The Sharpie Van

I got a call at work from the owner of a business that has been closed and it seems someone had warned the caller that the Sharpie Van had been parked in front of his place for a couple of days. I put in a  call for an officer as one is obliged to do but this is a small town and five minutes conversation with Dan the Artist would disabuse most people of the notion that he is a burglar in an easily identifiable vehicle that stands out even in a city filled with bizarre conveyances.

Previously posted on this page as Dan The Artist from June 2016. There is no denying he is different, an eccentric non conformist hold out who came to key West in September 2015 and seems never to have left. On the contrary he is now apparently moving into self expression in technicolor:

I cannot conceive of myself driving around in a vehicle marked for observation like this one, but by extension though my own van may be a plain gold shade does not make me any more a burglar than the distinctive Sharpie Van. Non conformity is a vanishing commodity in the Southernmost City.

I was surprised to find a sticker by the man recently arrested for defacing property with his four letter graffito, CYNE. Social media was his downfall as he posted a bit too much and in the end got caught. Southernmost arrested was where he ended up.

I take photographs and leave no trace of my passing and lately I have been forced to look closely to find things to catch my eye in the stasis of a citywide lock down. This little peach I found screwed to a fence near the Tropic Cinema. Two views:

Step forward and the picture suddenly looks like this. Holy hologram!

I was pretty much by myself so I had time to stop and ponder the weirdness some people surround themselves with.

Gratuitous Rusty picture sitting in the grass near the courthouse. He isn't actually annoyed, it's just how he looks:

Getting Around

During the height of the lock down in Key West the people one might come across were few and far between certainly, but they also belonged to one of two categories, occasionally both at once.

One group, the dog walkers, are easily identified when one is walking Rusty, who stops stares and points with his nose when another dog is anywhere in the vicinity. The other group of people wandering apparently at random are cyclists. Some are going somewhere and others are meandering through a life not terribly compromised by the coronavirus.

The stationary nature of life I have documented with piles of leaves but for some bicycles life was frozen by the lock down and they find themselves deflating at a bike rack, frozen in time.

 Key West; the city where garden ornaments must be padlocked in place or be lost:

Mornings on a skateboard on Duval Street. I wondered, after the second time I saw him planted in the same spot if he were waiting for Juliette. Perhaps she was texting him such was his close attention to the screen.

In my misbegotten youth I recall driving a number of balky vehicles that had trouble starting and often found it difficult to keep going. Thus when I saw the coconut Jeep's electrical clips  ready for use I felt a stab of sympathy and nostalgia. 

I never drove vehicles as decrepit and picturesque as this but an elderly VW van can be just as difficult to keep functioning on the road. Looking back I have no idea where I found the nerve to tour among Mexico 's undisciplined traffic with that fragile machine or to lose myself in the deserts of Southern California with no cell phone or outside contact to send help should I break down terminally. That I am still alive is a tribute to luck more than good sense.

I wonder if I shall look back ever on this coronavirus period with anything other than irritation and revulsion.

No Visitors

I am grateful there is a checkpoint keeping people out of the Keys because I get lots of calls at work asking if the Keys are open. I don't know the specifics because that's not my job, I answer administrative calls to the police department and 911 calls on a separate line; I send help. I am not expected to know the schedule for city fireworks or the state of the highway in Monroe County or the height of the tides. No one keeps dispatchers up to date with information. Indeed Monroe County has an emergency information line and that's where I refer most callers as I wait for the next call for actual help. I do know the Keys are closed, you can refer to Facebook if you can stand the vitriol or Google or the link above if you need confirmation.

Our neighbors to the north are ready, judging by the questions, to come to pay the Keys a visit whenever they can. County and city officials are tussling with the answer to that thorny question and I don't envy them. Meanwhile Monroe County and the City have decided that next week businesses can start re-opening for people in the Keys.  The specifics are on official websites but roughly speaking businesses should stay at 25% of capacity and everyone has to be six feet apart. I await with curiosity how that is going to look. I don't think my life will change as I have no desire to be the guinea pig in the coronavirus laboratory of recovery. 

We live in a weird crossfire of health and economy, in a country where economic support for people is minimal yet where the lock down requirements are such that the economy is shut down entirely. In Europe it is politically much easier to lock citizens at home when the government freezes all payment activity plus pays people a stipend to keep them fed while stuck at home. That sort of support is nowhere to be seen in our kleptocracy where corporations and people of influence are so used to making off with the wealth that very little bleeds over to the working people.  and there they are stuck at home unable apparently to fly for unemployment and frequently not receiving their twelve hundred bucks, money supposed to sustain family through this crisis.

Key West sells an image and a reputation and a well deserved belief that Key West can deliver the escapist fantasies of people who don't live the "tropical lifestyle." Right now we have bugger all to sell of anything so opening up businesses in a slow limited fashion has to be done if there is anything to be opened at all in the future. Unemployment benefits will be denied we are told if people refuse t return to their jobs which, for people with compromised immune systems susceptible to the virus will pose an interesting dilemma.  the modern city of key West sells a fake past consisting of pirates and wild behavior sharply at odds with reality and even more sharply at odds with current behavior.

Pirates would not have trembled before a coronavirus and I don't think history records them being put off by the deadly yellow fever or even the threat of hanging. Modern piracy is couched in rather more life affirming language in modern America and all too often they call us from distant heavily accented countries to advise us our internet security has been compromised and unless we pay a ransom our lives will be destroyed. Some people believe these pirates and pay up, most of us have learned to pull up the drawbridge and laugh them off. For example most recently I heard they are offering for sale one day passes for non residents to enter the Keys. A while back modern pirates offered fake entry stickers for sale in Miami requiring the checkpoints to abandon reentry stickers and to demand to see local identification before allowing people to enter the Keys.

I doubt my wife and I will be going out to gatherings or sitting in restaurants like we used to in the good old days. She will teach from home the rest of this year and I work in a locked building where sanitary practices are scrupulously enforced. Why hang out in a  crowd after doing all that? some people think this lock down will have a lasting effect on habits but my experience is that for the most part things go back to normal after a societal shock. It may take time and voting by mail and increased deliveries may become a new part of the social fabric but people have always hung out in bars for reasons other than paying through the nose for alcohol. Those social reasons have not changed and bars I'm sure will flourish once again.

I enjoy the absence of traffic, the silence on the streets, the clean water in my canal when I go swimming, I like to see how the animals take up our space in the public place. I view those as positive changes, albeit temporary. I wonder how jaundiced our view of this crisis will be in retrospect. Once we get a vaccine and this death threat is truly put to bed (I hope) will we look back and say the shut down was worth it? Who knows.

I see gaps all over the supermarket still with odd items missing from the shelves.We are told meat may soon  be in short supply and the President is ordering meat cutters back to work. How weird is that? These are strange times when low paid immigrant workers  who are too sick to work by their own account are not only being asked to work they are being forced to work. My wife is learning to make delicious bean and lentil dishes in her Food Pot. Just in time I dare say for us to become involuntary vegetarians.

I can stand on a busy city street and see no one and hear nothing and take the time to compose a picture that stands no chance of being interrupted by a  passer by. The occasional walker or cyclist stays far away as though I had the plague. As indeed I may. The Keys are closed and are not expected to open before June. Meanwhile even as the checkpoints stay in place they ask us to help kick start our economy again with visitors. I have not come this far in this brave new world of no clear information, absent leadership, politics as usual, scientists sidelined to sit down in a. restaurant with a room full of likely carriers. To reopen the economy on a wing and a prayer seems to fit the bill of this world we live in where no one knows anything and we each make our own choices.  May we all, elected officials or members of the mob, make the right choices. I for one haven't a clue what they should be. 

Gratuitous Rusty picture.

Rain

I have some pictures taken before the rainstorm this week. Clouds piled up overhead as Rusty and I headed to a nearby trail. The air was heavy and humid, I was cranking the air conditioning in the car.

Feels like summer I thought to myself. That's the time of year when sudden rain falls out of the sky and drenches anything underneath it. A short while later the rain stops and the sun comes out and steam rises everywhere and your glasses get frosty.  It felt like that when Rusty and I hit the trail.

My wife came here recently and was accosted by passing cyclists and not feeling like diving in the bushes to stay socially distant she decided that in the time of plague a narrow trail is too narrow for someone with a compromised immune system. Indeed, Rusty and I got strafed by a considerate but silent cyclist on our visit. The corornavirus is pushing people who have zero curiosity in normal times to stretch their boundaries and find lonely places to exercise. Very good for them no doubt but I am not used to sharing featureless mangrove trails with strangers. 

The trail was powdery  dry reminding me of a summer path in California where dust and dead grass line the trails.

Leaves are falling everywhere as though it were Fall in New England.

My pursuit of Edward Weston is hopeless nut a close up of a palm frond is my substitute for a cabbage. If the corornavirus lock down lasts long enough I shall be forced to photograph household objects in pursuit of Art. I hope that day never comes.

I like the outdoors.

Eventually we drove home, Rusty panting and me wondering how to justify another roll of digital pictures on this web page. And then summer arrived in the Keys. 

Lots of lovely cold wet rain. Everything perked up. Even me as I knew it would pass soon enough, but not so soon that my car didn't look shiny and dust free for a modest twenty four hours. All things shall pass be they drought or virus.

Surveillance

I think I may have mentioned how dependent I am become on my place of work for relief as the tedium of coronavirus restrictions press down upon us. The fact is I used to have a network of public toilets around Key West to which I can turn  in a moment of need. Since everything closed I have been forced to forgo my morning cup of tea as Rusty and I approach our walking destination of the day. A first world deprivation I know but a big Tervis tumbler of Yorkshire Gold sweetened and milky starts the day right and unlike coffee does not give one the hollow stomach feeling that requires calories to fill. It does however leave an old man feeling certain urgent needs a half hour later that only a public restroom can relieve without running the risk of behaving badly in public.

With that preamble out of the way it will become readily apparent why I was loitering at my workplace the other morning engaging in socially distant communication with a couple of colleagues. Normally I never go near the police station when I am off duty. Casual workday? asked one fully uniformed police officer seeing me in the hall at the police station disreputably shuffling near the men's toilets dressed in shorts and colorful shirt with my hairy accomplice shambling self importantly at my heels. No I said and we fell into conversation.

The changes wrought by the coronavirus were high on the topic of conversation and I asked abut the rumored city employee furloughs. I was told a majority of city commissioners voted against laying anyone off as the city budget is solid for the rest of the fiscal year and in a time of much financial desperation having families working and earning seems no bad thing. I puzzled out loud as I often do how we have no firefighters or police in the hospital with symptoms and one has to suppose we are lucky. Some police departments have massive sickness issues in big cities Up North.

There is some speculation that a round of illness early in the year may have been coronavirus and not 'flu as was believed at the time. I'm not convinced but it seems possible there must be some sort of immunity at play in the Keys, but from what I cannot imagine. Perhaps the heat and humidity helps defeat the spread? We read of hundreds of thousands infected, hospitals overwhelmed and all sorts of nasty symptoms Up North. We wear our masks, stay apart and continue on as normal, sort of, as though the Keys are somehow exempt.  I really shouldn't think about looking a gift horse in the mouth but I do wonder why it is. I hope that simply asking the question doesn't bring down the virus upon our heads with a vengeance.

I remarked on the overtime cut backs which will leave us with only two dispatchers in the room from time to time. Call volume is down a lot compared to normal times, so I expect I will be able to cope with the changes, and I hope callers with non emergencies will be patient when things go wrong for some other people as they always do from time to time and who need priority help. But it is odd when you think about how many fewer crashes there are now in Key West. Drunk driving reports are replaced by lots of requests to monitor Covid 19 compliance from citizen spotters. These new community needs in the time of pandemic make me wonder how emotional a return to "normal" might become. We are so attuned in the Keys to the common good, to herding us all through this pandemic, that I wonder what will happen to my neighbors when they are pushed back to the world of looking out for self from which we all came before the virus forced us to look out for each other.

So much has changed in so many subtle ways and of course some not so subtle, that it is hard to remember a time when things were different. If I watch a handshake on television I shudder involuntarily and my wife says she is never going to shake another hand again even when this is all over. I watch people drinking in bars on the little screen and I am reminded that those scenes are from a previous existence. You stay at home, you drink at home you go to bed without being pulled over to do field sobriety checks. Perhaps good behavior may become the norm? What happens to the bar economy then?

In a country where government support for citizens is negligible compared to other first world nations of wealth I am amazed by how well ordinary people have restrained themselves even as our leaders move to open the country back up. I am not looking forward to a return to crappy driving, public drunkenness and the tedium of bad behavior. And yet when it comes back I shall try to remind myself how odd it was living through this weird twilight zone of massively altered collective behavior and how insane sanity seemed at this time.

A car pulled over  last night as I was on my socially distant evening walk on a  lonely stretch of road. Rusty dives for the bushes when cars come by, a relic of his days as an unwanted abused stray, and the driver asked me what I was doing. He surprised me at first as walking by yourself seems very normal now and I do it far from neighborhoods specifically to be alone. I showed him my camera and my pictures. Yes I said no one else seems to find mangroves photogenic but I love the leaves and flowers and shadows and light. Anyone who has read this page has had their fill of my pleasure in the backwoods and mangroves and flat puddles and puffy clouds and absurd sunsets.  

I could not for the life of me understand why the driver of the car cared but eventually his concern penetrated my enthusiasm for the wilderness of the sunshine state. He thought I was gathering photographic evidence of youngsters, not related to him by a  million miles I am sure, who like to drive up and down the back roads at speeds roughly approximating the speed limit or possibly slightly over - I have no training nor skill to judge.

His fear saddened me because it has been proven justified these days in the formerly laid back Keys. Not because of my actions but because all too many people would bother themselves to mess with innocent kids letting off steam, just as I used to ride 50 years ago. I have no interest in snitching on anyone minding their own business anywhere. But we live in a  world where all too often the passerby feels an obligation to not mind their own business. I try to live my life as if my mother were alive and watching and I don't always succeed so I too can end up behaving badly. But these days everyone has a monitoring system to find out what everyone else is doing all the damned time and the simple act of photographing a wild flower in a public place becomes a revolutionary act of subversion. Clearly I do not fit into this brave new world. I hope it will leave me alone long enough to end my days in peace until I will finally get to step off and mind my own business in darkness for eternity. Let the nosey bastards monitor my grave for I shall give them nothing to ponder except perhaps an epitaph. And a few pointless pictures.

White and Black

Walking White Street and seduced by the shoes and shadows. If you want color pictures return tomorrow to this page. today's untrammeled offering is a play of light and shadow as Rusty and I walked around White Street between Truman and the Pier.

This looked like a bunch of neighborhood kids passing the time of lock down playing in the street as once was common. At least in my youth it was normal to wander around away from home.

I prefer walking to cycling as being on a bicycle puts you in the flow of traffic whereas using your feet gives you time and opportunity to stroll and look especially when Rusty gets interested in something. 

I enjoy the light in the Keys which produces hard shadows and lots of silhouettes. 

One is taught to appreciate soft ambiguous light, the golden hour twice a day as the sun nears the horizon with the blue hour a close second after or before the sun appears and everything gets that cold tint.

I like the harsh sunlight of midday in the keys, especially when combined with a breeze to unfit my glasses as I walk.

These bushy sidewalks along Flagler Avenue near White Street create tunnels of light especially when I turn off the color image. Some photographers like to shoot in color and remove the colors in the computer later. I enjoy the act of photography more than I do fiddling with computer settings so I try to see in black and white and if it looks good I take the picture directly.

During the lockdown I have found myself pushed to think more and more in abstract terms, of shade and shape and indeed colors too as tomorrow will reveal on this page as did yesterday.

I was trying to explain the abstract nature of shadows and objects and a socially distant stranger wandering in his own exercise hour called me an artist which was a bit weird. I am just a wanderer with a camera.

Rusty exhibits how own leash tolerant patience when the mood strikes me to try and spot the sun through. bush. In the back country he wanders around me at will, running forward and falling back but on the streets in the middle of a grocery run he has to pause alongside.

I'm not sure what will change if the leaders move forward with opening up the state. I don't think the Keys will open anytime soon and I know I'm not going to rush back into a normal life until I see what is really going on. I find I have lost confidence in what I used to think of as daily life. I fear that may be the worst coronavirus legacy for those of us who live through this epidemic physically unscathed.