The Longest Road Read online

  To get there, we would traverse the Everglades via U.S. 41, head up Florida’s Gulf Coast, cross the Panhandle into Alabama, hop into Mississippi, and join the Natchez Trace at Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis Presley. This north-by-northwest route was intended to give the trip coherence. That said, unforeseen circumstances, or a whim, were bound to take us off course.

  I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven’t gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven’t. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you’ve bypassed at seventy miles an hour.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of May 19, Leslie, the dogs, and I pulled into a campground on Stock Island, split from Key West by a mangrove channel scarcely wider than an alley. From Dogwood Farm, we’d made a two-day haul down the Florida peninsula through squalls of flying ants called lovebugs. Hitched back to back, they mate in midair, boiling out of the woods and marshes by the trillions. They went at it on our side windows, entertaining Leslie no end, and splattered against the windshield till we could barely see the road and had to stop at gas stations to refill the windshield washer. I liked slaughtering them; after all, they’re so repulsive they can’t even look at each other when they’re having sex.

  The drive down the Overseas Highway through the Florida Keys had been frustrating—bumper-to-bumper traffic turned what should have been a two-hour trip into four—and more frustrations attended our arrival in Key West. I couldn’t back the trailer into our assigned parking space; with a single axle and a short hitch, the Globetrotter jackknifed at a twitch of the steering wheel. That was one of the reasons I couldn’t back it in. The other was that I didn’t know what I was doing, a deficiency overcome by finding another, more accessible space. There, I discovered that the cap to the campground’s sewer line was frozen shut by encrusted salt and sand. No amount of whacking with a rubber mallet would loosen its grip. A strapping young guy from the staff answered my summons for help; he took a steel hammer to the cap as if he were trying to kill something and it came free.

  Time to connect the sewer hose. In my eagerness to escape swarming mosquitoes in the Everglades that morning, I had forgotten to close the valves to the holding tanks; so when I knelt to open the outlet under the trailer’s back end, guess what splashed into my lap? Another mishap cleaned me up. The onboard water tank needed to be topped off. With one end of the water hose screwed to the camp’s faucet and the other end shoved into the tank’s fill hole, I opened the spigot all the way. The water pressure must have been set to fire hydrant standards, because the hose leaped from the tank, swayed in midair for a moment, then writhed across the ground like a psychotic cobra, spitting all over me. This wasn’t all bad; aside from its hygienic effects, it cooled me off—the heat and humidity were Amazonian.

  I’d no sooner recaptured the deranged serpent and reduced the flow to a trickle than I heard a shrill squawking, accompanied by a shriek. The latter came from Leslie, the former from the propane leak alarm, a device designed to protect the Airstream’s inhabitants from asphyxiation or from blowing themselves up. I rushed into the trailer. How could there be a leak with the propane tanks shut off and no appliances running? An answer came to me. Leslie had brought Sage and Sky inside and switched the air conditioner to high to cool them off. Suspecting a power surge, I switched off the AC, reset the alarm, then turned the AC back on, setting it to low. The hideous squawk was silenced. Having shown so much ineptitude earlier, I was perhaps inordinately proud of myself for managing this crisis. Nevertheless, I fumed.

  “Maybe this trailer idea wasn’t so excellent. I’m spending all my time on this damned thing. I feel like calling this whole trip off!”

  Familiar with my tantrums, Leslie gave me a knowing look mixed with a little skepticism. “I told you that we should stay in motels.”

  From the moment she’d set eyes on it, she hadn’t been one to rhapsodize over the Airstream: “Looks like a Jiffy Pop bag.” I’d christened it “Nomadica,” after Erica Sherwood’s Web site. I really liked the exotic sound, but Leslie thought the prosaic “Ethel”—after Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s neighbor Ethel Mertz—was more appropriate. Her rigged survey sample of friends preferred that name, and that was how the Tundra, which I wanted to call “Gray Hawk,” was christened for Ethel’s husband, Fred.

  “And I told you, we’re not staying in any goddamned motels,” I snapped.

  “Chill,” Leslie said.

  That’s no easy thing when the air temperature equals body temperature, but I gave it a try, strolling around the campground, which was really a resort. Palm trees, rustling in a languid breeze, lined tidy avenues of crushed gravel. I confirmed an observation of Leslie’s: giant RVs with model names and logos all wrong for the setting. The “Montana” bore a drawing of a snowy mountain range; the “Teton” displayed another mountain range. In vain, I looked for a “Florida” with a picture of a swamp. Couples of a certain age lounged in camp chairs amid their toys—jeeps and powerboats on trailers hitched to their outsize motor homes. Our tiny, tinny, spartan Ethel distinguished Leslie and me from these indolent, luxury-loving vacationers in their glossy land yachts, or so I believed. We were road warriors, bound for the Arctic Ocean. And so, through self-inflation, I restored my self-respect.

  Dripping sweat but figuratively chilled out, I returned and had a reasonable conversation with Leslie about what to do next. Although we planned to stay in Key West for a few days, we decided to launch the journey formally with a swing past Mile Marker Zero and the Southernmost Point. That left us with a problem we were to confront over and over in the next four months: take the dogs or leave them in the air-conditioned trailer? We remembered the warning Bill Poppell gave us before we left Dogwood Farm.

  Bill is the caretaker and all-around majordomo of the place. He’s an older man with a keen practical intelligence and a Florida panhandle accent thicker than motor oil. Glancing at Sage and Sky, he’d asked skeptically, “Y’all gone to bring them dawgs?”

  Leslie and I nodded.

  “Uh-huh. Fine-lookin’ bird dawgs. Ya love yur dawgs?”

  Of course we did.

  “We all love our dawgs,” said Bill. “And they love us. Never leave ya. Know of a dawg follered us once when we was takin’ a truckload of swine to an auction, way off down a whole bunch of bad road. After we got there, there he come, a bigole pot-licker dawg like yours there.”

  The moral of the story was soon in coming. “He dahd one day of heat stroke. Y’all want my advice, ya leave them behind. Y’all be makin’ a mistake to take ’em. The mistake would be, ya leave ’em in the trailer, and the ahr conditioner cuts out, and ya got two daid dawgs.”

  Resolution: Sage and Sky went into the backseat atop a covered pile of gear, and we drove into town, the AC blasting. And Leslie had learned a new adjective: bigole.

  When I first saw Key West, thirty-five years earlier, it had the look of a funky, isolated Caribbean outpost, especially in the summers, when there wasn’t much for tourists to do except sweat. Its vibe was somewhere between raffish and decadent. A rowdy working seaport and navy town, home to Cuban exiles and the descendants of Bahamian settlers (nicknamed “Conchs,” after the mollusk), it was also a bohemian enclave for writers and artists, a refuge for homosexuals and runaways—guys fleeing child support payments, good girls escaping bad husbands, bad girls good husbands—and a haven for drug smugglers (as it had been for rumrunners, wreckers, and pirates in earlier times), all crammed together on eight square miles. “Dodge City on the Gulf Stream,” the novelist Thomas Sanchez called it for its outlaw ways, though he might have added Greenwich Village to the mix.

  Almost all of that is gone now. The shrimpers and the navy sailed away years ago, the gay population was ravaged by AIDS, the contrabandistas are dead, in prison, or gone straight. Many Conchs left, too, unable to afford li
ving in a destination resort. To paraphrase a line from a David Allen Coe tune, Jimmy Buffett doesn’t live there anymore, although there is a bar called Margaritaville, and other drinking establishments play that song till you’re ready to sledgehammer the jukebox.

  Key West has become an imitation of its former self, its eccentricities commoditized for sale to tourists. That “character” you see with a parrot on his shoulder is about as authentic as vinyl siding, employed to provide local color. Gargantuan cruise ships dock two or three times a week, disgorging passengers by the thousands to troll the cheesy T-shirt shops on the main drag, Duval Street. And with all sorts of diversions to keep visitors occupied, like parasailing and jet skiing, tourist season is year-round, clogging the streets with autos, bikes, motor scooters, and pedestrians.

  I was losing my cool in the downtown traffic, cussing and mumbling that tourist town was the terminal stage in a town’s life cycle. Yet—I couldn’t deny it—the island retained a seductive beauty. Hibiscus and frangipani daubed their colors along the narrow streets; bougainvillea draped like purple bunting over walls and gingerbread verandas, and royal poinciana—the “flame of the islands”—displayed scarlet blossoms against a sky of pure light, the empyrean.

  We turned off Duval onto Whitehead Street and, at its intersection with Fleming, passed a green-and-white sign bolted to a telephone pole: M.M. 0, it read, for Mile Marker Zero. Because Key West can be reached only by driving south, it is thought of as the end of the road. In fact, it’s the beginning, for M.M. 0 marks the start of U.S. 1. Maybe the island is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega.

  We proceeded up Whitehead to a concrete monument shaped like a bell buoy and painted in bands of coral, black, and yellow separated by white stripes.

  90 MILES TO CUBA, read the legend.

  Below it, in capital letters: SOUTHERNMOST POINT. CONTINENTAL U.S.

  That made it official. I set Fred’s trip odometer to zero. The four of us, a pair of humans, a pair of English setters, were under way.

  5.

  The next morning, before the sun grew homicidal, we walked the dogs down a paved path along Smathers Beach, on the Atlantic side. Sage and Sky were difficult to walk on lead; being hunting dogs, they instinctively chased things, and all attempts to train them to trot along, like the sedate suburban dogs owned by my Connecticut neighbors, had failed. Advancing age had made Sage more manageable. Sky, on the other hand, was fifty-odd pounds of explosive energy. If she spotted a bird or squirrel, or if her keen nose scented something interesting, she lunged like a sled dog and could jerk you off your feet, sending you flying. Leslie had nicknamed her “Wackadoodle.”

  Aside from their companionship, I’d brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplomatic function.

  “Oh, they’re beautiful!” a female voice said from behind us as we were about to load the dogs into the truck. “What are they?”

  We turned and saw a middle-aged woman, her honey-blonde hair pulled straight back. She had extraordinarily blue eyes and freckled cheeks, and she spoke in a voice that brought to mind high fiddle laments echoing through shrouded hills.

  “English setters,” I answered.

  “May I?” Gesturing to pet them.

  “Go right ahead. They’re sponges when it comes to affection.”

  Looking at the dogs, she asked, “May I?” Then at us: “Got to get the permission of the babies, too.”

  Apparently, Sage and Sky granted it. She tickled their ears and rubbed their bellies and accepted their slobbery kisses. “Oh, how I miss my baby. A golden retriever. We had to leave him behind with my stepson.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “Huntington, West Virginia.” The woman introduced herself—Jenita Meyers—and asked where we were heading. I expected her to be impressed when I replied, “The Arctic Ocean,” but she merely smiled and said, “That’s exciting,” as if I’d told her we were going to Disneyland.

  “My husband and I are travelin’ cross-country, too,” she went on. “We walked here.”

  “Walked? From West Virginia?”

  “Not all the way down to here. We walked as far as Jacksonville, and we were worn out by then—I’m forty-four and Scott’s fifty-three—and I told Scott, ‘That’s it.’ We hopped a bus to Key West. Scott’s dad is retired here. We’re camped out in his backyard. We bought a couple of bikes, and when we’re through here we’re going to bike to California.”

  It was about six hundred miles from West Virginia to Jacksonville, and a good three thousand from Key West to California. No wonder she was underwhelmed by our plans.

  “Through with what?… If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “We did ministry in the Universal Life Church back in Huntington, and one day this spring, God just slapped Scott upside of the head and told him to get rid of everything and to start walkin’ the country and helpin’ out people in need of it, and that’s what we did. Left a five-bedroom house with a big kitchen and a Jacuzzi.”

  Here comes a religious sales pitch, I thought, and composed the same polite but discouraging smile I put on whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses appear at the front door. I was relieved when Jenita said that she and her husband were not out to reap converts but to comfort the homeless and persuade drunks and drug addicts to amend their lives.

  Their main field of endeavor was Higgs Beach, about half a mile down the shoreline from Smathers. Higgs is a kind of derelict’s Riviera, providing a target-rich environment for anyone seeking alcoholics and junkies.

  “People drinking from daylight till dark,” Jenita told us, dismay in her voice. “You go there at eight a.m. and they’re already drunker’n monkeys.”

  I wanted to point out that they were probably drunk from the night before, but it seemed too fine a distinction.

  “One young woman panhandled us for food, and three days later we saw her again, drunk!” Jenita said, shocked that she and her husband had been hustled. “And women selling themselves for drugs or alcohol. We saw a man drive up to Higgs, give a girl some money, and they walked out into the water and she looked like she was sittin’ in his lap, but that’s not all she was doin’. I said to myself, I can’t look at this, and I can’t listen to this, F-this and F-that, GD this and GD that.”

  Curious about Scott’s Pauline moment, I asked if I could talk to him. Sure, Jenita replied. He was off with a young homeless man they were trying to wean off weed, but he would be back in about an hour.

  * * *

  If Scott Meyers was a missionary, he was one who’d adopted the native mode of dress: a baseball cap, mirrored sunglasses, T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. Lean and wiry, he wore a reddish-blond goatee dusted with gray.

  The young man with him, Eric Walsh, was the homeless pothead, although, tanned and well fed, with shrewd, alert eyes, he did not fit the image.

  We moved off the scorching street to a thatch-roof ramada on the beach, where we sat at a picnic table. Jenita took rolling papers, a plastic rolling device about the size of a can opener, and a pouch of “natural” tobacco from a backpack.

  “Smoking is our one vice,” she said, and produced two filter cigarettes, each one looking factory made. “Roll your own, you smoke less.”

  Eric bummed one from her. As she turned it out, I asked Scott about the divine summons. His answer suggested that earthly troubles had opened his ears to the call.

  “It’s this economy,” he said, puffing on the cigarette. “Everything is down. I felt like I was gettin’ nowhere.”

  He’d grown up in a prosperous household. His great-grandfather started a moving company that stayed in the family for three generations. Scott was learning the business from the bottom up as a long-haul trucker in the eighties when deregulation of the trucking industry enabled rivals to undercut the firm.

  “Things went south, and we went out of business,” he said.

&nbs
p; His first marriage broke up. He went to work in construction and later landed a job with a Huntington contractor. He and Jenita, also divorced, had married six years ago. They were doing fairly well, renting the five-bedroom house with the Jacuzzi from Scott’s employer, until the housing bubble popped and the Great Recession came crashing down. Work was wherever Scott could find it, and he couldn’t find much.

  “This past March, I was sittin’ at a bus stop, feelin’ like I was gettin’ nowhere, like I said, and that’s when God smacked me upside of the head. He said, ‘What’re you doin’ here, miserable? You’ve got to sell everything you have and start walkin’ the country, go out and lend a helpin’ hand to those who need it.’ That night, I came home and told Jenita.”

  “I was in the kitchen, fixin’ supper,” she said. “And I said, ‘God smacked you upside of the head? Did you fall on your head?’”

  I tried to imagine your conventional middle-aged, middle-class housewife listening to such an outrageous proposition, much less agreeing to it. But Jenita, sweet and innocent in some ways, was as tough as a hickory nut in others, and anything but conventional.

  “I was raised up poor in a real big family,” she said, and then ticked off a roster of brothers, sisters, half brothers, and half sisters. “I was born at the head of a holler in a house with no indoor plumbing. You wanted water, you went to the well. You had to go to the bathroom, well, honey, go out the back door, bathroom is the second tree on your right. I worked as a nurse for a while. I pumped gas and worked in maintenance—honey, I can hang you Sheetrock smooth as a baby’s bottom. I can use a chain saw, I can kill your supper, gut it, clean it, and cook it.”