Key West, Florida

Key West, Florida
January, 2017

I left Key West on the overseas highway which follows the railroad that Henry Flagler built with his oil money and slave labor in the early 1900’s. I was headed to Bellingham, Washington to play board games and watch the rain

I left a thin cloud of exhaust and traces of rubber behind me as I drove north. Mr. Flagler left a trail of dead black men that he rented from corrupt cops as he chased the sunset to Mallory Square. His wife was sick. She had a cough—maybe consumption?—and he hated lazy, unused land so he kept building and buying and building and buying and building. He had a lot of money. There is a university named after him on the east coast of Florida, north of the swamps, that was once a very nice hotel he built near where Ponce De Leon landed when he was looking for the fountain of youth. The Fountain of Youth is a special fountain that if you drink from you get to live forever. Mr. De Leon didn’t find the fountain of youth, neither did Henry Flagler, nor did any of the men he rented to build his railroad—all of those people are now dead.

The overseas highway stretches nearly 100 miles before it hits the mainland of Florida and passes over just as many tiny islands. Some of those islands are home to tiny deer that walked there when the seas were low but got stuck there when they rose. Today the miniature deer wander around people’s yards and eat snacks and look cute. My friend Chris has a dead one’s head on his wall at the best bar in Key West. You can find him and his Key Deer head tucked out of the way on Caroline Street near the post office. You are not allowed to have a dead Key Deer on your wall, even if you have the best bar in Key West, so don’t tell on him if you go there.

I turned west and drove across the shitty, weird part of Florida that is more mangroves than anything else. Mangroves are wonderful places where the best animals live and where the garbage and filth of humans is filtered and strained as it seeps from the land back into the ocean. On the tiny islands flung about Indonesia you can find baby sharks in them and plastic bottles that have sailed the seven seas. People like to hack and saw their exposed roots to bits and pile their slender hand-hewn boats with them and paddle home. They stack the dead roots under their homes and they look like little wooden elbows or maybe more like sweet potatoes or yams. There are a lot of people in Florida and so it is good they have so many mangroves.

I got directions from strangers and found myself driving along ‘alligator alley’ instead of zooming along on the freeway. I saw four alligators lounging in the narrow straight canals that were built to keep the mosquitos, Indians, and water under control.

I stopped on a reservation to see a giant statue of an American Indian wrestling an alligator. In the gift shop they had many things made from alligator skin and alligator teeth. Their skin is very durable. Their teeth are very sharp. Wrestling them must have been very dangerous but you have to pay the bills, I suppose.

On display were a couple of hand-hewn toy boats that look like all of the toy boats that exist in the world. They were very good representations of the regular sized ones. They were slender, delicate and long. The real ones require expert paddlers who kneel in the bottom of the boats and whom, in old age, have extraordinary muscles in their backs and arms and chest but their legs are wilted and crooked and won’t straighten out anymore.

I walked back to my car and smoked an American Spirit ® cigarette in the empty parking lot. American Spirit ® brand cigarettes are additive free and the logo emblazoned on the pack is that of an American Indian smoking a peace pipe. They are the most expensive cigarettes you can buy.

I thought about what south Florida must have been like before the railroad. I thought about what it would be like to paddle through the marshes and watch the egrets ply their trade in the shallow water and to hear their wings push against the heavy air and watch their wingtips dip into the water as they ascended beyond the low trees. I thought about nothing but the soft, wet, glide of a narrow canoe and the sting of cramped legs.  

I had a lunch of fried catfish in a bayou and got directions to a small road that passed through the orange groves that seem to stretch forever. I passed old school buses full of the Mexicans that are bussed to and from the endless rows of trees that reach all the way out to the road. I was reminded of a poem by Peter Kane Dufault that begins: 

I called you because I could not stand alone
looking north to that skyline-
tree globed with its yellow apples
balancing like a fountain of planets
in the bright light and the blue air.

There was no skyline but the air was indeed bright and blue and I couldn’t help but imagine each tree a little a fountain of planets, erupted from a seed spit onto the ground by a Mexican boy who, years ago, snuck an orange in the midmorning heat. Everything has a beginning.

I passed by dozens of defunct orange juice stands that were painted in the hues and shades of family vacations, big steel cars and plastic Mickey Mouse masks. I saw a pineapple on a pole and thought of Tenochtitlan. I pulled my car over and searched the unkempt lawn for a snake but I didn’t find one. Everything has an end.  

I drove across the nothingness of central Florida and hated every minute of it. I slept in my car behind a movie theatre and left at sunrise. I was in horse country and when I went for a cup of coffee I had to wait in line behind two girls in their ‘competition clothes’ and I quietly laughed at their glitter and sequins, tight pants and boots that were all show.

Somewhere in the panhandle of Florida things stop looking like Florida and the trees look like Georgia and stretch over the small roads from both sides. The moss grows and weeps in the shade. I left the highway for a small road that went through a national forest on a straight and narrow path. The road was empty and quiet and I went 120 miles per hour which was the fastest I have ever gone. The trees were all identical and looked like #2 pencils stuck straight in the ground as I zoomed past. I recently learned that these types of forests are not healthy or natural. Trees do better when they are surrounded by other types of trees with different ideas on size and different mineral needs and different shapes of leaves.

Somewhere past Sumatra, Florida I stopped for gas and bought a bad biscuit sandwich and listened to two men talk about hunting the wild boars that are the direct descendants of the pigs that Hernando De Soto brought to America in 1539. Both of the men were wearing a type of camouflage called Real Tree™ which makes them look just like the forest. The hunters stand a better chance of sneaking up on the pigs if they are disguised like branches and leaves.

Mr. De Soto was not looking for the fountain of youth, he was looking for gold. When he landed in Tampa his pigs were not wild. They were small and resourceful and dependent on the scraps of camp. They were not good at living in the forest, nor were the conquistadors. They did not have clothes that helped them to blend in. They wore heavy shirts and pantaloons and rusty jackets that were made out of metal. De Soto’s pigs mostly followed the soldiers on their search for gold and conquest but some got lost along the way. From what I remember, Mr. De Soto didn’t find any gold but he beat up a lot of people and killed a lot of people and raped a lot of people and then he died near the Mississippi River. With nobody left to feed the pigs, they grew tusks and sharpened their teeth on whatever they could find.

The panhandle of Florida is weird. It’s where the laziest of people go to winter on the ocean. You can drive from the bottom of Lake Michigan to the the Gulf of Mexico in 15 hours but you never should. The houses are built on stilts and are wind-beaten and chapped. The dunes there, like all dunes, are constantly in motion. The steady gulf winds blow billions of grains of sand from the top of one to the bottom of the next. Richard Dawkins once described the human body—maybe the entire human experiment— as being like a sand dune walking into a headwind. He said our cells are flaking off of us at an unbelievable rate and are attaching to whatever is behind us. So, I guess, we are constantly in motion and constantly new and, over time, we must become someone or something else.