Last Train to Paradise Read Online Free PDF

the highway’s shoulders here, and rare gaps in the mangroves offer a tantalizing glimpse of the Atlantic on one side, the Gulf of Mexico on the other.
    For the most part, though, it’s fairly claustrophobic, even monotonous, travel just south of Homestead—and some of the worst accidents in Keys history have taken place here. Drivers find it easy to nod off in this leafy tunnel and veer into the opposing lane, and even the most defensively oriented don’t have much maneuvering room. To make matters worse, rescue workers often find themselves stymied in trying to reach crash scenes; EMS vans have a difficult time weaving between miles of stalled traffic on the narrow track, and it’s even ticklish trying to bring a helicopter down into such tight quarters.
    “It’s about the last place on earth I’d want to get hurt bad,” says Alvin, a Miami paramedic and my new acquaintance.
    We’re standing in the middle of the highway at a spot near the end of the Homestead–Key Largo leg of US 1, between the back of his pickup and the nose of my car, waiting for the traffic southward to start moving again. It’s not an accident that has caused this pile-up, however. It’s just that the drawbridge at Jewfish Creek is up, and in a few minutes, as soon as the tall-masted sailboats and the larger, motor-powered “stinkpots,” as the sailing purists like to call them, have made their way through the cut that separates the normal world from the Keys Republic, we’ll be on our way.
    Spending any significant time in the Keys makes it clear that it’s not an unusual occurrence to make friends this way—there are tales of keg parties and impromptu dances in the middle of crash-closed bridges—but try to imagine the same thing happening during a snarl on the FDR Drive or the Hollywood Freeway, and one gains the first inkling of what lures people down this way.
    Soon enough, the bridge is inching downward and Alvin is headed back toward his pickup. “Make sure you pull over to the side if you have to write something down,” Alvin cautions, using the tip of his Budweiser longneck as a pointer. If he’s aware of any irony in the gesture, his earnest gaze does not belie it.
    There’s a whine beneath the tires as you cross the steel deck of the Jewfish Creek drawbridge, and, at long last, a serious look at real water for the first time as the road bisects a mile or so of Lake Surprise, so named for the reaction of the first railroad-building crew when they hacked their way down to this point from Miami. If your windows are down, you can get a good draft of sea breeze here as well: salt, seaweed, ammonia-tinged air. It’s the signal that things have changed, though it may be a little while until it’s clear just how much.
    At this point a motorist may also take notice of the “mile markers,” or MMs, little numbered signs that have begun to pop up along the shoulder of the road. Among the first is MM 107, near where US 1 converges with Card Sound Road on Key Largo, meaning that there are 107 miles of highway between that point and the end of the line in Key West. The mileage counters form the basis of all Keys addresses from that point on.
    Key Largo is by far the largest in the chain of islands, and the nearly twenty miles of highway that run along its coral spine could be laid along the outskirts of some Midwestern city: strip malls and geegaw shops abound here. The town itself was called Rock Harbor until 1948, when local business leaders saw the wisdom of cashing in on the popularity of the Bogart-Bacall movie that used the interior of a local roadhouse for a few atmospheric scenes.
    A few miles farther along, a motel has installed the riverboat used in the filming of
The African Queen
out front, touting Bogie’s long-standing association with the area. Both movies were essentially studio productions—one in Hollywood, one in England—and so far as anyone knows, Bogart never set foot on Key Largo, but it’s a diverting