The Last Keys

Hop in a car in Miami and drive south on U.S. Route 1 and you will eventually come to the end of the Florida mainland. Your drive time to the point will be about an hour or so and along the way you will pass strip mall after strip mall selling souvenirs and towels to tourists that almost exclusively seem to define the streetscape of southern Florida. Strip malls. Asphalt and concrete roads. And traffic lights about every quarter of a mile. The traffic lights are there to get you a better look at your surroundings by forcing you to stop every few minutes. It's not very pretty.

If you decide to make the drive and can persevere beyond the strip malls, you will come to one last traffic light and leave all that behind. Beyond that final traffic light, which is about 45 minutes or so into your drive, the road becomes a single lane each way bordered by a ten foot high barbed wire topped chain link fence with lush greenery beyond the fence. At this point, you are driving through the Everglades, the slowly-moving-southward water that is southern Florida outside of the strip malls and asphalt and concrete roads.

The barbed wire atop the fence on either side of the road is tilted out away from the road to keep humans on the highway and (if the signs on the side of the road are to be believed) crocodiles in the swamp and off the road. I think the fence is probably there for a reason. I would think the last thing you want to do on a single lane road is wait for a crocodile to cross in front of you, especially when the concrete median in the center of the road will likely make it turn back. All very slowly, I don't doubt.

When you reach the end of the mainland, U.S. Route 1 does not stop. Not even close. It keeps going for another couple of hours, stretching along an archipelago known as the Florida Keys all the way from Key Largo in the east to Key West where you will find the zero mile marker of Route 1. Before spending a couple of days exploring the Everglades last month just before Christmas, we made the trip past the strip malls, past the last traffic light on the mainland and all the way to the end of the road. My initial intent in planning this trip was to go see what all the fuss was about in Key West, which has at various times threatened or claimed to secede from the United States as the Conch Republic. While researching this quick vacation, I found reasons to go beyond Key West, and going beyond made this whole trip worthwhile.

The drive through the Keys on the Overseas Highway.

The Florida Keys stretch out across the gap between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico known as the Florida Straits. This waterway is critical to the naval defense of the southern United States and therefore the Keys being in the way is pretty darned convenient. They were originally inhabited by native Americans and were "discovered" by Juan Ponce de Leon on his quest for the fountain of youth in the early 1500s. For a while in the 1800s, Key West was the largest town in the entire state of Florida, supported almost entirely off an industry know as wrecking, which as the name suggests involved the recovery of valuable stuff from the many ships that unsuccessfully navigated the Florida Straits and wrecked.

For centuries, the Keys remained inaccessible to man except by boat. Then about 100 years ago, an overseas railway was built to connect Key West and all the Keys in between with the Florida mainland. If a railway made from steel or iron crossing saltwater in an area prone to violent hurricanes sounds to you like an accident waiting to happen, you'd be correct. In 1935, a Labor Day Category 5 hurricane wiped out an enormous section of the railway. For good as it turned out.

Following the 1935 hurricane, the remains of the railway were either abandoned or converted to the Overseas Highway, an extension of Route 1 that remains to this day. The drive from the U.S. mainland to Key Largo and down Route 1 to Key West was something I've wanted to do for a few years. I've seen movies with this lone concrete road supported from the sea floor with water on either side of the road as far as the eye can see and wanted to experience it for myself. The reality of the road did not live up to my anticipation. You can't really see anything over the sides of the highway. Yes, it's obvious that you are surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico but you don't get the sense you are driving over a large area of seawater, probably because the land areas are really close together.

Other than a stop for lunch in Key Largo for my first grouper sandwich of the trip, our drive through the Keys was fairly uneventful, although driving down the only road leading to Key West, you can't help thinking about what a complicated exercise a hurricane evacuation from these islands might be. There's only one road to get out by. I imagine planning needs to happen way in advance of that sort of event. As cool as the life in Key West may be, that's definitely not for me. I'm good visiting in December. I'll stay away during hurricane season.

Eventually Route 1 will end at the corner of Fleming and Whitehead Streets and you'll find yourself in Key West. Find a hotel, ditch the car and start walking around town is my recommendation. There's enough to see and do here to kill a couple of days and nights, although beyond that point I don't know. Key West has turned into one of those towns where drinking is a number one reason for most visitors being there so naturally there are collections of drunks walking up and down Duval Street acting stupidly just because everyone else is. Without all those people there, it would be an amazing place to visit.

Don't get me wrong, Key West definitely has its charms. Ernest Hemingway lived there for a time and his house is now preserved as a museum (we didn't visit - not much of a Papa fan) and we had some excellent fresh caught grouper, mahi mahi and snapper in every restaurant we visited. In fact, the food was just fantastic; I didn't know I liked fish so much before I was in Key West for a couple of days.

Key West is also the southernmost point in the continental United States and there's a red, yellow and black painted monument of sorts with some interpretive history signage around it to commemorate that fact, although I should point out it's not at the actual southernmost point on the island. The actual southernmost point is at Whitehead Spit, which is a few hundred yards west in the not-accessible-to-the-public Naval Air Station Key West.

But ultimately the reason I was in Key West was not to see the town but to actually head further west. You see, Key West, despite its name, is not the westernmost island in the Florida Keys. In fact, there are seven more islands that complete the Keys about 60 miles into the Gulf of Mexico. The largest of these, Garden Key, is open to visitors as a U.S. National Park but you can't drive there. This island, otherwise known as Dry Tortugas National Park, was my destination and it made my couple of days in the Keys totally worthwhile.

Dry Tortugas National Park is centered around Fort Jefferson, a six sided fortification which began construction in 1846 to provide the United States with a strategic military position in a critical shipping lane between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The Fort, which is constructed from over 16 million bricks and is the largest masonry structure in the United States, was in active use from its completion until the late 19th century when the invention of the rifled cannon rendered its fortifications useless.

Dry Tortugas from the air.

The island is completely surrounded by saltwater, which along with the complete isolation from the U.S. mainland, must have made life for the up to seventeen hundred soldiers (in earlier years) and five hundred or so soldiers plus 500 inmates (in later years when the Fort was used as a prison) extremely challenging. The Fort incorporated a series of cisterns within the fortified walls to capture and store rainwater. Today, supply boats running once a week keep the Park Service rangers stocked with supplies. I'm thinking in the mid 1800s that the supply boats were significantly less regular and feeding a couple of thousand soldiers then is way different than a couple of park rangers today.

The useful life of the Fort was relatively short, just about 40 years or so, for a place that must have taken a significant investment of labor and capital to build. Nonetheless, the place has some real notable history. In 1865, the four co-conspirators (other than John Wilkes Booth) in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were confined there. At least one of the four died in a yellow fever epidemic on the island before the Fort was abandoned by the military and turned over to the Marine Hospital Service as a quarantine station in 1888.

As a tourist in Key West, your options in getting to Dry Tortugas are fairly limited. Driving is out of the question. There are absolutely no roads that get you out there or really anywhere close. Mile Marker 0 of Route 1 might be about the closest automobile accessible point to the island. There's a ferry that leaves Key West at about 8 in the morning and takes a little more than two hours to get there. I'm sure the ride is very scenic and relaxing out there. I'm just not sure I want to take the same ride back to the main island beginning at 3 pm. At that point the excitement at the journey itself is probably gone.

The other option is to fly there. On a seaplane. It's a little more expensive than the ferry but not inordinately so (the ferry ain't cheap!) and it's way faster. The ride on the plane one way is about 40 minutes and journeys are offered as a half day (morning or afternoon) or full day package. Given the limited amount of time we allocated to spend in the Keys and slightly unsure of the appeal of spending a whole day out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, we opted for the half day package. And being a firm believer in the early bird getting the worm, I bought way in to the morning departure.

I've flown on a small plane before. When I was 16 I flew into the Grand Canyon in what I remember as a six seater but was just as likely something different. But I've never been on a plane that would land and take off from the water so at this point anything new like that in my life is exciting. I bit the bullet and bought a ticket.

There are immediate advantages to taking the plane. First of all, it's just cool as anything to take a plane out across the water. The flight altitude is about 500 feet all the way out there so you can really get a good understanding of the topography of the sea floor. You can see sea turtles swimming near the surface of the water, there are a couple of wrecked ships between Garden Key and Key West and every so often, you can catch a glimpse of a shark swimming in the shallower waters. It's obviously way quicker and the sea keeps my attention for just more than a half hour in a totally different way than it would for two hours plus. I'd recommend if you ever take this trip in the morning to sit on the left side of the plane on both the way out there and back. I sat on the right side. Awesome on the way out but the midday sun was brutal on the way back.

Our flight that morning was full, meaning a pilot and ten passengers, and fortunately everyone was early, meaning we got to leave early (the ferry is not leaving early, believe me) and spent an extra ten minutes or so on the island. This is not a commercial flight so don't expect the comforts, if you can call them that, of a jet airplane. Headsets are mandatory to drown out the engine noise and your ventilation control is rotating a quarter sphere shaped piece of plastic connected to a hole in the window next to your head. The sensation of landing on water is really pretty cool as is the takeoff on the way back. I'm not sure I'll ever get this chance again, although you never know.

When you take the early plane to the island, you arrive at a place that has just two or three park rangers and maybe a handful of overnight campers, meaning you are 60 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico with about 15 or so other people and a whole lot of pelicans on a glorified sandbar with an historic pre-Civil War era fort. It was just like being marooned on a secluded desert island, albeit with a cooler full of bottled water, some snorkeling gear and a promise from our pilot to be back to collect us in three and a half hours. Once the plane leaves, you are there almost alone.

The Fort today offers a number of activities for the curious tourist. There are coral reefs with a number of species of fish to explore with a face mask and a pair of flippers. There are a ton of pelicans and other species of birds, which I have to say I cannot identify, to check out both on Garden Key and the adjacent bird sanctuary. There's the Fort to explore on a self-guided tour. And there are seemingly endless expanses of water to gaze out over and imagine what life must have been like for some teenage or early 20s soldier when the Fort was in active duty.

I'll say a couple of things about the place. First, my swimming skills have atrophied over the years and snorkeling was difficult after about a half an hour in the water. My teenage self that spent hours in our backyard pool each week in the summer would be embarrassed. The fish spotting in and around the old coal pilings on the north side of the island was good but it's not like the kind of variety you can get in the Caribbean, which to this novice snorkeler, was about as amazing as I think I will ever see.

Walking around and through the Fort was fantastic, whether it was strolling around the sea wall that formed a sort of moat around the Fort while watching sergeant majors and other sorts of fish searching for food in the sea right below your feet or exploring the inside of the Fort learning about how the place operated about a century and a half ago. The best part was probably on the ramparts climbing over the old cannons and around the lighthouse with the light blue Gulf waters all around about 50 feet below.

Fort Jefferson from the ground...

….and from the top of the rampart.

But the best part of being on the island for a little more than three hours or so, which was just a little too short (I could have used maybe another hour) was the absolute silence of the place. It's a rare thing for me to get to a spot where there are precious few other humans and where cell phone towers are mercifully out of range. I know there were maybe 15 or so other folks out there with us but honestly I didn't notice. It's definitely big enough that you can spread out. Listening to the waves breaking on the sea wall and our footsteps on the beach or paved surfaces within the Fort with no other sound was amazing. It almost felt like we should be whispering because the quiet we experienced out there is so rare in our lives today.

While the silence was without doubt the best part, which still seems sort of strange, if we had taken the ferry or even the afternoon flight, we wouldn't have experienced this and our trip would not have been so special. From atop the Fort's wall at about 11:15 that morning, we watched the ferry arrive and discharge its entire 150 people or however many the ferry holds passenger load onto the island. Right then the experience would never be the same. Fortunately at that moment, our return ride home had arrived and it was time to go, although we still found about 15 minutes or so to watch pelicans dive into the water in search of food after climbing down from the walls of the Fort.

Dry Tortugas is one of the least visited U.S. National Parks. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the most visited) boasts over 9,000,000 visitors per year; Dry Tortugas manages about 60,000 per year, about three days' worth to the Smoky Mountains. It's not easy to get to, but the trip there is well worthwhile. The Keys definitely wouldn't have been as enjoyable without getting on a plane and flying out there for a morning. There's a lot to like about Key West, even with all the drunks and the seemingly endless Jimmy Buffett music, but the Keys wouldn't be the same without exploring all of them, all the way to the real key west.

Our ride home. The plane, not the pelicans.

King of the world!