Travels with Papa: Key West
I leave out of Miami just after dawn. Outside, the air is fresh and warm and the driving is easy: windows down, shades on, the sun rising steadily over my left shoulder.
An hour passes before I pull into Homestead. My empty belly tells me to grab some breakfast. The town’s generic name is apropos of the perpendicular streets laid into a grid on the hot Floridian plain. What few buildings there are, are sun-worn and shabby and give the impression of overweight sunbathers unable to flip over. A no-name diner sits on the east side of Krome Avenue. I sit down at the zinc bar to a plate of grits and coffee and listen to the local weather report drone over the radio. Sun. Sun. Sun. You’d be lucky to catch a single cloud here outside of hurricane season. Then you’d be very lucky if you didn’t.
I get back on the road and that infamous sun is at full force now, way before midday. I leave the outskirts of Florida City in the rearview and gun the engine south. From my viewpoint, there’s nothing but tall marsh grasses on either side. Somewhere far to my left lies the cool blue of the Atlantic; to my right, the never-ending marshes of the Everglades. I’m on Highway One, a thin, pencil-straight slab of blacktop that runs south from Homestead for 150 miles, eventually depositing sweaty travelers in aging Winnebagos at Mile 0, Key West, the end of America.
This particular strip of One is dubbed Alligator Alley. I can see the low wire fences on either side of the road designed to keep the local population out the harm’s way of speeding tourists. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Another hour passes and I suddenly burst out of the swamplands. The sun-drenched expanses of Barnes and Blackwater Sounds stretch to the horizon. An egret flies over the car and the air here is decidedly saltier than on the mainland. The highway continues over the sea, leapfrogging from island to tiny island before settling on a solid stretch of sand and palms. The road takes an abrupt right; I stop. Welcome to Key Largo, the sign reads.
In the late 1920s Highway One did not exist. Only a rickety series of train tracks built by the industrialist Henry Flagler in the 1910s bridged the largest of the Florida Keys’ 1700 islands. But it was by boat that Ernest Hemingway, arguably the Keys’ most famous resident, first arrived in early 1928. It was at the behest of his friend and fellow writer, John Dos Passos, that Hemingway even made it to Key West at all. The two stopped over for a holiday on the way back from years living in the Expat community of Paris.
In the days before the tourist crowds found their way south, the town was a stopover for sailors coming in from Havana, where the descendents of pirates and salty fishermen drank away their pay. Isolated, boisterous, hidden, and seedy, it was the perfect home for a writer. Hemingway fell in love instantly.
The tiny island on the southernmost tip of the U.S. was as near to a foreign country as he could get while still remaining on American soil. He told his wife after that first trip, “It’s the best place I’ve ever been anytime, anywhere, flowers, tamarind trees, guava, coconut palms… Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.” Better yet, the small, isolated community was the perfect place for a writer’s retreat, where Hemingway would find he did his best writing between nights spent drinking at local watering holes and afternoons sport fishing on the open sea.
I don’t plan to stay long in Key Largo. The largest of the Florida Keys, it is also the most visited and closest to the mainland – read: touristy. Situated between the bays of Everglades National Park to the west and John Pennekamp Reef State Park to the east, Key Largo is a scuba diving Mecca. The warm, shallow water just offshore houses the only living coral reef in the continental U.S. The draw of Key West is strong, but so is the heat of the late morning. I decide to take a two-hour snorkeling trip to refresh my road-weary body.
I park and meander through the harbor; million-dollar yachts and ancient fishing tubs share neighboring stalls. I see a businessman in a white Armani suit. I see a tanned surfer in cutoffs. True, Key Largo is more Miami Beach than Cuba, but even on this long sandbar of commercialism, the Caribbean vibe is coming on strong. The scuba outfit I hook up with is run by a pair of sun-loving hippies who split time as ski guides in the Rockies. I chat with Tim, the snorkeling guide, as the thirty-foot Triumph skips out of the harbor and over blue-green seas.
At the drop off point, we don spring wetsuits and pick through the tub of masks and snorkels. On deck, the sounds of seabirds and buoy bells clatter. Underwater it’s eerily quiet. Only the heavy throb of the tide echoes in my head. I take note of the boat’s location and dive off into the corral playground. Amazing views of purple, green, and lavender show up in my view mask. I dive down to the corral outcroppings and watch tropical fish and shrimp swaying in the tidal breeze. A barracuda catches my attention from a mere ten feet away, but is gone before I can even react – nature’s prototypical stealth submarine. It seems only minutes pass, but I wander for hours among the ocean’s tropical forest and emerge exhausted, enlivened, and salt-encrusted at the boat. On the ride back I sit on the foredeck, drying in the wind, and begin to understand that all life in the Keys is the mere conglomeration of sea, sun, and salt.
I thank Tim and ask about where to scare up some grub. He points me to a little roadside shack where I feast on huge battered Gulf shrimp and cool beer under a deck umbrella. The heat is dizzying, but the road is calling. I get back onto Highway One at the very pinnacle of the sun’s journey. The asphalt shimmers like an oasis on the horizon. I wonder at what temperature my sunglasses would melt to my face.
It’s well known that life moves slowly in the Keys. Well, so does the traffic. Highway One becomes a two-lane road for the majority of its run towards Key West and the slow-moving buses and motor homes make traffic dawdle. The high numbers of motorcycles don’t help either. It seems that every twenty miles or so the traffic slows to gape at the latest crash scene provided by Hell’s Angels wannabes.
An hour and a half out of Key Largo I pass through the grouping of long, thin keys known collectively as Islamorada. In some places, both the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean are visible on opposing sides of the road. The scenery changes from beach clubs to sand dunes to massive resorts and back to cool Atlantic views. I stop at the advice of a friend at Robbie’s Marina, a small private outfit servicing local fishermen and boat owners. You can feed the tarpon out on Robbie’s dock – massive six-foot long fish, all scales and teeth. They rise silently out of the dark water, grab a hold of the chum, and slip quickly back into the chop.
Another thirty miles limp by as the dying sun greets me in Marathon. Settled long ago, but incorporated in only 1999, the city of Marathon is made up of 13 separate keys that lead up to the famous 7-Mile Bridge. The town takes its name from an unidentified grunt in Henry Flagler’s railroad construction team who bitched, “this project is getting to be a real Marathon.” The name apparently stuck.
Exhausted from the sand, surf, and slow miles, I pull over at a motel and grab a room for the night. The bright lights of Key West – I can see them glowing in the distance – will have to wait ‘til morning. A dip in the pool and a cold shower make me feel close to human again. As night falls, so do I – onto a clean, overstuffed bed. The breeze is cooler now, and with it comes soft sounds of night. I think about what I’ve seen, what Hemingway saw when he first came here. The water, the sand, the sun. I open the book and begin to read. My eyes are shut before the moon rises, but I see it in my dreams, sparkling across the eastern ocean.
Hemingway’s most famous account – at least professionally – of Key West came in the 1937 publication of To Have or Have Not. The novel follows Harry Morgan, a salty dog with a big heart and empty pockets. A series of events forces Harry to try business on the wrong side of legal by transporting immigrants and contraband the 90 miles from Havana to Key West. Dark, edgy, often disjointed, the novel is considered one of Hemingway’s worst. But a look past the simple plot structure shows a wealth of characterization and description born directly from his time spent in the Conch Republic.
As much a writer’s colony as a pirate town, Key West has been home to some of America’s leading wordsmiths, including John Dos Passos, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens (who Hemingway duked it out with after the poet insulted his work). The moderate temperatures, the isolation, the progressive population all attracted writers and artists in the early 1900s. Key West may seem like a dubious literary epicenter, but even the Cuban-born cigar rollers traditionally listen to readings of Shakespeare, Dumas, and Unamuno to make the time pass by. The town celebrates its literary tradition still. The Hemingway Days Festival in July celebrates Papa’s unique style with arm-wrestling matches, story-telling competitions, and the famous Hemingway Look-Alike competition.
It’s morning again and first light is dazzling in the northern Caribbean. It takes me little time to cross the 7-Mile bridge and the outlaying keys. My guess is that the revelers are still sleeping out their Mojito hangovers.
Highway One enters town just over Raccoon Key. To one side I see the Key West Golf Club and on to the other, the international airport, the combination of which make up roughly a third of this big-hearted little island. The northeast side of town is ordinary. Shopping malls and gas stations – nothing more than Homestead with a stronger breeze. But as One filters into the narrow city streets, looping around towards the southwest side of town, I’m transported into another world.
Red, yellow, green painted Colonials pop up on either side of the boulevard. Men walk bare-chested down the sidewalk; children run shoeless in shorts and light sundresses. I turn off the AC and roll down the windows. The smooth notes of jazz filter in from a corner bar, already half filled with drinkers. It’s barely 10am but already I get a healthy thirst for a cold Margarita.
Much of the fodder for Hemingway’s novels came directly from Key West’s history. The mid-19th century was a turning point for the island. The pirate trade had been wiped from the seas by modern navies; Gulf coast fishing, though still lucrative, became centered in the more accessible ports of New Orleans, Biloxi, and Miami. The importation of cigars and sugar cane from Cuba became Key West’s bread and butter, along with ship salvaging and, later, liquor bootlegging. By late-century, Key West was America’s thirteenth largest port. Most of the old Colonial mansions that still stand here today were built in the golden age, when sailors and fishermen made vast amounts of wealth dredging up lost ships or importing goods from the West Indies. Smuggling has been a huge trade here, from the pirates of the 18th century, to prohibition bootleggers like Harry Morgan, to illegal aliens coming in from Cuba in the second half of the last century.
In 1982, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol discovered a supposedly ingenious way to stop the smuggling – they set up siege parties on the waters around Key West and a roadblock at the top of Key Largo, the idea being that no one could get to the mainland if not via land or sea. As traffic at the roadblocks lengthened and boaters were continually hassled, the tourist economy began to bottom out. Enraged by the loss of livelihood, a group of Conchs (the traditional title for Key West locals) banded together and decided to secede from the U.S. to found their own nation, the Conch Republic. They proceeded to declare war. The little-known second American Civil War lasted merely one day. No shots were fired and the short-lived Republic made only two legislative moves: to surrender and to request a billion dollars in foreign aid.
Such is the quirky personality of this island and its people. Not quite America, yet not yet the Caribbean, Key West still holds tight to its declaration as an independent Conch Republic – a place where people live by their own rules, where the day is reserved for sun and sand, and a distinct live-and-let-live attitude spreads throughout politics, business, and civil life. In fact, the Conch Republic national flag – a blue field with the emblem of a shell – still flies on nearly every porch today.
I turn down the wide, palm-lined boulevard of Whitehead Street. Huge Admiral’s mansions loom on either side amidst perfectly manicured lawns. I stop at number 907, a massive complex like an earth-bound ship, white and cool-looking in the morning sun. The Hemingway Home and Museum is housed in this gorgeous Spanish Colonial built by a successful salvager in 1851 and designed by Asa Tift, a famous marine architect. Hemingway bought the property in 1931 with his wife, Pauline. The single-acre lot is encircled by an eight-foot high masonry wall, lovingly warped by time and palm roots. Inside, one finds some of the most beautiful gardens on the island – Hemingway loved to walk the grounds in the cool mornings before retiring to his studio on the second story of the pool house (it was connected to the main building by a precarious rope bridge that must have been a dubious challenge for Hemingway after a couple Bloody Marys). The pool itself was the first of its kind on the island and is still the largest to this day. A penny is stuck into the concrete deck, placed by Papa himself, who declared the pool, “cost me my last cent.”
The home was sold at the time of Hemingway’s death in 1961, but bought back and lovingly restored by the Hemingway Foundation to house the museum. The tour is pricey and, though historically interesting, offers little more than a few dusty rooms and aging memorabilia. The biggest tourist draw is the some 50 cats that roam the property. Most are descendents of Hemingway’s famous polydactyl breed, which have between six and eight toes on their front paws. I slip away from the tour group to find solace and inspiration in the gardens by the pool. It’s here that Hemingway did his best thinking; alone in the cool shade, with the sound of the fountain running in the background, the perfume of blooming flowers, the promise of prose and fishing that inevitably came every afternoon like the ocean breeze.
I turn back out onto Whitehead Street and take my time walking north to the heart of the old town. Key West is an incredibly walkable city – maybe the best in the world. The high palms filter harsh sunrays and you’re never more than a half-mile from the sea. I go up a block to the heart of Key West life, Duval Street– Key West’s version of Bourbon Street. Musicians and street performers ply their trade as tourists dawdle in front of souvenir shops and get great cups of Piña Coladas to go. I see a man walking a dog with a cat on its back – and a mouse on top of the cat. I laugh, drop a dollar into his cup, and notice the stash of back-up mice in his shirt pocket. Only in Key West.
Halfway to the docks stands a South Seas monument – Sloppy Joe’s Bar. This was Hemingway’s favorite haunt during his winters here, downing cold beers with the sailors after boxing matches staged at his estate. He once took an old urinal from the bar’s restroom to use as a fountain (and cat watering tub) in his garden. I step in and grab a seat at the bar, order a beer and a burger, cleverly named ‘The Bun Also Rises’. I ask the barkeep about some Hemingway stories and he points down to the end of the oak plank where Papa once arm wrestled a Trinidadian sailor for what he described as “bloody hours”. I’ve been to a number of Hemingway haunts in my travels – there’s no shortage – and I get the same feeling every time, as if the bleached walls, the old oak bar, the ancient memorabilia is holding back stories told long ago.
Outside the day holds a cheery disposition, so I decide to continue the celebration. Down the street I finally discover where all those bikers were heading. The infamous Hog’s Breath Saloon is perhaps the quintessential biker joint. The vast open-air bar and grill booms day and night. Bikers, tourists, locals all share long driftwood benches and listen to the best blues and rock in the South Seas – cool under the marsh grass canopy. I sit down to a cold beer and listen to a Jimmy Buffet cover band drone away about Margaritas and Cheeseburgers. This is most definitely paradise.
With the tourist industry being the main breadwinner nowadays, it’s easy to forget that Key West’s working docks are not just Hollywood backdrops. I walk the worn wood planks and watch charter boats and trawlers navigate between massive Cruise ships. It is here that the mythic Harry Morgan would’ve unloaded his booty under a full Caribbean moon. The essence of Hemingway rides the tides here like the flotsam. I slip beneath the boardwalk and read in the cool shade until the afternoon and downed drinks lull me to sleep.
Hemingway never truly left Key West. And especially not in spirit. He continued to visit the island until his death, though fame and travel continually took him further and further from his old Colonial mansion.
I wake from a groggy nap just before sunset. Good thing I haven’t missed the natural light show that is reportedly more beautiful than anywhere else in the world. Mallory Square is a wide, open cobblestone terrace at the top of Whitehead, the very edge of the island. During the day the square is speckled with performers, artists’ stalls, roaming tourists. At around an hour before sundown, however, the entire population of the island seems to migrate here. It’s as if the cooling temperatures ring a bell across town.
From its unimpeded view, one can look far out into the Gulf of Mexico – you could see the Yucatan, in fact, if it weren’t for the curve of the earth. As the sun dips slowly to its home in the west, the lightshow begins. Beams of purple, orange, red, yellow seem to dance over the waves and across the evening sky. The buzz of the tourists is palpable. Everyone is in a communal mindset; people pass bottles of wine and chat quietly, almost in reverence to the beauty unfolding before them. And then, just as the orgy of light and color reaches its pinnacle and the very last dregs of the dying sun tilt over the horizon – boom – a bright green flash shocks across the water. The very last of the sun’s rays reaching the end of the prism of ocean mist; the green flash is a Key West legend. I catch a glimpse and spin around to see others nodding in excitement and disbelief.
As the crowds disperse to dinner and the night, I remain with my legs dangling over the docks. To Have or Have Not – it’s hard to thinking of having not in this beautiful island paradise. As the darkness fills in over the ocean, I thank old Hemingway for leading me here and walk away to a night of revelry, happy with the knowledge that that old Key West sun will rise yet again.
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