Night Ruminations

My wife and I went into isolation at home on the Ides of March and since then she has been teaching from home and I have been working at the police station where masks and social distancing have been strictly enforced. 

So now, a year later we are vaccinated and hoping to see a few normal activities creep back into our lives. It seems to be coming down to a race between vaccinations and virus variants at the moment and south Florida has been at the forefront of the Covid news with reports of widespread Spring Break crowds.

So I find myself trying to avoid early morning bar crowds more out of habit than necessity, still walking the side streets looking for shapes and colors I have failed to notice in a  year of wandering these largely empty streets. 

I find it miraculous any of these small galleries and businesses are still open after this crazy year but here we are. 

Island Books is displaying local authors, Key West themes and so forth. I have no data to back up my feelings on this subject but it seems to me that the writers of older generations who have cycled out of the Keys to families and communities Up North are not being replaced by younger writers. The easy target to blame is the high cost of living.

There again the way people publish and even the way they write has been going through all kinds of changes so I suppose it's fair to imagine that communities of writers will not look the way they did in the past. 

I find it rather odd to realize that the beginning of this century might very well have been the tail end of the golden age in Key West, the period that grew out of Ernest Hemingway's forced stay in 1928, which in itself grew into a decade long residence. Truman Capote, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, Thomas McGuane and heaven knows how many names one can add...where are their heirs? Do they have any? Not in Key West it seems like, nor shall they.

I look at the shops on Duval, the chains which are the only outlets that can afford the rent, the restaurants that hang in despite the difficulties of a pandemic. The champagne winters spent in the tropical heat  do not necessarily translate into long under populated summers, 92 in the shade... of drama  and good stories needing to be told.  

I have enjoyed the slowed down life of the pandemic, not least because I have been paid the whole way through as has my wife and work feeds the monster of daily life. Lockdowns haven't translated into long cold dark winter days staring at the walls. Life in the Keys has been reaffirmed as privilege in some ways, and I have taken note.

Above you see the building that has been three bars for as long as I can remember, and below Lucy's that came to Key West, moved, closed and now announces they are coming back, if indeed they were ever gone. That's the way it is, even when the prophets of doom tell us Key West is sinking under the hammer blow of economic failure. 

Irish Kevin's is still the southernmost Irish pub, as they retell it, the bar that stays put alongside Ricks and Sloppy Joe's and Captain Tony's and the Bull and Hog's Breath and so forth. So when things gets back to normal what changes for me who doesn't go downtown to drink?

Live theater and movie theaters, friends and music and a dinner out every now and then, the loss finally of masks, the crowds, more things and people to photograph, change might even be in the air.

The homeless guys will still sit on the margins, at least until Duval Street is organized. The project manager of the company hired to review possible changes has moved to another job so the studies proposed for Duval are currently in limbo. But it seems likely there will be much talk of changing Duval and much opposition as there always is. 

Cruise ships will one day return. They are running some experimental cruises in the Caribbean apparently, and by doing that they are avoiding US ports to circumvent the US ban on cruises. I guess we shall wait and watch and be glad other people are willing to give it a try. I had hoped to go to Europe this Fall to see my family prior to my retirement but Europe remains a shambles with closed borders, hardly any vaccinations and continuous lockdowns. So much for that...

I took the photograph below on the three hundred block of Duval. The building seen in daylight is just another sloping roof but in the half light with the tree shadows it gained to my eye and exotic distant air, a Balkan building, a place not like Key West at all. 

Perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me, or my camera, or perhaps lockdown is having more of an effect on my mind that I think. Six months from now...another six months and we may understand more!

Off Duval

I have been taking advantage of the bright sun and clear skies to check out downtown while the temperatures are cool and the skies are bright. I can't often be here at sunrise or sunset so in the middle of the day the light tends to be harsher and the shadows stronger which lends itself to black and white.

I also like to sidestep the popular views of Key West, Paradise, USA, especially during the pandemic looking for my own views . 

Sometimes I surprise myself, and were you to quiz me I would never have guessed this was an alley off the middle of Duval Street!

Fire Station 2 on Simonton Street where I parked.

And a few houses along the way back to the car.

The alley from the city parking lot to the 600 block of Duval. Always picturesque.

Waterfront

The Railway Condos as seen from the ground on Grinnell Street are clearly newer construction, modern with parking underneath the units and decent landscaping.

However when seen from the top of the parking garage on the other side of Grinnell, the eagle eyed observer will note the even taller and more imposing block of Steam Plant condos. The difference? About $1.4 million to buy the different units. 

Originally the Steam Plant units built in a converted steam to electricity generating plant were offered at nearly three million each with private elevators from the basement garage and private pools on the rooftops but times were tough apparently and some lucky buyers got cut price condos before they sold out. The Railway Condos are named for Flagler's railway which ended up in a terminus built on excavated soil up the street at what is now the Coastguard Base. They were sold as price controlled affordable quarter million dollar homes for local workers. 

The Steam Plant used to generate electricity for the city and spewed waste water into the harbor near where the loving couple above were sitting and enjoying the view. Those lovely waters used to be known as the toxic triangle thanks to the steam plant effluent. I had a friend who kept his boat on the seawall and he thought it was easier than living at anchor. True enough but that wasn't convenience I wanted and I stayed in the purer waters outside the harbor.

Nowadays the old shrimp boat free-for-all in the Bight has become a sedate and proper recreational boat harbor with several marinas dotted around inside the breakwaters. The public is welcome to walk the city owned boardwalk but rules abound.

The city very cleverly kept ownership of the Bight and rented space out to the various businesses which pay rent to the city. It was a smart deal, a reminder that Key West does not have to give everything it values away.

Bight in nautical terms means an indentation in the coastline suitable for a harbor, but most people don't know that. So instead of a "bite" the city now owns an "Historic Seaport" which sounds much more appealing. I suppose that's one reason I will stick to calling this the Key West Bight. 

The city offers dinghy dockage for a modest fee of $96 a month which gives people who live at anchor easy access to downtown. Actually Key West offers quite a few facilities beyond docking your boat if you live cheap at anchor. The homeless and hopeless have access to soup kitchens, sleeping space for the homeless, mental health facilities and low/no cost medical and dental clinics. People in house sometimes conflate  living on a  boat with being homeless...

From the city's website:

• Dinghy Dockage Rates: $7.15 per day or $31.90 per week or $95.70 per month (13 foot maximum)
• Private Dinghy Slip: $192.50 per month
• Shower Use: $24.20 per week or $71.50 per month plus $25.00 for the key deposit

On a bright sunny day with modest winds and tiny ripples it looks lovely. On a hot thundery summer's night in a tropical downpour the commute may look less attractive and in winter cold fronts can honk the waves over the breakwater.

It may not be sailing for sure, but it is cheap living in a notoriously pricey town. A boat, an anchor, a bicycle and a desire to look hardy and romantic keeps the dreamers coming. Soon they stop sailing and they sit at anchor more and more involved in town issues and working while less and less sailing and exploring takes place.

And if perchance you do head out best send the crew forward to bring in the lines and fenders. Its a romantic life all right!

Always lots to see at The Bight  Key West's Old Historic Seaport...

Turtle Kraals is being transformed into the Boathouse which occupied a space further round the harbor.  Slowly the historic connections to turtle slaughter and commercial fishing will evaporate from the waterfront entirely.

Fishing too can be a spectator sport now, a selfie opportunity, a moment of fun.

The hard drinking, hard fishing commercial fishermen with Cuban accents and white shorty rubber boots ("Stock Island Nikes" is their ironic name) are relegated to the next island over where you can see them behind fencing, like creatures in a  zoo preparing their traps and living their lives oblivious to the tourist mecca of the historic Key West Bight.

I took these photos a few years back but nothing much has changed.  

It's not the tourist water front of the Historic Seaport.

Hemingway wrote about this world of boating in To Have And To Have Not except in his day, during the Great Depression, fishing drama played out in Key West.

Five miles and a different world. 

Barricades

The Florida Keys by their nature offer limited opportunities to spread out on land. When you live near the end of a 120 mile chain of narrow flat islands you aren't going to have many wilderness hang outs. I have my favorite on West Summerland Key in sight of the Old Bahia Honda Bridge, a location that shows up frequently on this page. I was there yesterday thoroughly enjoying the sun and a cool breeze and I was not alone.

I have spent the night along the seawall and enjoyed the relative quiet even though I slept just below the highway, pretty much out of sight and at peace with the world. The track became viable after Hurricane Irma tore down the trees and the state decided to build up the wall with rip rap and gravel which anglers drove out on and flattened into a bumpy but viable trail.  Some enterprising folk then drove all the way out to the point and left some rather ostentatious campsites with fire rings and the usual trash...

I knew it wouldn't last...it couldn't last and this small privilege has come to an end of course. You won't see pictures of Gannet 2 here again:

I wasn't therefore shocked when I came back and found these cement barricades, a stock item used by county and state governments in the Keys to close off the few dirt trails to all terrain vehicles seeking some off road fun.

For someone like me (and Rusty) who like to walk the barriers will actually work to our advantage as most people seem to find locomotion too arduous and now that motors are effectively banned we will be alone out on the point. In fact a fisherman did just that yesterday, parking his truck here and venturing no further on foot with his rod.

I would also like to think we will walk trash-free. I take pictures and leave footprints and I carry a bag for those occasions Rusty feels moved to extrude an egg or two. Like the half-wild dingo he is, he likes to dump on the edge of the trail, unobtrusively, and leave little trace which I have to find and remove, not always easy. 

I confess I was surprised to see tracks coming straight down off the highway here a couple of weeks ago. I guess I wasn't alone in my astonishment because they aren't doing that again!

It seems as though the state had barricades to spare as they put them everywhere, carefully butted up to impenetrable tree trunks where possible. 

This one surprised me, carefully placed between two trees to avoid end runs by determined drivers, on a trail that didn't exist last year. Somone checked it out, someone else followed and then the trail was marked and became, as you can see, established.

I used to walk out here picking my way through the grasses until this freeway was trampled through the grass.  I also found some graffiti, high flown sentiments written in indelible marker on a plank. I took the picture and moved it back up out of the way where I found it. 

The great thing about this spot is that there is no beach, no sand, no attraction for people to come and feel like they are in a postcard. To me that makes it doubly attractive as people stop their cars, take a look, walk a bit maybe and then take off again. 

Rusty enjoyed his walks and then took a philosophical approach to change in the Keys. Change is inevitable he said and its rarely for the better when too many people want to jostle in too little space. He has a point.