Last Train to Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

notion to think otherwise, clipping off the miles toward Tavernier, the first of the truly tiny Keys settlements along the way.
    At MM 90 is Plantation Key, upon which the town of Tavernier sits. The Key is three miles long, and little more than a couple of football fields wide. The smell of the sea is stronger here, though there’s still enough development and foliage to keep the water hidden. There is little sense at all of the loveliest feature of the area: Pennekamp Coral Reef lies just offshore, the nation’s first underwater state park, and probably the premier dive spot in American waters.
    Through Plantation and Windley Keys, the road courses through another dozen mangrove- and motel-lined miles, past an abandoned quarry converted now to something called Theater of the Sea, where dolphins, sharks, and sea lions are promised to display themselves, past a massive marina-cum-bar and lodging complex called Holiday Isle, which might seem, with its hordes converging on it, to have been the end point of this highway . . .
    . . . but in short order the throngs are left behind, the road suddenly heaves upward and becomes airborne, arching high over the channel that connects the Gulf and the Atlantic here, and for the first time the traveler understands that, indeed, this is a singular part of the world.
    It’s an osprey’s-eye view here at MM 84, out over the patchwork-colored seas. Splashes of cobalt, turquoise, amber, beige, and gray alternate, then fall away to deeper blue and steel, and off toward a pale horizon where sky and water meet at a juncture that’s almost seamless on the brightest days. The variegations of color have to do with the time of day, the cloud configuration, the nature of the sand or grass on the sea bottom, and the shifting depths of the water itself surrounding the Keys, which can range from a few inches to a few feet, and then plunge several fathoms and back again in an eye-blink.
    To the west, there’s a view of a key called Lignumvitae, three-hundred-odd acres constituting a true island that rises sixteen feet above sea level and where giant mahoganies were once logged, today the site of the last untouched tropical forest in the state. To the east is a much smaller dot of land called Indian Key, once the outpost of a gentleman pirate, or wrecker, named Housman and the staging area for John James Audubon, who came to the Keys to shoot and then sketch tropical specimens for
The Birds of America.
Not much remains on Indian Key, but its modest aspect probably accounts for the urge that begins to creep into the back of the traveler’s mind at about this moment:
    . . . desert island, private island, island paradise. Buy myself one of these little dots, get a boat, and build a dock, kiss the world good-bye . . .
    There are not many places where such unspoiled islands still exist, not in so dramatic a setting, anyway. It’s an atavistic urge, perhaps, but one that likely pulls the traveler resolutely southward now.
    There is civilization to be encountered once the highway descends again, to Matecumbe Key, but except for the occasional exquisite resort (Cheeca Lodge and Hawk’s Cay among them) tucked away behind the palms, it has a decidedly temporary look about it: restaurants, motels, and houses that seem hastily assembled, with little expectation of their staying long. One of the world’s most exclusive sporting resorts—the Long Key Fishing Club—once resided here, but the hurricane of 1935 swept it away. When the storm had passed, observers found little trace of the club. Even today, historians argue that a memorial erected to mark the site actually stands far from where the club was built.
    Below Matecumbe, everything changes markedly. And while there is still land, bits of it, anyway, stitched together by a ribbon of highway, this is truly Water World.
    South of MM 65, two and one-half miles of multihued water separate Lower Matecumbe from Conch Key to the south, a stretch once crossed by