Public Breaths

The headlines I read have moved on from coronavirus coverage to other things. With two months to go as we approach a pivotal general election I suppose that's hardly surprising unless you are related to any of the 180,000 Americans who have died so far at the hands of the virus. Not to mention the survivors who are dealing with the several side effects attributed to coronavirus, the neurological problems, muscular weakness and so forth.

The rule in Key West is wear a mask. The only times you don't get to wear a mask is at home or when actually eating or drinking in a restaurant. Bars are closed by state order. And yet even when I set our in the early morning hours. five out of six people weren't wearing masks. I asked one guy why not and he said because no one's around. Oh I said, I guess I'm no one.

Bars may be closed by state order but I guess tasting rooms aren't. Sell food and you are more than a bar and can open, or I guess be a tasing room and you can taste alcohol. The issue comes down to an attitude. Mask wearing is an activity reluctantly agreed to and its not a decision entered into by most people who understand this is the best way to vanquish this wretched pandemic. As long as most people are looking fro ways to a void wearing a mask we can't do much about it.

The city s trying to enforce the requirement but its being treated as a speed limit that is too slow for the road conditions and as long as most people ignore it the net result is mask use is spotty and thus unlikely to do much good in terms of slowing the spread. I guess the hope has to be that tourists will take whatever infection they have or pick up and go home with it. Which to my way of thinking is pretty crappy. We really are not in this together.

I feel like a thief in the night, walking the streets not as I used to just for fun but now I take these pre dawn walks to snatch a moment in the city, to take back my streets and my photos from the unmasked hordes. My wife and I have been locked down since March 15th and it seems stupid to not hold out for a vaccine at this point. I wish masks were second nature, social distancing obvious and hand washing something everyone believed in as a matter of course. 

The last message I got from the Centers For Disease Control was to avoid sitting in a. room with strangers, as in avoiding restaurants, and not to fly in commercial aircraft. But virus fatigue has se in and the lessons on 1918 are lost and have bene lost for a while. Now we see people gathering to protest and masks as we have seen are no deterrent to gunfire. I feel in many ways that 2020 is replicating a combination of 1918 and 1968 all rolled into one. Fantastic and besides all that we have no certainty a simple calendar date will turn it all around. With only three months to go till the first snows drive people south I wonder how winter in Key West will unfold.  From a distance the social niceties are interesting but when you live them up close they become irritating and unnerving even. 

Fantasy Fest is canceled but will attractions re-open? Will cruise ships return? Will winter residents, elderly many fo them and infirm site a few of them, hunger to sit in restaurants and risk infection for a plate of elaborate food and conversation?  I will be watching and wondering and asking myself why I feel so alone in my social distancing.

Old Bahia Honda

Rusty and I come here all the time of course and my one day off work last week we stopped by here for more than two hours, mt break from overtime and his break from being at home. I like taking pictures here as this is a place of many moods so this is what I culled from this latest visit.  Hurricane Irmal on September 10th 2017 trashed this place. They are close to completing repairs and the gumbo limbo trees are mostly back while shoreline mangroves are now only fit for use as tree sculptures as you will see. 

I started out trying to take pictures that look like photos that could have been made when the bridge was built in 1911.

After Rusty got bored looking for iguanas in the undergrowth we moved on together.

Dog: barely seen.

A green slope that could have been in...Michigan maybe? I am not easily forgetting my vacation...

After our walk through the limestone outcrops, past the old pump station demolished by Irma and starting to head back to walk the shoreline in the other direction I saw a crab which kept scuttling thus preventing me from getting down to his level. I had to content myself with playing god, or a drone, hovering from above:

And then we rambled for a good long while finding all sorts of treasures:

Tropical Storm Laura, as it then was, threw up a bunch of seaweed along the shore which makes for some bright colors:

But also happily creates an ideal Rusty playground.

Too soft to support humans the seaweed platform gives Rusty no trouble at all:

And then finally we walked the section furthest from the bridge, a gravel beach littered with dead trees made artistic and gaunt by the aforementioned Hurricane Irma. In the distance we see the youth camp wrecked by 140 mile per hour winds.

And then back to the car and a twenty minute drive home:

Waiting For Daybreak

I learned last week that Cuban Coffee Queen has opened a third location. In addition to this very picturesque original location they have a coffee shop at Key Lime Square where Lobos sandwich shop used to be. Now it seems the empire expands with a coffee outlet at Clinton Square Mall next to the Custom House.

I prefer walking past this one as I frequently park in the city lot nearby. Because Key West ius small and there is no room the recycling center is right there too, wedged between Cuban Coffee Queen and Waterfront Brewery.  I find it oddly reassuring that these sorts of basic life functions are still operating in the heart of tourist Key West.

All happening under close pigeon observation.Maybe I am paying them more attention but I get the feeling there are more pigeons in Key West this year. 

My brain if probably fried by all these virus precautions and weather alarums and organizing my life around constant states of change (...where is my mask? for instance always that problem) because I saw this street sign and the mural in back put me in mind of motorcycles (big fish) hunting down the little fish (scooters). You probably had to be there.

Somehow I was quick enough to spot and focus on an aeroplane passing overhead with some foreground.  I post it here for no reason other than to show it can be done. Or rather to make the point even I can get it done.  

Lattice artwork at the entrance to the Waterfront Brewery. There was an odd story reported in the papers recently in which a state official suggested gently that bars, currently closed by state edict, roll up hot dog stands to make them eating establishments so they could re-open. I keep thinking the coronavirus can't make things any weirder and then up it goes, the scale gets tipped again by some brazen act of public weirdness. It seems that if bars can make a brave pretence at being restaurants they can re-open and help spread the virus some more. You could possibly get the idea we are going to be stuck with masks and Covid 19 and people dying for quite a while longer...

The message in town is pretty clear. Makss indoors and out when you aren't at home. 

And as a relief from the human made madness a picture of a pretty boat floating on calm water. This is what it should all be about.