Long Description:Key West's southern bragging right
Jeff Klinkenberg, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, September 27, 2009
Whenever I visit Key West, where I lived for a glorious summer
as a boy, I always head for a quiet residential neighborhood far
from the boozy hubbub of Duval.
At the corner of South and Whitehead streets I like to stand on
the seawall and look at the green water. I watch the pelicans dive
on the minnows and the blue crabs joust on the underwater rocks.
Mostly I like to watch people.
A stranger hands me his camera and asks if I will take a family
portrait. He and his wife and their kids pose next to a red, black
and yellow concrete buoy on the sidewalk. The buoy, at 24 degrees
33 minutes north latitude and 81 degrees 45 minutes west longitude,
marks the location of the southernmost point in the continental
United States.
Key West is a town where people like to argue, and some argue
that the southernmost point is actually blocks away from the
official sign. Alas, folks who insist on factual information are
likely to die unhappy in Key West. The chamber of commerce directs
tourists to the buoy at the corner of South and Whitehead.
By Florida's tourist attraction standards, the place seems as
dull as a St. Augustine lawn in January. There are no thrill rides
or shops selling "I was drunk in Key West" T-shirts, no loquacious
parrots or cavorting dolphins, no Jimmy Buffett wanna-be warbling
Margaritaville at 10 a.m..
But we tourists like it anyway. The alleged southernmost point
may not be Old Faithful or Broadway, but it's ours. It's a place to
plant your feet and to dream.
U.S. 1 begins at Fort Kent, Maine, 2,000 miles away and ends
here in the tropics, in the Lower 48's southernmost city, at the
end of the line.
Of course, the end of the line is also the beginning of the
line. Key West's brightest literary lights, Ernest Hemingway and
Tennessee Williams, came here to find their muse. When they did,
they went elsewhere. Some folks never leave. For noted
hypochondriac B.P. Roberts, Key West was the end of the line. "I
told you I was sick,'' was her epitaph.
• • •
Nobody keeps records, but the southernmost point is probably the
most photographed place in the Keys. Even in the summer off-season,
we tourists show up with our cameras and strike our best poses,
some of us in bathing suits, others adorned in cargo shorts,
tropical shirts and flip-flops.
Sally Lewis, who has lived across the street for 32 years, has
seen Amish farmers, Buddhist monks and drunken stumblebums smiling
at cameras. "It's a constant stream of humanity,'' she says. Her
neighbor, Ritva Castillo, remembers the night a group of stunning
Asian women, all wearing evening dresses, spilled out of a
limousine. "You don't see many limousines in Key West, trust me,''
Castillo says.
In other parts of skin-the-tourist Key West, a hamburger at a
mediocre restaurant induces sticker shock. But on the quiet part of
town, at the southernmost point, the price is always right.
Free.
"I wanted to say I made it here,'' Oliver Dettmar, a 40-year-old
visitor from Germany, tells me at high noon. He has driven three
hours from Miami for lunch and a photograph. "I think it's
fascinating to be this far south in the United States.''
Cuba is about 90 miles away.
"Which direction exactly?''
Ritva Castillo, standing in her yard with her chihuahua, Lolita,
answers that question almost daily. She points in Fidel's
direction.
"I can't see anything but ocean.''
"To see Cuba you would have to have vision better than 20/20,''
is her well-rehearsed reply.
• • •
My parents lived in Key West during the summer of 1954. It was a
different Key West, a Navy town, a brass-knuckles town, a straw
hat-and-fried fish town. My dad had a gig playing boogie-woogie
piano at a waterfront tavern for high-spirited revelers who
included shrimpers just back from the Dry Tortugas. "I had to duck
flying beer bottles,'' he liked to joke.
He'd go to bed about 4 a.m. and wake at noon to go fishing. I
was 5, eager to accompany him. At the seawall near the southernmost
point, we fished with cheap rods and reels next to locals, usually
black and Hispanic men, who used nylon hand lines. We all caught
the tasty pan-sized fish known as grunts. Later, at our rented
apartment around the corner from the Margaret-Truman Launderette —
it's still there — my dad dressed the fish after my mother took
snapshots with her Brownie. Then she'd fry them up.
When I was a young man, Julian "Yankee" Kee and grandson Albert
used the southernmost point as an outdoors market, selling fried
fish and rubbery meat from conch shells. Albert sometimes drilled a
hole in the conch shell and blew into it as if he were Gabriel
blowing a trumpet. You could hear him honk blocks away.
After Julian and Albert passed away, the city erected a
"Southernmost Point" sign on the corner, but it was quickly stolen.
Generations of other replacement signs vanished as quickly as they
went up. In 1982 the city solved its problem by installing the
current concrete southernmost point buoy on the corner.
Theft-proof, it weighs several tons.
In 2005, Hurricane Wilma swept across South Florida and battered
Key West, knocking down gumbo-limbo trees and torturing roofs. "A
car graveyard,'' is how the local newspaper described the flooded
city. When the storm tides subsided the concrete buoy at the
southernmost point remained standing, its horizontal lines
resembling a grin.
• • •
Gary and Becki Love just got married. The young Tampa couple are
honeymooning in Key West. "Make out, dudes,'' calls a friend with a
camera. They lock lips at the southernmost point.
A young dark-haired man waits for his turn in front of the buoy.
"I live in Miami now but I'm from Lithuania,'' explains Mantas
Kudrinas. "I come down to this spot every year. The marker looks
the same in all my pictures but I look older.''
He has brought along three young friends, from Bulgaria,
Kazakhstan and Ukraine. As their cameras click they converse in
Russian. This being Key West, a nearby rooster crows in the
distance while the palm trees sway.
Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at klink@sptimes.com or (727)
893-8727. His latest book is "Pilgrim in the Land of
Alligators."
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