A Salty Stretch of Highway

Thank God for the Catholics.

At my current office, Good Friday is a paid holiday. Sometime during the week I decided to make the most of it and those of you who know me won't be surprised to learn that yard work never crossed my mind. The weather people were unanimously promising bright blue skies and balmy temperatures for the Holy Weekend and so Key West beckoned loudly. I'd never been there before and it seemed almost absurd that I had lived in Florida nearly all my life, yet never visited the most famous island in the lower 48. Fully expecting to have my hopes dashed, I scanned the Internet to see if there were any camp sites available in the Keys and they were all booked solid except for one - the KOA in Sugarloaf Key, which was also the closest campground to Key West I could find. That it seemed sacreligious to awaken hungover and surly on the beach on the anniversary of our Lord's Resurrection caused some concern, but the stars don't often align themselves so perfectly and I told myself it was an omen, a sign from the Almighty Himself that I should honor Him by taking full advantage the Grace and Favor He had shown me through the sparkling Honda He had parked in my garage. When I stepped out into the driveway Thursday morning, a Snowy Egret was standing on spindly black legs in the street in front of me. His head, perched atop a serpentine neck, was turned to the right, and he seemed to be eyeing me, evaluating whether I was either a threat or a source of food. Clearly another omen, I told myself. It couldn't have been more obvious had he pulled a guitar from under his feathers and started strumming and humming Margaritaville. Then he pooped where he stood. I wasn't sure what to make of that at the time, but through the gift of 20/20 hindsight, I think I now know.



That night I cracked open a six-pack, put some Johnny Cash on, and started the ritual of strapping stuff to my bike with rope and bungee cords while the Man in Black sang about the road.

I've been to Reno Chicago Fargo Minnesota
Buffalo Toronto Winslow Sarasota
Whichita Tulsa Ottowa Oklahoma
Tampa Panama Mattawa LaPaloma
Bangor Baltimore Salvador Amarillo
Tocapillo Barranquilla And Padilla I'm a Killer

I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I had a long way to go to match Mr. Cash and certainly never will, but sitting around here and thinking about it wasn't going to get me any closer.

The next morning the alarm went off at 7:30 and I went through my typical routine of the 3 S's and breakfast, before topping off the radiator coolant. If I have a gripe about this bike, it's that the marks signifying an empty or full tank of radiator fluid are too hard to read when the overflow tank is dirty. I never clean the overflow tank and radiator fluid spilled onto the driveway. Dammit. Mistake number one. Remember the omen the egret deposited in the street? It took a valuable 15 minutes before I could get it cleaned up enough to where I wouldn't worry about poisoning any of the neighborhood stray cats. Then I hit the road.

There's not much to tell about the road except that it's long and grueling. It takes a physical toll on your body as you're cruising along the Interstate at 80ish miles per hour. Somewhere after filling up at the Mobil station on Miccosukee Indian Reservation about half-way across the Alligator Alley, I decided I'd had enough and couldn't take it anymore. Obviously, there was no turning back. Nor was there any stopping for a rest, because it wouldn't do any good. On the other hand, I was wearing my half-helmet and a half-helmet at Interstate speed is basically a parachute wrapped around your neck. I reasoned that impacting the sweltering south Florida asphalt at that speed would be fatal either with or without the helmet, pulled over, loosened some gear, and strapped my helmet to the sissy bar. Mistake number two.



From there it was pretty smooth sailing the rest of the way across the Alley and down Krome Avenue to Florida City, the last chance for anything before the 18-mile stretch to Key Largo. It was there that I stopped to refuel and realized that I hadn't secured a critical piece of gear after strapping my helmet down on the Alley. My sleep pad was flopping around on the highway somewhere in the Everglades. I wasn't particularly fond of the thing, but if the ground in Sugarloaf Key was anything like the ground at Fort Desoto, I was gonna need it. This was bad. Oh well. Spilt milk. It is what it is.


Over land, over sea.



Heading south from Florida City on US 1, you're greeted by a large metal sculpture of a marlin suspended in air, presumably in a fight for it's life against a fisherman. I didn't stop to measure the thing but I suppose it stands about 20' tall (maybe taller) in the middle of the median dividing the northbound and southbound lanes of the road, and is framed by programmable traffic information signs. It's actually quite beautiful and it's also right then and there that you get the feeling you're heading into a different sort of world. This is roughly where US 1 also becomes the Overseas Highway. (I should mention here that despite a feeling you might get as you motor past the big fish that you're almost there, you're not. You're not even close. In fact, if you're coming from Hillsborough or Pinellas, you're only about 2/3 of the way through your trip. Key West is actually a good 30 miles further away from Florida City than Walt Disney World is from Clearwater. And the speed limit drops considerably in the Keys.)



The Overseas Highway takes it's name from it's predecessor, the Florida Overseas Railroad, an extension of the Florida East Coast Railway built by tycoon Henry Flagler when the senile old bastard decided that Miami wasn't hot enough for him. (Okay, I made up the "senile old bastard" part.) Construction of the railroad was completed in 1912 and he died a year later. Large portions of it were smashed by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and the FECR couldn't afford the repairs, so they sold it to the state. Florida built most of the Overseas Highway on what was left standing after the storm. Obviously, it's changed a lot since then.

As I said, it's a different sort of world. It's remarkably rural in most places and that's certainly not what one would expect in a string of sub-tropical islands connected to the mainland US by a highway. Sure, there are plenty of hotels, restaurants, and an occasional attraction. On Key Largo for instance, one restaurant claims to be the place where Bogie and Bacall battled Edward G. Robinson in the movie of the same name. But locations are determined by mile markers ("Theater of the Sea. Mile Marker 84.5", says one billboard) and there are long stretches of road where you see little in the way of civilization. At times you wonder what motivated people to build the highway and it's bridges, to brave the hurricanes, alligators, crocodiles, sharks, buzzard-sized mosquitos, and sweltering heat, and to actually move down there and put down roots in the days before automatic weapons and air conditioning. Then you cross one of those bridges as I did, on a bright day with a pale blue sky overhead and shimmering turquoise waters below, and you know right away. You quit wondering why people went there, and start wondering why anyone would ever leave.



In all, the ride took about 10 hours, with stops for fuel, food, just to stretch my legs and have a cigarette, or in the case of the K-Mart in Marathon (mile marker 55), to get an air matress to replace the pad I had lost. I arrived at the KOA campground on Sugarloaf Key at around 9pm, setup camp, and went in search of beer and a meal at 10. Most everything nearby closed at 10 with the exception of a bar and grill / mini-golf course on Big Pine Key called Boondocks. There I feasted on crab soup and clam strips while a live band played classic rock. During my stay they played Jethro Tull's Locomotive Breath. Damned if the singer didn't play the flute too. I was impressed, but too tired to stick around and enjoy the show. Instead I went back to the campground and slept like the dead. The next morning a man in the next site over said, "You weren't kidding when you said you were tired. There was all kinds of noise going on. I figured you'd wake up, but you snored right through it all".



Saturday morning was cloudless and gorgeous, and also revealed the surprisingly light toll hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma had taken in 2005. I'm sure it was no picnic for those living there, but I expected worse. It took years for some portions of Miami and Homestead to recover after Andrew.

The ride from Sugarloaf Key to Key West took about 30 minutes and I was torn between opening the throttle in a hurry to get there, and a desire ease up and enjoy the scenery. When you finally arrive in Key West, you're greeted by a strip mall housing a Home Depot. At first it seems out of place, but then you realize that there are a lot of homes on the tiny island and despite the exotic location, locks still need replacing, hedges still need to be trimmed, and toilets still back up.

Soon afterwards you come to a stop light where you face a decision. To the left is A1A and the beaches, to the right is US1 and the business district. Straight isn't an option and given Key West's reputation that really comes as no surprise. I went right, reasoning that "business" in Key West was code for bars and wasn't disappointed.

With nothing but signs emblazoned with the names of streets I'd never heard of to navigate by, I simply pressed on. The road hugged the shore and I figured that since this was an island, at the very worst I would end up back where I started. Soon, the coast dissappeared but a sign for Duval Street came up. That one I recognized and took the next left.

Sometimes dumb luck has a way of guiding your steps. My primary desire in this trip was to see and touch the monument marking the southernmost patch of real estate on the continental United States. Everything else was gravy. As it turned out, the left I took was Whitehead Street, at the end of which stood that very marker. Mission accomplished.



Next on the list was the Hemingway Home and wouldn't you know it... I passed it on the way back up Whitehead. This was just too damned easy.

On Key West, there are four things that you can't escape:

1) Fishing
2) Jimmy Buffett
3) Alcohol and
4) Ernest "Papa" Hemingway's ghost.

Hemingway Home is obviously the epicenter of the number four.



At the advice of a friend, he made Key West his home for much of the latter part of his life (1928 - 1940) due to illness and a string of injuries that his violent and wreckless lifestyle had visited upon him. It was there that he wrote the story he's perhaps best remembered for, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The house was built in 1851 by Amos Tift. Tift was a wealthy and influential wrecker (more on wreckers later) who came from a wealthy and influential southern family. Indeed, Tift and Tifton counties in Georgia are named after them. Hemingway's second set of in-laws bought the house for him and his wife as wedding present for the princely sum of $8,000. His wife had a saltwater pool installed at a cost of $25,000. No wonder he divorced the bitch.



The story says that he dropped a penny into the still soft concrete and told his wife she might as well take his last penny. That penny was later retrieved, set in acrylic, and placed at the edge of a patio overlooking the pool.



While he lived in Key West, he adopted a polydactyl (six-toed) cat given to him by a retiring sea captain. (Polydactyls were valued by sailors because they're very good at climbing and even better at killing rats.) That cat had kittens. Lots of kittens. Today, some 60 of it's progeny still live at Hemingway Home. The caretakers "fix" most of them, but a few are kept uncut in order to preserve the line. Unlike my cat, they're quite used to strangers and will occasionally let passersby pet them. I scratched a couple on their heads and they seemed to like it, but let me know when they had had enough by taking a nip and a swat. This fellow was one of them. I later learned through the Hemingway Home website that his name is Spencer Tracey.



As I was about to leave, one of the tour guides told a funny story. The trough at the bottom of the fountain in the picture just below was once a urinal.



Hemingway got it from a bar that was either being torn down or renovated (I can't remember which) and brought it home as a watering trough for his cats. His wife was appalled, but he explained that if she could have a $25,000 saltwater pool on an island surrounded by ocean, then dammit he was gonna have that urinal for his cats. She agreed (Who's gonna tell Ernest Hemingway "no"?), but camouflaged it with Mexican tile and the big ceramic pot. To this very day however, the cats perch themselves atop the rim of the trough, place their forelegs on the pot and drink the water before it ever reaches the urinal, "Because as everyone knows", explained the guide in a dramatic and rising tone akin to a carnival barker, bowed at the waist, his head down, his arms outstretched, and his index and middle fingers extended in a Nixon-like "V" for victory gesture, "NO self-respecting feline of good breeding would EVER... drink WATER... from the TOILET!"

The next photo (taken from the Hemingway Home website) bears witness to just that.



He once said that he liked having the lighthouse across the street. It gave him something to navigate by on his way home from the bar. This is the view from the second floor balcony. The french doors to the right lead to the master bedroom.
















And this is what you see when you turn the corner on the balcony.
















From there it was on to breakfast at Denny's and a beer at Sloppy Joe's. Now that I had checked the two most important things off my to-do list, no way in hell was I leaving Key West without having at least one beer at Hemingway's famous watering hole. The place reeks of the man. Pictures of him hang on every wall as does an enormous stuffed marlin. A lone singer was on the stage with a guitar playing country tunes and as if on cue, part way through my noontime beer he began to sing It's Five O'clock Somewhere. It was a little awkward listening to him try to recite the conversation between Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett at the end, but the man gets an E for effort and a great big attaboy for having the marbles to move from Nashville to Key West to sing in bars for a living.







After finishing the beer, I started wandering wherever my feet took me, eventually ending up at the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum. It looked interesting enough, but what really caught my eye was the Shipwreck Historium and it's watchtower dominating everything else in sight. I wanted pictures and that seemed to be the place to get them.





Like much of the coastal areas in the New World, one of the earliest trades in Key West was wrecking and it was a lucrative business. Wreckers built towers like the one standing at 1 Whitehead Street and watched the coast for shipwrecks. When they saw one, they would head out to the site and salvage whatever they could. They were often sneered at and called looters and theives, but the fact is that they were good at what they did, and shipping companies were willing to pay top dollar to get lost cargo from the bottom and pull sailors and passengers from the drink. Wreckers made an especially good living in Key West thanks to a treacherous reef, the powerful Gulf Stream currents that the Conquistadors used to catapult their galleons loaded with plundered gold across the Atlantic, and later to the westward expansion of the United States. In the 1800s, cargo ships would launch from eastern ports like Savannah or Charleston, sail past Key West through the Straights of Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, and on to New Orleans and the Mississippi River. A lot of ships went down off Key West and the wreckers would salvage tons of cargo, ranging from porcelain tableware to ivory tusks to huge slabs of marble, with only their swimming skills and ability to hold their breaths for several minutes at a time to keep them from drowning. Tough work, but the pay was good.





From atop the tower you'll catch sight of some of the most beautiful tropical scenery you'll ever lay eyes on.











After the Historium, I wandered aimlessly for an hour or so, snapping whatever caught my eye.




























































Then I headed back to the campsite for a dip in the ocean, another shower, and a much needed nap. I was dead-on-my-feet exhausted when I killed the engine. I grabbed the book I've been reading and primary inspiration for the trip, Jimmy Buffett's A Salty Piece of Land, laid back on the mattress and quickly dozed off. After a short snooze I hit the beach, then the shower, then noticed mistake number three. I had left the motorcycle key in the ignition in the on position. On motorcycles, if the ignition is on, the light is on, and I had left it this way for a good two hours. The battery was completely drained.

A very uncomfortable mixture of desperation and remorse began to overcome me. Desperation, because I was one helluva long way from home and my only means of transportation sat in front of me as still and lifeless as a moon rock. Remorse, because I had only my own absent-minded stupidity to blame. There are far worse places in this world to be stuck than in the Florida Keys, but that didn't make me feel any better. Making matters worse, you don't just jump a 6 volt bike. Cars and trucks use 12 volt batteries and jump-starting a 6 volt bike with a car is a good way to fry something. Then you're really screwed. But I had to try something.

A group of young men were sitting around a fire at a neighboring site and I asked them if they had jumper cables. They looked very cuban and I assumed they were from Miami. One, a tall guy in dreadlocks said no, but they'd help me push start it. His brother, equally dreadlocked, joined in and off we went. We gave up after about four or five tries. Then I remembered seeing a group of people on Harley-Davidsons ride in earlier. Bikers are usually a helpful bunch, so I thanked the cubans for their efforts and marched off in search of Hogs. They weren't hard to find and were very sympathetic as one of them had done the very same thing the day before. Unfortunately, Harleys operate on 12 volts and had no jumpers with them anyway. I took a ribbing for riding a Honda. One fireplug of a man who looked to be in his late 50s suggested trying to jump it off of one of the golf carts the campground attendants use and offered me a lift to the camp office on his lowrider. I took him up on it and soon we had my bike wired to one of those carts. Nothing. Then a camp attendant had flash of genius. Tie it to the golf cart with a rope and pull the friggin' thing until it starts. You shoulda seen it.

The rope we used was rope I keep in the saddlebags to strap down cargo. It was in two pieces about six feet long each. They came apart on the first try and whacked me in the face. On the third or fourth try, she sputtered to life then died. A couple more tries and she was purring like a kitten. I tore off back down to Key West, ate a dinner of coconut shrimp and fried plantains at a cuban restaurant along the coast while the engine idled in the parking lot. (By the way, if you ever find yourself in Key West, look up El Meson De Pepe on US1. They've got a mango sauce that'll make you wanna lick the plate.) Then I ran back to the site and shut her off. Holding my breath, I turned the key on again and pushed the starter button. Fired right up. It wasn't until I got home and checked the shop manual that I learned the battery is indeed - get this - a 12 volt battery.

I left the next morning, had crab cakes benedict for Easter breakfast at Captain Crossbones, and slowly made my way home. There were a few moments of white knuckle terror on the Palmetto Expressway in Miami, but this has gone on long enough so I'll end it here. Hope you enjoyed it.