Ocala National Forest

You don't have to immerse yourself in Nature to find beauty outdoors and while I cannot say this is anywhere near as immersive as Ansel Adams' Snake River photo of international renown it was a pleasant interlude in a longish drive when Rusty reminded me we wer ein no excessive hurry. I spotted the land cleared for construction and we went for a romp just before the next shower dumped on us.

I don't suppose most Americans have much idea what the difference is between National Parks, Bureau of Land Management land and National Forests but they are distinct entities offering a mixture of recreation and land exploitation by businesses to varying degrees. I'm writing in broad terms here as my interest is in the concept of dispersed camping. Actually  the southernmost National Forest in the US is El Yunque in Puerto Rico a place I have visited briefly but the one I have wanted to explore in greater depth is Ocala National Forest, the southernmost on the mainland US. It's 400,000 acres of rolling sand covered in pine forests where hunting and fishing and camping and off roading are the activities permitted on a large scale. To camp here in summer is not to everyone's taste but we got the quietest most socially distant  Fourth of July in living memory.

To do the forest correctly you should be under 30, with a Shenandoah beard tattoos and a four wheel drive truck filled with stuff. When you see a couple of old duffers pottering around their FedEx delivery van putting out mosquito repellent devices you should wave casually as you bounce past at 50 miles per hour, your lean hunting dog in the bed, tongue flying as you leap to your next destination. I had hoped to find the spot looking out over Hopkins' Prairie unoccupied but I guess that was too much to hope for so I we tried a secondary route about which my wife had some reservations. The van is just under ten feet tall and I can tell you there are leafy branches considerably lower than that on many of the narrow trails. My impetuous descent required a slow considered reverse back to the main road.  Sod it. There's room here to be off the side roads and the wooded view is pretty much the same everywhere. We settled in.

Rusty and I took off on foot to check out the prairie  with my wife, suddenly reborn as an internet meteorologist advising imminent heavy rain. This was whee I wanted to park roughly but Rusty gave me the stink eye and hurried back up the sandy trail.

I liked the look of the prairie but I was alone in the Golden Van to hold that opinion.

Narrow dripping trails were more to Rusty's unaccountable taste and from time to time we found the spot where Hagrid had absent mindedly snapped a sapling or two. I wondered if it was some sort of traffic control measure in case anyone were riding a seven foot tall offroad quad bike or something. I saw them in several different places.

The recent rains had wiped out all traces of activity and it looked as though we were the only people in the forest, an illusion rapidly disabused when we rounded a corner and found a pickup parked in the bushes, a silent sentinel to what was I assumed a campsite approached from another trail. Far be it from me to wreck someone else's illusion of isolation so we investigated no further and never heard a peep from that direction.

There were lots of directions to explore and Rusty finally seemed to grasp the value of van life as he trotted on ahead, smelled the air and waited patiently for the photographer of the expedition to catch up floundering through loose sand.

We also discovered loose balls of  lichens lying all over the place like survivors of an epic moss ball fight. They were doing no harm and had been there long before I showed up full of curiosity so like the mysterious truck I left them in peace and moved on. 

Nothing like limp Spanish Moss to illustrate a damp afternoon. If you peel back the green cover you get a wiry black tendril that looks like a horses mane. That's why it's called horse hair when you stuff cushions or mattresses with it.

Something went horribly wrong and a few rays of sunshine broke through the cloud cover in violation of all protocols and weather forecasts and suddenly the forest lit up.

The sun lasted a nano second and as we trudged back to the van in the drizzle I wondered how Herself was coping with the dank conditions. She had never expressed any interest in the Ocala National Forest.

The Tampa RV show last January was pretty much a bore for us with our van already in the works at a custom shop, but the one thing we found that sucked us in, literally, was a vacuum cleaner.  And yes it sucks up dog hair like there's  famine. It turns out that when it's raining there is no reason not to suck up Rusty's DNA in his absence.

The air was humid and close which seemed like the perfect test of our anti-mosquito devices and for the entire 24 hours we spent here, doors and windows open all night  and all day neither of us got bitten and my wife is an insect magnet. The blue box is a Thermacell Radius repellent that uses a charged internal battery and a container of fluid which at fifty bucks seems like a deal. We also had a portable blue light zapper visible in the second picture below hanging in the back doors.

We also puta Hammacher Schlemmer personal repeller in the front window. Between the three of them the mosquitoes apparently didn't stand a chance. I assume they worked but its impossible to prove a negative. perhaps the bugs were taking the day off too. But for us it was cool enough to sleep with the van wide open and a fan plugged in and buzzing all night. Rusty loves the indoor/outdoor lifestyle and according to my insomniac wife he popped in and out as he pleased. In the Everglades he referred to sleep alongside me, here he didn't want to know me until the sun came up when I found a snout in my face inquiring urgently when was I going to get up.

With a thirty five gallon water tank and no need to run the air we living high on the hog but at first blush it isn't easy to adapt to new routines. My wife found she needed to relearn skills from life on a  sailboat, taking your time, staying organized and remembering where everything has its place. Despite a determined drive to help increase Jeff Bezos's unnaturally high net worth we still left home without a mirror, a crippling shortcoming in the shaving department, and I have yet to learn exactly which cubby hole holds what. This leaves me rather dependent on my wife and I find myself asking annoyingly where is this or that like a bored five year old on a wet afternoon. She is very patient with my shortcomings but it does inhibit me a bit form taking action if all is peaceful at that moment.

Within its limitations the overnight camp worked well. The weather as usual on my days off was execrable but the van did what was needed and did it well. For our part we lamented the enforced isolation as we do like to get out and seen human made stuff from time to time and for some reason getting used to the living space, all 72 square feet of it, takes up all available time. It's weird but I never did get to sit down with my book. 

Rusty finds the van very odd, full of swaying motion and loud noises and strangeness all round. However he is not just a creature of habit but he is smart and on the way back south he climbed on the bed which we left open for him and settled down to snooze by himself.  Changes of routine exhaust him but I am hoping he starts to see the van as  a source of interesting walks more than a source of weird noises.

I think I can say both humans see a solid future with this peculiar mode of travel and I am hoping Rusty will be on board too.  In a  couple of years I hope it will be unremarkable and normal. 

Going North For the Fourth

Last Saturday morning shortly after dawn this was the L5 Levee at the Rotenberger Wildlife Area. The musical accompaniment was the croaking of alligators seeking mates in the bullrushes. The noise they make is a deep short grunt, the sort of sound a bullfrog would make it if it were a ten foot long dinosaur looking for love. This was the start to a long weekend, by happy coincidence the Fourth of July, Independence by Van Day.

Friday night I got off work at 6:30 after a particularly trying day of fielding calls about holiday activities in Key West. People often seem to confuse police dispatchers with Chamber of Commerce help lines and I could have used Madame Zara's crystal ball last week as people called wanting advance warning of what daily changes might occur thanks to the coronavirus disaster currently sweeping Florida. Will the beaches be open this weekend? NO. Will they re-open by July 11Th? How the #$@! do I know? And in between the usual quota of people not being kind to each other. By 7pm we were in the van and on the road and I didn't have to be nice to strangers for three whole days. We stopped at a park in the Upper Keys where my wife used to nap on her way to see me in the hospital after her work in those dark days of our own hospital misery. She did the kitchen and I walked Rusty while some poor sod got a traffic ticket to the accompaniment of the usual flashing red and blue festival. Some days it feels like I just can't get away from work.

My goal for the night was a spot I had long since wanted to spend the night at when I finally got a van. It's nothing much more than a wide spot in a dirt road that leads deep into the Everglades, the place Marjorie Stoneman Douglas brought to America's attention with the name River of Grass. Most people think the Everglades look like a Hollywood swamp with cypress trees and dark lagoons covered in Spanish Moss. In real life it's a grassy prairie that floats on fresh water that it filters before it reaches the sea.

By ten thirty we had reached the gas station kitty corner to the Miccosukee Casino at the junction of Krome Avenue and Tamiami (Tampa-Miami) Trail. My wife was exhausted but I was on some weird high, perhaps a state of mind known as a second wind rather than some exalted altered state caused by driving a camper van. Rusty, who does have that skid row upbringing reverted to type and enjoyed the smells and the debris of a truck stop. My wife suggested, through drooping eyelids, stopping for the night. I said no, I know a better place which might have sound ominous to an eavesdropper but really did turn out to be a Good Idea.

The van passed its second big test that night. The first was ease of driving and it's really not bad to push down the road. A surprisingly high seating position reminds of driving an eighteen wheeler ( my lesser known career deviation) which makes it easier to see traffic patterns ahead, plus when you miss a turn, which of course I never do, the tight turning radius makes getting out of scrapes a lot simpler than backing up a 48 foot trailer. The second test was could the batteries power the air conditioning all night? South Floridians need to know if they are stupid enough to camp in the hottest June on record. Short answer? Yes. If you have 600 lithium amps and two alternators to fully charge them before you stop for the night. Keeping the air blowing full bore will kill the batteries in three or four hours but setting the air just a degree lower than the cabin temperature when you stop for the night (the dashboard air blows like the Trumpets at Jericho driving all heat and condensation before it) and the air will cycle for seven hours and leave juice in the battery bank. This discovery earned me my wife's admiration and the knowledge we can handle hot overnight spots on our own. The next day we have to drive or let the fridge run out of juice but that's why we're mobile. Without air and with our four solar panels we can operate all conveniences pretty much indefinitely it seems.

I got a bunch of pretty pictures on our walk that I shall post later on this blog page temporarily incorrectly titled "Key West Diary" but Rusty started to see the advantages of van life in a  world where things are new and fresh and cars appear every fifteen minutes and only because it's a weekend holiday. Outside hunting season this levee is open to dispersed camping Friday Saturday and Sunday and we didn't have a fishing pole between us.  Rusty sat in the grass and took it all in as the heat and humidity increased. I expect he had memories of being abandoned on the edge of the Everglades where he survived by his wits and avoided getting killed by humans and animals and lunch was cold raw iguana if he was lucky. His middle class manners are a veneer and I trust his wildlife skills far more than my own. If there were any alligators around he would have known. We did see two from the comfort of the van, one coming in at night appeared in our headlights on the dirt road. It reared up in surprise and scuttled off into the darkness, while in the morning on our way out a six footer basking in the grass slid quickly off into the water as I fumbled for my camera.

Our lunch stop up Highway 27  was in Sebring home of the race track, a pretty downtown and a whole bunch of lakes. We had all day to ourselves so my wife said drive around till we find some waterfront which eventually we did nestled among the lakeside mansions amid miles of neatly mown lawn. The park was home to Sebring's live theater, library and museum with pleasant lake views under a sweltering sun. A charming lady feeding bread to the ducks unmasked as though in normal times was the epitome of Sebring's inability to come to terms with coronavirus. I walked Rusty, my wife made chicken salad wraps and we stayed close inside in our own cool air far from crowds with nary a mask between them.

I found this sign hugely ironic as Rusty and I walked, me with a mask he without. "It's a social and lawful responsibility." Picking up dog shit is and I do it all the time. I don't park in handicapped spots because I am no longer handicapped. I wear a mask for the same reason to protect me and them, a social responsibility, yet in these communities loaded with elderly infirm we see less sense than the ability to pick up a dog egg. I was on a ventilator for less than a day, the worst experience of my life and I fear for these people who trust to luck and bad politically motivated advice to preserve them from the same fate.

I never had to dig for victory, or be in the first wave over the top, or be like my father in law a Jew who flew bombing raids over a country where even if he parachuted from a wrecked B-17 he knew he would be headed to a  concentration camp to starve to death. Now they ask we wear a mask. That is all, but we won't. 

Coronavirus has taken away so much of what we see as normal,  A walk along the waterfront enjoying Independence Day is impossible among crowds of people in a state where 10,000 people a day are reported to have added their names to the lists of  the infected. My wife has no immune system after decades of living with rheumatoid arthritis. If she gets infected she dies. Therefore our cheery neighbors say, she should stay home. Tough titties. She has, since the Ides of March, and now thanks to the Golden Van she can get out and stay away from people. Not every immune deficient American is so lucky and in our Brave New World the Facebook epidemiologists and eugenicists don't much care about the weak the feeble or the poor. If you are too weak to live too bad, the surviving race will be strengthened  and purified. However did we get here from the place this country used to be? Given time we will find our way back meanwhile we peons just have to do the best we can while Important People make us look like dolts.

The open road, which from the driver's seat looks like the usual north Florida scene of dips and peaks and orange groves and long straight lines of asphalt.  In this part of the world a hill fifty feet tall is a high lookout point and so different to the plains of South Florida. We stopped for gas, cooked in the van, slept in the van and pondered how much we missed traveling the old way, stopping and looking and talking and being carefree. First world problems no doubt.

My second long desired campsite was under the rain and cloudy skies covering the pine forests of the Ocala National Forest. Who needs four wheel drive? Not me but a  clearance height of less than ten feet would have been nice.

Felines

Rusty does not gather praise and love everywhere he goes. He does seem to put the backs up of some creatures who notice his passage. 

Walking Key West these days is a balance between seeing actual people or avoiding them and as Florida's virus count seems to be completely out of control I prefer isolation. Thus the shadowy abstract art...

And the view across the harbor from the end (the north, lower end) of Duval Street with Wisteria Island across the water. It's named for a ship which sank on the west side of the island, barely visible at low tide but to locals it's known as Christmas Tree Island for the Australian pines that grow there ( and not much else). 

You wouldn't know it but the picture below is the window of Keys Energy on Grinnell Street reflecting the elaborate facade of the Park and Ride parking garage across the street. I thought it looked more like a church or public building than a multi story parking structure.

For some reason it was cat day. I include these pictures as someone mentioned to me they thought that the number of stray cats in Key West has declined even as the number of wild chickens seems to have increased out of control. I'm not suggesting there is some sinister connection...well actually may be I am?

This lot around the Mel Fisher museum seems rather harmless.

The wild and over heated pariah dog who crosses the street when facing a wild chicken maybe knows something about the cats' fate that humans have yet to figure out.

Fleming Street Heat

People who sail modern recreational vehicles on the water  have inherited an ancient tradition of naming their boats and posting where they are from, a hailing port as it is rather quaintly known, so we decided to do the same thing to remember our time spent on Miki G, from Santa Cruz California. Tomasz at Key West sign took down the particulars of my wife's design and after three days called me in to do the deed. 

The name was suggested by Webb Chiles which took me aback as the original Gannet is a 24 foot ultralight sailboat which Webb sailed round the world on his sixth circumnavigation. We have some traveling to do to keep up with that fearsome reputation.

I have to say I was quite proud of myself as I managed to drive into town, negotiate the streets of Old Town, locate the back entrance to the store and back into it all without scratching the van, sideswiping a car, killing a cyclist or knocking the cell phone booster on a low hanging branch.   I don't know how long I can keep that up bt I doubt Gannet 2 will be seen too often in Key West, a place where all vehicles are fair game for scratches dings and broken mirrors.

It was a blistering hot day, I was on foot and as a precaution I had left the hound at home. I don't think Rusty was impressed by my act of kindness as for some unaccountable reason he loves to travel everywhere with me and   being left behind is not acceptable. Except it was the right thing to do.   

They tell us the "feels like" temperature (the only one that counts in my book) has been around 105 degrees which is much hotter and unbearable than is normal or acceptable. I wandered around Fleming Street while Tomasz worked his magic and as much as I like the colors of Key West...

....sometimes black and white is a better way to express my mood. I like summer heat in South Florida and I prefer humidity to dry itchy skin such as I get in the desert but this sort of temperature is off the charts hot. I suppose we should get used to it as the cycles of heat are supposed to get more frequent and more intense with the passage of time. There's a prospect.

I have lost track of the anti-climate change debate but I suppose there are some hardy souls out there who think wild weather and heat waves and hurricanes and winter storms are supposed to be this intense but for the rest of us who live at zero feet above sea level climate change has been brought home with a  jolt. The Army Corps of Engineers is doing a study to figure out what needs to be done to keep "flooding events" from inundating the Keys and their engineering expertise brought local politicians up to speed with reality according to the newspaper.

The bill to flood proof the Keys for the foreseeable, which gets to be an ever shorter timeline as the planet warms up, is going to amount to $3.8 billion dollars not all of it available from the Federal Government. That includes money to buy land and houses that cannot be saved and to raise others on stilts and build sea walls, King Canute style. Our local leaders in wisdom balked at that price tag but facts as has been noted previously are stubborn things. The study continues and will doubtless bring more ghastly reality checks to cheer up our community leaders.

I passed the offices of the spouse of a candidate for Mayor and I was not surprised to see the poster calling for votes. What I was more surprised by was to read in the Key West Citizen the remarks made by that candidate in regards to the bar closings mandated by the State. One has to wonder at a candidate for high office who compares a state health mandate to the modern all purpose villains of the Third Reich.

On Tuesday, Mark Rossi, owner of the Rick’s entertainment complex, and Rick Haskins, both running for Key West mayor against incumbent Teri Johnston, attended a protest Tuesday, June 30, in front of the Monroe County Courthouse. Organized by a group of people who depend on bars for their livelihood, the two candidates and about 20 people, three of whom held Rossi campaign signs, asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to allow bars to reopen. DeSantis closed all state bars for a second time June 26 after cases of COVID-19 began hitting new daily highs.

The protest group, calling itself Business Industry Liberties (BIL), was formed this week by Monica Woodbury, owner of Rose Petals in Paradise, a home florist who sells flowers in several local bars and restaurants; and Kendra Sue Krause, a regular bar staffer. Woodbury said the BIL Facebook page attracted 80 members in its first two days online.

“We are doing it for the people who are losing their jobs daily,” Woodbury told The Citizen. “Bars are being discriminated against. COVID knows no difference between a bar, a Walmart, a restaurant.”

Woodbury said that if local bars and other businesses are following city emergency orders on social distancing and wearing masks, there is no reason for Gov. DeSantis to single bars out for closure.

“This virus could last a year, five years, forever. How long are we supposed to be closed,” Woodbury said, adding, “We have to learn to live with it. It could take our whole economy down.”

Rossi was also unhappy about the city’s new rule turning giving code compliance authority to police officers, calling the new emergency rules “Gestapo tactics of the mayor.”

“They’re stopping everybody, even if they’re wearing a mask. They’re shutting down Duval Street,” Rossi claimed. “People have to take personal responsibility. If they don’t, is it the government’s job to make them responsible? It’s a free country.”

The finished result pleased me and what's more important pleased my wife. 

There was no pleasing Rusty who greeted me and pouted for five full minutes when I got home.