A gazillion miles from Reality

Key West is known as ‘The Last Resort’. It’s the final southerly outpost of North America – which can be a big deal if you are American, and even if you are not. It is a long way out into the water : it is a semi-aquatic frontier town. It’s also the last stop before Havana. “We’re ninety miles from Cuba and a gazillion miles from reality,” one local drawls. “That’s fine by me.”
It is also Paradise, trademarked: the police cars have Protecting Paradise printed on the side. Just for good measure, it is also The Home of the Sunset, The Southernmost Point, and – because US Highway One runs out here – The End of the Rainbow.
The official town motto is ONE HUMAN FAMILY. Local bumper stickers say Choose Freedom - Key West. Freedom to do what, exactly, is not immediately clear.
Arriving here, in a humidity you could spread with a knife, my nostrils were immediately filled with the thick saltiness of the air; a hot, rotten saltiness that although I didn’t know it yet, was the core smell of the Keys. Where on earth was I?
Seeking cool air, I wandered in to a coffee house and bookstore in an old Conch fishing cottage. People swung in hammocks in its shade cradling huge cups of locally-brewed iced coffee. There was a poster for Captain Outrageous and his De-motivational Seminars. I picked up Conch Smiles, a collection of Key West memories. In the book, there were descriptions of the day it rained fish, and of the night a local man had sighted a mermaid on a sand bank near Cow Key Channel, just off the island, one moonlit night when he was rowing out to check his crawfish traps.
What to make of this I didn’t know. Back outside the cafe I saw a man slumped on the pavement who looked like a picture-book pirate. The Keys have a history of piracy: we’d passed the pirate museum earlier on. This man had a headscarf, an angular beard, was dead brown, wild and drunk and snarling gently.
“Get a job,” a passer-by said to him.
“I got a job” he replied, sitting on the corner outside the Cuban grocers, where his legs had just folded under him while he’d been trying to pat someone’s Siberian hound.
Between the fish rain, the mermaids and the pirates, I felt like I was somewhere far away and not entirely real. Water and land overlaid each other here, interrelating in a luminous, unfamiliar way, and the people themselves seemed tempered by salt and light and broad water; by the subtle beauty and original strangeness of this environment out at the extremities.