Last Train to Paradise (2 page)

This shed was built up on a kind of platform to help with the loading and unloading, but while I was trying to lean into the door to keep it from blowing in, I felt something wet and looked down to see water pouring under the sill around my shoes. I thought I knew what that meant, but I put my hand down in it and tasted it just to be sure. It was salt. That meant the water had risen overtop of the whole island. I told my Dad and he shook his head.

“We’ll have to get out,” he said. “Or drown.”

He told everybody to grab hold of somebody else and not let go, no matter what. I grabbed my sister, who had her little two-year-old boy in her arms. I told her to let me hold the boy, but she shook her head and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t argue with her. It wasn’t that kind of time. So I held her and him together, as best I could, and out we went.

The noise and the wind were unbelievable. The minute we were outside, the wind took us, and we began to spin around, all three of us. I tried to hold on to them but I couldn’t. We were in midair as I watched her being pulled away from me. She still had hold of her little boy. And I was trying to reach her, but I just couldn’t. It was like being in a nightmare.

That railroad embankment where Bernard Russell and his family had run for safety, where the men of the work camps cowered under the force of the storm, constituted the sole lifeline for the thousand or so people stranded on the Matecumbes that night. After all, the workmen had been brought to the Keys to build a highway bridge that would replace the ferryboats linking Islamorada with the mainland. With the bridge unfinished and boat traffic out of the question in such weather, only the railroad remained as an escape route from the tides that now threatened to obliterate the Middle Keys entirely.

In Miami, officials had earlier that day begun to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and in response to frantic pleas from work camp supervisors, the Florida East Coast Railway had finally dispatched a rescue train from the North Miami yards.

Because it was a holiday weekend, however, there was some delay in rounding up a train crew and assembling the necessary equipment. It was nearly 4:30
P.M.
before a locomotive pulling six passenger cars, two baggage cars, and three boxcars finally left Miami. Scarcely had the train gotten under way when there was another maddening ten-minute delay at the crossing of the Miami River, where a turntable bridge yawned open to allow the passage of Labor Day pleasure craft below.

By this time the initial storm bands had begun to push ashore as far north and east as Homestead, the jumping-off point at the southern tip of the Florida mainland. As engineer J. J. Haycraft guided Old 447 through the increasingly intense squalls, his misgivings grew, for he was a fourteen-year veteran of the Extension and had seen his share of tropical storms. The otherworldly gray-green cast of the sky before him told Haycraft that this was likely to be the granddaddy of them all.

Given the intensity of what he sensed coming at him, Haycraft reasoned that it only made sense to shift the big locomotive from the front of the train around to the rear. That way he could back his way down the single-line track that crossed the Keys, and, after he’d piled everyone on board, could pull straight back north, hell-bent for leather, able to use the engine’s headlamp to guide the way through the oncoming darkness. It might have been a prudent decision, but going through the switching process in the Homestead yards took another precious fifteen minutes.

By now it was nearing five-thirty. The winds had risen beyond the point of exerting mere physical pressure. The force was such that any matter capable of movement—guy wires, stays, eaves, power lines, trees, and timbers—had begun to vibrate, whine, and moan, each element calling out in its own characteristic voice and pitch. The result was a harmony of dread that anyone who has lived through a Category 4 or 5 storm can never forget—they will tell you that in many ways, that unrelenting, awful sound is the very worst part of all.

“It’s like a freight train roaring forever right over your head.”

“Like an avalanche that never, ever stops.”

“Like your head is ready to blow apart.”

“Like hell on wheels, bud. And it’s got its eye on you.”

Visibility was near zero, the rain blasting through the open cockpit like needles in Haycraft’s face and eyes. Even on relatively broad Key Largo, the winds had driven the tides hundreds of feet across the flattened landscape to lap at the verge of the rocky right-of-way. Though he’d had to cut his speed back to twenty miles an hour once he’d left Homestead, Haycraft pressed on, mindful that he was the only hope for those trapped by this ungodly storm.

By the time the train approached Windley Key and the first major span over open water, it was nearly 7:00
P.M.,
and light was virtually gone, save for the strobelike flashes of greenish lightning. At the approach to Snake Creek Bridge, Haycraft caught sight of a group of refugees crowding up to the track, panicked by the water that now threatened to engulf them.

Though his primary mission was to reach the work camps and the 650 who were counting on him, Haycraft did not hesitate. He brought the big engine to a halt and waited for the refugees to be loaded on board.

Haycraft’s instincts might have been understandable, but as certain philosophers have noted, nature is short on understanding. And so are the fates.

When Haycraft fired up Old 447, the train started forward, then there was an ungodly crash and the engine lurched abruptly to a halt as if a giant hand had seized it. Haycraft worked his throttle frantically, staring about in disbelief at his crew. No wind, no matter how strong, could hold back a roaring locomotive’s thrust. “I didn’t know whether we’d had a wreck, a washout, or what,” the engineer said. “We might have been at a bottomless pit, it was so dark.”

For a moment the men wondered if they might be in the grip of some force that went beyond reason. Then trainmaster G. R. Branch clambered up from the floor where the impact had thrown him and pulled Haycraft away from the engine’s controls to show him what had happened.

A thick gravel-pit boom cable, which normally passed high above the tracks, had sagged when one of its supports blew down in the storm. The cable had somehow cleared the tender car behind them, but had swept into the open cab of the engine where Branch had been standing. Had they been going any faster, the cable might well have cut the trainmaster in half. As it was, Branch had been thrown to the floor by the impact, and as the train had rolled on, the cable had tangled in the superstructure of the cab, eventually dragging the engine to a halt.

When Haycraft realized this, he tried backing up, but the impact had virtually welded the cable to the engine. It took nearly an hour for crewmen to locate the proper tools to cut the thick cable free.

Less than twenty miles remained between Haycraft and his destination now, but in that short distance, Old 447 was to traverse the great gulf between the known and the never-before-encountered. The full force of the storm had begun to cross the Matecumbes now, the barometer plunging to record lows, crewmen forced to work their jaws against the sudden popping in their ears.

The winds were approaching an ungodly two hundred miles per hour, far beyond any forecaster’s expectations. The rain was a horizontal force, as painful as a sandblasting, so much moisture aloft that it was difficult to draw a breath.

A visitor to one of the work camps that day, Charles Van Vechten, recalls seeing the train that was to have rescued him as it passed him by:

You can’t imagine how awful it was. At noon we were told to expect a storm . . . but that a train would arrive in time to take us out. . . . We packed up in the afternoon, and assembled, ready to leave, but the storm hit before the train got there. When it did, I guess it was about 8:00
P.M.,
and it was pitch black and blowing like fury. I saw bodies with tree stumps smashed through their chests, heads blown off, twisted arms and legs, torn off by flying timber that cut like big knives. When the train came I dug into the sand to keep from being blown away. I saw the sea creep up the railroad elevation like it was climbing a stairway. The train went on past, heading for the other camps on Lower Matecumbe, I guess.

Haycraft never saw Van Vechten, of course. From his perspective, water covered virtually everything. Over tracks that had once stood seven feet above sea level approaching the Islamorada station, breakers were crashing.

By all appearances, Haycraft was now piloting a rocking train—at one to two miles an hour—across the surface of the ocean itself, and even he had begun to despair. How could anyone survive? he wondered. For that matter, how could he?

Then, shouts from his crewmen brought him out of his reverie. As if in a dream, Haycraft caught sight of desperate faces flashing past the engine bays, the hands of men, women, and children clutching toward the train that was passing them by.

Haycraft brought his engine to a halt some 1,500 feet south of the Islamorada station and watched as the crowd stumbled down the rails toward him: women at the front of the pack, as it should be, many of them clutching children by the hand, others pressing infants to their breasts. Something would come of all this effort, then, he thought. Some precious few lives could be saved, after all.

He would load up this band of human cargo and steam northward out of a watery hell, and not let himself think about what wretched others might be clustered on down the line. It was time to cut the losses, get out while the getting was good.

And then he felt the grip of his fireman upon his shoulder, and sensed the panic in the man’s shouts. Haycraft turned to see what had possessed the fireman, then caught sight of it out of the corner of his own disbelieving eye. At the same instant, he felt the rumble rising up from beneath his feet, a growling that overwhelmed even that of 447’s mighty engine.

A dark wall was rushing toward them, a swath of blackness and evil that seemed to swallow the dim illumination of the locomotive’s headlamps. Nearly twenty feet tall it was, and it stretched across the horizon from end to end like the sweep of doom itself.

A tidal wave. The worst that had ever struck American shores. Then and now.

“Lord have mercy,” J. J. Haycraft murmured, his hand going instinctively for the throttle. And everything was dark.

2

The Road to Paradise

The intertwined skein of design and fate that brought Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Russell, J. J. Haycraft, the six hundred or more veterans, and scores of others together in the Keys on that ill-fated Labor Day night in 1935 is complex indeed, possible to trace in retrospect, perhaps, but impossible to have foreseen. Rust Hills, literary critic, fiction editor of
Esquire
magazine for much of the last half of the twentieth century, and a seasonal resident of Key West himself, says as much is true of any good story:

“On your way along, it seems there are a myriad of choices cropping up for characters to make, one road after another constantly dividing and offering first this alternate path then that, so from the direction that experience takes, it seems that things could turn out in a million different ways. Once the story is over, though, you can look back, retracing the steps, and see that this ending was inevitable, that every choice along the way led to the one, unavoidable place.”

Given history’s perspective, then, what happened on September 2, 1935, was not so much an accident as a culmination of forces that had been set in motion many years before. On that fateful day in 1905, however, when Henry Flagler, cofounder of Standard Oil and one of the world’s most famous and powerful men, announced that he would extend his far-flung empire by building a railroad across the ocean, few could have anticipated how things would ultimately turn out.

Many immediately dismissed Flagler’s intentions as impossible, even lunatic, it is true. But those detractors weren’t in the slightest concerned about some storm to come decades later. They were not soothsayers but hardheaded scientists, engineers, and businessmen who thought what Flagler proposed—to build a railroad 153 miles from Miami to Key West, much of it over open water—a crackpot notion on the face of it.

“Flagler’s Folly,” the press dubbed the project, though the man who proposed it was undeterred. He would press on, though what was to come of his vision—certainly what remains of it today—bears little resemblance to what he originally had in mind. And while he was quick to offer practical justifications for the project at the time, in retrospect it seems apparent that other forces were driving this otherwise sobersided man.

This much is certain: Most contemporary travelers who drive the 128.4 miles of US 1 that now stitch the Florida Keys, from Homestead at the tip of the U.S. mainland to Key West at the very end of the line, find it one of the most remarkable stretches of highway in the country.

Though the roadway across the Keys may lack the mountainous drama of a few rival Western counterparts—Seventeen Mile Drive, sections of the Pacific Coast Highway—the road through the Keys offers an intimacy with sea and land and sky and a variety of perspective and play of light unparalleled anywhere.

This piece of highway also offers a certain definitiveness, a very inescapable destination: Key West sits literally at the end of the American road, and for most of the twentieth century the “Southernmost City” has sung a siren’s song to tourists and travelers, literati and glitterati, grifters and drifters and modern-day pirates alike.

For most travelers, the highway down the Keys is a convenience. For many, the scenic aspect of the drive is a welcome bonus. Certainly, few would give this highway’s history much thought.

To tell the average traveler that until the twentieth century the only way down to Key West was by boat would likely elicit a tolerant stare. Adding that once only a railroad ran this very route, where now only asphalt snakes along, might bring a distracted nod from a listener with a fix on Margaritaville.

Yet the story behind the very being of this road may be its most amazing aspect. It is a story that concerns one of the world’s richest men, one of the most difficult engineering feats ever conceived, and the most powerful storm ever to strike American shores.

In a sense, the highway is what remains of one of the last great gasps of the era of Manifest Destiny and an undertaking that marked the true closing of the American Frontier. The building of “the railroad across the ocean” was a colossal piece of work, born of the same impulse that made individuals believe that pyramids could be raised, cathedrals erected, and continents tamed. The highway is a ghost really, all that remains of an era when men still lived who believed that with enough will and energy and money, anything could be accomplished.

Quite often, in the wake of terrible natural catastrophe—typhoon, volcanic eruption, earthquake—the press confuses accident with intention and labels a staggering loss of property and life as “tragic.” But as Aristotle—were he still around—would be quick to remind us, nature is as immune to tragedy as it is indifferent to man in general.

Tragedy is a human invention, called forth to give meaning to certain catastrophes, those in which unfortunate events are exacerbated, if not brought on, by well-meaning men, men who are in many respects “larger than life” or who might have seemed so, at least, until greater forces came along. In this instance, then, the story of the building of the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway and its ultimate disposition fills Aristotle’s bill—it is, in fact, tragedy incarnate.

Today, US Highway 1 is alternately the bane and the lifeblood of the local populace. It is the only way in and out of the Keys for most, and when an eighteen-wheeler jackknifes and comes to rest across those two narrow lanes, or a drunk plows head-on into a counterpart hauling the other way, chaos results. For hours, even a day or night, depending upon the degree of carnage, no one goes into the Keys, and no one gets out.

Some of the locals (you can call yourself a “Conch” if you were actually born in the Keys) lament the situation, but it’s a lot like complaining about the weather. There has been talk of widening the road to four lanes, but that would bring its own set of problems: aside from the argument that more lanes will simply generate more and bigger accidents, there is the havoc certain to be wreaked on an already fragile environment, as well as the specter of encouraging further development where more than enough has barnacled itself already.

On the positive side, the highway permits speedy travel north for Keys residents, a release valve for what they sometimes call “island fever.” Along the hundred miles of highway down the Keys, there are no malls, as most Americans know them. You can count the number of movie screens between Homestead and Key West on both hands, the number of bookstores on one. Yet a distance that would otherwise take the best part of a day by boat (and not so long ago did) can be traveled these days in three hours, tip to tip.

And from the mainland down US 1 (there were no designations, by the way, before the National Highway Aid Act of 1925 replaced “named” highways such as the Tamiami Trail or Dixie Highway with a numerically based, east-west/north-south grid known as the “Uniform System”) flows everything Keys residents need to live: food, medical supplies, lumber, new video releases, beer. Even fresh water, for there is no natural source of it in the Keys, and the single big pipe that carries that elixir for every resident from Key Largo to Key West follows right alongside the roadbed.

For the tourist, moreover, there’s little downside to US 1. That’s how most of them reach America’s southernmost point in Key West—and all of the glittering marinas, the upscale resorts, the dive spots, the bonefish flats, and the jaw-dropping marine wilderness vistas scattered along the Keys in between.

There’s a commercial airport in Key West and an executive airstrip in Marathon, and sailors still make their way by boat along the Intracoastal Waterway and from every port in the world, of course. But by far the greatest numbers of visitors to this singular part of the world come to it by road.

And what a road it is.

The first few miles of US 1 out of Homestead, an agriculturally based city of some twenty thousand, are, save for their utter desolation, comparatively unremarkable. Homestead, it might be noted, is the place that took it squarely on the chops from Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Though the storm leveled most of the area, chasing the Cleveland Indians out of their new spring training camp, driving a stake through the heart of Homestead Air Force Base, and running up the largest storm damage tab in American history, locals still shake their heads and wonder what the devastation would have tallied had the hurricane strayed northward thirty miles or so to hit Miami and Miami Beach square-on.

On a pleasant day, though, the concerns are less dire. L
AST
C
HANCE FOR
B
EER AND
B
OOZE
warns a sign that flaps above a battered saloon and package store on the far-south fringes of Homestead, at journey’s outset.

And it is not an idle threat. From here the road bores southward into the virtual nothingness that marks the verge between Florida’s mainland and the Keys.

The narrow two-lane is bordered first by a mile or so of feathery Australian pines—tall, trashy intruders from another continent, which fall away gradually, offering unbroken views across unpopulated swaths of saw grass, interrupted here and there by dark hammocks of mahogany and scrub—hallucinatory vistas not unlike those across the baking African veldt.

There’s a gravel spur spinning off the highway here and there, leading off toward a distant rock pit, a rumored work camp, or perhaps a secluded turnaround where lovers meet or stolen cars are stripped and dumped. But as the sign promises, there is nothing truly civilized: no houses, no pit stops, no gas pumps, no cold beer to be found.

In these parts, the most remarkable feature is actually to be found high up in the cross-timbers of the huge electrical pylons that flank the highway, where the great ospreys—the eagles of the sea—have discovered an agreeable place to build their nests. These are massive tangles of interlocked tree limbs and driftwood, a dozen feet or more across, half again as tall, draped over the poles’ crossties and braces—and protected from human molestation, by the way—floating up there like beaver dams tossed up by an apocalyptic tide. Since there are no trees within hundreds of miles anywhere near the size of the pylons, drivers might wonder how the ospreys made out before progress came along. It’s the sort of idle speculation a drive through such country encourages.

Halfway to Key Largo, though, the terrain shifts again, the road tunneling now through an unbroken wall of mangroves, a gnarly tree that rarely grows to more than the height of a Greyhound bus, and within whose watery roots are sheltered the fry upon which most of the Florida fishing industry is based. Water in roadside canals laps at the highway’s shoulders here, and rare gaps in the mangroves offer a tantalizing glimpse of the Atlantic on one side, the Gulf of Mexico on the other.

For the most part, though, it’s fairly claustrophobic, even monotonous, travel just south of Homestead—and some of the worst accidents in Keys history have taken place here. Drivers find it easy to nod off in this leafy tunnel and veer into the opposing lane, and even the most defensively oriented don’t have much maneuvering room. To make matters worse, rescue workers often find themselves stymied in trying to reach crash scenes; EMS vans have a difficult time weaving between miles of stalled traffic on the narrow track, and it’s even ticklish trying to bring a helicopter down into such tight quarters.

“It’s about the last place on earth I’d want to get hurt bad,” says Alvin, a Miami paramedic and my new acquaintance.

We’re standing in the middle of the highway at a spot near the end of the Homestead–Key Largo leg of US 1, between the back of his pickup and the nose of my car, waiting for the traffic southward to start moving again. It’s not an accident that has caused this pile-up, however. It’s just that the drawbridge at Jewfish Creek is up, and in a few minutes, as soon as the tall-masted sailboats and the larger, motor-powered “stinkpots,” as the sailing purists like to call them, have made their way through the cut that separates the normal world from the Keys Republic, we’ll be on our way.

Spending any significant time in the Keys makes it clear that it’s not an unusual occurrence to make friends this way—there are tales of keg parties and impromptu dances in the middle of crash-closed bridges—but try to imagine the same thing happening during a snarl on the FDR Drive or the Hollywood Freeway, and one gains the first inkling of what lures people down this way.

Soon enough, the bridge is inching downward and Alvin is headed back toward his pickup. “Make sure you pull over to the side if you have to write something down,” Alvin cautions, using the tip of his Budweiser longneck as a pointer. If he’s aware of any irony in the gesture, his earnest gaze does not belie it.

There’s a whine beneath the tires as you cross the steel deck of the Jewfish Creek drawbridge, and, at long last, a serious look at real water for the first time as the road bisects a mile or so of Lake Surprise, so named for the reaction of the first railroad-building crew when they hacked their way down to this point from Miami. If your windows are down, you can get a good draft of sea breeze here as well: salt, seaweed, ammonia-tinged air. It’s the signal that things have changed, though it may be a little while until it’s clear just how much.

At this point a motorist may also take notice of the “mile markers,” or MMs, little numbered signs that have begun to pop up along the shoulder of the road. Among the first is MM 107, near where US 1 converges with Card Sound Road on Key Largo, meaning that there are 107 miles of highway between that point and the end of the line in Key West. The mileage counters form the basis of all Keys addresses from that point on.

Key Largo is by far the largest in the chain of islands, and the nearly twenty miles of highway that run along its coral spine could be laid along the outskirts of some Midwestern city: strip malls and geegaw shops abound here. The town itself was called Rock Harbor until 1948, when local business leaders saw the wisdom of cashing in on the popularity of the Bogart-Bacall movie that used the interior of a local roadhouse for a few atmospheric scenes.