Newcomer in Paradox
© 2001 by Hal Howland
[This piece appears in another form in The Secret of Salt: An Indigenous Journal, no. 2 (2006).]
Paradise. 1. Eden, Heaven. 2. A place or state of bliss, felicity, or delight. 3. A sales term used by chambers of commerce (if not residents) in Hawaii, Florida, and similar locales.
I want to tell you about Key West. I’ve lived here one year, so that sounds a bit like Jim Morrison’s proclaiming Texas Radio and the Big Beat when he’s this nerdy kid in NorthernVirginia pointed toward Venice Beach in a station wagon. Or whatever. That’s not the point.
My Key West is a sated athletic woman. It’s an orgy of every color bathed in heat and feathered by cool breezes and imbued with the thick green smell of night-blooming jasmine. That scent settles over you in certain areas and leads you down narrow lanes overgrown with nature running riot. I fell in lust with Key West my first day here, but I’d chosen my new hometown about six months before.
I did my house hunting in cyberspace, and might still be skating the icy roads of Vienna, Virginia, had my old toaster Mac not crashed and I not been dragged online, like Jack Kerouac in the woods with his lantern crunching toward the eruption of the Pacific. In his case, it was a vain attempt to outrun alcohol; in mine, simple boredom.
First of all, don’t come here. Not to explore, definitely not to rent one of those stinking screaming scooters, but especially not to live. There’s no room for you. There’s no room for me, or for the last several thousand selfish libertines who got here before me; but at least I bought a house that was already built and didn’t clear my neighbors’ last stand of privacy and throw up another modular eyesore surrounded by little white rocks and portable landscaping.
My opening sentence made me think of the Doors not just because of that song (and if you don’t know it, don’t even consider coming here) but also because Key West is full of old hippies and beatniks and writers and angry painters (way too many of those) and other nonconformists who either grew up in the city’s proudly nonconformist history or came here at least partly because of it. Paunchy middle-aged guys with ponytails who’d be laughed off Main Street, U.S.A., not only blend in here, they own the joint. For the most part they reflect the quiet wisdom that leads a man to the place where his body wants to be.
I came here because I was sick of metropolitan Washington, D.C.—I lived in the suburbs, but as a musician necessarily traversed the entire region and knew places my neighbors wouldn’t have set foot in—, also because my mother’s side of the family hailed from Florida and I’d spent time here as a kid (later as a player on the road), but mostly because I like the water and open windows and the crazy counterpoint of bird song and the chance to wear little or nothing just about every day of the year. (In any case, call first.)
I was fortunate, though I didn’t know it at the time, to grow up in a foreign service family (as dysfunctional as anyone’s, but that story is already fictionalized elsewhere), so I lived in and traveled through just about every climate there is. I belong in the tropics.
I float in sartorial gratitude. The light colorful clothing traditional to the region mixes with the loose gauze of a generation that grew up with George Harrison’s dewy sitar. The Realtor who found my house, a fine singer named Frances Edge, recalled the saying that if you’re wearing a tie in Key West you’re either the defense or the prosecution. Earlier this year Key West mayor Jimmy Weekley, whose family runs a pair of historic grocery stores, showed up in a golf shirt to greet secretary of state Colin Powell. This government brat had to smile.
It’s amazing how quickly you get used to a place. I’m still bumping into things in my house, of course, but even that is refreshing after all those years of predictable efficient motion toward nowhere in particular. My new home is so sympathetic to my being that it already feels like a partner—and so expensive that I’m not ruling out that other sort of marriage. I must swim, and I live minutes from the spectacular jade sea.
It’s less amazing how quickly the things that would make you unhappy in one place follow you to another.
And least amazing of all is how quickly the idealism of a big move becomes tainted by the whining that infects any community. Here it’s stuff as serious as wages and affordable housing, pervasive drug abuse, the environmental degradation that accompanies development and overpopulation, or as frivolous as the crowing of a thousand roosters that all together aren’t as loud as one of the flatulent two-wheelers rolling down Duval Street on any given afternoon.
There are famous things about Key West, things that for many people are the main reasons to come here, that don’t interest me at all. I wouldn’t cross the street to hear Jimmy Buffett (I played “Margaritaville” as many times in D.C. as anyone’s played it here), I think the steel drum is the most annoying instrument since the banjo, I don’t care about pirates or their treasure, fishing is gross (and sport fishing immoral), I have no particular desire to own a boat (kids, dogs, and boats are, well, never mind), the bar scene here is even more deafening and juvenile than in most cities (since half the population is on vacation and the other half cleans up afterward), and the sunset ritual at Mallory Square has become such a burlesque that the best way to behold the cosmic miracle that may be the most remarkable thing about this place is to get off the island entirely, onto the water or a few miles up the Keys.
The Hemingway Home, my first stop as a visitor, is wonderful, the guides and their crocodile tears notwithstanding. Ditto the other writers’ haunts. So are the many local gardens, public and private, beautifully sampled in Janis Frawley-Holler’s Key West Gardens and Their Stories. The Cuban connection, the sad history of the Conchs (born Key Westers who one day may be as rare here as Native Americans in Georgetown), the resilience of a tiny island society in the face of the occasional transforming hurricane: those things are interesting, and have been well documented by others. See encyclopedic Tom Hambright at the Fleming Street library.
Folks in Key West are real. Friendships I’ve made here feel in ways truer than a few I’d known for decades in D.C. Sure, many there said they’d miss me, adding that slightly obnoxious promise to come crash on the floor; some simply envied my freedom to pick up and split. But a lifelong transplant is accustomed to casting his dearest memories and relationships all over the world, and to the certainty that no matter where he lives he’ll never see most of those people again. Descended from a small family whose Anglican fear of intimacy was offset by the comedy of its working-class residue, I tended to gather mostly with the members of whatever band or orchestra I was in; and those, like all families, eventually grow up, grow old, dissolve.
So moving here was a simple matter of comparing temperature charts. I’d thought of returning to Israel or Holland; I’d visited L.A. and loved it. But those places get cold at night, and in the daytime too. As for peril—the foul air and oppressive traffic of D.C. compared with nature’s mood swings—well, I read the stats, unloaded a ton of gear, furniture, and crushing hereditary flotsam, and boarded the Auto Train.
As for my family connection here, my mother’s relatives in Coral Gables are long dead; I have little curiosity about the places where my parents courted (Dad, a science teacher from Pittsburgh yet to become one of the more entertaining characters to inhabit the State Department, and Mom, a medical technician, were stationed at Camp Blanding during WWII); last year’s business trip to Jacksonville, where my sister was born, was another reminder that you can’t own too many sweaters; and my brother’s family, who live in the Fort Myers vacation house Dad could never move Mom into, might relocate to New Mexico. Our parents’ grave at Arlington was the last place I stopped on the way down.
One of the first people I met here was Mark Howell, Welsh raconteur and arts editor of the Key West Citizen. As we strolled Eaton Street discussing Vaughan Williams and the Beatles, I knew I was home.
So how do I tell you about Key West? I who, though inured to its social quarrels and to an antiquated infrastructure that is charming until you need to get your tape recorder fixed, have lived here a mere twelve months?
For the uninitiated, Key West (pop. 25,478) is the southernmost city in the continental United States, over 150 miles below Miami and only ninety miles above Cuba. (City is an official term for what is and for the most part wants to remain a small town.) It lies where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Gulf of Mexico, at the end of a long string of coral reefs that hardened into neighborhoods. It’s a Caribbean island where we use U.S. currency and drive on the proper side of the road. It’s two miles wide and four miles long. It’s as different from the rest of Florida as Spain is from France, except that we speak more or less the same language. It’s home to Africans, Americans (North and South), Asians, Bahamians, Cubans, Europeans, Haitians, and everyone else who appreciates fabulous weather.
Culturally, of course, the city’s past as the home of Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, as host to Robert Frost, U.S. presidents, and a succession of colorful outlaws, as the site of a federal art program that pulled Key West out of the Depression and put the city on the map of international tourism, evokes gracious imagery that today is impossible to sustain.
There is an abundance of very good, if not great, visual art, much of it inspired by tropical surroundings and Caribbean ancestry.
A vibrant theater scene stays busy all season, featuring fine local talent, including the star power of sometime resident Kelly McGillis.
The Key West Film Society offers imaginative programming not to be found at the strip mall.
There are several active writers’ groups, though the newspapers in this literary town routinely display the sorts of errors that should get a kid booted out of freshman English.
A handful of good jazz musicians and many pop performers make this their home, and often are joined by famous visitors, though the tourist industry offers few opportunities to play original music.
All the listenable classical music is imported from the mainland or abroad.
There’s no better or more ironic example of the Conch Republic’s independent spirit than the three-year-old Key West Symphony Orchestra. In most cities the local orchestra contains local musicians and the conductor is flown in to lend foreign credibility. Here the elegant Sebrina María Alfonso, a Conch graduate of Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, necessarily contracts an ensemble of former classmates and freelancers from across the nation. As a group that assembles only a few times a year, the KWSO will always sound like the decent regional organization it is. It brings great music and educational outreach to a community that badly needs both, however, and after all is hardly the only American orchestra whose every utterance inspires a provincial standing ovation.
Television here is either cable or satellite, and many of us don’t subscribe.
Local radio is mostly unbearable.
But I knew all this before I left Washington. And there is a small army of dedicated professionals and organizations here determined to help the Island of the Arts live up to its image.
To tell you of this place I must return to nature.
In that regard there’s no point in comparing metro D.C. to Key West. Virginia is all about the earth: rolling green hills, red clay, and the romantic fragrance of boxwood. (My dear Shenandoah Valley, so lovely in summer, remains with me like a prom boutonniere.) Here it’s all about the sky: the water and the sky, the two flowing together like the vast unknowable universe beyond. The coral panorama that washes my morning jog would have sent Ferde Grofé back to theory class.
I actually live on Sugarloaf Key, a short commute for a Yankee, for a local the equivalent of scaling Everest. The only Key West house I liked and could afford was tiny, flood-prone, and just sold. I like Sugarloaf for its spaciousness and quiet—there are salt-scented mangroves within a mile of my house where all you can hear is the sound of your own heart beating—, and for the stars. The first time I saw the night sky on Sugarloaf, I actually cried. It reminded me of Dad’s astronomy lessons on our veranda outside Tel Aviv.
But I work in Key West, and, let’s face it, Key West is where it’s at. To all those Middle and Upper Keys folks who complain about that perception, I could say, Does New York apologize to Buffalo? Instead, I offer these words once used to soften the blow of avant-garde music: Don’t lament what isn’t there; cherish what is.
You walk through Old Town and at every corner are astonished anew at minute variations on a glorious theme. The old Conch cottages hide behind tiny throbbing jungles of palm and banana, poinciana and frangipani, bougainvillea and elephant’s ear, fat twisting vines and fallen seed pods kissing the feet of a thousand colorful varieties of low plants blown in from Jamaica or outer space. The profuse gardens that explode behind the embarrassing mansions next door possess a casual Southern grace as stunning as the natty obsessions of a British lord. And of course the riotous celebration blooms all year. You walk in that fertile smell and nuzzle the overhanging blossoms and listen for the crystal tinkling of small fountains. You feel the Japanese density of it all, exquisite wood houses six feet apart, heat-slowed neighbors on porches amid hushed conversations and the muffled cries of love. You walk in a verdant breeze that is like a sleepy lover’s breath on your neck.
In Key West an unaccompanied woman will say hello to you on a quiet street at three in the morning. She might blush, she might wish you were another woman, or both.
Don’t come here.
Hal Howland is an award-winning musician, composer, songwriter, and author, and has released three critically acclaimed jazz recordings, The Howland Ensemble, Reiko, and 10 Years in 5 Days. For fifteen years Howland was the timpanist of the National Chamber Orchestra, and he appears on its recent compact disc featuring New York Philharmonic principal cellist Carter Brey. He lives on Sugarloaf Key with numerous wild birds, raccoons, reptiles, butterflies, and a scorpion (quoting Woody Allen) “the size of a Buick.”
For more information contact:
Hal Howland
263 Venetian Way, Sugarloaf Key, FL 33042-3612
Telephone: 305-745-2572
Internet: halhowland@bellsouth.net