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- To the Keys
- Highway 1
- Big Pine Key
- Key West 1
- Key West 2
- Coral Castle
- Lake Okeechobee
- Vero Beach
- Wrap-up
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Florida: Down Highway 1
We saw many interesting things driving down the Keys; first I'll tell you a little about roadside attractions and advertising techniques. On the north Keys, the entrepreneurial imagination seems particularly lively. Driving down Hwy 1 from Key Largo to Islamadora we passed, in quick succession:
-- a Westward-Ho style covered wagon advertising a dive shop;
-- a boat full of flowers to attract you to a fishmonger;
-- a medieval castle renting Harleys (complete with a mud fringe on the back fender, practical I guess, but it came across as a little sissy);
-- a realtor where Edward Scissorhands interned, carving bushes into cubes, benches, hearts and trash cans (? - you know, a tallish upright box with squashed pyramid on top); and -- several giant cement sea creatures, including an angelfish, a sea horse and a conch shell. Oh, and a rhinoceros!
The individual houses, not to be outdone, had mailboxes held in the mouths or arms of manatees (some with babies), sea turtles, great-mouth bass (yuk, yuk) and sharks. And then there were the boat yards, some selling new boats, but mostly used, ranging from someone's side yard with half a dozen boats to large, used car lot-type operations with mboats of every kind stacked three deep in giant tinker toy structures.
So, civilization tried mightily, but couldn't really command our attention like nature did. The phenomenon that is the Florida Keys is wondrous. Land has such a fragile lead over the ocean in most places--you wonder at the dozens of little hummocks of trees and sand scattered across the horizon and then you realize that you are driving along on an island that is only a tiny bit larger and higher above the water. In fact, the Keys average less than 10' above sea level and many are only 4' to 6', are all in the process of turning from coral reefs into limestone and are more or less protected from the ocean's might by the underwater reefs that curve around them and the entire eastern coastline of Florida. (I don't want to make light of the devastating hurricanes that have periodically ravaged the Keys, but we were far from the hurricane season and thought about it very little; callous, but true.)
On the Gulf side, the ocean floor is very close, less than 10 feet in most places, as little as 3 or 4 feet in many. This, and the lightness of the limestone sand, results in some fascinating colors. The day we drove down the Keys the ocean in most places was a beautiful creamy green, somewhat like celadon glassware, but more translucent, very placid, very striking.
A quick aside about how this 130-mile road down the keys got here. In the early 1900's, Henry Flagler, a true entrepreneur of the era, partner to John D. Rockefeller, decided to extend his Florida East Coast Railway from the mainland to Key West. The human and engineering challenges of such a feat were enormous. If you're interested, the book by Les Standiford "Last Train to Paradise" is an excellent, very readable rendition of the construction and destruction in 1935 (by hurricane after only 22 years of operation) of this remarkable achievement (gosh, I sound like a book's end notes). Much of the roadbed and bridges remained after the hurricane and from 1950 to 1980 the various legs of the Overseas Highway were completed, most of them on the base established by the railway.
So. For the nature part of our exploration of the Keys, we managed only two attractions -- Crane Point Hammock Museum and Nature Center in Marathon (Mile Marker 50) and a small portion of the National Key Deer Refuge on Big Pine Key (reached via Key Deer Blvd. at MM 30.5). But remember this was only a three-day trip to the Keys including driving time.
The Crane Point Museum showcases a selection of information and artifacts about ancient Native Americans, pirates, shipwrecks, railroaders and local flora and fauna. I wouldn't call the exhibits "museum quality" exactly, but they are quite educational and seem to be accurate. The turtle exhibit was particularly sad. It wasn't live turtles, of course, only shells of the major turtles in the Keys arranged in size order and listed like this:
-- Leatherback Sea Turtle - Endangered
-- Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle - Endangered
-- Hawksbill Sea Turtle - Endangered
-- Loggerhead Sea Turtle - Threatened
-- Green Sea Turtle - Threatened and Endangered
The outdoor part of the complex was far more interesting to me. The grounds cover maybe 20 acres and include paths through and around a mangrove swamp, several "tropical" hardwood hammocks (which I think are actually sub-tropical) and an artificially-watered rain forest exhibit. The rain forest is very well done and feels and smells like the rain forests in Belize, but I saw more orchids there than I ever saw in Belize. Most of the plants along the hammock and mangrove paths are labeled and you can get a pretty good idea of what the wild keys are like while you stroll comfortably along.
The complex also includes the Adderly House, an example of a traditional "conch" house and surrounding garden and domestic animal areas of the late 1800's and early 1990's. This particular site belonged to George Adderly, a Black Bahamian immigrant, who made his living as a sponge harvester. The house is built of "tabby" a building material made of sand, lime and shells mixed with water and poured into forms, pretty much like a modern poured concrete building. The rectangular house has a thatched roof and is laid in a standard arrangement with front and back doors in the center directly opposite each other and 8 windows to provide cross ventilation. The exhibit does a good job of showing you how "normal" people lived at the turn of the century. But, of course, there are far fewer mosquitos and other biting bugs and hardly any alligators or poisonous snakes on the grounds of the Center, so you can't *really* get a feel for it. All in all, though, we enjoyed this side trip a lot.
This chapter has become entirely too long, so I'll have to leave the Key Deer for next time, just across the 7-mile bridge on Big Pine Key.
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