ON HAVING REACHED THE KEYS

Islamorada, I’m here and everything about you is foreign to me. Timeless retro hotel and diner and marina signs. Languid, saronged women in their generous brown skin and strong, salty women in their salty brown skin. Bar-top sweat-rings telling stories between drinks. Backcountry islands hovering on the teal horizon. Clouds building and climbing and retreating in five thousand sunrise and sunset hues. Skiffs and single-masts and cruisers in powder blue, white and pale aqua-green. Impossibly tight-woven mangroves and endless channels. The soul-wrenching siren-song of tarpon and bonefish and permit on the constant, humid breeze. Your guides and anglers in sandaled feet and tan-lined eyes at the bar immersed and unwinding in the vernacular of day after day after day on the water. Everywhere, ghosts of writers, artists, movie stars, sports figures, fishermen, smugglers, drifters, lost and wholly-found souls – bohemian shadows in their public anonymity – still clapping each other’s backs while in gritty, close, passionate conversation over whisky or rum or beer or all three. Islamorada, I’ve only been in your tide a few days. But I’m here and I can see how easy it would be to absolve myself of mainland life and simply chart a course for nothing. To look south over nothing but eternity’s tide from the bow of this skiff waiting for northbounders and see everything I need.