Cays and Coral

Florida has three national parks. The Everglades National Park takes up a large chunk of the southern tip of the peninsula state. Biscayne National Park kicks off the route down the Florida Keys, and Dry Tortugas National Park marks the end of the Keys. Two of these three parks are on the National Park Conservation Association’s list of the most endangered parks for 2005 -- Everglades for management and pollution issues and Biscayne for over fishing and water pollution. Since endangered areas are a theme for my trip, these parks were high on my list to see. Three national parks in one state, how convenient! Did I really experience any of these parks? Sort of.

At Biscayne National Park, I saw the visitor center, where I inquired about the boat trips to the coral reefs. No boats going out due to high winds. Neither were boats going out at John Pennecamp Coral Reef State Park on either of the days I checked. Camping at Biscayne is only out on islands so that excluded The Dude and the camper. Does this count as a goal crossed off the list if I only saw the visitor center?

The Everglades had been crossed off my “To-See” list. I had done some hiking and wandering there on a previous trip to Florida. In 2004, I just drove across the north end of the big swampy national park, then camped at a state park to the west of it on the Gulf Coast.

Dry Tortugas, made up of seven coral rubble islands that lie 68 miles west of Key West, was once a place where Ponce de Leon and others caught and ate Tortugas, aka sea turtles. Fort Jefferson, an incomplete 1800s fortress remains, available for tours to those who take the boat to the island. I couldn’t go because the boat tour takes all day with no dogs allowed. I didn’t want to leave The Dude alone in the camper that long. Traveling with a dog has its drawbacks. Some other time perhaps, I can do a trip where I do everything I couldn’t do on this trip. Yeah.

Looking forward to Biscayne, I left Hobe Sound taking the freeway to Homestead, a tourist center north of the Florida Keys. I found a comfortable, uncrowded RV park. The wordily named Larry and Penny Thompson Memorial Park and Campground is a county-operated park next to two hundred seventy five acres of preserved woodlands. The campsites are arranged in eleven circular pods with 15 sites like spokes surrounding a center circle of five sites. On May 10, there were few campers so only four of the circles were open and even those were sparsely populated. My spot was not far from the shower and laundry facilities, nice since I hadn’t done laundry in awhile. The people working at L&PTMP&C were friendly and helped me figure out how to get where I needed to go. I really had a hard time getting around the area because my maps were not very good, or maybe I was just not navigating well. My co-pilot is a dog. If he could read a map, he wasn’t telling me about it.

The morning I set out to sightsee, I found the grocery store I had been directed to. I seldom ate at restaurants, making good use of the kitchen I was hauling. Maybe not good use. Though I appreciate good food, I am not much for cooking. I do make great sandwiches. After meat or cheese on a nice whole grain bagel, I slop on a lot of tomato, lettuce and red pepper, some good old yellow mustard and maybe mayo if I have reliable refrigeration. For dinners, I make pasta meals from the frozen aisle if staying near a grocery store, or canned soups and sauces for pasta and rice. It's easy and I don’t have to go anywhere or get lost trying to find a restaurant. Though sometimes I get lost looking for grocery stores.

On days with lots of driving, I would be more likely to eat at a restaurant. Sometimes I would look through the Roadfood directory, but seldom saw any listings for the cities where I found myself. I did enjoy a café on the Keys recommended for its conch. Another time I actually found the suggested restaurant but it was closed that day. Life is brimming with such disappointments. Nevertheless, where there is one good place to eat in a city, there are often other good places to eat nearby. And, as you can see from my cooking skills, I am pretty easy to please. One reason I am not a professional restaurant critic.

After the disappointing news about boats not going out at the parks, I thought I would see what was at the northern end of the road in Key Largo. Here, my Discovery Channel atlas let me down. The parks and cited landmarks are not all in the places on earth, in the real world, that the map claims. I will grant you that they are nearby, but not in the order or seeming location indicated by the Discovery Channel. It bugged me enough that I wrote in big letters on the map with arrows and circles, “None of these places are placed correctly!” I finally found Key Largo Hammocks State Botanical Site. A small parking lot and gateway on State 906 marked the place. As I was pulling in, the only other visitor was just pulling out.

Hot. It was hot. Really, really hot. Floridians and other southern residents will scoff when I say so. I don’t know what the temperature was but probably only in the 90s. The sun was shining and the hefty winds were not cooling anything off. It was so hot I sat on the benches to rest quite often. I’m not complaining. Just saying.

Good signs gave informational bits about the trees and shrubs, though I was not always sure to which particular plant the signs referred. I learned a few plant names and took pictures of the names and specimens of a lot more. I now recognize a Poisonwood tree by its puzzle-piece-like bark of green and brown. Perhaps, armed with some of the 50 photos I took there, I could identify Bahama Strongbark, Mahogany, Blolly, Pigeon Plum, or Rough Velvetseed. I might recognize a Black Ironwood tree, aptly named because a cubic foot of its wood can weigh as much as 88 pounds. And perhaps not.

There was no getting lost on this walk. A wide road (closed to tourist vehicles) led me for a mile or so before I decided it was time to turn back. I managed to lose a favorite sun hat while enjoying botanical specimens. Thinking back, I don’t see how I could lose a sun hat on a sunny day. So I will conclude that I took my hat off to dry the sweat of my brow. Have I mentioned how hot it is in Florida?

After lunch in the camper at the parking lot, I headed back to Homestead, figuring this would be a good time to find the Coral Castle. Having read about it in Roadside America, Coral Castle was on my must-see list. For a change, that day anyway, something was right where I looked for it, and I had no trouble spotting the “tourist trap” right on the South Dixie Highway.

The Coral Castle is a gift to America from an incredibly creative man, Ed Leedskalin. Ed did not intend it as a gift to America. Ed spent 20 some years (depending on which marketing piece you read) single handedly building an incredible coral dreamscape in a monument to the girl who left him at the altar in his native Latvia. The day before their wedding, the 16-year-old bride told the 26-year-old Ed that he was too old for her. Ed thought it was really because he did not have enough money, but I think it was because Ed was crazy. Perhaps Ed’s being only 5 feet tall and weighing 100 pounds had something to do with it too. Give the girl a break. I don’t think merely being rejected, however cruelly close to the wedding, can send the average man off on a lifetime like Ed’s.

Ed did not get over it. He wandered Canada and the United States for several years working lumber camps and cattle drives. Finally settling in Florida, he bought land, started his monument to his Sweet Sixteen, then decided to move the whole works 10 miles away to avoid a housing development rising adjacent to his property. Not a small feat moving tons of coral sculpture, however short a distance. But he did it in 1936, and apparently the move was as mysterious and magical as the carving and erection of the structures themselves. Almost as mysterious as the great pyramids, if one is to believe the guide brochure.

Perhaps you can tell that I am not believing the guide brochure. Ed used big trucks, mined the coral from his property in an admittedly strenuous manner with levers and pulleys, and spent over 20 years doing little else than adding to his walled sculptures. He lived in the “castle” tower, his workshop and home. As far as coral sculpture goes, Ed was the master. Maybe not a Michelangelo master but definitely an insane-genius-living-on-the-edge-of-the-Everglades-with-a-lot-of-determination type genius. A beautiful sculpture garden, enclosed by sculpted coral walls, still testifies to Ed’s talents.

The author’s preface to his pamphlet “A Book in Every Home,” gives a clue to his personality. “Reader, if for any reason you do not like the things I say in this little book, I left just as much space as I used, so you can write your own opinion opposite it and see if you can do better.” Every page opposite his text is blank.

I don’t see that it explains much, but in his own words, Ed explains “His Sweet Sixteen.” “Now, I will tell you why I did not get the girl. In Ed’s Place, there was a lasting fame for a girl’s name but it would have taken money to put the fame upon her. The trouble was that I did not have the money and did not make enough. That was the reason I could not look for a girl.” Reason enough. Another reason appears later in his tale. His Sweet Sixteen had another boyfriend, and Ed wanted “a girl the way Mother nature puts her out.” He reasons “in such a case she could not be one hundred percent sweet.” No, I suppose not.

Ed can not abandon this line of thought for many pages and soon clarifies his position a bit with more reason and thought: “Lower forms of life are guided by instinct alone so the present only comes into consideration. As soon as the other male is chased away, the female is a good as she ever was, but with us it is different. We are guided more by reason and thought than by instinct and so the present, past and future come into consideration. Now, if it is not good today, it was not good yesterday and it won’t be good tomorrow. That is why an experienced girl cannot be one hundred percent sweet.”

And so on.

I can’t agree with Ed more than when he moves on to the topic of Education: “All books that are written are wrong, the one who is not educated cannot write a book and the one who is educated, is really not educated but he is misled and the one who is misled cannot write a book which is correct.” Huh? And whose fault is this? Our ancestors “knew nothing but they passed their knowledge of nothing to the coming generations and it went so innocently that nobody noticed it.” As we have discovered in our own era of presidents named Bush, “if you lack willingness to learn, you will remain as a brute and if you do things that are not good and right, you will be a low person, and if you believe in things that cannot be proved, any feeble minded person can lead you …” Despite any earlier sarcastic tone, I truly do believe he has a point there.

Okay. Maybe Ed was not a genius at writing his philosophies, but he sure could move and sculpt enormous chunks of coral. In his own words, “the Coral Castle of Florida is the finest example of massive stone construction in the United States.”  He claims he used over 1100 tons of coral in the building of his tower, walls and sculptures. Some wall sections weigh as much as 13,000 pounds. Most of his tools he crafted himself from junkyard finds.

Every one of Ed’s sculptures has a story. The “camera stand” works like a tripod facilitating photos of most of the inside of the courtyard walls. His outdoor bathtub is a chunk of coral hollowed and sealed with concrete. He could fill it in the morning from the adjacent well and by afternoon it was warm enough for him to bathe. A 57,000-pound Obelisk stands forty feet high with a wind vane on top. The carvings on the obelisk denote the year he carved it, the year he moved it to its present location, and the country and year of his birth. The coral Sun Couch can be turned to face any direction because it is rigged to do so on a Ford brake drum. There are other furniture designs, planets, fountains, a barbeque, a throne (because every man’s house is his castle), a sundial, stairways, a telescope and planters all carved from large chunks of coral. A three-ton gate rests on the axle of a model T Ford so that it is easily swung by the smallest of children. He built a huge table in the shape of Florida where he invited (unsuccessfully) the governor and senators to meet and figure out new ways to raise taxes. Throughout the enclosure were beautiful plants in the sculptures themselves or in small garden beds.

If I had come before 1953, the year he died (and coincidentally the year I was born), I could have seen the place for twenty-five cents, up from the ten cents he charged when he began admitting the populace. Ed showed the place to anyone who knocked at the gate, if he was in the mood to do so. He saved up several thousand dollars that were found hidden away after he died of cancer at age 64, leaving his estate to a nephew in Michigan. The guide says a family from Chicago bought the place, so I assume they are still the owners.

Can you tell I enjoyed this place enough to spend several hours taking photographs and reading the plaques describing the artwork? I returned to the Larry and Penny Thompson Memorial Park and Campground as a happy tourist.

On Wednesday morning, I bid goodbye to the L&PTMP&C and headed down Highway 1 to the beautiful Florida Keys. In the early 70s, I had driven part way down the Keys with my family. I remembered the fabulous variations of blue ocean, the beautiful flowers and one really great seafood restaurant. I had had prawns in butter and still think fondly of them. On this trip, the business areas were more built up of course, but the blues of the water lapping on the white sand and coral beaches were still fabulous.

This visit to the Keys was a study in change. When I was there in the early 1970s, the Keys were much less populated, with distinctly fewer restaurants, motels and homes. Now more people, less wildlife. People didn’t think so much then about the plants and animals displaced by our expansion. Most still don’t. I grew up being taught, “man (sic) has dominion over the earth,” thinking that natural systems were more or less permanent. If people moved into one area, the animals would move somewhere else. And who cares about the plants? There are always more somewhere else. Such thinking was always a fallacy. Now in the beginning of the 21st century, I am appalled at unending details about species and habitat loss, not to mention shrinking glaciers and melting snow cover at high elevations.

One telling statistic concerns the coral. Since the 1970s, 98% of the Staghorn Coral in the Keys and Caribbean waters has died. Hurricane damage and pollution are part of the problem, but the major factor seems to be the oceans’ rising temperature due to global climate change. Why should we care about coral? If we can’t conceive of valuing coral for its own sake, perhaps the loss of habitat for fish and other sea life may concern us. Keep this up everywhere and we ain’t got no fish to eat. Eventually almost all lost parts of our ecosystem lead to losses and disadvantages for people. Barbara Kingsolver puts it well,“To love life, really, must mean caring not only for the garden plot but also the wilderness beyond the fence, beauty and mystery for their own sake, because of how meager a world would be without them.”

Thanks to organizations like The Nature Conservancy, efforts are ongoing to reverse some of these depredations. In the Florida Keys, the Conservancy is trying to bring back the Staghorn Coral through cooperation with the Florida Reef Resilience Program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They are growing coral on submerged concrete blocks. Scientists are hopeful that Staghorn may be able to repopulate. (Nature Conservancy Magazine, Winter, 2006)

I didn’t stop at restaurants or tourist traps as I drove south. I just gazed in awe at the ocean, hopping from key to key (or is it really cay to cay?), and stopping frequently at parking areas, to wonder at the designs in the coral beaches. I would have liked to camp at a Florida state park on one of the islands, but none of them allowed campers with dogs. Sigh. In this incredible scenery that I have always associated with Paradise, you would think I could find a beachfront camping place or something vaguely scenic. No, I spent the night in an alley in downtown Key West.

I had never been to Key West and did not know the kind of crazy tourist-over-populated city I would find. There was traffic, plenty of that. There were chain stores and malls lining the highway I chose to drive in on. I was not surprised to find that three million tourists visit Key West every year. If I camped outside of the city proper, then I knew I would not drive in and try to find parking for my behemoth 21 foot Escaper (vehicles over 20 feet long are restricted in Key West). So I wouldn’t get to see the town. In the town were good restaurants, old architecture, and street performers on the wharf. The other RV campgrounds I saw in my guide were far away from the “old” Key West. So I chose Jabour’s Trailer Court located just off the Boardwalk near the tip of the island city. I found it without too much trouble in the narrow crowded streets. Jabour’s was located in an alley with space for about a dozen small motor homes. I chose a nook between a little shed and one of their guesthouses. This place was convenient for walking to anything downtown and the showers were clean. And it was expensive. Sixty-five dollars per night, but worth it for the convenience.

I said Jabour’s was located there because in looking for them on the web as I write this, I find that the family who ran it has since closed the campground. They are redeveloping it as a “transient condominium community” according to the one page web site. As a matter of fact, they closed the campground just weeks after I visited, so I was lucky to have the chance to stay there.

Being on vacation alone in a city is not my favorite pastime. Wandering around the streets of tourist stores and bars in the evening felt lonely to me. Here were all these other people with friends and family. If I’m going to be alone, I prefer to be in the woods or the backcountry. I did enjoy a great meal at Alonzo’s on the Boardwalk. Crab cakes are my new food memory for the Keys. After dinner I wandered along the wharf at Mallory Square where a guidebook had directed me to street performers and a nightly “festival” at sunset. I have a lovely photograph of a beautiful sunset as a sail rigged ship floats past. The evening festival reminded me of a small version of Barcelona’s Ramblas, where I had seen “living statues” frozen in a myriad of costumes and poses, plus jugglers and musicians. Here in Key West, there were fewer performers. Joining a small crowd, I watched a guy juggle fire while he rode a unicycle. I feared there were not enough tourists about to keep even the half a dozen performers in spare change. Along with the others, I put a couple bucks in his hat. Then I checked out the vendors and caricature artists that dotted the wharf.

The crowds were smallish that night. Not the masses of people one encounters at peak tourist season, but enough that I felt comfortable walking around as night drew on. There was a theme park atmosphere in the streets of old Key West. Tacky shops and pricy shops cheek to jowl in interesting 19th- century buildings -- T-shirts, tattoos, jewelry, postcards, books, figurines, hats, gems, -- if a tourist might want it, it was there. Street lights illuminated families examining trinkets and couples holding hands in bars.

The next day I thought about checking out some of the other spots of interest in the city, but decided the traffic and the narrow streets creeped me out. I wanted to head back to the oasis of less heavily populated land that the state parks provided. Thus I missed the Key West Aquarium, the Ernest Hemingway House Museum and most sadly, the Audubon House and Tropical Gardens.

The Dude and I did pause in our flight for a short walk through the beautiful neighborhood of the Truman Annex, where President Truman’s summerhouse is open for tours. The Annex is a gated community, but tourists are allowed to stroll there and visit Truman’s place. The decorative gates where I entered were open and unguarded, so I strolled in with a few other tourists. I didn’t see the sign forbidding dogs until I was leaving. Thank goodness no one called me on it or I would have been mortified at my error. The street was a dreamland of lovely homes with gardens in full spring flower. I admired giant purple passionflowers, strings of red Love Lies Bleeding, and the brilliant shades of reds, pinks and blues of flowers I still don’t know the names of.

Then we crawled out of town with the other traffic and got back on Highway One going north. On the highway traffic was brisk but not bumper-to-bumper. Driving more slowly than many others, I pulled over at waysides frequently to let other vehicles pass and to drink in the blue horizons of the Atlantic on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. We worked our way north going and stopping, photographing water, sky and coral shores in a vain attempt to capture the view and bring it home.

I took a short hike at Long Key State Park to admire the greens of succulent thick leafed plants growing and glowing in the white sand. A wooden boardwalk took me across the dunes covered in vegetation to the ocean for another longing gaze at the treasured blue water.

In the afternoon, I stopped to try the conch at a café recommended in Roadfood, The Crack’d Conch. The deep fried conch bits had a good flavor but were a little chewier than I like food to be. It reminded me of the chewy squid I’ve eaten in the U.S. In Barcelona, squid was the local temptation and it was delicious, with a texture more like shrimp. In Florida, it seemed to me that conch was the local food to try. I may never eat it again, but I ate most of the heaping plate I was served.

That night I stayed in a commercial park, Key Largo Kampground and Marina. The grounds attendant was a nice, talkative guy who was helping some other tent campers when I pulled in. My turn came and he let me choose from available sites on a map, then showed me where to find the laundry, bath house and the screened patio common area where the pay phone resided. While my laundry sloshed in the washer, I spent some time on the pay phone talking to Tom, as my cell phone was not getting a signal.

Some of the motorhomes and trailer homes were set up for the long term, with skirting and personal landscaping touches like potted plants and boat parking. Transient campers like me were not filling all the available spaces in the area I chose, so I had some privacy along with the little grass-roofed picnic spot each site sported along the marina channel. These little “Tiki Huts” were built on wooden decks hanging out over the channel, open on all four sides but for some vegetation between platforms. Not many people were outside. Sitting at the picnic table, I wrote in my journal while trying to ignore the television of a neighbor across the channel. Through their open window I could see the action on a large screen and even catch some of the dialogue. The commercials were definitely louder than the shows. I could distinctly hear “Everyone tells you how to take care of your baby,” booming across the 30 or 40 feet of space between us.

For the first time while in Florida, I put on a sweatshirt to keep off the cool breeze. I wrote until it was too dark to see. About the time I packed up my stuff and went inside the Toy House, the neighbors finally turned off the TV. Blessed quiet fell as I pulled out my maps and plotted my next move.