Email correspondence with an old amigo from Birmingham, who, like me, practiced law there. Who, unlike me, kept his feet planted solidly on terra firma.
Sloan,
Can you help me with something? My son James and his wife Laura, when she graduates from law school in May, are going to the Florida Keys with some friends to celebrate. They would like to find a cottage or house to rent, or, failing that, a motel at which to stay. Any ideas? Sure would appreciate it.
And Merry Christmas to you!
Roben
By the way, I’m badly laid up right now with an injured ankle – bedridden, actually, by doctors’ orders, but I don’t completely follow them. But it’s cold now any way, and when it gets warmer I’ll get back with you on getting both me and the Encantada down to the Keys to do some serious sailing.
Hi, Roben. The Keys are about 100 miles long, differ greatly. Maybe if I knew what interests the youngsters, I might be able to get a fix on what part of the Keys, from which I might be able to locate someone who can help them get a house to rent. I know some of the motels/hotels to recommend, depending on which part of the Keys. Sloan
Sloan,
Should have added that James is a FISHERMAN, not a sailor or a diver like me. Having him on board is like having you – fishing lines dangling all over the place, hooks and bait to dodge, etc. Come to think of it, you and he may become fast friends.
Anyway, any cottage, etc. he and Laura and their friends stay at should be fisherman-oriented, not sailor or boater oriented. He goes into almost a hypnotic state when fishing. One Christmas I took him and the rest of the family skiing at Whistler-Blackcomb, Canada (finest skiing in North America, and the site of the next Winter Olympics) and he insisted we spend an entire day wading around an ice cold river casting for salmon (never got a bite, but it made him happy). All the while I shivered and shook and chattered my teeth together, and wanted to ski so bad my feet itched for it. And I really don’t understand you fishermen. The first thing he does after catching a fish is to take out the hook and throw it back into the water. Oh, well …
Roben
Hi, Roben. This narrows it down to: Islamorada, Key West, perhaps Big Pine Key area, although in all places for the kind of fishing I sense James likes, game fish, catch and release, he will need to hire a fishing guide and his skiff, which comes at about $800 a day. The $800 a day guides (two anglers per boat – fast skiffs that can run likity-split in shallow water) are about light tackle fishing for bonefish, permit, tarpon, all of which are plentiful in May, weather cooperating, which it usually does that time of year. I remember when all day-fare on a flats skiff was $40. Out of Islamorada and Key West, you can go off-shore, light or heavy tackle, for dolphin, sails, marlin, wahoo and bottom fish — more expensive than skiff fishing. It’s also possible to go out from Islamorada and Key West on party boats with other people, maybe $100 a person all day, but it’s mostly table (food fish) fishing, which can turn out to be pretty sporty. Key West and Islamorada are cosmopolitan, plenty of shops, restaurants. Big Pine Key is in the sticks, home habitat for Key deer, miniature whitetails. Protected national refuge. Seat of the tree-hugger Resistance in the Keys 
. There’s a wonderful old fish camp there, which rents out cottages probably by the week, maybe even by the month. The trick there would be to arrange a guide. There are a few living in that area. There’s also a nearby bridge a lot of people fish off. Bait shop at fish camp, no guide needed for bridge fishing. Not much fancy in the way of restaurants on Big Pine, but the kids won’t starve and only about 45 minutes down to Key West for nights out. Or, they could stay at the Sugarloaf Lodge, very nice setting, on Lower Sugarloaf Key, about half way between Big Pine and Key West, and work it both ways. Restaurant at at Sugarloaf Lodge and a tiki bar, pretty laid back, great at sunset, interesting local crowd evenings, music some nights. Probably plenty of houses to rent around Sugarloaf Lodge and on/near Big Pine Key, but probably not for less than a month. Also in Key West, more like New Orleans than anything else I could compare it to. Don’t know housing-for-rent situation in Islamorada, but I know someone living there who does. Although I’d recommend The Islander (motel) for the kids at Islamorada; they have cottages with screened porches. On the Atlantic, laid back, away from US 1, quiet, I’ve stayed there a few times. Well run, swimming pool, near the guides and party boats, good fishing bridge not too far away, lots of good places to eat, interesting watering holes. That used to be where I hung out all the time in the Keys – Islamorada. Billed as the game-fishing capitol of the world, but there’s plenty good game fishing out of Key West, too. Maybe you pass this email along to James and Laura. My drive to fish left me many moons ago. I still go out sometimes, when invited, for old time’s sake, for table fish. Maybe I can be resurrected for catch and release. Or just to go out and watch someone else do it and remind me of when it was so much a part of my life. Plenty of other kinds of water sports in Islamorada and Key West, and nice evening sails on party boats in Key West. If the kids also get an itch to dive, it’s either Key West or Key Largo at John Penecamp State Park. A long drive from Key West to Key Largo, but not too bad from Islamorada, maybe half an hour. My cell is 305-407-4285. Sloan
Thanks, Sloan. I’m forwarding your email to James, who will know better than I what interests them and will be in touch.
I myself will be in touch later about sailing down there, stating my own interests to be sailing and diving! But sadly, that won’t be for a long time. This mysterious ankle/tendon injury is pretty serious, a lot more than I thought at first. I do think the doctors are trying to make more out of it than it is, much as frankly attorneys often do about legal problems. In effect, so that, should something go badly wrong, no one can say they didn’t warn me, yada, yada, yada. But I do believe them that it is serious and will take a long time to heal. It’s just that I don’t understand how something like that can happen merely from a light two mile jog one morning, no different from thousands I’ve done in the past. It would be different if I’d tripped and fallen, or stepped on a stone of some sort, or something else unusual had happened – but it didn’t. Nor do I have any quarrel with any of the docs or the operation – I put up with the pain and the limping for quite some time, and it just never got any better, so something had to be done. I guess it’s just baaad luck.
By the way, in a magazine or on the internet recently, I came across an article by a famous pro football player (whose name I recognized, but can’t recall now) entitled something like “Why I Wish I’d Never Seen a Football.” It was, basically, because though wealthy after his career almost every joint in his body was in about the same shape as my ankle, he had undergone some 19 operations similar to the one I’m griping about, and he now spends most of every day in a wheelchair or in bed, in either event in pain. I had a lot of sympathy with the guy, under my own present circumstances. I would put my own price on going through something like this single injury again, well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Daytime tv has greatly improved; right now I’m watching a documentary on the ancient Egyptians rather than, say, “Days of Our Lives” or “As the World Turns.” And I know what the modern KKK is like and what sort of guy is in it, and how the earth was originally formed, and the moon, and that cows emit more methane into the atmosphere than cars, and even that contrary to what you might think the methane comes mainly out of their mouths and nostrils, not their other ends. And what the Hell’s Angels are up to these days, who Jack the Ripper probably was, and all sorts of other things. Like the fact that aquatic animals that live around Hawaii in 2,000 feet of water are red, because the water at that depth has filtered out all the red light and being red makes them almost invisible. Amazing what you can learn from day after day of daytime tv. But it hasn’t been worth it. Anyway, I do think it’s getting better, slowly.
Roben
Hi again, Roben.
Darn, just now see I didn’t see your original “p.s.” about your foot. Bummer. I once ruptured an achilles tendon playing handball and was a year getting over it. The doc said it would have been better to snap it in two, so he could sew it back together; it would heal faster. Happened the day after my daughter Nelle was hit by car on her bicycle, nearly lost the lower half of her leg — same leg. Same doc. A wizzard, saving Nelle’s leg. He told me she would walk before I would. Maybe he should have asked me what the hell I was doing playing handball while my daughter was in the hospital? A question I have asked myself many times since. I spent a lot of time trying to prove myself in those days, and have little doubt it has a lot to do with why I never hear from my daughters. If I had it all to do over again, like the pro football player, I imagine I would do it very differently. But I don’t have it all to do over again, and what I became instead of what I might have become, had I done it differently, well I suppose the jury is still out. Some day I hope we do get to go sailing together down this way. We have talked a lot about it for many years; maybe there’s still time for two old farts to do it.
No sense of what kind of Christmas this one will be. I probably will catch up with the crew from radiofreekeywest.com, who are taking food to the homeless at Mallory Pier later this morning. Then one of them is having people over to his place for turkey and so forth mid-afternoon. Maybe I’ll take a nap in there somewhere. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t take a nap, or two, sometimes three. Depends on how I’m holding up to this life I ended up having, instead of the one I might have had if proving msyelf to me, my father, his father, and so forth, wasn’t so important to me when I should have been well over that and moving into something more in keeping with being a father and husband. I don’t have a T.V. I suppose I have getting caught up there to look forward to, later than sooner, I hope. Meanwhile, how, I wonder, does someone today figure out and tell others how the world started several billion years ago? How does one exclude the possibility that Earth was created and terraformed by, say, ETs? Angels? God? How does one exclude the possiblity that the dinosaurs were sentient beings? That they were seeded here and stayed here until it was time for them to do something else, somewhere else? How does one exclude the possiblity that human beings are really no different from the dinosaurs? Here today, gone some place else tommorrow? How does one know? I suppose one has to live long enough to find out. I suppose what human beings think they know probably is about 1/billionth of what is. Or less .
Sloan