The Yellow Jack

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It is nice to get away from the bustle of White Street once in a while, and since all good things come to an end, I thought I would go up to Mile Marker 14 and have dinner and watch the sunset over the Saddle Back Keys and the Overseas Highway.

Off on the road again tomorrow, back to Bad Idea Central. This has been a fabulous visit, a real vacation for the first time in what seems like years. It featured serious discussions about The Iguana Problem, and whether the all-night crowing of the roosters is going to be a problem with the noise abatement regulations under intense discussion with the County Supervisors.

If anyone here was seriously concerned with the latest Federal Agency out of control (the FCC at the moment) or the collapse of the Syrian policy, or the imposition of martial law in places as disparate as Ukraine and Venezuela, or the astonishing hubris of Secretary Kerry as he flew a large jet to Indonesia to decry wasteful carbon emissions I did not hear about it directly.

And good riddance. There is nothing that can be done from here about any of it, except to vote to ignore it. I mean, the people ostensibly in charge of responding to all this don’t seem to be worried, so what the hell. They had things to worry about here in this place. The passing trolley reminds me each time they pass the field with the single granite marker on it that stands in memory of the soldiers who died of the Yellow Fever, the plague of the Gulf and SE Coast not so very long ago.

It would appear with a malevolence to which we are no longer accustomed- though of course with globalization, we are vulnerable to disease that flies as fast as Secretary Kerry.

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There is a long list of things to do today in preparation for traveling again. First, I have to find the car and see if it is parked somewhere legal. Then I have to put some things in it. Then I believe I will go on the town this evening, and make preparations to get underway.

That is an appropriate turn of nautical phrase. I am reading the first novel in the “Honor” series “At the Edge of Honor,” by a fellow named Robert McComber. It is set (in part) in Key West in the depths of the American Civil War, and conveys what this place was like in the dying Age of Sail, with the running up of the Yellow Jack signaled to ships entering port that the killing fever was abroad.

I guess I am happy with the considerably lesser, if perhaps for complex things to worry about today.

I don’t know if I will be in touch over the trip back. I am thinking about you, no kidding.

Wish me luck.

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