FishingForPelicans

To the mirth of Hell's Angels, I found myself trying to free my fishing line of an alarmed pelican that had decided to elegantly careen into it. A cheer rang out and a beer was handed to me when the bird eventually untangled itself and glided out over the violet water towards Havana, only 100 miles away across the gulf of Mexico. I couldn't help feeling that I had arrived somewhere special, for the sense that in deciding to come to the most southerly and remote point of the USA, I may just have found an old-time anachronism in the middle of the sea as Key West made me recall Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, whose rum-smuggling, cigar-toting, sea-dog outlaws might just be gathering at Sloppy Joe's that very evening. So off I went to Duval Street, bound for adventure as the humid night drew in.

But the main drag seemed to have reached that dispiriting level of homogenisation that makes it hard to travel with gusto. Bright lights, fast food, and stalls selling overpriced Panama hats, pointless bead bracelets and $50 conch shells being fondled by slow hoards of visor-sporting retirees. I bought a Montecristo cigar from a cuban gentleman and picked out the sign of Sloppy Joe's through the crowd, but within, more retirees sat in silence in Hemingway's sanitised drinking hole, where beneath stuffed Marlin a bland band played insipid rock for the tourists. Crestfallen, I stepped back out onto Duval and, seeing a taxi, I asked the driver in desperation:

“I know I'm not from round here, but this isn't right. Where do you drink?”

He shot me a grin.

“Head south to Whitehall and Southard. The Green Parrot's my dive.”

Finally. Tucked away among creaky 19th century homes, the perfect Parrot's open walls lead into a dark room of smoke and laughter, smothered in bric-a-brac from as far back as 1890, with a circular bar clad with local raffish fishermen enjoying the jukebox and free popcorn from an antique circus machine.

“Where's a good spot to catch fish rather than pelicans?” I ask the rugged barman after a few rounds of pool.

“Try the bridge just after Stock Island”.

The next day saw a cuban lad and I locked in a tug-of-war with a mighty barracuda yanking wildy on the end of a fishing line as thick as a match. As we teetered on the edge of the Overseas Highway, I realised that all is not lost in this day and age; how finding those places and people that conjure adventure are all down to one rhetorical question: “How did I get here?” - I asked.