Higgs Night

I got to work early Sunday morning, so early I took the time to visit my favorite beach area. I like Higgs beach not because I like to sit in the sand toasting myself but because this small patch of sand encompasses variety.

I love the toilet building at Higgs, a circular cement shed designed to please Salvador  Dali's taste for eccentric architecture with interior nooks and crannies for the various toilet stalls. It is the hardest interior to photograph because who wants to meet a creep with a camera tiptoeing inside a public loo? I don't and I'm pretty sure anyone seeing me oohing and aaahing at the compound curves wouldn't want to encounter me. And at this hour of the night its locked.

I have attempted this socially awkward feat over the years to bring you the most up-to-date perspective on public toilets in Key West but my efforts have failed to inspire even me:

You can't really see how odd the interior of this building really is.

If you are in the area you should walk through this maze disguised as a toilet and enjoy the eccentric architecture inadequately displayed here.

Back to the Sunday morning exterior and I spent twenty minutes wandering  around looking at light and shadows.

The bums used to camp out at the tables under the ramadas until people with power got fed up with receiving complaints. They took the initiative and put up a fence saying only parents with children could hang out here. That solved the bum problem but a tree limb nearly fell on a little dear so they cut down the trees and replaced with with shade sails. Which is still better than enjoying afternoon performances daily of bum drama at the tables.

It's rainy season so I spent some time avoiding puddles. I spent more time framing a photograph of same:

The Key West tractor. For one as me who grew up in farming country for part of his childhood the absence of farm equipment took a while to get used to but I was relieved to see the beach cleaning was carried out by a farm implement. Rather than harrowing the soil the trailer towed by the tractor brushes the sand and sweeps up debris and leave neat parallel lines in the sand for human feet ot mess up.

Seagrape leaf study 100 thousand and seventy eight. These dinner plates on branches fascinate me.

I want you to know I crouched in a  swamp of rich rotting food smells to get this glimpse of a mural. The gate must hide the trash cans because I was very glad to get the frame and get away.

I am looking forward to Mexico this winter - deus vult - but for now I found Mexico not just in my fevered imagination but also in the back of Salute restaurant at Higgs Beach.

Clarence Samuel Higgs died in 1961 at the age of 57 unexpectedly at home on Grinnell Street. He had had heart issues apparently but his death wasn't expected.  They named this beach for him because as county commissioner he was responsible for the push to build the modern White Street Pier. He was also head of the carpenters union and belonged to every civic group he could find in Key West. Doubtless the sort of model citizen and mover and shaker who could be useful today in this city. Remembering him through the beach is helpful to remind us the good our leaders can accomplish.

David, Panama 1999

Panama's third largest city lies in the north of the country deep inland but still available to passing sailors via the Rio Pedregal. It is a boom town and even 20 years ago was an economic powerhouse for Panama. Weirdly enough it's named for the Biblical King David and was founded in 1602 by those delightful administrators, the Spanish. The two founders of the city were converted Jews and the speculation now is that Panama City refused to give official recognition to the new administrative center for that reason! I don't think anyone in the city cares and they never mentioned it when we were there getting our teeth cleaned and going to watch Star Wars with Spanish subtitles at the movies.

I also came across some rather spiffing fruit called pifa which are like chestnuts, dry and not sweet, supposedly known as peach palm fruit in English but we didn't know that before the internet.  I would buy a bunch for twenty five cents and eat them walking everywhere peeling off the skin and discarding the pits like a Panamanian. I want to go back to Panama to eat pixbae as they are known.

I hear modern travelers to Panama complain bitterly about paying $230  to get their dogs through customs into the country. In the dark ages when we arrived at David and met the customs officer there was a four month quarantine to land animals in the country. Panama is trying to keep foot and mouth disease in South America and so it is a road through the Dairen Gap to Colombia has never been built even though the quarantine seems to have been forgotten.

However the Customs official told us our dogs had been seen as we had incautiously walked them into town but he was not in his office before 9 and he went home promptly at five. We took the hint. The dogs lounged on the boat during those hours in full view of the Pedregal Marina onlookers...but morning and evening the marina compound was theirs.

I am not a river rat as I find fast flowing bodies of water to be more awkward than the open ocean. Rivers are unpredictable and filled with debris and currents push branches and logs into your boat. Then there are the cows:

We drove the boat up the river everyday and landed at a jungle trail well out of sight of any onlookers. There the dogs ran and explored and had a real walk until they were exhausted. Then we drove back to the anchorage. In the midst of it all we got a taxi ride back to the marina after spending a  morning in town doing chores and the driver Edgar invited us to go inland with him and his wife for a road trip. 

We left the dogs on the boat which isn't as awful as it sounds as the door was open and they could stroll in and out of the patio-like cockpit on the catamaran at will. To keep them comfortable we risked some rain getting into the boat and they did fine while we were away for much of the day. I got to see my first rodeo:

We drove high onto the mountains into a  cool region of Alpine fields and buildings with strangely peaked roofs as though heavy snow were a possibility. We bought root vegetables, the kinds that grow in temperate climates under the direction of Demaris, Edgar's wife and his mother Doris.

Doris and Demaris joined me in some foolishness as Doris expressed a wonderment about the US. I remember in particular Doris thought of America as a clean place and that view colored the rest of our journey through Latin America.

Americans who think about these countries tend to like Costa Rica, the country with no Army. I like Panama a country with numerous national parks, vibrant Indian cultures totally absent from Costa Rica, the whole Canal system which has infused the country with money and an international outlook that is quite surprising. Panama was a vital link in the transfer of wealth from South America to Spain and that inhumane trade in people and coin has left a trail of astonishing physical ruins. There is a sense of history, for good or ill, in Panama that Costa Rica completely lacks. 

I never got to stand in a freezing cold stream in Costa Rica though I have to say I never expected to find one therefore I never looked. These experiences in and around Boquete in Panama gave me a sensation of confusion at Eight degrees north of the Equator the closest I had ever been to the middle of the globe. 

It was an interesting enjoyable day and I expect that if we do drive to Panama in the van a tour of Boquete will be on the cards and we will ooh and ahh with the memories. This time Rusty will be with us to enjoy the cold, not left at sea level. 

But of course when we got back to the boat the dogs needed walking so we moved the boat up the river to our landing and this time we showed the cab driver and his family how it's done on the water.  Happily after this stop to check into Panama the dog quarantine was never mentioned again and our dogs were free. We just had to negotiate the canal and that was no easy thing.

Move To Key West

Over the years people have turned to me to ask my opinion on moving to key West and I am leery about offering advice, mostly because it is ignored and sometimes misinterpreted but at this late stage I suppose I can offer my thoughts especially by way of thanks to people who think I know more than I do.

The first question I have is why would you want to move to the Keys?  Layne and I washed up here looking for a place to earn some money to continue sailing and I had friends here from previous visits and thus it all fell into place. If you want to move to the Keys you have to know why. It's  a long way from nowhere and and as much as people promise to visit you shouldn't count on it. The Cuban embargo effectively makes Key West a dead end and you will have to learn to live separated from your former life. This isn't a  frontier town in the traditional sense with a nearby  open door to new cultures. It's a cul-de-sac for most residents.

The fundamentals of living in the Keys are the same as anywhere else. Except consider this: you have to drive north of Atlanta some 800 miles from Key West to see a mountain. I love the varied landscapes of the Florida peninsula but the terrain is seen as monotonous by most people. The other point to consider is Miami is a shithole. I used to hear other people characterize it thus and felt rather put out. My wife and I speak Spanish and we enjoy different cultures but Miami is a cross roads of incivility, indifference and cruelty. Of course there are people and pockets that buck the trend but it takes years to find the places you can enjoy and its a tough journey to find what you like in that city. Miami does not add  nearly as much as you'd like to think it would to the experience of living in the Keys and it's a shame. That's my very personal subjective view of a city I wanted to love and that has spurned me. Like everything else I write you may have a very different experience and I hope you do.

You need to make a plan and part of that plan is understanding the limitations. At work you have to dump your ambition and your expectation. The best career positions are taken and you need to understand you are optional in the cog of career  choices in the Keys. The best paid jobs are for permanent residents, people with connections and roots and you will be tolerated as long as you threaten no one. Innovation, over work and pushiness are fatal to your prospects. It may not be immediately apparent but you will be sidelined. If you live to work stay away. The best career move you can make in the Keys is to be reliable, show up and do things as you are taught how to do them. Become an old timer yourself...

Quit yer bitchin'. I promise you no one cares how you did it Up North. If you move to Old Town and think you have a divine right to park you can easily start a neighborhood war and remember you don't know who your new enemy knows. Connections are everything. Make friends not enemies. If you aren't used to living without offsets you'd better practice. Your neighbors live in your butt crack so enjoy. No one cares how many millions you paid for your shack. You suffer the same shortcomings everyone else does on your street not least because they paid more. Your reputation will be set in stone by the end of your first week and it will take years to overcome whatever negative characteristics have been attached to your character by silent, unseen observers.

Make friends and keep them close. Connections in the Keys are everything. We got our rental home thanks to a friend who lived two doors down and acted as our character witness and we got to check out the available home before it came on the market. My wife took it instantly and had the cash to pay first last and deposit in cash. Layne is a planner. Do not come to the Keys impoverished unless you are young and happy to sleep rough and couch surf and all those improvisations of our long lost childhood. If you want to live on a  boat know the best anchorage for liveaboard is in Marathon and key West harbor sucks. Look at a  chart: its exposed in all directions, the bottom is thin sand over rock and as i said above all the bets spots are already taken. When Layne and I arrived from San Francisco I had a friend with a mooring ready to help me settle in. Make a plan, execute the plan and show up on time. I'm not telling you things I don't do and haven't done myself. If you come and hope for the best you will need lots of money but if you have lots of money you know that already.

Island Time. Oh how I hate that phrase, applied to so many ideas of how to live and used as a blanket to cover up endless miles of sins and omissions.  For you Island Time means moving slowly mon, ignoring the clock and shrugging when your appointment shows up late, if at all. That sort of island time is deployed by the idle rich as a measure of how cool they are now they live in name brand sandals on a  tropical island. No worries mon, I can live without air conditioning/running water/ a functional car for a few more days. That's island time for the sidewalk philosophers who have to justify an inability to function. This is all bullshit. I have been late to work twice in 17 years if I remember correctly and I have commuted 25 miles on the ever clogged US 1. Island time in my book means live your own life on your terms and pull out of the way if you are clogging up someone else's life. Island time means don't be a snitch. Because I choose to live differently than you isn't cause for you to interfere. Offer a hand but don't get butt hurt if you are rejected.

Richard has lived on the streets of Key West  for 46  years. I asked him once if he gets bored and he looked startled - in Key West? he said incredulously. I made the faux pas of offering money in my ridiculously suburbanite way -money cures all ills- but he looked at me again as though I were stupid. I've found street people like to pet Rusty, the non judgmental, silent soft ball of furry warmth. It's the human touch not easily found on the streets. And it comes from a  dog. Remember the true value and meaning of Island Time. If you can stand an atheist quoting the Bible at you Island Time means Judge not lest ye be judged, for with what judgement ye judge ye shall be judged. Try and figure the difference between a criminal, a lunatic and a non conformist before you feel called upon to act.

In a way I feel like Covid has brought the rest of the country down to the level of service the Keys have been enjoying for years. The problem is you can't get a job that justifies spending the money required to buy a house. Professionals can manage but even so the work to pay ratio remains out of proportion and the only true compensation is joy in living here. For people not planning to be doctors accountants vets and managers the cost of living requires you work all the time so you don't get to enjoy the living in the Keys side of things. So you leave. Thus under staffing is a permanent issue. There is no shopping in the Keys compared to the mainland. If you don't like ordering stuff you are going to be living truly minimally. On busy weekends and during the winter my internet service routinely pixilates my Netflix on my television as the bandwidth is insufficient for the influx of people. See above: quit yer bitchin'. Layne and I developed a saying 20 years ago after cruising Central America on our boat. The Keys: First World Prices with Third World Service and none of the charm.

You know what the good bits are but be warned the difficulties are real and friends have a habit of leaving town and scattering so the people you'd like to grow old around may be in California, North Carolina, Maine, Ocala or Tennessee or any number of other interesting places. So you may find yourself negotiating the difficult times alone. Friendships are also hard to make in a town where people scatter all the time. No one wants to invest in you if you have one foot out the door. I feel it myself now that I am on the down escalator, life carries on and you are history. Know that you will be lonely for a long while and you will need to prove yourself. Don't be pushy but think of Keys residents as wild deer, let them approach and get to know you slowly. Make yourself available but don't beg. Its a tight rope, I'm telling you.

Come on down, the water's lovely, but tamp down your expectations, be cool and don't put a Conch Republic sticker on your car to show off your new status. And please, do me a favor and start taking pictures and walking a round Key West to remind me of what I left behind. Try to make me regret my choice. Thank you.

Loading Gannet 2

I think in at least one respect I am like most men inasmuch as I like to be, if not clean at least tidy. My wife respects my neurosis but I have to say that tidying up a house we are trying to empty is an art that has got away from us. It's a sort of moving target, today the kitchen is neat and the spare room, well, not so much. Tomorrow we tidy the bedroom and then we have to empty a drawer somewhere so we pour it onto the bed and then slowly sift through the contents, some for discard and some few to save for storage. and on it goes.

The van is such a small space cleanliness and tidiness go hand in hand but fortunately the 70 square feet are easy to clean and sort in no time at all.  Layne designed the bed/couches to sit above a hidden storage area we call the basement, which is where we keep all the stuff we won't use daily. On the left in the pull out drawer we have our table and sand mat to sit outdoors, our Moonshade awning for cover and the air compressor to inflate the tires. In the middle cupboard we have our recovery gear, the treads, straps, shackles and rope and shovel. As well as the mythical Deadman to wrap around boulders or trees or bury in sand as an anchor for the winch:

All on the off chance we get stuck.  I don't want to go four wheeling but I want to have the ability to stretch my exploration a little with the ability to take care of myself in mud holes or sand pits. So last week we did our first test run loading the van. It went okay.

My wife has decided the right hand locker, the shortest basement door is for the exercise gear, weights, rubber bands, a mat and so forth. Her domain even though we both exercise on the road as we do at home. Old age is unremitting and I certainly don't want my legs to seize up for want of movement after all that time I spent learning to walk in the hospital. The round silver thing is the water tank cap where we can fill the water tank by hand if there is no hose available. We even bought water filters to purify water as we fill the tank. A stream will do as our source if necessary. I would rather just plug a hose into the other pressure filler and let the water pressure do the work but I like having simple back up systems. We could live in the woods for a long time if we wanted to, as long as Kindle keeps functioning...

The middle cupboard of the basement with all the recovery gear and stuff is actually pretty huge. Inside the living space of the van the basement forms a step up from the kitchen floor. In this way we were able to scrap plans to carry a bulky and awkward box on the back of the van on a hitch and put equipment we may need from time to time out of sight. 

On the roof we have our four 100-watt solar panels which put out up to 20 amps combined between all of them every hour in the  brightest and most overhead sunshine. If we don't run the air conditioning and we have a reasonable day of mild sunlight the roof will keep our massive battery bank well charged. We run our inverter all the time and keep the electric fridge on and all our wall units and cooking accessories available.

All our outlets work when we want them just as one does at home. The idea of having to ration electricity seems very uncomfortable and annoying to me in this era of modern technology. The little black box is a fan and the big black box is the air conditioner which we run off our batteries with a cell phone booster mounted on top. I'm not sure the booster does much but everybody swears by them...

Under the bed in a distant compartment we will store our new winter clothing, a puffy jacket thermal underwear and waterproof boots. We are resigned to facing cold damp weather even in summer and a large part of dealing with that is having at least a few bits of clothing that will help. 

Getting the clothing right will be a long difficult curve after so many years of treating a  fleece as heavy duty winter clothing.

Boxes bins and an increasing number of empty spaces on the walls define my life at home. I had forgotten what a long drawn out drag is the process of packing up a house. 

Rusty sleeps through chaos. An example to us all.  

Retirement, At Last

I have signed my exit papers and my last  day at work officially is October 2nd.

Between now and then I work a few more days and then burn off my accumulated leave. Essentially I am done and am turning my attention to helping Layne complete the packing and sorting the innumerable details of separation from daily life and working for a living. 

It would be invidious to go into the reasons, and there are several, why my wife and I decided to push the process up. One big consideration  is the rampant spread of the virus and the contact the police department will be forced to have with the Fantasy Fest super spreader event. Partial cancellation won't do enough to limit crowds and may only damage the incomes to be made from an event that seems startlingly out of touch with the spread of the virus. 

My wife and I are fortunate we can protect her weakened immune system from a lot of potential exposure and it seemed silly to go on risking transmission for no clear reason. I signed my retirement paper with a mixture of sadness and elation.

It has been a fortunate career for me but the employment situation in Key West is such that working permanently short staffed with people half my age who have a different work ethic to me has been wearing me down.  It startled me but my wife confronted me at home after my last shift and said you need to retire right now. I guess she noticed me falling asleep earlier and earlier and me dragging my ass more and more. Working two person shifts was wearing me down after years of expecting three people to be in the room. The stress is increased exponentially.

I am grateful to my wife for insisting we get jobs with pensions and I am grateful to the city of Key West for the chance to work in such a place with the opportunity to learn skills I never imagined I would learn. I can now speak "police" a language I never expected to need to know. I understand the difficulties of police work a lot better than I did two decades ago and my respect for the work that has to be done, in the face of the bad publicity from the big cities, has not diminished. I know I completely lack the patience required of a police officer in the street.

But I am also very much aware I am a dinosaur in a dispatch center full of dispatchers who seem to lack the basic skills of cherishing each other and working together. If someone needed a day off we used to club together and figure out coverage to help a colleague see a doctor or have a chance to swap a shift to be with family. I don't see that collegiality among my younger brethren and I blame myself for expecting too much of people who work and live and speak in a  culture different from my own. I simply don't fit in, and perhaps I never really did but Key West used to allow you to smooth over rough edges and we got along. Most probably I am just old and weird and out of touch and they are happy in their world of dispatch. I hope so because answering 911 is hard enough and doing it permanently short staffed is exhausting.

Finally I have to admit I am also old fashioned inasmuch as I have plans for my life. We always plan and try to follow the plan rather than just pile on debt, work and hope it all works out. My reward for working too much isn't an expensive car or jewelry but a vacation, a journey, something different to remember all winter long.  My wife and I are both passionate travelers and we know what it takes to get on the road. We have been discussing our post retirement life for the past five years  and staying in the Keys was never on the cards. It's not just the expense, its the return on investment. For us the lack of access to services, from plumbing to medical was going to be an issue. Road access is growing annoying as traffic gets heavier and slower with every passing year on the highway and the drive to build up and limit access to public spaces seems a constant feature of life in these islands. The latest census shows 10,000 more people living here and thousands of wealthy demanding middle class suburbanites have replaced the drunks and idlers and pirates of common myth. Besides I do not enjoy fishing or drinking so for me there is every incentive to leave once the anchor of work is removed. There is a world of fog, mountains, towns, forests and coastlines to explore and photograph.

I have long said Key West is an enchanted place if you can find satisfying work that pays well, and I did just that, pretty much by accident. And my wife the lawyer turned teacher did too. For us it was magical to get to work and play in an endless summer. Consider this:  my wife commuted the seven mile bridge for years one of the most iconic views in the Sunshine state! We were lucky to have serious jobs we liked and to be allowed to work the daily grind in a community where eccentricity was once prized and a point of view was simply the basis for a friendly conversation over a con leche. Incivility in a small island community was social death.

 The content of this page will change and I hope become more interesting even though it will obviously no longer be about Key West. I have felt for a while the burnout must be apparent but I would not wish to disappoint so I have done my best to find material to write about without sounding repetitive but it hasn't always felt successful. My plan is to change the name of the page to The Golden Van and I have purchased thegoldenvan.com which if you type it in even now will redirect to this page. However the underlying url to all of this is conchscooter@blogspot.com which isn't changing.  You will still be able to type in Key West Diary as I also own keywestdiary.com and have that address redirected! 

I may not be able to post an essay a day after November 1st as there will be no more sitting at a desk growing fat and restless, besides I will be dependent on a Verizon wireless signal to be connected. But I will keep posting pictures and commentary here for what I hope is an adult readership that is interested in more than what I had for breakfast and the view I saw out the back doors of the van. Van Life at my age is a tool to explore, to see and to learn. Video is too labor intensive, time consuming and band width sucking for me to want to get involved with YouTube.  So the more things change the more they will stay the same here.

Expect US travels visiting friends for a few weeks followed by a  winter spent exploring Baja California I hope. Next summer we plan to drive to Alaska before seeing how the virus will impact an attempt to drive to Patagonia. All is dependent on our health, the health of the van and whatever else may be going on in the world. There is always lots to see in the good old USA, though if it were up to us we'd like to do that when we are older and less able to cope with adversity than we are now.  I find US travel very low stress and easy.

That's it for now, my life may be changing but yours isn't necessarily so enjoy low stress with much fun whatever you are doing, and if you are in the throes of change you have my sympathy because change, as much as it may be desired, is by its nature disruptive and therefore hard. Speaking as an almost former dispatcher, stay away from Covid, even if it doesn't kill you it's nasty. Vaccinate, wear a mask and think before you act. 

Best wishes

Michael.

The Nomad. Panama 1999