— 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.