The Florida Keys: A History & Guide Tenth Edition - Softcover

Williams, Joy

 
9780812968422: The Florida Keys: A History & Guide Tenth Edition
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812968425 ISBN 13: 9780812968422
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The Florida Keys: A History & Guide is an engaging handbook to the unique coral and limestone islands that curve southwest off the tip of Florida. Acclaimed novelist and Florida resident Joy Williams traces U.S. Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West, combining the best of local legend—colorful stories you won’t find in other guidebooks—with insightful commentary and the most up-to-date advice on where to stay, eat, and wander. Along the way, you will:

• explore the exquisite underwater world of North America’s only living reef

• discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive “conch” architecture of Key West

• experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay’s “backcountry” and the unique ecology of the Keys

• visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys’ eccentrics—writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions

• find the best (and avoid the worst) cafés, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offer

Here is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region’s idiosyncrasies and delights.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joy Williams is the author of novels, collections of short stories, and Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel The Quick and the Dead was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Fund from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. Williams lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

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"The Florida Keys: A History & Guide is an engaging handbook to the unique coral and limestone islands that curve southwest off the tip of Florida. Acclaimed novelist and Florida resident Joy Williams traces U.S. Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West, combining the best of local legend--colorful stories you won't find in other guidebooks--with insightful commentary and the most up-to-date advice on where to stay, eat, and wander. Along the way, you will:
- explore the exquisite underwater world of North America's only living reef
- discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive "conch" architecture of Key West
- experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay's "backcountry" and the unique ecology of the Keys
- visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys' eccentrics--writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions
- find the best (and avoid the worst) cafes, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offer
Here is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region's idiosyncrasies and delights.

Aus dem Klappentext

The Florida Keys: A History & Guide is an engaging handbook to the unique coral and limestone islands that curve southwest off the tip of Florida. Acclaimed novelist and Florida resident Joy Williams traces U.S. Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West, combining the best of local legend colorful stories you won t find in other guidebooks with insightful commentary and the most up-to-date advice on where to stay, eat, and wander. Along the way, you will:

explore the exquisite underwater world of North America s only living reef

discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive conch architecture of Key West

experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay s backcountry and the unique ecology of the Keys

visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys eccentrics writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions

find the best (and avoid the worst) cafés, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offer

Here is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region s idiosyncrasies and delights.

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The Upper Keys

Key Largo to Long Key

The Spanish first found the Keys during Ponce de León's 1513 expedition and promptly called them, with inquisitional flair, Los Martires-the martyrs-because they seemed twisted and tortured. They logged out the mahogany that grew here early on, and probably enslaved the native Caloosa Indians, but they were indifferent to exploring or settling these stony islands. There was no gold, no fresh water, and many, many bugs. They mapped and named the Keys principally as an aid to their ships, which, laden with gold and silver, used the Florida Straits as their route from the New World back to the Old.

The first settlement in the Keys was at Cayo Hueso, or Key West, in 1822, more than two decades before Florida became a state. The other keys remained pretty much deserted until 1874, when the government surveyed them and plotted land for homesteading. The early homes were primitive, built from the local "coastal store"?the beach?with wood and materials washed up from shipwrecks. The biggest plague of the settlers was mosquitoes. The mosquito was king of the Keys. Mosquitoes blackened the sides of houses and obscured the shapes of animals. Mosquitoes blackened the cheesecloth which people swathed their heads in as they slept. If you swung a pint cup, the saying went, you'd come up with a quart full of mosquitoes. Smudge pots burned constantly inside and outside the driftwood houses. Burlap bags filled with wood chips soaked in old engine oil were hung to drip over stagnant water holes in an attempt to kill mosquito larvae. With mosquitoes gnawing on them day and night, a few pioneering families nevertheless managed to claw a living from what one writer of the time referred to as "worthless, chaotic fragments of coral reef, limestone and mangrove swamp."

The people who first made their homes in the Upper Keys were hardworking Methodist fishermen and farmers. They spoke with a Cockney accent, were closely interrelated, and bore the names Albury, Pinder, Johnson, Russell, and Lowe. Their more flamboyant wrecking neighbors were in Key West, but life in the "outside keys" was earnestly drab, farming rock being somewhat Sisyphean in nature. But farm the rock they did, burning and clearing the land and planting coconuts, citrus, pineapple, and melons in the ashy interstices between the coral. They homesteaded on the Atlantic, and transportation between the scattered houses was by shallow-draft boat. These boats also took the produce out to deeper waters, where it was off-loaded onto schooners which sailed to Key West as well as to northern ports.

In 1905 Henry Flagler, a former partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil and president of the Florida East Coast Railroad, began extending the train track from Homestead, through the Everglades, to Key Largo. Flagler was always pushing southward, legend has it, because his wives were forever wanting to be warmer. (Flagler had three wives. The middle one, Ida Alice, went mad after finding too much solace in her Ouija board. The planchette kept telling her she was destined to marry the czar of Russia. The strict divorce laws of Florida were changed for Flagler. Sailing through the legislature and signed by the governor in a swift two and a half weeks, a new provision made incurable insanity grounds for divorce. Flagler disposed of Ida Alice and quickly wed a bubbly lady named Mary Lily who liked bourbon and laudanum but avoided the Ouija board.) Other railroad tycoons thought Flagler's interest in Florida absurd, considering it a worthless country, save for its climate. Flagler had the great field of Florida to himself. He pushed down from St. Augustine to Palm Beach, and then to Miami (then known as Fort Dallas), but shipping out from that point was limited by the 12-foot depth of Biscayne Bay. Key West, with its fine deepwater port, was the perfect terminus for the Florida East Coast Railway. With the Panama Canal being built, Flagler saw a rosy future for commerce, with rail and ferry lines extending to South America. Flagler was 75 years old when construction began on his oversea railway and died only a few months after the project was completed in 1912.

For seven years the track and train, freighted with peril and mishap, inched their way down the Keys to Key West. Settlers in the Upper Keys longed for the railroad to be completed, believing that it would put them in closer touch with their markets and make them wealthy. But eventually the railroad meant the end of their little coastal communities and their large fruit farms. Key West became a receiving center for produce from all over the Caribbean and South America, and cheaper fruit was introduced to the mainland. Too, the few inches of Keys topsoil that had supported such exotics as Porto Rico, Abbakka Queen, and Sugar Loaf pineapples was soon robbed of all nutrients, and the plantations failed. Towns like Planter, which once shipped out a million crates of limes, pineapples, tomatoes, and melons a year by schooner, simply disappeared, a victim of sporadic hurricanes and the railroad. Other communities that sprang up along the track vanished too, when the 1935 hurricane blew the train away.

It was this hurricane?the hurricane, the nameless one?that made the history of the Upper Keys. It swept across the Matecumbe Keys on September 2, 1935, with an 18-foot tidal wave and 200-mph winds. Matecumbe is a name of obscure origins, but it may be a corruption of the Spanish mata hombre?"kill man"?which was also the meaning of Cuchiyaga, the Indian name for the island. In any case, it was a fated place. More than 800 people died in the hurricane, many of them members of the second "Bonus Army" of World War I veterans who, seeking early military benefits, had been hired instead by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for work projects across the country. In this instance they were building a road from Lower Matecumbe to Grassy Key so that the ferry route could be eliminated. Most of them died when the train sent down to rescue them was blown off the tracks in Islamorada. Of the 11 cars, only the 106-ton locomotive, Old 447, remained upright, saving the lives of the engineer and the fireman. Many of the dead were burned in funeral pyres overseen by the National Guard in the sunny days after the storm, while others were buried in a common crypt marked by a monument in Islamorada.

Besides winds, the history here is in the waters?in the wrecks and reefs. The waters off the Upper Keys conceal a remarkable number of wrecks, from Spanish galleons to British frigates to World War II freighters. Cannon from the HMS Winchester, a 60-gun British frigate which went down in a hurricane in 1695, are displayed on dry ground at Pennecamp Park, and the adventurous diver can frequently see less restored and considerably wetter and blurrier artifacts. A wreck that is not present but that has left its contemporary and eternal mark is that of the Wellwood, a 400-foot Turkish freighter which ran aground within the park's boundaries in the fall of 1984. The Wellwood, filled with chicken feed and captained, it would certainly seem, with some incompetence by a C. H. Vickers, ignored the 45-foot flashing light that marks Molasses Reef on the southernmost boundary of the park and plowed into the reef, annihilating four acres of living coral. It made a portion of that fabulous tract?all the peaks and valleys and colorful caves bright with life?as flat and as gray as a parking lot.

The reef that runs along the Atlantic coast of the Keys, close to the great Gulf Stream, is fantastically fragile. All reefs are complex and highly particular life-forms, requiring lots of sunlight and clear, warm water. The Florida Keys tract (the only reef in the continental United States) exists at the northernmost limit of tropical reef...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812968425
ISBN 13 
9780812968422
Einband
Taschenbuch
Zeichner
Carawan Robert
Anzahl der Seiten
306
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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