Ride to Work Profile: “Conchscooter”
Sunday, June 3rd, 2007
Michael Beattie, aka “Conchscooter”, rides to work in Key West.
“Conchscooter” is the screen name of a fellow scooterist named Michael Beattie. He first started showing up in the comment section of this blog, quite some time ago. Since then, we have started a dialogue via email, in which he has described his unique Ride to Work to me in a rather flowing, Hemingway-esque style.
Riding his Vespa GTS from his home on Ramrod Key, Michael commutes to his job as a dispatcher for the Key West Police Department, twenty-some miles along the causeways that link the Florida Keys. This is quite a contrast to my various Ramble Plans, and it makes for an interesting read.
But let’s let him tell you about it…
This is Michael’s view out the window at work.
I am already starting to anticipate the ride home by the time the clock says 05:00 hours, still at least an hour before the sun comes up, this time of year. The last dark hour at the computer console every morning consists of cleaning the work surfaces and emptying the night’s accumulation of trash while we monitor the phones and the police radios and hope no one decides to rob, fight or steal in the last slow hour of the morning before we are relieved.
Unlike my caged colleagues I like to check the weather radar, look out the window at the street lights shimmering on the water, checking wind direction. Jessie knows me well enough watching me sneak a glance at my Vespa sitting in the parking lot, but we share lots of secrets after working nights together for way too long, and she won’t reveal my waspish obsession to outsiders.
When the day shift finally appears I am free at last, the second best moment of the day! I love the transition from the chilly, neon- lit corridors inside, to the warm, damp night air outside the front doors. The street lights throw an orange glow on everything, making my GTS look more vintage plum than vintage red.
The breeze blowing in off the ocean gives the streets of Key West an early morning flavor of salt water, and marsh and tropical things rotting gently in the night; it’s the sweet thick smell of decay and it blows over me, clearing the sterile, air-conditioned cobwebs of the night shift, as I ride towards the first hint of the sunrise.
No Ramble Plans here, there’s only one road to ride on.
North Roosevelt Boulevard runs straight along the water for two miles from the Police Station to the Cow Key Bridge, the only bridge out of the city, and it’s a street tourists don’t generally pay much attention to. It’s four lanes of suburban Americana: Sears, Kmart, Home Depot, Publix, TGIF, IHOP, many of the usual suspects lurking on the periphery of the fashionable and suave narrow, palm-lined streets that the Southernmost City advertises around the world. “The Boulevard†as we call it is a slalom course of potholes, sleepy cages, unlit bicycles and a small number of early morning drunks stumbling god knows where.
I wish I knew how to take it all at a snail’s pace; to observe the form and harmony of a little town in the sticks, fast asleep and snoring off the debauchery of the night before. But I just want to get home to bed, my favorite moment of the day. So I’m staring at the road ahead, checking the street, checking any signs of movement, anticipating the drunken lurch as the driver feels for a lost cell phone, sweeping smoothly past the straining, smoking Chinese scooter, its rider hunched over against the cool pre-dawn eighty degree air.
I hear so much noise about “small wheels†and how they are inherently unstable, but my Vespa is as surefooted negotiating these messy streets as it was stroking the top end of the speedometer on the smooth freeways of Miami this weekend.
The red light at the “Triangle†is where I turn out of the city in a narrow left which gives me a chance to pull clear of cages still trying to figure how the moped got to the light ahead of them, and I’m over the hump and onto Stock Island before they’ve got their feet off the brakes.
Stock Island is the last half mile of urban sprawl; a used car dealer, a tattoo shop, an all-night gas station, a liquor store, a darkened Burger King still sleeping, and Highway One heads north to my home 25 miles away, in a final blaze of orange-sodium four-lane mainland automotive glory, 55mph speed limit be damned.
We never have skies like this in Minnesota.
The pack breaks loose, the Hobbit on the moped is a little red speck hauling ass across the causeway, aiming at the rural two lane beyond the glow of urban street lighting, grinning at the damp, pink tendrils of sunrise to the east, looking for all the world like the open lips of a Queen Conch shell, promising another fine sunny day of riding to anyone lucky enough to have the night off and a splendid Vespa to ramble on, seeking out that new and secret beach in some clump of mangroves close to home and never too far from the main road that leads, as do all main roads, from home to work, and back again. Thank God! I’d have no excuse to ride so long and so far, if I didn’t have a job to get to!
