13 October 2019
For the last three mornings I’ve awakened around 3:45 am. The first morning, I thought I was hearing someone’s alarm in the guest house. I finally got up to pee and then tried to track down the direction of the sound. It wasn’t a guest’s alarm. It was a rooster that sounded like he was missing some rooster parts – a very soprano crow!
Key West used to be famous for Hemingway’s six toed cats. You don’t hear or read much about them these days. What you do see and hear a lot are roosters – very early in the morning. The rooster has become the unofficial mascot of the city.
You can find them on t-shirts, see them in paintings, statuary, ceramics, and mostly underfoot. It’s gotten to where chickens are everywhere and even slowing traffic on Duval – maybe not a bad thing.
Blue Heaven is a restaurant famous for the chickens roaming the courtyard where they serve food. Not particularly sanitary but certainly entertaining. I even took Rocky there once and he was fascinated by chickens running around underfoot of the wait staff.
I don’t have a real beef with chickens. Both grandfathers raised them and one participated in the sport of chicken fighting – illegal then and now in Mississippi. What I do have a problem with is their inability to tell time.
Three forty-five am is a little early, even for roosters. He’s the only one in the neighborhood that goes off at that time. All the other roosters respectfully wait until an hour before dawn.
What I have noticed is most of the chickens in Key West seem to be bantams. When I first noticed them years ago, they were the full-size version of chickens but they seem to be overtaken by the bantam variety.
There were a few people in my hometown of Morton that had bantam chickens. The one thing I remembered about them is they roosted in trees, not hen houses. That and you would have to eat three of their eggs to make one of a regular hen.
Last night we had dinner at Azur. I think I mentioned Tom Green introduced me to this restaurant a few years back and it continues to deliver on good food.
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I saw them off for the evening in an Uber car and headed the short distance back to the guest house.
Tomorrow we plan to explore and shop more of Key West, have lunch at Louie’s Back Yard, and then take in the sunset at Mallory Square. Too soon Monday will come and we make our way back to the routine of Fort Lauderdale.
I’ve been coming to Key West since the early 80’s. My original trip down was over the old seven mile bridge. I remember gripping the steering wheel very tightly while meeting a semi coming toward me at 10 at night with maybe two inches between as we met on that bridge. That’s one inch between my old truck and the semi and one inch between my truck and the guard rail.
The reason the fit was so tight is the old seven mile bridge (and all the old bridges of the Keys) were modified railroad bridges. They only built them wide enough for a single locomotive. All the highway department did was pave the bridge and add guard rails.
Old Town has certainly changed. It’s become more gentrified and sedate. It makes for better sleeping when the roosters are quiet but it takes away from some of the wildness that made the city fun. You still have some of the local character color and there’s always a drunk staggering out of some bar, but it’s become a town mostly for cruise ship passengers to disembark and walk Duval for the t-shirt shops. Not quite the Key West of The Copa, the Monster, and all the wild night clubs.
My preference is to get off Duval and explore the rest of Old Town. You’ll find the prices in restaurants one block off Duval cheaper and better. The architecture away from Duval gets a little kinkier and individualistic, and the people who live here will often greet you instead of snubbing you on Duval.
No matter how much the town changes, it still has that mystique, that allure, that peculiarity that makes you want to come back again and again.
I think we’ve decided we’re going to make this an annual tradition for us to celebrate our three birthdays. Any excuse to return.
By the by, still no news about the death at the guest house. The Citizen, the local newspaper, hasn’t updated their web site nor has there been any internet news about it.
