Episode 38: Making Merry in Margaritaville

A winter-shortening visit to the Florida Keys is an unfailing antidote to the the assorted physical and intellectual madnesses of life up in America. That pleasure is kicked up a few notches when South Florida TV meteorologists gleefully chart the progress of historically awful winter storms back where you were a few days earlier. It is not enough to be blissfully warm and sighing with pleasure under banana palms and frangipani, one's friends and family must be buried beneath snow and ice.

We start discarding items of clothing almost as soon as we hit Card Sound Bridge arching over to Key Largo. Socks are the first to go, the better to wriggle in the sand of the nearest beach.

Key West is another 120 miles down Route A1A. It's the largest town in the Keys, and by far the most popular with the snowbirds who funnel themselves down the Overseas Highway every day of the year, especially from December to April. The effects of the hurricanes that swept over the island two years ago have been all but erased. Then, towering heaps of destroyed refrigerators, washing machines, carpeting, and broken branches and entire trees piled up at curbside.
Now, all that has been cleared away, leaving only more For Sale signs than normal, planted by people victimized by the mortgage crisis and fear of future storms. The flowering vines and trees are as profligate as ever. Our buddy Michael opines that if everyone left Florida for three months, the plant growth would obliterate every last sign of human habitation.

We are impressed, yet again, by the tolerance and good will of this most disparate accumulation of residents - beefy, fearsomely proportioned bikers, gays both hyper-flamboyant and as conventional as a family-friendly Cleveland suburb, heartily boisterous blacks with origins in The Bahamas, Cubans whose grandparents arrived long before Fidel, latter-day hippies denying the last three decades, as well as drugged-out and booze-poisoned dropouts and their suppliers. Just about everyone, the drunks slumped in doorways included, salute strangers, ever ready to chat at the merest sign of interest. A sense of humor is obligatory.

It takes a full day to get to Key West. As ever, the worst thing about the island is having to leave.

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Choices

The G.O.P. has just the candidate for you, if....

*You'd really like, at the start of the 21st Century, a president who believes in Creationism and rejects Darwin.

*You want a president who will be 73 years old when he takes the oath of office, committed to continuing our Iraq adventure.

*You admire a man who changes positions on political whim and who proclaims with his bare face hanging out, that there can be no freedom without religion.

*You feel that a guy who married his cousin, divorced her, had a press conference to announce he was leaving his second wife for a woman with whom he conducted a public affair, then charged the resultant expenses to various city agencies is a fitting moral leader.

*You're amused by an actor-politician who says that his most cherished possession is his "trophy wife."

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Butterflies or Papa
The big-deal sightseeing attraction in Key West is the house where Earnest Hemingway lived from 1931 into the 1940s. He wrote The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls there. The 150-year-old house (907 Whitehead St., 305-294-1575) sits beneath lush palm and flamboyant trees and behind an astonishingly ugly brick wall Hem had built in haste to defend his diminishing privacy. Lounging around the property are the descendants of Papa's own six-toed cats. Geezer has walked through the house and yard often, over the many younger years when Hemingway was a personal hero. Then he re-read Across The River And Into The Trees, a painfully sentimental, nearly plot-less mess that was - is - a waste of paper and ink.

So much for Papa. Our favorite attraction now is the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservancy (1316 Duval Street, 305-296-2988). We enter a glass-enclosed conservatory alive with dense tropical plants and blooms that are home to scores of butterflies and a corps of brightly hued small birds. They flutter freely by, coming to rest on the ankles and shoulders of the bipeds among them.















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Key West Limonade
Transport yourself to a warmer, sunnier place with this take on a popular rum drink. Most recipes call for Sprite as a central ingredient, but I'd sooner use Tang. Makes one.

3 ounces Bacardi Limon
3 ounces vodka
One and one-half ounces cranberry juice
One and one-half ounces lime juice
Framboise

Place Bacardi, vodka, cranberry juice, and lime juice in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly. Pour into a squat rocks glass with ice. Carefully fill a soup spoon with Framboise and gently it lower into the drink until the Framboise floats. Remove spoon without stirring.

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Irony has no place in Key West.
Or maybe it does.
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