You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Driving to Cuba.
I’m on highway 1 South out of Miami. The top is down and the splendid south Florida sunshine is filling my face with a rejuvenation one only feels on the 1st day of a long awaited vacation.
I am in a rented 2016 Ford Mustang Convertible. The car has a lot of power. It’s a V-8, angry and adrenalized. I tap on the accelerator and let the ponies run.
I’ve been behind a large truck for the last ten miles. It’s hauling a Nissan Sentra somewhere. Where do you tow a car in the Keys I think to myself. The thought is fleeting. The car is blocking my view, like a total eclipse of the sun.
I step on the gas. The car is responsive, allowing me to push past the tow truck with ease. As I pull back into the fast lane, I see the signs that say Key West 165 miles.
I feel my heart beat happily like a steel drum at a Jamaican pot convention.
Highway 1 is less highway and more scenic 2 lane vista. It is a complex series of bridges and cause ways that connect one little island to the next. Summerland Key and CudJoe Key and Big Pine Key are all tiny ocean communities on my eventual drive toward Cuba.
As Jimmy Buffet and Alan Jackson remind me that it’s 5 O’clock somewhere, I think about the magnificence of this engineering project I’m driving along. It’s 113 miles long, built in 1938. It rises high over the Atlantic ocean at points, affording me a vista that stretches to that place where the sky and the ocean meet in a single filament of time and space on the horizon. Then the road drops down to almost sea level as the marshes and lush tropical vegetation rise up to suffocate the concrete and any view of the sea.
The road is filled with palm trees and t shirt shops and marinas filled with fishing boats. Many residents ride beach cruisers up and down the boulevard. The people are an assortment of everything and everybody. They have come from up north and from over seas. They are sun baked and sweaty as they broil in the 88 degree scorcher.
What bring them all here? How did they get here before the advent of this land bridge?
A waiter at an Italian restaurant will tell me the Keys were once the most affluent place in America because of ship salvage.
“Ships ran aground on the reefs. Locals who got to them 1st were entitled to whatever the ship was hauling and had 1st right to sell the merchandise back to the captain.”
I stare at the Duval Street waiter. Could that even be legal. A ship crashes and renegade land pirates seize the cargo and then sell it back to the shipping companies?
“Yes. Legal under then maritime law,” he says pushing me in the direction of a crab alfredo.
The Sirius XM Channel is set to Jimmy Buffett and the coral reefer band. The tropical sounds of steel drums and songs about drinking rum mix with the wind filling the cock pit of the car.
Fort Lauderdale to Miami was a spider web of highway confusion. Many exits and opportunities to get lost. People driving 90 miles an hour right up on my bumper, trying to physically move me out of the way.
But now? Now is a simpler drive. I have only one task. To stay on highway one south, and meander to the end of the Earth. There’s no way to get lost. It’s one direction to Key West. You drive till you get to the buoy that marks the southernmost spot in the continental USA. There’s a line of people 20 deep there, waiting to smile and hug this painted orb that symbolizes the end of world.
I will hear a tour bus go by the buoy and exclaim. “You are closer to Cuba right now than you are to the nearest Wal Mart.”
People on the passing bus laugh. “That’s right,” she continues. “The closest Wal Mart is in Miami, 120 miles from here. Cuba is only 90 miles.”
Key West is a zip code where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote and drank his way through four wives. A cab driver will tell me he had a pool in his basement. I took the tour. I will come to learn that it was a $20,000 pool his wife built outside at a home that was only valued at $8,000. Apparently Hemingway was as bad a husband and father as he was good a writer. I will learn much about this free spirit on the tour of his home.
Hemingway’s likeness is omnipresent. It is like the swaying palm, a consistent fabric of Key West debauchery. I will see Hemingway’s face on walls of beer joints and musical venues. His bearded mug is on beer coozies and T-shirts on every corner. He is the symbol of world famous Duval Street, a colorful burst of alcohol joints, musical pit stops and a constant green light to have another round.
As I roll down the highway toward Cuba, a mile high anvil shaped thunder boomer explodes over head. Suddenly rain the size of cumquats begins splatting down in the open air convertible. It is alarming, yet also exciting. I am trapped on the two lane, driving 55 mph. The rain is hitting the aerodynamic Ford and bouncing over my head. But the liquid bombs from the tropical sky are imploding in the Mustang’s back seat creating a swimming pool of moisture.
I laugh. There’s no where to pull off on this antiquated 2 lane. I am on a causeway in the middle of the Atlantic and the Gods of insanity are raining down upon me.
I turn up the Coral Reefer band and wait for the anvil sized thunder boomer to move on and rain on someone else.
Within 5 minutes the sky is bright and the humidity so oppressive, I wonder what I have done to anger the Earth.
Key West is an attitude. It’s a place where all the disenchanted nuts roll to the edge of the USA and then simply exist. These vagabonds and hippies and communal thinking souls come here to exercise a relaxed freedom where community is paramount.
A cab driver will tell me that homes go for a $1,000 a square foot here. That’s a lot of money for 700 and 800 square foot homes that look like they have been ravaged by hurricane Katrina.
“Money is not that important,” a bar tender will tell me. “We have expenses like that of New York and San Francisco, yet we derive an income like that in Appalachia.” I stare at the woman behind the bar who tells me this. “That’s why we all work at least two jobs.” Key West is a contradiction in philosophies, I think, while sipping on my 2nd Bahama Mama topped with Bacardi 151. It seems that people come here to escape, yet they are forced to work two jobs to exist. It is a wonderful, tropical paradox that entices and tortures the free spirit that is so wildly pervasive here.
As I pull into the Southernmost Hotel, I feel a relaxation wash over me. The sun is hot and the blue sky filled with the sound of a steel drum drifting down through a lightly blowing palm branch.
I close the door to the Mustang and stretch. I feel like throwing my car keys into the ocean toward Fidel Castro. I will not drive again for almost a week. Only bikes in Key West. Bikes and wild Chickens. Suddenly I’m ready for a rum drink. Imagine that.
Life’s Crazy™