Every place worth visiting anywhere in the world needs a guidebook like this. I know there are tons of books, good bad and indifferent written about the Keys and every one has a following but to come to the Keys without Joy Williams' book is to do yourself a disservice. In one area in particular Williams stands head and shoulders above the rest: she tells it like it is, and with a dry and piercing sense of the ridiculous.
I have never lived in a place where the term
local carried so much weight. When I lived in Santa Cruz, California no one ever made much of being a local, in part I am sure because locals and visitors never mixed.
They drove down Ocean Street to the Boardwalk,
we crossed on River and Water Streets and avoided
them like the plague. In Key West such a separation of tourist from local is much harder to manage, the city is tiny, the attractions are everywhere and even residents of New Town are forced from time to time to cross paths with visitors.
This is a guide book that devotes pages to fascinating history through personal observations and favors harsh reality over the trite platitudes of the glossy guides. Like every other book written about the Keys details go out of date before the book hits the streets. However Williams sticks to tried and true restaurants and places to stay and the likelihood that they will be around for a while, makes her observations more trustworthy than most. Anyone know what Sloppy Joe's was called before it became Sloppy Joe's? There are exceptions to the longevity rule: the original Dennis Pharmacy, The Deli and Flaming Maggie's are all gone, among others.
Williams is a well known and respected novelist which gives her prose more than usual appeal in a guide but the drawings that illustrate the book are divine and penned by someone credited only as Robert Carawan. His illustration of the Point gives this modest symbol strength that is generally only visible to people unlucky enough to be hanging around waiting for a hurricane to hit:
I wonder who he is because his talent is prodigious, and all I have of his are the beautiful drawings throughout this wonderful book.
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In 275 pages packed full of information like this one it's hard to pick out a passage to illustrate the quality of the writing. For me her off hand comments ("no commercial activity on North Roosevelt before 1952" or the notion that the Park and Ride was so underused it became, briefly, a wedding venue) give the book its special flavor. Not being one to believe in ghosts her description of the weird events at the Little White House reported by the Citizen, are entirely intriguing. Do you have any idea what sound a goatsucker makes at dusk when it is hunting down mosquitoes? Or who described Florida as "the poorest postcard of itself"? I could go on and on and I am tempted, believe me.
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If you are contemplating a trip to the Keys and have some spare time between now and then this Guide will enrich your trip immensely. Keep it in the bathroom and throw out the fashion and motorcycling magazines it's $16 US well spent. Oh and do yourself a favor, order it through your local independent bookstore...
ISBN:0-8129-6842-5 Published by Random House
And we close of course with another in a series of gratuitous Triumph Bonneville photographs, lifted from the Olivia Street rejects:
