Last Train to Paradise (3 page)

A few miles farther along, a motel has installed the riverboat used in the filming of
The African Queen
out front, touting Bogie’s long-standing association with the area. Both movies were essentially studio productions—one in Hollywood, one in England—and so far as anyone knows, Bogart never set foot on Key Largo, but it’s a diverting notion to think otherwise, clipping off the miles toward Tavernier, the first of the truly tiny Keys settlements along the way.

At MM 90 is Plantation Key, upon which the town of Tavernier sits. The Key is three miles long, and little more than a couple of football fields wide. The smell of the sea is stronger here, though there’s still enough development and foliage to keep the water hidden. There is little sense at all of the loveliest feature of the area: Pennekamp Coral Reef lies just offshore, the nation’s first underwater state park, and probably the premier dive spot in American waters.

Through Plantation and Windley Keys, the road courses through another dozen mangrove- and motel-lined miles, past an abandoned quarry converted now to something called Theater of the Sea, where dolphins, sharks, and sea lions are promised to display themselves, past a massive marina-cum-bar and lodging complex called Holiday Isle, which might seem, with its hordes converging on it, to have been the end point of this highway . . .

. . . but in short order the throngs are left behind, the road suddenly heaves upward and becomes airborne, arching high over the channel that connects the Gulf and the Atlantic here, and for the first time the traveler understands that, indeed, this is a singular part of the world.

It’s an osprey’s-eye view here at MM 84, out over the patchwork-colored seas. Splashes of cobalt, turquoise, amber, beige, and gray alternate, then fall away to deeper blue and steel, and off toward a pale horizon where sky and water meet at a juncture that’s almost seamless on the brightest days. The variegations of color have to do with the time of day, the cloud configuration, the nature of the sand or grass on the sea bottom, and the shifting depths of the water itself surrounding the Keys, which can range from a few inches to a few feet, and then plunge several fathoms and back again in an eye-blink.

To the west, there’s a view of a key called Lignumvitae, three-hundred-odd acres constituting a true island that rises sixteen feet above sea level and where giant mahoganies were once logged, today the site of the last untouched tropical forest in the state. To the east is a much smaller dot of land called Indian Key, once the outpost of a gentleman pirate, or wrecker, named Housman and the staging area for John James Audubon, who came to the Keys to shoot and then sketch tropical specimens for
The Birds of America.
Not much remains on Indian Key, but its modest aspect probably accounts for the urge that begins to creep into the back of the traveler’s mind at about this moment:

. . . desert island, private island, island paradise. Buy myself one of these little dots, get a boat, and build a dock, kiss the world good-bye . . .

There are not many places where such unspoiled islands still exist, not in so dramatic a setting, anyway. It’s an atavistic urge, perhaps, but one that likely pulls the traveler resolutely southward now.

There is civilization to be encountered once the highway descends again, to Matecumbe Key, but except for the occasional exquisite resort (Cheeca Lodge and Hawk’s Cay among them) tucked away behind the palms, it has a decidedly temporary look about it: restaurants, motels, and houses that seem hastily assembled, with little expectation of their staying long. One of the world’s most exclusive sporting resorts—the Long Key Fishing Club—once resided here, but the hurricane of 1935 swept it away. When the storm had passed, observers found little trace of the club. Even today, historians argue that a memorial erected to mark the site actually stands far from where the club was built.

Below Matecumbe, everything changes markedly. And while there is still land, bits of it, anyway, stitched together by a ribbon of highway, this is truly Water World.

South of MM 65, two and one-half miles of multihued water separate Lower Matecumbe from Conch Key to the south, a stretch once crossed by a railroad bridge, the remnants of which still stand as a fishing pier stretching, unspliced, from the south and north, and paralleling the modern highway that zips alongside. Water everywhere, right, left, ahead, and behind, so much of it that land is nearly out of sight; fishermen standing a few feet away, vying with pelicans for elbow room on the old bridge rails: the traveler might wonder whoever had the thought to build such a road as this in the first place.

It’s a thought that won’t go away, despite another interlude of landlocked driving through Grassy Key, a spot so isolated that big-city aquaria and water theme parks regularly send their overstressed dolphins to the marine research center here for a little R and R. After Grassy Key comes Crawl Key, and next Key Vaca, and the sudden quasi-urban sprawl of Marathon, where actual airplanes are tethered along the narrow runway at highwayside. There is a plethora of motels and restaurants in Marathon, most of them there to service the moneyed sport fishermen who have come to pursue the more than four hundred varieties of fish that are said to live in the waters surrounding the Keys.

Yet this overbuilt enclave marks another stage in civilization’s steady unraveling down the archipelago. When the original railroad was being built along this path, progress was swift and steady, despite the many obstacles this unique terrain presented. Even the Long Key Viaduct was built rapidly and without incident, relatively speaking.

But just past Marathon, at MM 47, land as most people reckon it truly ends. From this jumping-off point stretches seven miles of open water. Even the railroad builders were stymied. For three years, engineers struggled and men died to span the unthinkable distance between Knight’s Key and Little Duck, until finally it was done.

Following the railroad’s disappearance, the highway was built atop the old railroad span, and in the 1980s, another modern bridge was built alongside. As was the case with the original Long Key Viaduct, much of the original railroad bridge was left standing, some of it serving as fishing pier, some of it simply remaining, massive stretches jutting up from the water, pilings and arches built literally out of sight of land, as obdurate and mystifying to the modern traveler as the vestiges of Stonehenge:

“What
is
that over there, anyway?”

“Old railroad bridge.”

“Railroad?”

“Yep.”

“Across the ocean?”

“That’s what it is.”

“Who would build a railroad across the ocean?”

“Now that’s another story.”

A lucky traveler might get that much out of a typically closemouthed Conch, maybe one he’d bumped into on the rocky beach at Little Duck, MM 40, or Missouri or Ohio Key. But there might not be anyone on those flyspecks of land, not unless someone had come to do a little roadside fishing or load up a pile of the lobster traps that are often stored along this lonely stretch of road.

Along with Bahia Honda or “Deep Bay” Key, this relative hiccough of land marks a true geological distinction between the Upper and Lower Keys, the Upper Keys being formed primarily of ancient coral, the lower an upheaval of limestone that nourishes a somewhat wider range of plant and animal life. Separating the two are the waters of the Bahia Honda Channel, the deepest to be encountered in the Keys, and a fresh challenge to the builders of the railroad.

While the waters to be crossed at Long Key and Seven Mile were vast, they were at least shallow. Pilings could be sunk in water a few feet deep at most. And, as engineering science holds, even hurricane-driven waves could not logically exceed the depth of the water, so the height of the bridges was correspondingly modest.

At Bahia Honda Channel, MM 38, engineers encountered steely blue waters, however, and divers soon confirmed their fears. “Twenty-three feet in some places,” was the report. “Thirty-five in others.”

Which meant the pilings that were to hold the rails had to rise up in response, or else risk railroad passengers being swamped at sea, a concept as bizarre as it was terrible. So progress slowed to a crawl while the railroad builders could once again devise a way to do what had never before been done, all the while mindful of the advancing age of Henry Flagler and his determination to ride his own “iron” to Key West before he died.

It is the sort of knowledge that few contemporary drivers contemplate of course. Those lucky enough to have timed the trip with the onset of evening might slow down to savor the view from the soaring bridge. Others, as desperate in their own ways as Flagler to reach Key West, find the bridge’s downhill slope a welcome spur to pick up speed.

On the other side of Bahia Honda, the low-lying keys of Big Pine and Ramrod, Cudjoe and Sugarloaf, are notable for disparate, even bizarre, reasons. Cudjoe, for instance, is home these days, to “Fat Albert,” an unmanned interagency surveillance blimp that floats high above the island like a perpetually tethered cloud, keeping its ultra-high-tech electronic eyes and ears attuned to all naval goings-on—drug running not the least of it—in the Caribbean corridor.

At MM 31, Big Pine is home to what’s left of the herd of tiny Keys deer: creatures not quite the size of a Great Dane and whose near extinction in the mid-twentieth century was one of the spurs to the passage of the Endangered Species Act. There is some debate among scientists as to whether or not the Keys deer are a native species all their own, or are the descendants of the Southern whitetail deer scaled down to Keys size by eons of hardscrabble life in a circumscribed environment, but in any case they are remarkable to see, assuming you can find one. Though the numbers of deer have increased in recent years, it’s not as though you’re likely to find the shy creatures grazing in herds along the road. And for creatures that are seldom seen, it’s the long-sought-after residents of the Bat Tower, on Sugarloaf Key, that are hard to beat.

To reach this attraction, a thirty-five-foot wooden colossus that looks something like a mine shaft housing or, well, a bat tower, requires a short detour westward off the highway. The structure was built in 1929 by Sugarloaf’s original developer, R. C. Perky, a man who’d hoped to somehow attract a colony of bats that would in turn eat the clouds of mosquitoes that favored Sugarloaf, and that were discouraging Perky’s efforts to lure tourists to his island. Despite the deployment of a top-secret bat bait sold to Perky by a Texas entrepreneur, no bat has ever lived in Perky’s tower so far as anyone knows, but the structure remains, a somewhat lesser testament to the grander dreams of man.

The Bat Tower, near MM 17, may be the last sight of interest to divert the resolute traveler from the jewel at the end of the road. From there, Key West lies less than twenty minutes’ drive to the west and slightly south, with only Big Coppit (not big at all), Boca Chica (home to a Navy air base), and Stock Island (home to Mount Trashmore, the highest point of landfill in the Keys) to intervene.

Key West is, after all, the point of this journey for most, as it always has been, as it always is likely to be.

There’s something special about Key West. It is the closest habitation the United States has to being truly tropical, lying fewer than fifty miles north of the Tropic of Cancer, and as locals are fond of pointing out, it is far closer to Havana (one hundred miles) than to Miami (half again as distant). Its geographical position is, in fact, one of the points that Henry Flagler raised when asked to explain his otherwise unfathomable urge to build a railroad here.

But Flagler’s railroad across the ocean never earned a dime of profit, and it is difficult to imagine how a businessman as bright as he was ever thought it would. Flagler managed to fabricate excuses for his endeavor, one of them being that some would come to call a World Wonder. And while tourists made use of the line, freight shippers—the bread and butter of the railroad business—never did.

Plenty of practical excuses for Key West have been dreamed up over the years—military garrisoning, cigar making, sponge diving, shrimping, turtle raising, pirate sheltering, drug and booze running, and Flagler’s speculative notion of a deep-water, South American gateway port among them.

But the truth is that Key West has survived in spite of all these practical notions, principally by providing pleasure in a dizzying array of forms. Fishermen and artists, divers and drinkers, day-trippers and dropouts, Navy men and those who ogle them, presidents and paupers: Key West has lured them all. (Harry Truman once maintained a southernmost White House on the grounds of the naval station there.) Key West remains to this day beyond practicality, the ultimate destination, a rocky island whose siren song has lured so many to its shores, even the no-nonsense partner of John D. Rockefeller himself.

3

Citizen Flagler

In early 1904, when Henry Morrison Flagler made his fateful decision to begin the building of the Overseas Railroad, he was already seventy-four, and, in the eyes of most, was nearing the end of a second successful career. Certainly the drive to make money had little to do with his decisions in those days, even if money, or the lack of it, had been the central force in the first part of his life.

Flagler had grown up poor, the son of a Presbyterian minister with a parish in northwestern New York State. Young Henry was only fourteen when the family’s spartan existence prompted him to leave home in 1844 and join his half brother, Dan Harkness, in northern Ohio, for a stint as a salesman in an uncle’s general store. Flagler, who arrived in Bellevue with a few pennies in his pocket, was determined to make the most of his opportunity, working long hours to save his money and often refusing invitations to join acquaintances on weekend jaunts to nearby Sandusky. His hardworking, sobersided ways would persist through much of his life, earning him the trust of employers and, later, of influential investors and partners who would change his life beyond his dreams.

Part of the ambitious young Flagler’s duties came to involve the brokering of local corn to shipping agents in nearby Cleveland. Though he knew nothing of the grain business at the outset, he threw himself into its study with his characteristic devotion to the job at hand. His singleminded approach was so successful that he was able to buy into the Harkness family business within a few years, and shortly afterward made the acquaintance of one of his Cleveland counterparts in the grain-brokerage chain, one John D. Rockefeller.

Though Flagler’s upbringing had been puritanical and he himself was a virtual teetotaler at the time, one of the natural adjuncts of a grain dealer’s business was the maintenance of a distillery, a sideline that constituted a ready conduit for the use of surplus grain. Faced with a choice between his scruples and his overriding desire to succeed, Flagler barely wavered. It wasn’t long before the distillery business was as important to him as the merchandising of corn.

The onset of the Civil War proved a boon to Flagler, who, though he was opposed to slavery, saw no reason to go to war over such matters. While Dan Harkness, now his partner in the grain brokerage, volunteered and went off to fight, Flagler stayed home to tend to business, encouraged in his decision by Rockefeller and others of their circle who felt that the war was a distant and wasteful distraction.

A distraction, perhaps, but certainly a profitable one for a grain merchant who began to realize the truth of the maxim that an army travels on its stomach. Business boomed, and Flagler was soon rich by his own standards—rich but bored. He had fifty thousand dollars in his bank account, a tidy sum in 1862, and a king’s ransom in the tiny town of Bellevue, Ohio.

Casting about for something more interesting to do, Flagler hit upon the idea of . . . salt. Intrigued by the discovery of vast deposits of the mineral in nearby Michigan and an act of that state’s legislature that made the business tax-exempt, Flagler sank every penny he had into the venture, along with an equal amount that he borrowed. But the great salt rush had drawn a horde of competitors, some of who actually knew a few things about the business.

When the end of the Civil War brought a collapse in prices, Flagler’s operation fell apart. He found himself not only penniless, but fifty thousand dollars in debt. It was a lesson the ambitious young man would never forget: failure was simply not acceptable.

He returned to Bellevue from the offices he’d been keeping in Saginaw, Michigan, and borrowed enough money from his relatives to satisfy his creditors. Though he could have opted for safe haven there, Flagler was resolute. He might have been beaten, but he would not move backward.

Instead, with a few hundred dollars in his pocket advanced him by his father-in-law, he moved with Mary, his wife of eleven years, to Cleveland and renewed his old acquaintances in the grain-dealing world, taking a post in a firm that had been vacated by his old friend Rockefeller, who had left grain for an intriguing new substance called oil.

Because of its position on Lake Erie and its proximity to the newly discovered oil fields of western Pennsylvania, Cleveland had developed over the past dozen or so years into a shipping and refining center for the new elixir, which, at the time, was still competing with whale oil and lard for supremacy as a fuel and lubricant.

Rockefeller had invested in a refining business during the Civil War, and by the time of Flagler’s arrival in Cleveland, he had decided to devote all his energies to the business of making and shipping oil. Because Flagler had rented a house on the same street as Rockefeller and kept his offices in the same building, the two often walked to and from work together, comparing notes and sharing their chief, binding passion: the desire to make large sums of money.

Rockefeller was convinced that oil was the conduit to success, and he had joined forces with a chemist by the name of Andrews, who possessed the technical expertise upon which the refining process was founded. Rockefeller himself was the consummate manager. But he was well aware of his own shortcomings as a marketer, and that was where Flagler came in.

Flagler was one of the most successful grain brokers Rockefeller had known in the halcyon days before the war. At thirty-six, Flagler was nine years older than Rockefeller, and, if not handsome, was at the very least striking, with a vigorous head of hair and a full mustache, and a personality that radiated confidence and drew others to trust him.

Rockefeller valued Flagler’s undying optimism and drive as well as his relative maturity, which would come in handy for a fledgling business founded upon a new technology and seeking to attract investment from others. When one of Flagler’s wife’s cousins offered to invest $100,000 in Rockefeller’s new venture, the deal was made. It was an agreement that would alter the course of American history.

For the next fifteen years, Flagler and Rockefeller worked side by side, walking to their offices together in the mornings, passing drafts of letters and detailed business documents between their desks during the day, walking home together at night, always planning and calculating. The result of their efforts was Standard Oil, the largest, most powerful, most profitable, and perhaps most notorious corporation ever formed.

Rockefeller would come to freely attribute the secret of the firm’s success to his partner, for they were not long in the business, said Rockefeller, before Flagler realized that the negotiation of a lower freight rate was the key to the entire matter. If oil could be brought to their refineries at a rate below that offered to competitors, it would create an unassailable competitive advantage. In the highly competitive oil market, no other factor in the process could differentiate one player from the next to such a degree.

As a result, Flagler soon became a master at the negotiation of rebates from the major rail carriers who served the oil fields, carrying crude oil to Cleveland for processing. In return for lower rates, Flagler would guarantee massive shipments to the railroads. To meet these goals, Flagler would in turn have to acquire more crude and increase his refining capacity, and in order to make that happen, he and Rockefeller would need money, a lot of it.

Later, a writer was to ask John D. Rockefeller if he had had the idea to incorporate the business. Rockefeller minced no words. “No, sir, I wish I’d had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler.” With Rockefeller’s grudging agreement, the Standard Oil Company went public in January of 1870, its capitalization of $1 million divided into ten thousand shares. Rockefeller took about 2,600 of the shares, and Flagler about half that. All but one thousand of the shares were taken by various insiders. Inside a dozen years, the worth of the company would grow to $82 million, a staggering rate of increase, and one fueled largely by Flagler’s remorseless goal to control completely the production of refined oil in Cleveland.

A reserved and devoted family man in his personal life—he was dedicated to the care of his fragile wife, Mary, and was reportedly content to spend his evenings and weekends at home by her side—Flagler was a ferocious tactician at the office. Within a few months, he and Rockefeller had either bought out or scared off twenty of their twenty-five competitors. The choice offered to most was simple: accept what Flagler always insisted was a “fair” price for their holdings, or go broke trying to compete with a powerhouse that could do business more cheaply.

In a letter to an associate of the day, Flagler displayed his characteristic approach to business negotiation: “If you think the perspiration don’t roll freely enough, pile the blankets on him. I would rather lose a great deal of money than to yield a pint to him at this time.”

Flagler’s irksome tactics were not limited to his fellow refiners. In 1872 he took advantage of a fall in oil prices to persuade most of the Pennsylvania oil producers to join with him in a scheme directed at the entire rail industry. In what may sound familiar to those accustomed to today’s OPEC shenanigans, Flagler proposed an industry-wide agreement to limit oil production, thereby guarding against price fluctuations, and also forcing rate concessions from carriers who would have to play ball or be frozen out.

Though public outcry foiled the most egregious of these “associations,” sub-rosa agreements of the sort were the order of the day. And, fat with the ever-growing profits, Standard Oil could afford to construct its own transportation systems, including the newly developed network of pipelines. The rich simply got richer.

By 1877 the company had become a behemoth that had far outgrown its Cleveland roots. Rockefeller and Flagler determined to move their operations to the burgeoning city of New York, where the company’s far-flung holdings could more easily be managed and where other titans such as railroad builder Cornelius Vanderbilt, fur mogul William B. Astor, and department store maven Alexander T. Stewart had made their homes.

Despite the heady move, Flagler was not keen to join the New York City social swirl. Even in Cleveland, he had virtually no social life. His wife had been plagued by a lifetime of chronic bronchitis, and when Flagler was not at his office, he was with her.

The move to New York did little for Mary’s health, and when her doctors changed their diagnosis to tuberculosis, they also suggested that a winter in Florida might improve her condition. Flagler did not hesitate. Despite the pressures of a massive business and the growing antitrust fire directed at Standard Oil, Flagler accompanied his wife and their son and daughter on a train as far south as Jacksonville, where, as history would again note, a lack of adequate transportation and a dearth of decent accommodations halted the entourage.

Mary responded well to the balmy climate, however, and the Flaglers would return to Jacksonville again, though she was hesitant to stay long once her workaholic husband had returned to the fray in New York City. In spite of the forays to Florida and the best of medical care, which Flagler’s wealth provided, Mary’s condition continued to deteriorate. By the winter of 1880 she had become so ill that doctors advised Flagler to cancel their planned return to Jacksonville. Mary’s condition continued to worsen, and in May of 1881, she died.

Her death was a stunning blow to Flagler. The Flaglers’ twenty-six-year-old daughter, Jennie Louise, was married and living with her husband, but with his eleven-year-old son, Harry, still at home, Flagler resolved to do a better job at fatherhood. Despite the irony for a preacher’s son, Flagler bought a grand estate named Satan’s Toe in Mamaroneck, forty-two rooms on thirty-two acres of land overlooking Long Island Sound, and persuaded his half sister, Carrie, to come live there and help tend to his young Harry.

To prepare properly for this new phase of his life, Flagler saw to the absolute renovation of Satan’s Toe, including the installation of fixtures he picked out himself, the building of a two-hundred-foot breakwater, and the construction of a sandy bathing beach along the shore. Satan’s Toe had been transformed into a resort destination that was the talk of New York society, and the fifty-two-year-old Flagler, for the first time in his life, was taking pleasure in something that did not have to do with work.

Concurrent with these new interests had come a withering condemnation of Flagler’s business activities from the newspapers, the public, and governmental agencies alike. While a country torn asunder by the Civil War had been all too happy to see prosperity return to the nation during the 1870s, it was not long before a feeling of laissez-faire, if not outright gratitude, directed toward successful business interests was replaced by scrutiny of those same organizations.

Competitors who had been steamrolled by Flagler and Rockefeller had for years complained bitterly about the high-handed tactics of the all-powerful Standard Oil, and several investment groups had been formed to build pipelines of their own that would compete with Flagler’s virtual lock on the rail transport of oil. When Flagler began to call in political favors to block the new competitive threats, public resentment reached a crescendo.

In December of 1882, Flagler was called to testify before a Senate antitrust committee in New York, where he was badgered unmercifully by the Senate’s attorney, who insisted that Flagler stop hedging and answer his questions directly. As tensions mounted, an intransigent Flagler shouted at the man, “It suits me to go elsewhere for advice, particularly as I am not paying you for it.”

“And I am not paying you to rob the community, I am trying to expose your robbery,” responded the attorney.

The confrontation ended in deadlock, though Flagler had begun to see the writing on the wall. Entire national political parties—Greenback, Union Labor, Prohibition—were being based largely upon antitrust platforms, and a number of the larger industrial states were in the process of enacting monopoly-busting legislation.

It was not so much that the value of Flagler’s holdings was threatened: by 1888 the value of Standard Oil shares had risen to more than $150 million, and even the eventual dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust was similar in financial impact to the reorganization, nearly a century later, of Ma Bell into all those little Baby Bells. For anyone who held substantial stock in a parent company of such clout, money was hardly an issue.