Art Levy:  

I've been a Park Ranger for the better part of my life, starting with the National Park Service at Gateway National Recreation Area at Jamaica Bay. i also started drawing and painting in college and kept at it on the side for years. My favorite places were the Art Students League near Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I eventually moved out to Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington State ( the place was aptly named ) where I ran a small campground and supervised the main park entrance. I then worked my way up to hiking the Backcountry at 5000' elevation. From Rainier I moved west past Seattle to the city of lost dreams on Puget Sound on the Olympic Peninsula - where I continued to paint. I also lived up in the North Cascades National Park for a few summers working as a tour guide at several Hydro-electric dams . I moved to Kansas to escape the dreary Cascade rains, and relish the oceans of land where I produced my best landscape paintings. As artwork is the first thing people give up in a recession i headed back east to upstate NY, then to Florida where I resumed my Park Ranger career with the Florida Park Service on the beautiful tropical island of Key Biscayne. I retired in Jan '22 after 21 years and as soon as I set up my new house I'll be ready to start painting again !!!! Purchasing my first house on the space coast in the middle of a world wide pandemic with thousands of NY ers bailing out to Florida and jacking up prices by $ 100 k was a real nail biting ,stomach churning , emotional nightmare. Houses opened and closed the same day. You'd look at 6 houses and then have to decide that moment if you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. I spent more time deciding on purchasing my sneakers than I could spending my life savings on a house I visited for only 10 minutes. ☝ 😑😒😡👺 I got cheated out of 3 houses I had high bid on. But finnally found a sweet place that has great space and Fung shui in a safe area close to the ocean and lots of fine dining close by. And I can hear freight trains rolling by all night and watch rockets blast off and land from my front yard !!! I'm single, with no kids. I only have a 20 word vocabulary in Spanish, ( I guess I should have been paying more attention in Miss Goody's class. 😊. ). and no billion dollar endowment, so I don't have a Miami ladyfriend. I'm a Progressive democrat. I lived for 20 years in a city that was built very late in American history at the start of the 20 th century, out of a swamp . where no one speaks English, knows how to drive, knows anything about manners, or consideration, nor do they recycle. Every day was like a visit to a steamy sweaty science fiction movie with billionaire swindlers on one side of the street, and bums , mariachi bands ,and burning barrels on the other side of the street. It's a bizarre life where many foreign speaking banking and real estate swindlers have insane money, and all the trappings of such. The 1 % South American style. 16 year olds casually driving around with their friends in $ 150,000. Masseratis. And almost everyone you see is a type " A " personality. ....butting heads with each other constantly. And the homeless are driving around in old Mercedes. Driving in South Florida reminds me of the final scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke brings his fighter down into the trenches of the death star, and guns are firing at him from all directions. It Could have been filmed on I - 95 , with dozens of interweaving cars switching 3 lanes at a time, passing you at 85 mph, clearing your front bumper by less than a foot. In South Florida the soil is sand, the air is water vapor, and we haven't had a winter in the last 15 years. Climate change. 🏝 🌅. You never know what season or month you're in as its the same day year round. Blistering heat and humidity smack you in the face as soon as you open the door, and you're thinking - Jesus it's only 7 am, how hot is it going to be at 3 in the afternoon. !!! Working at a park on Key Biscayne was like a blend of the movies Ground Hog Day and Caddyshack, minus our old friend Bill Murray, with marauding racoons and possums replacing gophers and groundhogs as the pesky varmints stealing food off picnic tables, knocking over trash cans, and posing for photos with visitors. The one good thing about Miami is that it's so close to the United States. No plane or passport required. So I'm exceedingly happy to be 200 miles north of Miami back in the United States where most people speak English, and it gets cold enough to wear pants and long sleeved shirts once in a while. And we have giant Sandhill cranes here, and armadillos and bobcats , and I even spotted a mom and baby otter slithering by the house headed for the pond across the street. I've studied and experimented a lot with metaphysics, sacred geometry forms, crystals, magnetism, and celestial psychology - astrology. I listen mostly to straight ahead jazz on Miami station WDNA , and Chicagos WDCB, and of course disc's of the great rock bands we grew up with. My friends think I've committed high treason for proclaiming the Grateful Dead better than the Beatles...what do you think ? For me the Dead are timeless, while the Beatles always take my emotions back to the moments I first heard them. Take a listen to those first chords in " I want to hold your hand " , experience a full body rush and get whisked back to the Ed Sullivan show in 1964 instantly. Who said time travel was impossible ? If any of my old friends are reading this I'd love to hear from you, my only friends in Bongo Congo and Viera are my co - workers, and neighbors, and that only goes so far and so deep. Write me at ArtLevy 1953 at Gmail.......not at Classmates I stopped paying so i wont r...Expand for more