Miami

Today was supposed to be the day we flew to London to start a ten day tour of the British Isles, my wife and I.  Two weeks ago the doctor told her she can't travel as she has a messed up immune system making her susceptible to the coronavirus. Bummer.

I suggested I go alone, a notion that merited the stink eye I got for that suggestion so we had to plan a staycation and wait out the panic that has infected the planet. the doctor was pretty blunt and the idea that we might either get sick with my wife having a chance of serious complications or both of us being quarantined indefinitely somewhere unpleasant seemed not ideal for a Spring Break vacation.

 While I must  confess to some irritation I get to spend time at home and perhaps i shall test the waters of the canal and see if it is vaguely swimming warm. There are chores to be done, friends to have round for dinner and books to be read on the deck. I have plumbed he literary depths deep enough that I have a few books made of paper that need reading owing to their nonavailability on Kindle. Say what?! The next ten days stretch out in front of me with the prospect of nowhere to be and not much to do, unless Herself dreams up some obligations.

In that vein while she bought fruit to bring home, and a muffin, Rusty and I walked the woods behind the Norman Brothers Produce a mandatory stop when visiting the rheumatologist. Behind the shop there is an open space,a former orchard and Rusty settled down to sniff one small corner so I wandered with my iPhone and looked for patches of light.

I must confess I don't really understand the Coronavirus thing very well.  If one isn't in an at risk group the threat seems no worse than any other flu. I know tons of people who positively refuse to take the annual vaccine and now there is no vaccine available they are all freaked out. Call me muddled but people baffle me.

In consideration of the fact our trip involved a complex jigsaw of five flights to connect me with my family it seemed likely our paths would cross with a traveler or three infected with some virus so the doctor nixed the whole plan.

I had  been hoping to get together with my sister and pay a visit to our ancestral roots, recently discovered in Ireland, a country I have somehow never visited. It turns out my grandfather was Irish so it seemed high time to correct my travel deficiency. The coronavirus said otherwise and the voyage of exploration to County Wicklow will have to wait.

Rusty doesn't mind though he will miss out on being spoiled by his favorite uncle who was already planning elaborate menus to help keep his morale up while I was away. Oh well we all have to suffer through this period of plague.

The sooner this thing dies down the better. The prospect of growing old gets worse and worse as these weird problems crop up in the era of the Internet. Now we know everything all the time and we don't seem to be using the information very well.

Occam's Virus

When I understood that the United States has no means of testing a community for the presence of the coronavirus I pretty much gave up on tracking anything. Statistics are meaningless in a situation where you can't produce reliable numbers. A colleague got back from a short vacation in New Jersey and he reckons he is fine because New Jersey isn't a hot bed of coronavirus. I guess not if we assume the virus can be counted by the number of people officially registered as carrying the virus. What if they are asymptomatic? Then what? No one knows. 

Oh but they do and they propagate nonsense against the backdrop of a town that is thriving under the weight of Spring Break. Were you in Key West today you would see a city that is as far from a world pandemic as any I could think of, and that is to say the situation here is absolutely normal. Movies live theaters music bars restaurants are all open and selling just like they always do. In a city packed with elderly millionaires I find this slightly disconcerting but I am on the sidelines unwilling to rain on anyone's parade.

It reminds me of the Key West of old, the Key West that kept its face painted as AIDS killed people by the hundreds, which is to say the "gay plague" killed people by the hundreds and the government fiddled and hemmed and hawed and got embarrassed by the term "anal sex." Nowadays our leaders are even more squeamish and are squirming at the mention of "coronavirus testing." In the face of all this nonsense I am reverting to my novel and turning my back on all the advice and the discussions and the statistics that mean nothing. No one knows. What I do know is how to wash my hands, how to greet people without touching them and where to walk my dog to be by myself. And I know how to wait until this passes.

It's going to be a long slow process. I'll bet you've heard this one: The Coronavirus was sold by Canada to China as a bio-weapon and the Chinese lost control of it. It is a wildly bizarre conspiracy theory riddled with racism and misinformation and stupidity but it does illustrate how Occam's Razor is an approach that should be adopted more widely in daily conversation. Simply put Occam posited that of any number of theories the most likely is probably the truth to pursue if it is the most easily tested. For instance: Either Canada sold China the virus OR the Chinese ate wild animal parts that were asymptomatic carriers of a common flu virus with extraordinary properties to harm humans. You choose. Which theory seems more likely? I think I know which one William of Occam would have selected.

Occam was a medieval English friar and if my explanation is inadequate here from Wikipedia is his very valuable theory of how you walk gingerly along any theoretical fine line as though on the blade of a razor blade. I read it more than once with an eye on how to deduce the meaning for myself:

Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models. In the scientific method Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.

Aside from the disputed origin of this wretched virus we now face a future of increasingly bizarre theories and wild speculation and fluctuating stock markets and financial uncertainty and unpaid medical bills and on and on. The Navy is preparing to set up a quarantine tent at the hospital to help cope with the expected influx of cases. However the tent isn't up yet. No need, obviously. A part of all our minds leads us to hope that this thing is going to go away, and I am among those.  Yup, it's too warm down here for the virus to survive. Or my history of 'flu vaccines will protect me. Whatever.

I suggested to a friend that I was glad to be in the Keys for this crisis and I got a weird look. From my perspective Keys  residents, at least some of them, have experience in self sufficiency after hurricanes. They are no strangers to the notion that stocking up with food and water (and that Northern bugaboo: toilet paper)  in preparation for a period of no help. We've done it before, more than once and we can do it again. Unfortunately this also produces a rather cavalier attitude as they forget the actual disease itself. I wouldn't mind 14 days at home one neighbor said loudly, unless you can't breathe on your own I interjected. And you end up in a  quarantine tent at the hospital with inadequate staffing. They paused. In Italy I added they are putting patients on ventilators face down as even with breathing machines they can't catch a breath on their backs. Silence. Drowning is no great way to die in my opinion and to do it in a  hospital bed must just suck.

I don't ever want to be on a  respirator again thanks. I could go through the rest of my life quite happily without seeing the inside of Intensive Care again for that matter. I remember with perfect clarity how they pulled the tube out of my throat after the operation when they finally got me breathing on my own again. Even the possibility that coronavirus could lead to this again does nothing for my equanimity. To hear people dismiss Covid-19 as just another 'flu, by now, boggles my mind.

                     

I'm not mingling with crowds as we struggle to live ordinary lives, I try not to touch people at work, we buy food to go to eat with friends, our much anticipated vacation in Europe is cancelled (Rusty would be delighted if he only knew). I'm not given to panic or exaggeration but caution seems the best way forward. The biggest obstacle to peace of mind for me is the lack of reliable information and the sense that no one seems to know what we are doing. 

If this virus is as bad as they say it is why are we not doing the obvious? Why is it awful in Italy and Iran and not here? The scientists say give it time and the politicians say ignore the scientists.  I feel as though I live in a  madhouse. Actually we all do live in a  madhouse, it's just that the veneer is off and the lunacy of how we live is completely exposed.

Is it better to anticipate the worst and prepare for it, or assume the best and prepare for that? Or a combination of both inasmuch as we  hope for the best and prepare for the worst?  I wonder what William of Occam would be doing about now? Buying hand sanitizer probably and shaking his head at how obtuse we all are.

Holding Pattern

Walking around Key West or driving the Lower Keys you would see nothing much out of place or abnormal. Indeed there are a few signs about washing your hands to keep the virus at bay but restaurants are operating as normal, hotels seems to have guests sustained I am sure by this very active Spring Break and visitors are visiting by car plane and cruise ship. No change seems to be the order of the day.

I listen to people around me and there is no sense of panic or even fear. I heard one person talking about coronavirus as though it is merely a different form of flu and he would never get vaccinated anyway. At the gym yesterday morning a  young woman in class allowed that she is taking an Airborne multi vitamin every day as a precaution. However she also spoke breezily about her  forthcoming vacation taking in total ten different flights. I think I started at her much as one might stare at  a mammal creeping toward extinction right in front of one's eyes. I know of one other Millennial anxiously planning relocation flights to the West Coast more anxious about abandoning this dreary little backwater than pondering the wisdom of setting up in a city like Los Angeles not necessarily where I would want to be friendless in a pandemic. 

These reflections force me to wonder what am I thinking? I happened across the President's speech closing down flights from Europe, leaving open one giant barn door in that you can still hop on a plane in Britain and fly to the US. Ad, despite Brexit for the rest of this year there is free movement between Europe and the UK. So am I an alarmist to wonder if my fellow Americans are being on the whole too casual about this or am I a Cassandra, a prophet doomed not to be believed were I to speak up about the grim possibilities?

My family in Italy is confined to home, able to maintain their farm but not to operate their bed and breakfast and restaurant. They exchange anguished messages about their confinement in Central Italy where the virus has a more modest foothold. They are afraid and they have heard about younger people, not just eighty year olds ending up on ventilators unable to breathe.

My childhood friend the doctor,a  cardiologist for thirty years writing me a brief note expressing his profound dismay. They might as well have dropped an atomic bomb on us he wrote. Everyday life has ground to a halt, the city has fallen silent, he doesn't know how they will climb out of the combined mess of disease,death and lack of economic activity.

In Britain my other sister lives on her farm in the far north away from population centers and watches and wonders. The British government is spending money it doesn't have creating the biggest budget in it's history to cope with the shortfall of economic activity. I read this stuff and I listen to my neighbors and I wonder what anyone is supposed to think.

The nearest thing I can relate this time to is the feeling I get waiting for a particularly brutish and nasty hurricane to land. I have hung around for every storm since 2004 and every time I hear people spout nonsense, like they have a feeling that this will be a "bad one" they mutter darkly. Or they trace possible tracks predictions put out by every weather agency on Earth. Then I hear people say "I wish it would get here and get it over" and I find myself shying away. I never want the storm to hurry up, I like the wholeness of my life before everything gets torn up by impossibly powerful winds and large storm surges. I'd like the storm to make me wait a very long time before landing and upending my life.

The people in charge in this country promise things will get much worse before they get better so as I look at a map of coronavirus cases in the US I wonder what the fuss is about. However when I look across the ocean at the other countries already dealing with this thing there is nothing casual about their attitude toward this flu.  Should we take our lead from the Chancellor of Germany? 

So far there are no cases reported in Monroe County though one traveler has been reported, as of Thursday evening, as testing positive in Dade county to the north of us. I heard rumors early yesterday that there was a coronavirus case in the hospital in Key West, but as usual the rumor seemed to be generated by those conspiracy rumors that insist that the authorities are trying to pull one over on us. I don't think anyone is served by those weird mental rationalizations. we will get our first case in the fullness of time.

I also read a suggestion that perhaps the virus can't survive an 80 degree ambient air temperature therefore we in the Keys are safe! Yay! Maybe not....Someone mentioned to me that perhaps we who have been vaccinated against the 'flu over a period of years may have unwittingly absorbed some vaccine that might prove effective at holding off the coronavirus. Someone else pointed out that sanitizer and scented wipes don't kill viruses. I wash my hands and sing "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" anyway. Might as well sound as idiotic as I feel. As magical incantations go "Old MacDonald" doesn't seem too bad to me.

For now we keep on keeping on and I dare say that is what we will continue to do whether or not there is a coronavirus in the offing, whether or not it is a super flu, whether or not the health hurricane will land and soon. Meanwhile I am enjoying walking Rusty, who is I am told immune to the virus. Lucky him because he's also immune to the rumor and innuendo and promises of catastrophe to come. 

Planes And Vans And Boats

In working out the plans for our van conversion the owner of the company told us he used to travel all over the country with his family in various homes on wheels. These days he flies. With an airplane of course but still the notion of being able to make an eight hour car trip in less than two hours has a certain allure.

It happened many years ago that I was let loose upon the United States after my marriage failed. I was young and impossible to live with, I the new immigrant, and my friends were of my wife's side of the marriage and I was alone and at a loose end. I went through a  period of experimentation that ended up on a boat for many years to come. I learned to dive at Monastery beach near Carmel, and loathed the cold dark waters of the Pacific Ocean. I remember dropping down one hundred feet under water and landing on a sandy beach in a green shaded light and standing there like an astronaut in a  cold dry suit wondering what the hell was I doing?  I had imagined weightless flight under water but all it ended up being was a breathy struggle to see while floating around in a  pea soup fresh from the coldest corner of a refrigerator. I loathed diving in California with all the complex apparatus of regulators and tubes while calculating time allowed down followed by a  drearily slow ascent and getting tangled in kelp and feeling like a clown in a  clown suit immersed in freezing salty water. Our instructors talked dreamily of tropical diving in Mexico and the Caribbean. We got certified in a miasma of cold vegetable soup in ridiculously deep waters. I got my PADI certificate and looked for more comfortable ways to die. I wore my diving suit liner like one piece pajamas to keep warm during California winters on my boat.

Hang gliding was becoming fashionable so I though what the hell. No woman will ever love me again so I might as well dangle over the long sand dunes at Marina on the shores of Monterey Bay. The thing about hang gliding is you need a cliff to jump off of, and a strong breeze to catch and hold your wing above as you soar like an eagle. Exhilarating stuff. I suppose it might have been that had things been different but Marina is a hang gliding center because the cold sea breeze blows strong and steady off the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean where I had frozen while diving. I thus froze while standing huddled on the sand absorbing the rudiments of dangling suspended in the air. From there we started the practical part of the course which required holding onto a cross bar under a piece of triangular cloth while running down a steep sand dune then pushing the bar forward which created lift and much to the surprise of the runner you were flung suddenly into the air.

The day I actually took flight I nearly came undone. The sand dune dropped away suddenly and I finally pushed the cross bar at the correct angle and instead of nose diving into cold sand or rising suddenly like a stalled elevator I rose into the air like the long sought after eagle I aspired to be. I looked down some thirty feet at very small people staring up at me with the same wonderment with which I stared down at them. I was very high up with no visible means of support and I nearly pee'd on the unfortunate spectators below as I struggled to stay composed under my hang glider.  The ocean was approaching rapidly and we had been instructed to hit land not water else the wing would turn into a death trap as it sank over our heads and cut off the oxygen we needed to stay alive we intrepid aeronauts. Looking back with the wisdom of age I suspect the instructors had fewer worries about us drowning than they might have had about getting cold and wet themselves retrieving our expensive gear from the ocean waters. Nevertheless I paused only briefly in mid air and then pulled the crossbar back to came swooping down to land, running like a cartoon roadrunner as my feet hit the sand whereupon I forgot to push the bar forward to activate the brakes and  tripped spectacularly to take a face plant in the sand. 

I decided hang gliding was interesting but not for me. Not least was the problem I faced fair and square: what do you do when you are up in the air? I watched hang gliders hovering over the cliffs up and down the California coast looking like caterpillars caught in a cobweb doing nothing but meditate in their sleeping bags holding their position in the freezing winds doing all day what insects do who stay hovering in the air with one millionth the brain power of an average human being. I saw no reason to hang around in the sky like that, I want to do to go to see and a hang glider is a very poor means of transport. I figured I needed some other thing. 

I had always wanted to learn to sail ever since Arthur Ransome captivated me as a twelve year old with his delightfully illustrated novels about young people sailing, Swallows and Amazons.  It is a bit of  stretch to transpose learning to sail in Santa Cruz California to learning to sail and fight off pirates on a picturesque English lake but the novels of my youth were never far from my mind as I navigated Monterey Bay, bought a boat and made it my home. After seeking our adventure and looking for a way out of a lonely divorce I settled on sailing and a life in a marina as the best possible world. I messed around in boats for years to come.

Thus when we made the decision, my wife and I to retire in motion the question of a boat came up. In favor was familiarity, the pleasure of sailing in tropical waters and landing in exotic islands and coastlines and being able to anchor offshore in one's own little world. Against that we foresaw a miserable life for Rusty who is a land dog, and a certain separation from places we wanted to visit in inland areas. Besides we also want  a new type of adventure. So we looked at land cruisers.

The funny thing was that the man who is overseeing the building of our van has himself moved from vehicles to airplanes, reveling in his Comanche single-engined plane capable of 200 miles an hour and flying him to weekend destinations as far away as New Orleans in a couple of hours from his North Florida home. He showed me pictures of a luxurious air conditioned and heated interior, four seats and  l parked five minutes from home. In my head as I stared in fascination at this exotic world so far from my own I saw myself hovering over the sand dunes of Monterey Bay as ungainly as a blimp, or finding my solace in a movable home and here is the master of movable home builders seeking perfection in air and space and speed. We humans are unaccountable. 

Standing on Simonton Beach pondering my forthcoming life as a nomad I looked out over the harbor and saw a figure striding across the deck of his boat. He took up the pose and I knew what was coming next...

Going...going...

Gone! Morning ablutions.Not a thing so easy to accomplish in a  van i thought to myself enjoying the morning sun illuminating the water and the boat and the greenery on Christmas Tree Island.

Later I saw the boat slipping out of Key West answerable to no one and free to go in any direction, wind tide and fuel supply permitting.  Dragging a  dinghy like that I doubt the high seas are his target but a watcher on the seawall can have his fantasies can't he?

My van is my future, I turn my back on the ocean. No more night watches, no more wet bottoms getting ashore, no more endless walks to accomplish the simplest of chores, no more going a shore at all hours to get the dog walked. Van life? Piece of cake.

Boca Chica Bridge

My wife is confined mostly to the house by the Coronavirus currently wrecking economies around the world. Which was why I had time on my hands the other night before I was supposed to attend a concert at the Tennessee Williams Center on the College campus.

 I drove from work to Publix, picked up a  sandwich at the grocery and drove to Highway One between Key Haven and Boca Chica. I drive past this stop a million times a month  into and out of Key West but as I am going somewhere I never take the time to stop so I figured a visit was overdue and as I had time before the program was scheduled to begin at 7:30 pm (Daylight Savings Time = Daylight!) I stopped on the shoulder to eat my sandwich and plot my photography.

My wife suffers from rheumatism and the treatment weakens her immune system to the point it is an irritation at worst but her doctor got very stern with her and said she is to avoid crowds, airplanes and movie theaters for the duration as the 'flu virus could do her serious harm. It was  a pity as she had decided that this time she wanted to attend a classical music concert with me and instead she encouraged me to go by myself.

 I can't see the value of creating the sort of panic that has wrecked stock markets interrupted trade and sent people frenetically shopping for the sort of supplies prepper nutters usually crave. Most of us with normal immune systems face the prospect of a fever every year and so many of us refuse to be vaccinated, why I don't know. All this herd madness means people like my wife who, lacking a vaccination are at risk, can't buy sanitizer or wipes thanks to the stupidity of the uninformed and unintelligent. People baffle me.

It's an ill wind that blows no one any good so I took advantage of being utterly alone and untrammeled by obligation to go out and look at a cloudy sky and a dying day that normally I would be obliged to drive past. 

 I don't know about you but the light and dark and shades entranced me.

And there was a frigate bird overhead which was interesting as I discovered later as one of the music pieces in the program told the tale of Key West and  a frigate and a hurricane were all involved in inspiring John Gottsch's Sunset which was played for the first time ever by the South Florida Symphony. I thoroughly enjoyed it much to my surprise. I am not a fan of modern atonal compositions but Sunset was lively and had all the elements I prefer in a  piece of music: a story and structure a melody and a certain effervescence. You can't hear it yet because it is going to be recorded about now and published eventually I suppose.

The boats anchored in Boca Chica Bay were getting bounced around a bit by the 30 mph northeasterly gusts:

 But fortunately the generally shallow waters in the Keys keep wave action to a minimum:

 I say fortunately unless you happen to be a surfer..

Back at the bridge I girded my loins to take the underpass back to the north side of the highway where I had left my car. This is the footbridge alongside the highway looking east toward the Boca Chica Navy Base.

 These two bridges are the underside of the four lanes of US 1 running overhead.

And this is the underpass, a solid construction used by (sensible) cyclists and pedestrians. There is a Class 1 shoulder bicycle path separate from the highway on the north shoulder.

They use solid bags of cement wetted down and dropped in place to create barriers to support the soil under the bridge embankments. They make a nice pattern.

The medical helicopter returning to the hospital. I am quite fond of Trauma Star after they flew me to  Miami. I was actually fond of them before but I am more grateful to them now I suppose. Else I'd be dead. And no charge to me as I am a resident of Monroe County. Sweet deal.

 Ready for the evening's program celebrating Beethoven's 250th.