Last Train to Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

replaced “named” highways such as the Tamiami Trail or Dixie Highway with a numerically based, east-west/north-south grid known as the “Uniform System”) flows everything Keys residents need to live: food, medical supplies, lumber, new video releases, beer. Even fresh water, for there is no natural source of it in the Keys, and the single big pipe that carries that elixir for every resident from Key Largo to Key West follows right alongside the roadbed.
    For the tourist, moreover, there’s little downside to US 1. That’s how most of them reach America’s southernmost point in Key West—and all of the glittering marinas, the upscale resorts, the dive spots, the bonefish flats, and the jaw-dropping marine wilderness vistas scattered along the Keys in between.
    There’s a commercial airport in Key West and an executive airstrip in Marathon, and sailors still make their way by boat along the Intracoastal Waterway and from every port in the world, of course. But by far the greatest numbers of visitors to this singular part of the world come to it by road.
    And what a road it is.
    The first few miles of US 1 out of Homestead, an agriculturally based city of some twenty thousand, are, save for their utter desolation, comparatively unremarkable. Homestead, it might be noted, is the place that took it squarely on the chops from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Though the storm leveled most of the area, chasing the Cleveland Indians out of their new spring training camp, driving a stake through the heart of Homestead Air Force Base, and running up the largest storm damage tab in American history, locals still shake their heads and wonder what the devastation would have tallied had the hurricane strayed northward thirty miles or so to hit Miami and Miami Beach square-on.
    On a pleasant day, though, the concerns are less dire. L AST C HANCE FOR B EER AND B OOZE warns a sign that flaps above a battered saloon and package store on the far-south fringes of Homestead, at journey’s outset.
    And it is not an idle threat. From here the road bores southward into the virtual nothingness that marks the verge between Florida’s mainland and the Keys.
    The narrow two-lane is bordered first by a mile or so of feathery Australian pines—tall, trashy intruders from another continent, which fall away gradually, offering unbroken views across unpopulated swaths of saw grass, interrupted here and there by dark hammocks of mahogany and scrub—hallucinatory vistas not unlike those across the baking African veldt.
    There’s a gravel spur spinning off the highway here and there, leading off toward a distant rock pit, a rumored work camp, or perhaps a secluded turnaround where lovers meet or stolen cars are stripped and dumped. But as the sign promises, there is nothing truly civilized: no houses, no pit stops, no gas pumps, no cold beer to be found.
    In these parts, the most remarkable feature is actually to be found high up in the cross-timbers of the huge electrical pylons that flank the highway, where the great ospreys—the eagles of the sea—have discovered an agreeable place to build their nests. These are massive tangles of interlocked tree limbs and driftwood, a dozen feet or more across, half again as tall, draped over the poles’ crossties and braces—and protected from human molestation, by the way—floating up there like beaver dams tossed up by an apocalyptic tide. Since there are no trees within hundreds of miles anywhere near the size of the pylons, drivers might wonder how the ospreys made out before progress came along. It’s the sort of idle speculation a drive through such country encourages.
    Halfway to Key Largo, though, the terrain shifts again, the road tunneling now through an unbroken wall of mangroves, a gnarly tree that rarely grows to more than the height of a Greyhound bus, and within whose watery roots are sheltered the fry upon which most of the Florida fishing industry is based. Water in roadside canals laps at