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 Travel Journal
Marathon / Looe Key Reef
May 2000
The Spiritual Traveler
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I
was jogging on the Old Seven-Mile Bridge, just south of Marathon, in
the early morning. The stretch of condemned bridge runs parallel to,
and several hundred yards distant from the one in use, and is open to
joggers, cyclists, rollerbladers, and fishermen. It's about
two miles each way from the tip of Vaca Key to tiny Pigeon Key, where
the condemned bridge breaks off, and back. Pigeon Key-the
halfway point of my jog-is a sad, deserted looking place, dotted with a
number of dilapidated whitewashed wooden houses on stilts that dated
from the WWII era and some clusters of yellowish palm trees, which
presently serves as some type of marine research station.
I was feeling stiff, out of
shape, and the distance seemed a long one. The sun was not
yet up, but the sky was already bright. I counted about four
or five other people on the bridge-either fishermen whom I passed or
joggers coming the other way-not many people in a two-mile
stretch. I liked the feeling of isolation-the long bridge
running over open sea practically at the very tip of the continental
United States, the ungodly hour, and the old bridge itself-a ghostly
remnant that led basically nowhere and back.
The previous year I had
visited this spot, and at the time the old bridge seemed a fitting
symbol for my life-a failed and irrelevant experiment. The
parallel bridge, with its purposeful traffic heading to Key West or
Miami represented an alternative path. In the intervening
months, I had gotten my life started in a whole new direction, and yet
it had brought me right back to this rusty old bridge, which now felt
very comfortable.
Pigeon Key started to come
into better view. I was three-quarters of the way to the
island when a young woman passed me slowly on an old one-speed
bike. She was dressed in a bikini top and cutoffs, with a
baseball cap pulled over her head, and her skin was very
bronzed. Every once in a while, she would stop her bike and
peer over the bridge, down at the water below. I watched her
pedal her way to the dead-end just above Pigeon Key, and stop her bike
there. Always meticulous in my habits, I didn't intend to
let her presence deter me from jogging right up to the dead-end sign
before making my turn. At the last moment, however, it
didn't seem polite to just run up to where she was standing and turn
around, so I stopped and greeted her.
"Hi, how are you doing?"
"Fine. Nice
morning, isn't it," she returned me greeting in friendly
fashion.
I joined her at the side of the bridge, resting my elbows on the railing, and peered down at the water with her.
"I like to come and watch the
fish," she said. "You can see puffers, eagle rays, skates,
tarpon, needlefish. There are sea turtles,
too."
"What are needlefish?"
"Long, translucent
fish. They look like a needle, like you can thread
them. And down there," she pointed, "there's a nurse shark,
a brown nurse shark lives down there. I see her almost every
day."
"How do you know it's the same one?"
"They're
territorial. They stick pretty much to the same
area. I saw a couple of bonnet heads out
here. They're also called shovelheads. I saw some
puffer fish yesterday, and a cowfish."
"Cowfish?"
"Yeah. They're
small. They've got two little points on the top of their
head, almost like antennae, and they're fat. They'll fit in
your hand, and they're really friendly. And if you're in a
canal, looking down, and one swims by, he'll turn his body sideways so
he can look up at you. They're really cute."
I felt I should get back to
my jogging, thanked her for the information, and watched her pedal off
ahead of me, sticking close to the railing, and occasionally stopping
to peer over it. In this manner, she kept ahead of me, but
not far ahead. I caught up to her once again, and smiled.
"Looks like it's going to be a nice day."
"Yeah, a great one," she smiled back.
A few minutes later, she was
ahead of me again, and leaning over the railing, when she suddenly
signaled to me wildly. "Come and look," she called out.
I jogged up to her and looked at the sea. "Where?" I asked.
"There," she pointed.
At first I didn't see
anything, but then I saw it. A huge creature shaped
something like a piece of ravioli, gliding near the surface of the
water, cream colored, with purplish markings all over
it. "What is it?" I inquired.
"A spotted eagle ray. They're solitary creatures."
I watched the graceful
creature sail through the water with the edges of it broad mantle
rippling, as if it were flying. "I wonder how they find
mates, if they're swimming around alone all around the ocean," I
commented. Maybe they have some kind of sonar."
"I don't know, probably. The sea turtles are the same way."
I introduced myself.
"My name's Abbe Ludwig," she
said. She asked me where I was from, what I was doing in the
area, and where I was staying. I told her that I was down
for about ten days, and was holed up in Marathon.
"How did you get so
knowledgeable about the marine life out here, just by reading?" I asked
her.
"Reading, and watching the
Discovery Channel. They're also things you want to know when
you're diving. Do you dive?"
"I've never tried it."
"At least you should go
snorkeling while you're here. You can take a charter from
Big Pine Key to Looe Key Reef. It can be pretty spectacular."
"That sounds like good advice. What other places do you suggest I see?"
 "You
ought to out Long Beach Drive. It's sort of an exclusive
area, and at the end of it is Little Palm Island. There's a
resort there where the rooms are eight hundred dollars a day."
"Eight hundred a day?"
"Oh, yeah. The
local folk call it Little Pompous Island," she
laughed. "There's a ferry that takes you out there from
Little Torch Key. It's where they used to film Gilligan's
Island. Kathy Lee Gifford stays out there, and a lot of
sports people. My husband did a lot of work out there after
the hurricane.
 The
chefs used to fix elaborate these lunches for the
roofers. They had a couple of good months
there. They all gained a few pounds."
"Eight hundred dollars a
day! It would be nice to be able to throw that kind of money
around."
"Yeah. It's pretty
amazing, too, with the bugs and mosquitoes. They don't have
mosquito control out there."
"I haven't noticed mosquitoes out here."
"It's not bad in
Marathon. But they spray in the Big Pine Key and Little
Torch Key area. The planes buzz you when you're driving
by. They come real low."
I asked her what she did, and
she told me that she was a volunteer worker with Habitat for
Humanity. "I do mainly office work, but I go out to
sites. We're tearing down a lot of buildings damaged in last
year's hurricane, and putting new structures up. In the
Miami area, it's a big corporate competition-companies send their
employees out to enhance their reputation. A lot of the
recipients of their help are people on welfare-many of them perfectly
capable of helping themselves. But here in the Keys, it's
different. Most of our workers are people assigned by the
courts to do community service-lots of people busted for
DUI. And hopefully most of the people we help are people who
genuinely need us."
"A lot of them are storm victims?"
"Yes. And others
are just elderly people on fixed income, who just can't do repairs
around the house. So we help them with that."
"And is there any problem
with the people assigned to do community service? After all,
they're not volunteers, are they?"
"No. They have to
do the work for a certain number of hours. But, amazingly, a
lot of them continue to work with us after they've done community
service. For the most part, they're very
helpful. They do the work. And we try to make it
fun for them. And the men take to that macho
stuff. They end up making it a
competition.
"Do you come out to the bridge pretty regularly?" I asked her.
"Yeah. I come out with by bike and least five times a week."
"I was out here with a bike
once," I replied, "and had a hard time pedaling into the
wind. If you've got a really good bike it might be fun."
"This is a really good bike."
"It looks like just a one-speed.
"With a foot brake, that's
right. It's a stainless steel, heavy-duty
bike. I've had it for seven years. It never
rusts."
"But it must be hard work going against the wind."
"Yes, but I'm in it for the
exercise.
 I
decided to take Abbe's advice and booked a trip to Looe Key Reef for an
afternoon of snorkeling. The company was called Strike Zone
Charters, and was located at the southern tip of Big Pine Key, on the
western side of the Intercoastal Highway. There were only
six other passengers, beside myself, along with the captain and first
mate. The boat was docked at the end of a canal, right
alongside the booking office. We climbed aboard and waiting
about fifteen minutes before shoving off at 1:30 in the
afternoon. The sky was hazy, but mainly
cloud-free. The temperature must have been in the low
90s. We headed in a southerly direction through the canal,
emerged in an inlet, turned suddenly eastward, and went underneath the
highway causeway and out into the open Atlantic.
After about thirty minutes,
we came in sight of the reef, which was recognizable as a line of boats
anchored in what appeared to be open water. "How far are we
out from Big Pine Key?" I asked the tanned, well-built, college age kid
who was the mate.
"About five miles," he answered.
"And how far are we from Looe Key?"
"This is it."
"There's no actual island?"
"No. It's just a reef.
As soon as we had anchored,
the captain stepped forward and explained the procedures. We
were given snorkels, swim fins, and a life vest, along with
instructions on how to signal in case of distress, when to come aboard,
how to inflate the vest, and how to clear the snorkel apparatus of
water.
I jumped in the water and
slowly tried to acclimatize myself to swimming with all this
gear. After a while, I got the hang of it more or less, and
set about searching for fish to photograph with the disposable
underwater camera I had brought along with me. A couple of
bikini-clad girls on a nearby boat were a greater attraction than the
fish. After a while, I tired of struggling with the snorkel
apparatus, swam back to the boat, and traded it in for a pair of
ordinary swim goggles I had brought with me. I also felt the
lift vest inhibited me from diving.
"Is the life vest absolutely
necessary?" I asked the captain. "I'm a good swimmer."
"I guess not," he replied, somewhat reluctantly, and took the vest from me.
 After
getting rid of the vest, I found it easier to swim around and dive deep
enough to be roughly at eye level with the fish. I had been
swimming around for a good twenty minutes, when I suddenly felt
seasick. I managed to get back to the boat and hold on to
the ladder. The movement of the boat in the swell increased
my discomfort. I hauled myself aboard and lay down for a
while on the deck. After a while, I felt better, and struck
up a conversation with the captain.
"I didn't see any big fish," I said.
"You didn't?" the captain
replied. "Two of the divers saw a Caribbean reef
shark. It was about six feet long. And one of the
snorkelers saw a tarpin about five feet long. There are
barracuda out there, too."
"Well, I saw mainly small
ones. There was a really intense blue fish. That
was a parrot fish?"
"A blue parrot fish. Yeah."
"Then there were those small striped ones."
"Those were the sergeant
majors, with the black and yellow bars, probably. They're a
kind of damselfish that is found near the surface. But there
are a lot of other kinds of damselfish that are found down on the
bottom."
"I got right in the middle of a school of them."
"Right. They travel in big groups.
"Then there were these long,
pale-colored fish, sort of silvery blue with a yellow stripe."
"Yeah. That's the
yellowtail snapper. The vertical marks on fish are called,
bars, by the way. The horizontal marks are called
stripes. So the sergeant majors have bars, and the
yellowtail has a stripe. The yellowtail snapper will also
come up right near the glass and hang around. As a matter of
fact, there are some swimming around under the boat right now," he
gestured to the box frames in which the glass bottoms were set.
"Every day we have boats out
here," he continued, "so the fish on Looe Key are used to
people. And the thing about reef fish is that this is where
they live. The fish on Looe Key live on Looe
Key. Once they become resident fish, they stay in the same
area their whole life."
"So they're territorial?"
"Yes. They're
territorial. But another way of saying it is that they have
a very specific home range. As they get older, their home
range increases. That's particularly true of the grouper and
snapper. As they get bigger, they start sweeping a larger
area. But still, their main area remains the same."
"And the boats and people are just something they get used to?"
"Right. Looe Key
had been a sanctuary for over twenty years, so the fish are not afraid
of people in the water. They just go on about their
business."
"So they've all seen people before."
"They see people and boats
all the time, and they realize that no harm will come to
them. That's why they tend to swim close to
you. The barracuda, especially, tend to be
curious. They're at the top of the food
chain. They're not after people, but they're not afraid of
people, either. People tend to get a little nervous when
they see the barracuda swimming next to them. They also have
an uncanny ability to pop up behind you. They have much
better depth perception in the water than we do, of
course. And people, over the years, have done lot of feeding
of the fish, so sometimes the fish are associating you with a potential
food source, and they tend to follow you a bit."
"What do people feed them?"
"It depends on the
fish. Actually, the yellowtail snapper are very
opportunistic. They'll eat almost anything. They'll eat
pizza, hamburgers, and French fries. But their normal diet
is made up of small crabs, small fish, shrimp, and things like
that. A lot of the predators-the grouper, most snapper, and
barracuda will not eat things that are not flesh."
The other divers and
snorkelers were coming on board, and we set off for a new location, in
the middle of the reef. I felt up to going in again, and saw
mainly more of the same type of fish. I felt seasick once
again, and clambered aboard. The captain had some music
on. It was "A Whiter Shade of Pale." As I sank
weakly on deck, I heard the familiar lyrics:
We tripped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels on the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
The crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray
"Is that some kind of inside joke, playing that song?" I asked the captain ruefully.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"You don't have that on tape?"
"No. It's the radio."
 "That's
strange. Didn't you notice the lyrics? I was just
climbing on board feeling seasick and they were about feeling seasick…"
The captain seemed startled.
"I've never been seasick before," I said, somewhat defensively.
"It's a fear reaction," the
captain replied. "You've got this thing in your ear called
an odolith. It's basically a calcified
sphere. It's floating in fluid, and it's got nerve
endings. All vertebrates have them in their inner
ear. It's a balance organ. Whenever you move one
way or another, gravity makes the odolith sink in the fluid, and this
pulls on the nerve endings and tells you whether you're on your side,
if you're up, if your down, or whatever. We're land
animals. We're on solid ground, and we're dictating our own
movements. So therefore, when you're on a boat, or in a
care, plane, or train-anything that's moving you around-you're not in
control of every time you move. It's a matter of perception
overload. Your brain is getting too many messages, and
you're not the one that's making it happen. It's telling you
to stop, and the problem is that you can't. Over time, it no
longer happens to you. Your brain gets used to those
messages, and you ignore them.
It's not really a physiological thing, like gastrointestinal
disturbance. It's literally mental. We don't
think we're supposed to be moving unless we decide to
move. Gymnasts don't get sick because they're consciously
deciding to make their movements. The rationale is there, so
it doesn't bother them. When you can't control your movement
any more, it produces a panic reaction. Your mind is telling
you to get out of this situation in which you're not in
control. It affects some people more than others."
I thought about the captain's
explanation, and there seemed to be something profound about
it. It struck me that the coincidence of hearing the music
lyrics just when I was feeling seasick was telling me that this
experience had some significance for me. There was a way in
which it was mirroring something that was occurring in my life at the
present time. Lying on the deck of the boat, I felt a desire
to be back in my car, driving down the Overseas Highway, in control,
driving in a straight line, dictating my own movements.
 Life
was a curious thing, much of it spent shielding ourselves from too
great a sensory overload, in order to reassure ourselves that we were
in control of out body, our mind, our life, or our
destiny.
I thought back to my
experience of looking at Seven-Mile Bridge over a year
ago. I had turned a corner, then. I had seen my
life as a dead-end bridge, leading to nowhere. But instead
of switching to the modern bridge, to the road with a sure destination,
I felt I had jumped off entirely into the waters of experience
below. The seasickness was telling me that I was a little
out of my depth, a little bewildered by my new
environment. But it also meant that I was pushing myself a
little, which I needed to do. All in all, this seasickness
was a good thing, I thought to myself.
A few days later I
met Abbe on the old Seven-Mile Bridge again, and filled her in on my
snorkeling trip. She was not on her bike this time, and her
small stature was more noticeable. We walked halfway to
Pigeon Key and back. It was a cloudy day, which made the
water impenetrable to our gaze. There was a rainstorm in the
distance, and she pointed out what seemed to be a waterspout forming. I
told her that I planned to come back in September for the hurricane
season, and would look her up again when I returned. When we
got back to our cars, I wanted to take her picture, but she said, "Oh,
no," and quickly ducked inside her car, put on her sunglasses, rolled
up the window, and smiled at me as I fumbled with my camera
case. I just managed to get her as she pulled away. |
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Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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