Despite the obsessions of "serious  photographers" telephone photography isn't all bad; my wife took this  phone picture on my last visit to Santa Cruz about five years ago:

When Springer talks about photography as hot sauce all he means is that you spice your photography and thus your life  the ways that tastes good for you. And life without hot sauce, whatever that may be for you, is flavorless and flat. It's really quite simple yet we all of us find it so hard to live like we understand this simple principle. The way he puts it  males me embarrassed to have had such difficulty with my hot sauce:

Do your thing and find your vision and don’t get sidetracked by the the so called negative energy users. You will never make too many photos and you’ll never have too much time to do it.

Enjoy your hot sauce my friends

Simple right? Well, that's my project I guess in my sixties. I have heard people talking about it being too late at a certain point but  I am more convinced than ever that it's the breath that counts...as long as you are breathing it's not too late. Time there for to mix  up a fresh batch of hot sauce. Happy Birthday To Me.

Afternoon Sunlight

My sister offered to use her surplus airline miles to buy my wife and I tickets to visit her in post-Brexit Britain next Spring. She lives in Scotland and is an ardent separatist wishing an independent Scotland were back in the European Union for her children's futures. She is living through tough times as farming subsidies vanish and practices sustained by the EU are withdrawn and her neighbors find their backs to the wall as the markets for their products are in a state of total uncertainty. Yet she found time to figure out with my wife how we can get back for a visit next Spring Break. I look forward to it.

My own future is filled with certain uncertainty and where I look forward to that my sisters, all three of them, live lives of measured certainty. I  was always the wanderer which leads me to conclude there is a great deal of nature in us overriding the nurture. But that is an argument I leave to geneticists to sort out; I have a life to live.  For the first time in twelve years of posting on this page I find myself running into a mental block as i thresh out my situation in my own mind while trying to maintain an outward even keel on the page.

My relationship to Key West is changing even though my feelings for this town, and my very generous employer haven't changed. For a nomad like me to find myself able to describe Key West as home is a special thing, and as much as I struggled to think of Santa Cruz as home during my decades in California, the relationship never jelled for me. I grew up there and became an adult even though I arrived in town at age 23 and was properly an adult in body if not in attitude when I left Europe for the last time as a resident. I know my feelings for Key West will evolve into the most nauseating nostalgia after we take off until we eventually return to the reality of this place and a cabin in the sun in a grossly overpriced marina. And then the complaints about Key West's shortcomings will resume. It's what you do when you live here.

I suffer also from a slightly obsessive personality, producing a daily blog for a dozen years hints at that condition, so now my mind is focused on the future. My wife is pondering living options in the van we are staring to design which will be built in the Spring while I am contemplating maps and routes and distances and costs and photos. Too much of my life has slipped by the era of film and I have few photos of my life in the 20th century. I was born as the first human built satellite circled the Earth and i grew up in a world promising technological wonders always  "...by the year 2000." That landmark came and went and sure we have astonishing technology but not the flying cars and body transplants they promised when I was a child. I'll happily take the Internet and satellite communications in the meantime, thanks.

Digital photography has become my blessing and my curse. I cannot see an immediate future on two wheels. If I were single and dog free I would take off on a motorcycle to see the world but as I am encumbered with two sidekicks a motorcycle even with sidecar is not going to work. And let's be honest, the comfort of a van and a home on wheels wherein I can close out the world has its appeal. My friend Webb who loves an ascetic life in a small sailboat acknowledges he could make a comfortable home in a  box on wheels equipped as it will be with kitchen toilet shower (after a fashion) and heat and cold. To him 72 square feet of living is luxurious but for most people living in a shoe box would be a severe inconvenience. For me now a motorcycle is surplus.

That is where I can now focus my intensity: digital photography is difficult to master I have discovered and nowadays the technology is superb and free! The modern digital camera has outpaced me. If you look at early entries in this blog when I conceived the idea of documenting this wondrous happy place I had landed in you can see I had some good photography ideas in between the cliches but the machinery i held in my hands, an HEC smartphone was sorely lacking. Especially as I had no idea how to bend digital photography to my will.

I am attempting to remedy those deficiencies by taking on a course of photographic learning with all the intensity I applied to learning to ride a motorcycle in my teenage years when the only tools I had were magazines and books and trial and error. I have one ankle that still aches occasionally from the time I dropped my motorcycle on it when practicing a slow turn I read about in a magazine interview on how to ride better!

I ride my scooter to work and I find, much to my surprise I feel no fear after my spectacular wreck a year ago. I am extremely cautious around distracted drivers or people pulling out of side streets but riding still gives me pleasure. However I am really focussed on my desire to have an interest in something that I can enjoy with my immediate family on the road. Photography will have the added benefit of moving the story of my life forward in a creative way I hope and leave behind a few mementoes for my distant family members who want to remember the black sheep of the family who left them for the New World. Jack London isn't in it!

So I have undertaken to teach myself photography and the blessings of Youtube make this possible along with my preferred written word form of communication. I expect I shall have to get involved in video at some point, my wife thinks the future is something I should come to grips with even as I struggle to adapt to the digital present...Carrying a camera is a solitary pursuit but I can look around even when I am not alone and I enjoy the process of learning to  notice what previously was only seen.

I have taken to reading Internet forums on photography and I find the participants as cruel and nasty and opinionated as participants on any other specialized forum. This however is not 2010 anymore and with a decade's experience under our belts we recognize and avoid people "vexatious to the spirit." Easily done, though I have to say I was naively quite surprised to find rabid people posting on a forum ona subject as pacific as photography. Webb tells me sailors do the same thing and god knows I've seen them discussing motorcycles tearing each other to shreds. I ain't got no time for that.

So I try to find the knowledge I seek and the opinions I might try to trust elsewhere. I have not much interest in gear as I like my modest undervalued fixed lense camera. I like the pictures I get from my Panasonic FZ1000  and it comes complete with image stabilization and total manual control as I want it and a zoom lense that isn't great all the way but it goes a long way out and produces decent pictures in  a package that fits in my hand just about (!) and cost me $360 lightly used on e-bay. I think the camera has been on the market for five years and it has only recently been updated slightly for improved video recording. The original version is sold brand new for six hundred dollars. In the same way I want to travel by banal two wheel drive van where more driven people want to rock hop in their four wheel drive homes, I plan to keep the photographic recording department simple with my Panasonic and a smaller Panasonic camera for back up in case of failure. I have my eye on an almost pocketable camera  for unobtrusive street photography and as it has a wide aperture it could be handy in low light situations. At this stage I am reluctant to go all National Geographic with piles of lenses and big heavy cameras and bush jackets and all that stuff. I don't really like using a  tripod much as I find it cumbersome and modern image stabilization is astonishing.

Of course there are proponents of photography who only use Canon or Nikon or Sony equipment and others who only use tripods and others who...blah blah blah. I just hope to get through this adventure with some decent pictures to post here and and on Instagram. Those and some words and perhaps the occasional video will I hope tell the story and make a proper electronic diary for me to look back on when I am in an armchair in a nursing home a surprisingly few years from now. Unless I fall to a violent death failing to negotiate Bolivia's Highway of Death in the meantime.

And one final note on this work in progress, I am leaning away from my previous title for this page after I got some grief not least from Webb for thinking a homage to Steinbeck might be in order with Travels with Rusty. Especially as, upon mature reflection Rusty's time is finite and he may not outlive the blog title. I wanted it to be snappy so my current tentative title which I came up with after searching Domain Names on GoDaddy is just that, and impersonal says Webb. For the price of $12 I bought ArmchairTrekker.com which if you type it into your browser will land you back on this page. Webb still doesn't fancy this name but I  like it as it's easy to remember it expresses my desire for a rugged journey undertaken in some comfort and it will make it easy for people we meet along the way to connect online. Conchscooter.blogpsot.com is a bit of a mouthful and let's be honest "conshscooter"  is the common mispronunciation and it has the same effect on me as nails on a blackboard. The cool thing about that name given to me on a motorcycle forum fifteen years ago is when someone says they know Key West and they can't pronounce "Conch" you know them for the poseurs they are. 

Yeah and I'm never going to fall in love with wild chickens either. Give me a nice quiet clean well behaved native Ibis any day.

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: