Full sun, as usual, and glorious whiteblue sky, and light green water. But the woman at Fury recommends, “especially because you’ll be here awhile,” that I wait for a less windy day for snorkeling.
The reefs nearby aren’t any good. It’s one hour to get to a good one, one hour snorkeling, one hour back to the harbor.
UD was all packed: swimsuit, shirt to protect her back, towel, sun cream, book (Key West Tales), writing tablet. Money. Allergy pills. Hat.
“I wouldn’t recommend going out on the water at all today,” said the woman at Fury. “If you take a glass bottom boat, you’ll definitely get seasick. Leaning down to look, then sitting up again… Seasickness guaranteed.”
Two massive cruise ships spilled passengers onto the harbor walk.
“Everybody here? Anybody been to Key West before?” A tour guide addressed twenty Asians from Celebrity X Cruises. “Well, if you’ve been here, you know it’s not Key West. It’s Key Weird.”
But it wasn’t weird here, country clubby Sunset Harbor, with standard luxury hotels and upscale shops, and even a gated community.
UD‘s always astonished at how illiterate the advertising copy meant to appeal to pretentious people can be. Note that the short paragraph describing the Truman Annex bursts with blunders.
Pedestrians are allowed — only between certain hours, to be sure — to walk Truman’s gated ground.
… by John Hersey, at Voltaire Books.
The proprietor was thrilled UD‘s doing a literary tour, and gave her various writers’ addresses, plus some literary gossip.
“Go to it!”
— Caroline’s — from the web, before I came to Key West. Of all the images of KW cafés I found, this was the most charming.
When you’re sitting at one of its tables, Caroline’s is about frond shadows on green umbrellas, the smell of good hamburgers, a big central bar, and views galore of Duval Street in the midday sun.
I’m eating my asian salad at a spot just across from the Hard Rock Café, a yellow gingerbread building also fronted with green umbrellas. Two glorious palm trees obscure Hard Rock’s second floor balcony.
The fashion of planting a tight line of high palms hard against KW’s flat facades makes the houses coy. They shake their leaf fans seductively, now showing their face, now hiding it.
Two sorts of humanoids walk and bike and moped and electric car about: Locals and tourists.
Locals seem to conceive of KW as what they call, on their house flags, the Conch Republic, and of themselves as (why not?) supremely fortunate citoyens de la République.
Signs of ornery individuality abound as you walk the streets. In front of a typical one and half story white dwelling, a welcome mat says GO AWAY. Another, similar, house advises BE AWARE OF STRANGE DOG. In front of a third house, a flag reads: DON’T TREAD ON ME.
Don’t tread on me also happens to be the motto of Garrett Park, Maryland, UD‘s home town. She’s not surprised by the coincidence. Both Garrett Park and Key West are haunts of Paul Fussell’s X’s — brainy non-conformists. In KW, you see them on their rusty red bicycles, front baskets stuffed with books and bread, and no helmet on the rider’s head. Slender, somewhere in his fifties, the KW X wears a tight save-the-reefs t-shirt, loose faded shorts, and sandals. He has a ponytail and facial hair and his skin is pleasantly weathered from sun and booze.
He exhibits a studied – long-studied – tolerance of the tourists. Although he finds them deeply uninteresting, he will give them directions, and he will gently get out of their way when they blunder into his bicycle lane.
Edward L. Glaeser, New York Times:
Cracking open the Champagne [UD‘s not much of a drinker] does not exactly feel in tune with today’s spirit of national austerity, but recessions get worse when prosperous people do not spend. In fact, if you can afford it, then this is exactly the moment to redo your kitchen [UD does not cook] or buy a car [UD does not drive]. Not only will you be able to get a good deal, but your spending will help revive the economy. The economist John Maynard Keynes convincingly argued 70 years ago that thrift was no virtue during a recession.
How, UD asked herself, to avoid the vice of thrift?
She could help keep Key West afloat!
So she has rented a palmy apartment here with excellent books in the living room and fine art (the owner’s an artist) in the kitchen. This morning she slept late (7:30) and then lay in bed, sometimes reading, sometimes gazing at the palms swaying outside her bedroom windows.
She blogged a little, and she felt the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe, as a calm darkens among water-lights…
No, no, no. That last bit was Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning. UD felt neither darkness nor encroachment. She felt fortunate, and light in spirit.
She did some writing.
Her breakfast was leftover bread from last night’s dinner at a Duval Street bistro. She dipped the bread in some flavored olive oil she found in a cupboard. Also she had the two weeny biscottis she’d been given on her flight to Fort Lauderdale.
All sinfully thrifty, but this was her first morning on the island, and her old ways lingered.
She fixed things right away this afternoon. She went to Panini Panini and bought THREE salads, each ridiculously expensive, and she’s now having one of them for dinner.
**************
For hours she walked through the sunlit streets of Key West. The wind took the edge off the sun and made the palms sway, and the palms made shadows on the white houses.
On Margaret Street (there’s a Margaret Street nearby), a man in painter’s trousers greeted UD. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful!” said UD, and then she wondered whether – since almost every day is beautiful – the greeting Beautiful day isn’t it gets a bit old around these parts. Maybe people eventually say it to one another sardonically, like that character in the film White Mischief – “Oh God not another fucking beautiful day.”
Here was the main cemetery for the island, everyone buried above ground in white body boxes with flowers and photos and dates of birth and death on them. A rooster and his girlfriend poked among the tombs. One of the boxes was a sculpted casket; it was sustained at a strange angle by four gray marble columns underneath it. It sort of looked like a model for an airplane.
Without the wings and shit.
“Ma’am,” said a fellow tourist to UD, who hates being called ma’am. “Do you happen to know where the marker is that says I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK?”
“Is that here? It seems every graveyard claims it, it’s so clever. No, I don’t know where it is.”
Then the guy found it, and he ran and got UD to show her.
Among the hypercharming houses across from the cemetery was one with the same tree that overlooks UD‘s bedroom windows. She wrote about this stunner yesterday; its bright copper leaves have fallen all over her balcony. The house’s owner had nailed a paragraph of description to the tree’s trunk:
TERMINALIA CATAPPA
NATIVE OF SOUTH ASIA
FLESH IS SWEET AND TART
“In Key West,” thought UD, “even botanical markers sound decadent.”
… writes Richard Wilbur, in one of his best-known poems.
He lives here, on Key West.
UD‘s eyes open to a cry of roosters, a swish of palms, and church bells. A breeze from her screened window, and a ceiling fan, cool her. Water trickles off the hot tub in the pool, and a small jet crosses a sky already bright blue.
What’ s the other animal? Querulous, jabbering.
And another bird, a parrot? Whistling.
The big red heart-shaped leaves from the whatever tree that shades the pool have fallen down. They make scratching sounds on the balcony. A man in a blue bandana stands by the side of the pool scooping out the leaves that fell overnight.
The church bells repeat the two notes that begin Goin’ Home. Go – in’. Go-in.’
After the frenzy of yesterday, the eyes open to a slow consideration of the world we’ve flown ourselves into. Questions of travel? That’s Elizabeth Bishop, another lover of Key West.
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
It is childishness, the rush to this bright blue miniature world; blue and gold as the sun climbs over the island and lights up the palms. “All your life you’ve been bursting through doors,” said UD‘s sister to her at Mie n Yu two days ago. At this table, in fact.
The white one, in the foreground. “At Suburban, and at Washington Hospital Center, when Mom was sick, you just pushed your way in to see her. People were always shooing you out.”
Pushy. Yes. And here’s another door.
Long, long day. Two hours in the air to Fort Lauderdale; then a drive to Key West with UD‘s friend Kevan, who met her at the airport and took her down there in his blue Honda Del Sol convertible.
The views along the way, of endless green water and vanilla skies with vultures, set the surreal tone for all that UD‘s so far seen in this warm and brilliantly lit place. All the islands in the sea, and all the clouds that swirl around them, make the sort of beauty you have trouble grasping — it’s so out of line with anything else in the world.
UD‘s long day ended at a pier famous for its sunsets. Another species of surreality, the deep pink bands on the horizon, the elegant sailboats purring by, people dancing in the peaceful dusk.
