Florida Keys a la Cart
Posted: Monday, November 10, 2008
by Gregory Lewis
PopGnosis
Florida Keys in a shopping cart
There I was in Miami-Dade County, where all eyes were scrutinizing the ballot lines, anxious for indicators of outrage. This was the historic 2008 Presidential Election, and I failed in my duty to report on it. The long lines snaking out of Miami Beach libraries and City Hall each and every weekday since my arrival on October 29 went unwritten. Many enthusiastic Obama supporters on street corners waved signs of hope, while their Republican counterparts, a relative smattering of already dispirited worriers balanced their placards with abandon.
"A no brainer," he said, when I told him I had already voted for Obama by absentee ballot.
For this lapse I hope to be forgiven, especially after I explain my adventures of the last week. Tonight my feet are tired, my back sore. I should pass out from exhaustion soon, so I write hastily in order to give a proper accounting.
Here I lie on my back writing this in my new apartment in Vaca Key, Marathon City, Florida, which I practically begged for. My peach colored bungalow is sandwiched between a lime and a raspberry colored one, part of a line of miniature fruit pastel domiciles. Mangroves and coconut palms line the marina just 50 feet from my front door, and a private beach, too, if I'm willing to walk, with pigmy palms well-positioned and shading exactly three beach chairs facing the Gulf of Mexico, and a not-too distant mangrove island. Some 130 miles beyond the island: Cuba.
Working backwards (and upside down)
The part about pushing a shopping cart to the Florida Keys is only a partial exaggeration. As it happened, I found a shopping cart on the bikeway beneath the elevated Miami Metro Rail. My Yankee pragmatism bested me, I'm afraid, so I heaved my 40 pounds of backpack into the empty cart.
Some other homeless person no longer needed it, with its non-squeak wheels and Winn-Dixie green handlebar. It was a stroke of grace that I should happen upon it, because I was at the moment back-tracking two miles to the grassy park where I had spent the night sleeping, concealed behind the relative obscurity of a palm tree. I was less interested in the change that fell out of my pocket than I was my Gerber folding-blade pocket knife, which I found on a roadside in upstate New York exactly one month ago.
Nobody bothered me all night, as I tossed and turned directly under the landing path of jets approaching Miami International Airport. It was a cold night, again.
I arrived at the lonely park at about 6:00 p.m., after having walked from North Beach, Miami Beach, to South Beach, then across the McArthur Causeway, and finally through downtown Miami. 20 miles of concrete, boardwalk and beach sand passed under my feet that day.
I slept on the beach the previous night, as I had the night before that one. Daytime temperatures were hot, especially wearing a backpack, but after sundown it was cold and breezy. The breeze was the cold. A penetrating, relentless November sea blow from the north.
Nobody hassled me either night, but on both nights lonely men tried hitting me up for a smoke.
"Hey bro, you ain't got a smoke do you? I'll give you a quarter for it," asked the shaggy silhouette interrupting the twilight a few yards to my left.
"Sorry bro, I don't smoke. Take care bro, and God bless you." I made it a habit to depart with "God bless you," especially when it became obvious that so many people who intersected my path were society's marginalized down and outers. More disconcerting as the days went was that the beachcombers and homeless were starting to identify me as one of them. At some point I had transitioned into drifter. A young Hispanic man at the train station offered me his freshly lit cigarette when all I wanted was to know how far south the train would take me. Young hotel women turned their glance indignantly as they passed me on the boardwalk. More damning yet was the female security guard who did a double-take as I exited the restroom at the Franklin Hotel, which the young Laotian woman humanely allowed me to attend. Me, hunched like a dwarf by the burdensome pack, a leather hat on my burned head (20 years this travel hat, called a double-beaver, Iroquois-American made), and blue jeans with frayed cuffs whose aroma offended even I.
In hindsight I regret thanking the poor girl in front of the steely security lady, whose condescending stare hammered a subtle browbeat upon the poor thing.
As the orange sun peeled itself from the sticky surface of the Atlantic Ocean, stretched oblong like a lava lamp's warm globule of colored wax I folded and packed my sandy bed sheets and marched onward, the chill disappearing with Orion and the Pleides and pale Jupiter of the night.
I met quite a few of Miami Beach's homeless, and there is no reason to deny that I, also, was presently homeless. Like Zebedy and Jonya, from Jamaica.
Zebedy makes beautiful green roses out of palm leaves. He taught me about the jelly nut, that sweet juicy immature coconut. Finding one of Zebedy's coconut roses on the boardwalk, I threaded its stem through the mouth hole of the bamboo flute I carried on the outside of my backpack. I suppose I resembled a cross between Crocodile Dundee and Kwai Chang Kane from Kung Fu. Perhaps I intended to, a little bit.
Ron was a marooned art dealer from New York, who once owned a hunting camp in Massachusetts not far from where I lived. Ron was going through a thin streak with his fortunes. His wife divorced him, his art business failed to take off.
"I want to get out of Miami Beach," said Ron. "I miss New York; I miss the mountains."
So just go, I thought. Walk, like I am doing.
Again with Meyers, from Grand Rapids Michigan, who was four years "marooned" in Miami Beach.
"Where's the food?" he hollered, approaching on the beach jogging path as I marched southward on the return from Bal Harbor. "I want to know where the food is. Man, I've been in Miami Beach for four years, and I can't get nothin' goin' here. I see so many beautiful women here, but I can't get no sex. It's making me sick."
Note to self: Do not get into the art business; do not look for sex. I do not wish to become Ron or Meyers. Making flowers like Zebedy would be nice, though, or the grasshoppers the quiet old Jamaican man crafted from palm leaves.
"I want to get out of this city!" Meyers nearly cried.
I pulled out a package of tortillas and American cheese, and offered the whole thing to Meyers.
He dismissed my offer with a wave.
"Nah, I don't want that," and Meyers walked away without further ado, gone from my life for good.
I became homeless after checking out of the South Beach Hostel on Monday morning, two mornings before bumping into Meyers. I had been sharing my nights between two hostels: The Jazz Hostel, then the less expensive South Beach Hostel on the weekend.
My discontent began on Sunday. The group of German kids that checked in were obnoxiously loud, singing their drinking songs and banging walls and doors until 4:00 am. Disgusted, I didn't wait until noon to check out. I did, however, return for the early bird continental breakfast later that morning.
There I met Sting from Denmark and Sam from Brazil. We talked politics, since the lounge televisions were tuned to CNN. The hostel guests were an international bunch, with a very few actually being U.S. Citizens. For the young adults far from their homes across "The Pond," the hostel life meant liberation; party time. Not so for the older residents like Sting, Sam and myself.
"I couldn't sleep," Sting grieved. I nodded sympathetically.
Looking at South Beach for the next to the last time, I decided that I was simply malingering. I harnessed my bright orange back pack and walked northward.
Miami Beach's latitudinal dimensions are demarcated by the rude height of Porto Fino Tower on the southern tip, to the causeway on Bal Harbor at the north end, a distance of about 11 miles. Because there is so much to see along the way, it's not a simple matter of "just" walking. The entire journey by foot is a panoply of art deco hotels, space age hi-rise condominiums, a pristine marina, the vast McArthur Causeway overlooking a picturesque Biscayne Bay, with Fischer Island on the left sprouting Spanish villas like a hedgehog, and Star Island on the right ringed with private boats.
My hill town upbringing had prepared me wonderfully for such a walk. I noticed people here regularly responded, "too far to walk; take the bus" when a place I was looking for was only one or two miles away. These flatlanders seemed land-locked by the city gridwork.
The immense Miami business district dominated me though. Business towers rose from immaculate streets like spears of quartz, aquamarine and beryl crystals in a magic cavern. A young girl and her older sister gave me directions to a Publix supermarket, and walking to it I passed the most densely packed tropical jungle I had ever imagined could be. It was a nature walk in the heart of Miami.
After eating an orange, some tortillas I smeared with guava paste, wrapped around pepperoni slices (a craving since before I flew south) I continued hiking until distance made the sky scrapers less imposing. Eventually I happened upon the grassy park, where I decided to relieve my burden for the night.
A bus driver told me that if I wanted to leave Miami the metro train was how to do it, and though I didn't heed her advice when she offered to take me there the previous day (I naively thought I could walk the entire way to the Keys), I yielded to her common sense today.
The train took me to a place called Dade-South, where for another 50-cents I hopped a bus to Florida City, the southernmost part of continental Florida. For $2.35 (actually $3 because I didn't have exact change) a bus delivered me to Marathon City, just 40 miles shy of the Promised Land of Key West. Like Moses who led his people out of Egypt it was not my destiny to be, not yet, at least, to actually rest my bones in Key West.
With a cardboard sign fastened to the rear of my backpack reading, "Key West," I put the pack on the grass, sign facing toward the oncoming traffic, and stuck out my thumb on Highway 1.'
It wasn't 30 minutes before a Sheriff's Deputy pulled alongside me and asked, "You aren't hitchhiking, are you?" What could I say but yes? I had long ago reconciled my conscience with hitchhiking, which is hardly a moral dilemma.
"Hitchhiking's not allowed?" I queried. He shook his head in the negative.
The patrol car pulled into the driveway ahead of me, and I obliged the good officers inside with my Massachusetts driver's license. In truth, they were quite polite, if faintly understanding. I told them where I was from, and by my sign they already knew where I was going.
No ticket, just a verbal warning to take the bus. But the bus stop was one mile behind me. Walking back to it, I happened to ask an inn manager about a place to stay, and it was she who hinted that there might be a reduced monthly rate available at the resort where I ultimately checked in.
Yet, for all the toil and dirt and discomfort, I counted my blessings and gave thanks to my God with all my heart for this new home. I'm resuscitating the American Dream, something that had been for too long harrowed under the fallow fields of possibility by regulation and immigration reform and 9/11 and Recession The Patriot Act and all the other pitiable excuses that have decapitated our collective spirit. It will take a lot of mouth-to-mouth, but I think the old girl still has a bit of life in her, yet.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)G, I read this article a few days ago. Not that I expected you to tell me everything, but I wasn't aware you were going to be a free spirit down there! I had to digest that part and come back to comment. You are incredible!
Thanks for the update. I've wondered about you and prayed harder since reading this article. *chuckling* But seriously, I have. I know you are enjoying your experiences and hope you get settled soon. Ja'mai'can me homesick.Please log in to respond to this comment.Thanks for readng Avis. I came down here to write. Not just something I do on SearchWarp, but a lifestyle, you might say.Yesterday I did a reading of James Joyce's "Ulysses" on Mallory Square, Key West, home of Ernest Hemingway. What a scene that was! Found a 100 Franc Tahiti note (but that bank wouldn't exchange it 'cause they couldn't find it in their book).- GPlease log in to respond to this comment.
hi gregory,and then there's me, sometimes too lazy to walk down and get the mail!this was a very interesting and well written article, and i wish you the best.keep us posted,best regards,sue thomPlease log in to respond to this comment.Thanks for reading, Susan. My motto is: If I can move an inch, I can move a mile (I relied on that philosophy a lot with my car in the snow belt up north).- GPlease log in to respond to this comment.
found your article when searching for flordia keys campgrounds, and was hoping you could tell me the name of the shuttle bus systems you took all the way down to key west? im a student at the university if miami, and my friends and i are constantly looking for ways OUT of that crazy city on the weekends - thought this sounded like a good way! thanks.Please log in to respond to this comment.Thanks for writing. Loving Keys life immensely. If I remember right, I hopped on the Metro train in Coconut Grove, just south of Miami for $3, took me to Dade-South, wherever that is. From Dade South, for less than $2 hopped on a bus that took me t Florida City WalMart. There, I caught the bus to the Keys, Marathon City, for $3. Getting to Marathon from Miami is easy and inexpensive. Public transportation in south Florida is very good, busses comfortable & clean. A bus from Marathon to Bahia Honda campground or Boyd's in Key West will cost you and your buds another $3, one way. Bahia Honda is cheaper than Boyd's. best, GregoryPlease log in to respond to this comment.
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