“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
"What is your earliest memory of this place, of Florida?" Peg asked as we drove across the bridge to Stock Island. It's been a demoralizing few days, experiencing the negative changes in Key West, in Florida, in the country. Not to mention P's nursing a toothache with no dentist willing to help here on the island. The notion of a "working vacation" has always seemed an oxymoron; this trip proves the point.
"I was five. We were in Key Biscayne over the summer while Dad was training in the Red Coach Inn restaurant brand he'd be managing for HoJo once we moved to Georgia. Miami seemed a jungle to me, the greenest place I'd ever seen. It even had palm trees, which I'd never seen before."
"Where'd you move from? Some desert place?"
"Nope. Charlotte. We lived in a condo five stories up, with this jungle canopy spread out below us. In the morning I remember walking onto the patio and hearing the elephants call out at feeding time at the Key Biscayne Zoo down the street. It was magic. Florida was just a magic place."
And the memory left me feeling that awe and wonder again, as development gave way to a seemingly endless archipelago of grassy islands, bisected by this two lane road and the occasional sun-bleached office or coffee shop along the shoulder.
The first time I came to the Keys was in 1988, in January. I was at Homestead Air Force Base for water survival, and rented a car over the weekend to drive the long two-lane down here. Duval Street was quiet, looking back at it now. There were a few people in the bars, a guy with a guitar at Sloppy Joe's. It felt like a Jimmy Buffett song, just as I was discovering Jimmy Buffett several years after everyone else. Florida still carried a certain enchantment then, and I remember marveling at the wild beauty all around me on the drive through Key Largo and Islamorada and Marathon.
Later, this was a favorite wintertime overnighter for a couple F-15 pilots escaping the cold on a cross-country weekend. I remember watching the ice form on the windscreen as we waited to take off from Langley on a Friday afternoon, then two hours later popping the canopy to a burst of warm, damp air after we landed on Boca Chica Key at the Navy base. The VOQ, a brown, squat, three story cinder block building, was a short stumble from the bars in the center of Key West, and for ten bucks a night provided a clean bed and a view across the water on the northeast corner of the island. And always either on arrival or departure, we'd convince approach control to let us run low and fast over the turquoise green water to buzz Fort Jefferson, the old brick citadel perched on a rock in the Dry Tortugas.
Wandering through all this reverie in my head, we finally arrived at our destination, the Square Grouper restaurant on Cudjoe Key. Sporting a wild, homemade paint job that told the world this was no franchise chain, the Square Grouper is one big homage to the golden age of drug smuggling down here in the '70s. The walls are adorned with photos of grinning DEA or FWC officers with deep tans and shaggy mustaches standing next to piles of confiscated weed in large bales (hence the term, "square grouper"). Everywhere are references to drug culture, right down to "Mary Jane's Hot Sauce" on the counters and seafood offerings that are "smoked, baked, or fried."
The food was pretty good, the wine passable, and the scruffy solo guitar act in the bar just the right volume and a pleasant mix of '70s tunes we both remembered. Our waitress was a transplant from Worcester, Mass, come south to take care of her elderly grandmother. And to live in the Keys. It's not so bad.
On the drive back down to Key West, we watched the sun set over the mangroves.
Returning to the hotel, we curled up on an oversized chaise lounge on the beach, watching the lightning flash offshore with another old guitar player strumming his heart out across from the tiki bar behind us.
There's still a little magic here, something left of that strange and beautiful place that captured the imagination of a five-year-old from the sticks. One just needs eyes to see, and maybe someone to help rediscover that vision.
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