Things I've Seen

Just walking and looking.

Outside Fausto's on Fleming someone had eaten a box of ribs, picked them clean, then left the bones in the box and walked away failing to connect the trash with the can.

One of those pandemic positives we see from time to time: sidewalk dining which should be a common sight in Key West but isn't. Better indoors with air conditioning seems to be the rule.

Overexposed picture of Duval Street, I was going to dump it but I liked the mood of burning heat it imparts. It wasn't really summer hot but I liked the look:

This plaque on the drug court complex caught my eye once again. I remember all the county commissioners listed. Three dead, one retired, one sitting. Time spares none of us. Commissioner David Rice gave me my psych test when I applied to be a police despatcher. I've been around too long.

Key West is pretty no doubt about that.

Mangrove Sunset Backwards

Much to my annoyance the computer downloaded my pictures backwards. I was grateful it downloaded them at all as sometimes Blogger is reluctant to add pictures to my page for some reason. The engineers have upgraded the service with all the usual screw ups change brings in its wake. Besides I am in a happy frame of mind at the moment, the Republic is secure, I am halfway vaccinated and the outside temperatures haven't caused me to break out in a  spontaneous sweat for several weeks. Life is good.

So I thought to myself I shall turn this upside down lemon into lemonade.  It was dark by the time Rusty and I were back at the car on Summerland Key. I had finished the walk by taking pictures in black and white and I rather liked the atmospheric views of the road, a departing Jeep, a stationary dog. Not, I hasten to add in the same place at the same time.

Look! A Christmas tree out of season!

I have been reading about locked down photographers unable to travel and who are as a consequence bored. Some days I leave the house more focused on giving Rusty a good time filled with not much faith that the trail will produce anything worth looking at and yet. and yet I see things.

I don't see dead people or anything exciting like that but the landscape yields some great sights even in these monotone flatlands. For every minute spent trying to capture it I get ten minutes of standing, or walking, and staring. Imagine the silence.

A plane full of Covid 19 and humans flew overhead into the sunset leaving a suitably pink contrail.  Grist for my camera.

I walk and I see stark white tree trunks in the gloom. I like that so I put a dark background behind them to make them stand out. Non Floridians worry about rattlesnakes and alligators. I worry about getting sufficient contrast.

Fat Albert framed, below. I have been reading some RV comments about Florida and there is universal dread of alligators. These are not people who follow Clyde Butcher very closely, a photographer who wades through the Everglades for the pleasure of finding pictures. I just walk through the mangroves and the most aggressive creature I find are horseflies.

I see signs of human passage, tire marks usually but I am very lucky to be alone on these trails almost all the time. Especially in a time of pandemic I feel privileged.

And here we are at the beginning of a forty minute stroll, a dead tree reaching up to the sky.

If I didn't photograph it would it still be there?

Saturday Afternoon

 It was not a lunch break to spend indoors so I took my big camera (a Panasonic FZ1000 with a one inch sensor and four hundred millimeter lens if you care) and went to look for things to look at. I didn't even get out of the parking lot before I spotted a group of three shady characters loitering in front of the police department:

I got to Garrison Bight and pelicans were floating around, slow and easy to photograph and an elegant reminder that it is winter in Key West:

Winter in Key West, 75 degrees, sunny and a light cool breeze blowing over everything:

There was a fair bit of small boat activity. It is an axioma that the smaller the boat the more it gets used:

Garrison Bight residents watching the traffic from their waterfront home:

A sudden flurry of wings announced the arrival of an unwelcome drop-in:

"That way!" Nautical mansplaining I dare say.

The intruder with the sharp beak took up a position underneath the bridge and quietly watched what was going on. he seemed unwelcome and rather lonely. No one wanted to play with him of be decapitated by him either.                                                                                                        

Houseboat row in the sunshine. They used to be tied up along the seawall on South Roosevelt near the Riviera Canal Bridge. Then a developer decided to build two million dollar condos overlooking that stretch of seawall and the houseboats were deemed unattractive. Money talks and the scruffy houseboats were walked over to the city marina and offered docks in the heart of new town. 

Other boaters live on the city mooring field outside Garrison Bight. They pay a few hundred a month ion an area wide open to north winds and minimally protected from the prevailing south east winds. They get dinghy dockage with showers and trash collection. 

The pigeons watched the boats come and go and wondered when the kestrel might leave.

When I was back at work I got a 911 call from a man who was being yelled at by a couple on one of Key West's narrow lanes. The picture I was painted after some slow patient questioning revealed that he had come across a car stopped in the narrow street blocking his path and he felt they weren't unloading their vehicle fast enough so he tooted his horn. The reaction he got was not a  quick apology and a rush to move the offending vehicle. The mild mannered guy got full on in your face yelling from the busy couple. So he called for help. It's what people do all day and all night in contemporary Key West. In the old days it would be a case of "what up cuz?" and an offer to help unload. I wondered if the pigeons had called 911: "There's a creepy looking bird of prey landed in our midst and upset our afternoon routine, threatening us. Can you come and move him along?" It used to be in Key West you waited and pretended it was cool to be on "island time". Now its all yelling. Be a pigeon.

People ask me when to call 911. Generally I say the time to call is when you are afraid, not when you are angry. Sound advice rarely heeded I fear. 

The self reliant pigeons took up positions on isolated lamp posts with clear views in all directions and waited for the passage of time to remove the intruder.

Winter is the time of year for fighter pilot training at Boca Chica. Every time I see them fly overhead I wonder how soon cheaper drones will knock these romantic expensive planes out of the sky for good. Time and technology waits for no one, as I look at my futuristic pocket phone unimaginable in 1945 when dogfights ruled the air.

That's my pigeon soulmate up there on his own far from the madding crowds, far from any office enjoying the sunshine.

Flowers For Optimism

I got my first vaccination shot on Friday, courtesy of Moderna. I had wondered if the day would ever come given the requirement that I be at work through a pandemic that has raged pretty much out of control all year.  Luckily my bosses have taken this problem seriously with closed doors, mask requirements and my colleagues in dispatch have avoided any infection. I have felt very fortunate, and the vaccination program felt like one more great good fortune, even though my right shoulder aches just a  little bit...

Only three dispatchers including myself participated even as Facebook epidemiologists continue to rant about genetic mutations and other nonsense. I stopped paying attention to Facebook when I read the debates arguing coronavirus  was less fearsome than the annual 'flu.  410,000 deaths later I think it's safe to safe Covid 19 is far more deadly than the annual 'flu season. And then again we have to remind ourselves that surviving coronavirus is not a binary business - death is one outcome but the other outcome of a brush with Covid may involve permanent or long term disability in varying degrees. To think I am vaccinated with a  booster shot promised in three weeks is frankly astonishing considering no one knew of this virus a year ago. 

My wife has rheumatoid arthritis and her specialist has forbidden her from getting the vaccine yet as her immune system needs to be built up first so for myself masks and social distancing won't be changing as  we neither of us want to get infected at this hopefully late stage of the pandemic. Patience is the watchword. just one more lesson of a terrible year. 2020 has taught me a lot about myself, the  history I thought I knew and the ease with which human beings can be fooled into believing arrant nonsense. I always used to ask myself how a people as civilized and educated as the Germans could pile onto the Jews in their midst and torture and kill them by the million. It just seemed too weird and in my head I knew I would never participate in such a crime. I grew up after all in the shadow of that terrible War and every adult I knew had suffered in some way because of it.

Well 2020 showed me a thing or two. I watched as tens of millions of my neighbors bought into the cruel and self serving lies of a man who ran for President to boost his television appeal they tell us. He pitched white supremacy and religious zealotry as the new American virtues and people all over the place lapped it up and apparently still do. Fortunately it takes dexterity and skill and political training to be a successful dictator and President Trump lacked  all the skills necessary to win himself a second term. Luckily too the US military chose not to back a coup and we are now skidding off in a different direction. Most chilling of all for me is how little remorse there is expressed for the events of January 6th and how quickly partisan sniping has returned to take the place of productive political compromise. Any action taken by President Biden is written off as divisive and arbitrary by people who sat on their hands during the assorted Trump emergencies. None of his edicts seemed particularly focused on national unity and now that the other party is in power all they can do is attack the President not with facts or counter arguments but with witless sniping. I have no doubt now that the attacks will be unsupported by facts and that shortfall will not be questioned by President Biden's opponents.  Thoughtful opposition seeking compromise is a lost art.

Through all this madness Key West has soldiered on, a haven of relative peace for those of us lucky to live outside the swirl of violence and ranting that has swept the country. Now that we are settled on a more peaceful national  course I can allow myself to feel lucky to be here, even though the tourist trade is visibly reduced this winter and stores have closed across Lower Duval. One allows oneself to be optimistic that soon the normal tourist trade will resume to everyone's benefit. I am amazed how resilient Key West is in the face of all these disasters. 

After I got my vaccination I took a walk downtown in the sunshine with my camera (Rusty was at home). I enjoyed the warmth and the light and after a while of randomly recording things that caught my eye I found a theme I wanted to follow around Duval Street. I started photographing flowers where I saw them.

I have had a hard time this past year watching the chaos  get worse, seeing the effects of national mismanagement and indifference combined with increasing deaths.  I expect most of us  in the first world want a return to normal easy living, surrounded by annoying technology and pricked by the irritations that come with failed expectations. They will be a relief after this deluge of bad news and national drama day after day. I have felt fortunate that I can get out and walk Rusty away from people, in the mangroves with my camera, in weather that is never too cold or life threatening or even uncomfortably cold. I am lucky my wife doesn't mind communicating electronically with her web of friends; I am lucky my colleagues take mask wearing and distancing seriously, I am lucky to have a job that keeps paying me regularly even if I am expected to show up in an office instead of working from home.

So to go for a walk and find sunshine and flowers in all these strange places makes me feel even luckier. I was approached by one guy wearing a  Monroe County employee t-shirt and he said "For every picture you take you have to take five chickens home!" I really enjoy being mistaken for a  tourist but I liked his line so much I admitted to him I wasn't actually a visitor ( I don't think he believed me! Even better!) and I told him I liked his line so much I was going to use it even though I have heard it deployed many times before.

I recall a joke circulating last year: CAN WE ALL AGREE THAT IN 2015 NOT A SINGLE PERSON GOT THE ANSWER CORRECT TO "WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF FIVE YEARS FROM  NOW?" Not a joke that would get much traction in the hallowed halls of psychic readings I dare say.

You could offer me a crystal meditation but I would move along and take a another peek through the viewfinder of my camera. Give me flowers, give me quiet, give me  a break from the noise please. Last year I wanted the superpower of seeing into the future, to figure out where we would all be six months into the pandemic from hell and this year I find myself in the same spot. This year I'd like to think we will be putting away masks and no gatherings  and no eating at restaurants, those of us who have stuck to the protocols against all Facebook-epidemiologist advice. The flowers tell me nothing except that they will abide, no matter what happens to me and the virus and my neighbors in our frenzied world.

Looking for depictions of flowers in the window at CVS on Duval I got struck down by an attack of whimsy. I saw the twelve inch surfboard and I knew that I had to spend $15 to get it. I see all those young people in Vans living Instagram's Van Life with their kayaks, bicycles, surfboards, skateboards and skis. My wife and I like to keep our crap to a  minimum and we had made a pact to not take anything that won't fit inside. Now however I determined on the spur of the moment we have to be hip too and we can show the youngsters a trick or two.  Now I proudly carry my own surfboard on the back of my Van and even though it may be too small to actually ride it expresses my desire to live the life of freedom in the great outdoors. Some thing similar to: "as seen on Instagram hash tag van life".

And there is another blow coming for the eccentrics of Key West inasmuch as the city commission is moving ahead with a  new law that will probably take effect next month forbidding the public feeding of wild chickens. I'm not a great fan of wild chickens as they are noisy and they scratch landscaping all over the sidewalks but tourists love them and this is the town that sold it's soul to tourism. Now we are moving into the world of upscale tourism and the chickens are becoming off limits to their passionate devotees. I don't suppose they will suffer pangs of hunger as tourists are constantly dropping food all over town more as a result of inebriation and carelessness rather than a desire to feed wildlife, and besides Key West has a healthy insect population to feed them. Too healthy for many new arrivals from Up North. The joke is that you can identify the new arrivals in Florida by their shame and embarrassment when buying roach motels at Publix.

By contrast with all the weighty stuff flying around wherein you hear people mutter "constitution" and "martial law" and "impeachment" to get back to some local irritations can be quite a relief. The Key West Citizen, the newspaper that refuses to die has come out once again with an interesting story on the chamber of commerce in Key West. Apparently the chamber has found itself on the wrong side of several local issues annoying citizens  and the mayor who won her race with an overwhelming positive vote. It was none too smart therefore of the chamber to endorse one of her opponents who managed to get a meager 20 percent of the vote...The newspaper goes on to list a whole bunch of stuff that has seen the business organization butt heads with city residents: cruise ships, environmental protections and so forth all mixed in with some office drama exposed which makes for some riveting gossip. This from a news paper I am always too ready to fear may soon be extinct. 

Sunny days cool breezes fewer tourists and flowers to take your mind off things. It could be worse.

The Conch Republic is a state of mind and we've had our revolution thanks.

West Summerland Key

 Some more of my pictures from a walk at Old Bahia Honda. No words needed this Sunday.