A Month at Mile Zero
Key West is full of signs.
You’re hard pressed to find a fence or yard or front door that doesn’t have at least one sign on display. I’m naturally introverted, so when I get to a new place I’m always interested in what I can learn before I have to start talking to strangers. So each morning when I went for a walk from our house in the center of Old Town to the Mallory Square waterfront for coffee, I started trying to figure this place out by reading the signs.
I learned that locals sometimes ask twice that you not park in front of their driveway and block them in. The first time, they will ask nicely.
I learned that Chef Jeff gets to park his tricked-out tricycle-turned-tuk-tuk anywhere he wants. And if you disagree with him…beware.
Most Beware signs around here seem earnest – though some are quite funny.
If you need a 5XL t-shirt, you’d better get to the store before the owner decides it’s beer o’clock.
I’d heard before we came down here that there were a lot of feral cats roaming around. So this sign, while hilarious to me, didn’t come as a surprise.
But we learned from our neighbor a couple days after moving in that an ASPCA-type organization spearheaded a big effort a couple years ago to get the strays on the island spayed and neutered. I can count on one hand the number of stray cats I’ve seen the past month. An unintended consequence has been an explosion in the hen and rooster population. Without the cats around to prey on them, they’re cockadoodle doo-ing all over the island, all the time.
And they’re running out of food. Some look okay. But others are pretty skinny. Last week one rooster pecked another to death in the middle of a busy street after they both went for the same dropped pastry. It doesn’t take long for desperation to set in once it becomes clear that there’s not enough to go around.
The sign I’ve seen most down here is this one:
I figured it would be a pervasive sentiment. The thought of two thousand sunburned cruisers pouring out onto a handful of streets on a 3-by-5-mile island four days a week makes me cringe. But these signs aren’t everywhere. The houses that boast them are all freshly painted. Some have Tesla charging stations installed in their picket fences. About half seem occupied right now. The other half’s owners are at their second or third homes. Turns out this sign, or the absence of it, is a pretty good indicator of who’s down here because they have money, and who’s here because they need to make money.
I’ve only met one person down here who has one job (our favorite waitress at Blue Heaven works in a coffee shop in the mornings and runs fishing charters on her day off; the woman who comes by each week to clean the pool at our rental also works for a landscaping company and details cars on weekends). The woman I met is named Laura. I was sitting out on the porch of a place called Rum Bar on Duval Street, and was just getting up to leave when she sat down one chair over from me and started talking. She was a little lit, and alone, so I stayed and listened to her story. She started a sailboat charter company with her husband twenty-six years ago. It’s a big outfit down here, I immediately recognized the name. She talked about how big a deal it is, how successful she’s been, the big house on the water in the Outer Banks that she goes to when she’s not in Key West. I nodded and smiled. I waited for her to take a breath, or another sip of the third cocktail she really didn’t need, so I could claim an early morning meeting the next day and get out of there.
In the middle of a sentence about how great life was, she got a little choked up. She said that business has been down since March. Way down. She got a federal relief loan, but the money’s gone. She and her husband had been fighting since the wintertime – he’s gone now, too. He’s living at the house in North Carolina and he’s not coming back. She’s here because she can’t go there. Her son got kicked out of his boarding school and needs to start somewhere else in the fall. She’s going to vote for Donald Trump. She doesn’t want to. But if the country doesn’t open up again, soon, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. She said, “I don’t want to…but I don’t know what I’m going to do” four times. She stood up and hugged me, leaned heavily on the railing as she made her way down the steps, got into her BMW and drove away.
208 businesses have closed in Key West since March. There are handwritten signs on a lot of the restaurant and shop entrances instructing: “no more than eight people at a time,” “20 guests maximum” – but you can usually count less than half that many heads through the window. Duval Street is hopping on the weekends (most bars more social than they are distant, though Conch Republic masks are reliably up) but weeknights it can feel pretty baren. This is a town that needs its tourists. With a two-lane highway the only way on by land, it needs people dumping off cruise ships every day by the thousands. The near-term outlook for that is grim. Those roosters vying for a dropped pastry in the middle of the street should feel like a sign.
It seems like it should be starting to feel desperate here.
But, from what I’ve been able to tell in the past month, it’s not. And that’s the weirdo magic of this place. I’ve been thinking for weeks about how to describe it. And then a local I ran into at the Simonton pier when I biked down to watch the sunset described it for me. He pointed to the two islands that you can see from the pier, Sunset Key on the left and Wisteria Island on the right.
They’re separated by roughly a quarter mile. Sunset Key is where Oprah lives (when she’s not at one of her other eight houses). Wisteria Island is where Key West’s homeless population lives. They camp out there overnight in tents instead of having to sleep on sidewalks or benches in town. They get rides out from other locals. Fishermen. Sailboat and powerboat charter captains who’ve dropped off their paying passengers for the day. Supposedly one of the guys who keeps his yacht moored at the Truman Annex makes a few trips most evenings until everyone who wants to go is able to get out there. And the same general thing happens in the morning to bring them back into town. That’s Key West. Trumpers and hippie liberals. High rollers and vagrants. Hillbilly rednecks and Oprah. They’re as wildly different a group as I’ve ever seen in one place. But they’re all locals. And they take care of each other.
Tomorrow we start our 1,600 mile drive home from Mile Zero. We’re leaving too early to get in a workout beforehand, so I went for a longer-than-usual jog this morning to take in as much of the island as I could. I ran up a side street I found a couple weeks ago that leads to a tiny beach, tucked away from the crowds a few blocks over at the Southernmost Point. The sun was just starting to come up and my plan was to go out onto the sand, take off my sneakers, and dip my toes in the water. But I pulled up short when I saw someone was already out there. I looked a little more closely – it was a homeless person. A sleeping bag was open on the sand to his left. And to his right was a Styrofoam takeout box and two roosters. He was feeding them.
