Mangrove Thunder

Thunder clouds were brewing Monday afternoon when I took Rusty out but to my surprise he didn't pay any attention to the rumbling. 

Once upon a time the little stray used to cower at the sound of thunder. not surprising as he was chased by farmers with guns in the Redlands of Homestead where he was dumped. Guns and thunder sound the same to Rusty. 

These days the thunder has to be overhead and very loud to freak him out, but where once he ran for the darkest corner, usually a bathroom, these days he sits next to us and trembles. It is against all appearances, an improvement.

Meanwhile I walk and ponder and enjoy the silence of the world around me. In Key West there is an expectation cruise ships may be back in September even as the city and the governor fight over jurisdiction. Money from a businessman in Key West with an interest in cruise ships has set the governor firmly against the city. So the mud wrestling continues.

My neighbor was slightly grumpy about the lobster mini season. Jose was passing in his boat yesterday evening while my wife and I were swimming as we usually do of an evening in the canal. He  said it took all day to catch his quota unlike years past when they are home with all due lobsters by breakfast time.

Lobster catching during the two day event allows for six lobster per person in the boat, a limit applied to each of two days. Going out with eight people Jose had a limit of 48 and there weren't that many in he water. Don't ask me what you do with 48 lobster (that will live to 120 if unmolested) but I suppose frozen lobster at Christmas  might remind you of the halcyon days of summer.

There was a report last week of a drowning at the Special Forces training dive tank on Fleming Key. The newspaper reported a 31 year old drowned in the tank during an exercise. It happens from time to time and one can only imagine how tough the training must be if a 31 year old in peak fitness dies. 

Apparently a new report quoted by The Citizen says drowning wasn't the cause of death but the military haven't specified what was. Who knows if the stress of training set off some previously unknown condition. It puts things in perspective when you read about the work that goes on, away from the bars and the parking problems and the neighbor arguments of petty daily life. 

We have the almost knee jerk reaction to the military "thank you for your service" and then suddenly you are brought up short by the blistering reality. I see a lot of the daily deaths on my computer screen at work, usually people dying of disease or old age (whatever that is), in a Key West that barley notices them. Sometimes they die in accidents or even occasionally in swimming pools and sometimes those deaths get reported. Never while training for their jobs do civilians die and  it does give you pause. 31 years old with widow and children left behind. While training for a job I can't imagine handling.

I'd rather watch the doves preening on the branches of a tree killed by Hurricane Irma.

I was waiting for the bird to take off, my ambition to catch it just in flight, but instead the uncooperative wretch settled down to out sit me. I walked away. 

Flowers at least don't disappoint:

A zebra striped street with another uncooperative poseur:

Rusty has entered that time of year when he comes home panting. Me too. It's hot and sticky.

Dark Morning

I haven't been downtown much lately for a number of reasons, during the day it's hot and up till now tourist traffic has been heavy, and on my rare days off I have been sleeping a lot to try to catch up with the sleep deficit of overwork. Even Rusty seems to have slowed down a bit and perhaps middle age is catching up to him. In any event neither of us seems too keen to get up at 4.30 in the morning to capture these kinds of pictures.

But there are those exceptions, and whenever this day was, it was one of those days when I was moved to get up and drag Rusty downtown to see what was what.

I parked on Simonton Street at Greene and found myself staring at these townhouses that have been around I think half a dozen years already.

I look at these buildings and all I can think of is Boca Raton south. Not what realtors cheerfully call "Key West style" when they are trying to sell townhouses in Truman Annex. These modern towering structures are just more of the resort style. 

The Pier House, The Galleon, Ocean Key, the Opal Resort, the Hyatt Townhomes and now with Simonton Beach closed to all but customers of the burger joint (and no dogs) the waterfront is rather removed from the scenic part of Key West.

Silly aphorisms are decorative around here. You read this poster and it only looks tawdry and obvious if you pause a minute and imagine the reaction of anyone passing by! All our lives only make sense to each of us and I suppose trudging Greene Street to have a drink at Sloppy Joe's qualifies as a place seen and a memory made.

I have come to like the distillery with its emphasis on the city connection to Hemingway and his old fashioned joy in Key West. A friend of mine set me straight on this saying only Key West would use a writer to celebrate a distillery when I was whinging about the advertising. Hemingway made memories and didn't need aphorisms to guide him. 

Rusty the headless dog was finding urban gardens to study. The lack of attention to tidiness in Key West gives me hope that not all is too sanitized yet.

I don't think I noticed this symmetrical mansion on Ann Street previously. I did the other morning. 

It's Christmas time on Greene Street! Illuminated palms remind me of December.

And back to the ticket booth for Historic Tours. I was hoping to find it open and offering tours to another galaxy. No such luck.

Dey Street 2021

John Whitehead was one of four founders of Key West who bought the island from Juan Salas who was awarded the island in a  land grant from the King of Spain. Apparently Salas was less than enamored of the scrubby little island used, they say as an isolated burial ground by early inhabitants and he was happy to unload it again and again to North Americans looking for adventure and profit in these tropical, yellow fever infested latitudes.

John Whitehead's father William was from New Jersey, Newark more precisely where he lived on Dey Street. Casting around for a name for this street in Key West he gave it the same name.

There are other streets called Dey in that part of the world and apparently they derive from a Dutch name brought to the New World by immigrants from the Netherlands. And here it is in Key West. It's a small street no doubt mostly overlooked yet it has held it's fair share of dreams and art.

Dey Street joins Elizabeth to Simonton Street. John Simonton was another of the four owners of the island. And in that vein Dey Street runs parallel to Greene (sic) Street named for Pardon Greene who was the third of that quartet of original owners of Key West.

It would be annoying to fail to point out, for those that are interested that the fourth owner was John Fleeming whose name has been abbreviated to Fleming and he got his own thoroughfare across town. 

Dey Street joins Simonton to Elizabeth Street and Elizabeth was, we are told, a relative of Pardon Greene's. Who exactly she was The Streets of Key West has never found out. I have a hard back copy of the book and I greatly enjoy dipping into it for forgotten details or ideas about where to take my camera, even after all these years.

Dey Street used to be home to one interesting artist, one among so many who used to live and work in Key West. I posted this essay in 2013, fully two years after her obituary appeared in the Key West Citizen, which means Suzie dePoo has been dead these ten years. Time really does fly.

I left Santa Cruz in California when Silicon Valley next door grew out of control and spread remote work over the Santa Cruz mountains into the small beach town. I found the young, driven tech entrepreneurs dreary and the crowding, high prices and traffic they brought with them pushed me off into my boat to sail away. I go back from time to time and things never did return to the laid back vibe I came to adulthood amongst.

Key West has changed on me over the past twenty years but change is inevitable in all communities. I think perhaps I haven't changed and still feel the youthful drive to see what's over the horizon. I saw this banana tree framed in an empty frame and i felt rather the same way: pushing against a sense of confinement that isn't actually there perhaps, unless it is there only in my head. 

Perhaps it takes twenty years to unravel the myth from the reality, and always the reality comes up short when measured against the dream. But we have to keep on trying to get the two states to intersect. I think that's what Suzie dePoo was doing in her quiet way on Dey Street. 

 

Dragonflies

Walking a dog doesn't give you the time or the space to plant a  tripod, set up artificial lights and zoom a massive lens so my pictures of dragonflies are works in progress on the ...fly as it were.

I find myself standing there, staring at these funny little bugs hovering and stopping on branches apparently at random. They have been represented in art, and scientists say they have been around for 325 million years.

I read somewhere that unlike butterflies, which are impossible to photograph, dragonflies tend to stop back at the same spot over and over. I also read they live as larvae for several months underwater breathing through their backsides, which sounds weird, and after they become adults and get wings they live for up to two months. Which sounds like a lot of effort for a short return.

Which makes it possible to lie in wait for them to return and gives a hopeless amateur a chance to snap them. I guess we should feel lucky to see them at all as they can fly at speeds to 35 mph and they can even fly backwards. 

They are fierce predators but foul weather can wreck their survival chances when they and their prey get grounded.  and on another weird note male dragonflies are sexual harassers so females tend to live separately in drier habitats mingling only when they want to fertilize their eggs. Something like that.

Apparently the females prefer drier habitat and the males wetlands so if that's correct I must spend a good deal of time walking through a  frat party in the mangroves.

This time of year they are all over the place stopping randomly on twigs. They don't walk on their legs reserving them to grab prey or twigs as needed.

And for a change here we have a snail on a seagrape. Little white shells have appeared since the rains began.

Seagrapes are abundant too. They are edible when the fruit turns purple though birds get first dibs so you'll be lucky to taste any. They have a flavor like mild grapes with a  giant stone inside the flesh. It's a bit of work to roll a seagrape around your mouth to extract the pulp and not swallow the stone...

Then there are the resident pigeons hanging out through the summer. These birds aren't migrators like the more rare white crowned pigeons who come back in the winter.

Then there are the usual selection of ibis heron and egret wandering around the salt waters of the extensive mangroves. 

Rusty and I hurried home to supper and sleep leaving behind the sleepers in their trees and nests.

Little Hamaca Lunch

Yes I know it looks fearsome and I wouldn't really mind if it kept people away but that isn't in the spirit of public open spaces. I can only say with certainty I have never seen any crocodiles at Little Hamaca, though I have seen these signs all over the place.

The sort of wildlife I encounter is a family like this one out for a picnic. Rusty doesn't much like chickens and will cross the street to avoid them ever since a broody hen ran him down on Appelrouth Lane a few years ago. 

Aside from the perils of being eaten by dinosaurs, Little Hamaca is a good place to go for a little wander and imagine yourself far from civilization on your lunch break. 

You aren't actually far from civilization because the main path through the woods is well built for your convenience.

Check out these magnificent leading lines, known to some people as handrails. I could  come out here even when I was in a wheelchair ...

..and look at the clouds through the trees.

Or look down at the dark waters under the mangroves.

Little Hamaca is named for the term given by early Spanish explorers to humps of dry land in the middle of Everglades marshes. They asked what those clumps of trees were and the natives who lived there called them "hammocks" which mean sleeping places because they hung their beds between the trees that grew out of the dry land.

The Spanish, who had little time for the original residents took the term "hammock" to mean the sleeping arrangement not the entire clump of dry land. Confusion all round of course so today we call string beds hammocks and we give the same name to stands of tall trees growing out of the marshes on mounds of dry land. This billboard would have told the story had it survived Hurricane Irma:

Little Hamaca is the last original stand of mahogany and other dry land trees that grow in the middle of the flooded salt ponds behind the airport.

The boardwalk ends at the Rivera Canal which cuts through New Town, west to east,  to the Cow Key Channel next to Stock Island.

If you want a dock behind your Key West home you can get one here, for a price of course, on Rivera Drive or on the north side of the Key West at Hilton Haven Drive.

Aside from the woods you can also spot the missile battery antennae left over from the ancient Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962:

Back to the car, back to work, rested and relaxed.