Then and Now

I have a good memory, though good is somewhat questionable, since there is a tendency to over-remember life rather than to look for new life to be lived. “Late in the Great Depression, on the first day of spring in 1938, in fact, I gazed from the cradle as my parents ate smoked pork chops and the last of the home-cured sauerkraut, which was particularly redolent from six months in the crock, whose stone surface I often licked for salt while crawling around the floor, looking up at the underside of the world, the small strawberry birthmark on the back of my lovely aunt's thigh just below the apparent bird's nest wrapped in white cotton. I rejected baby food with sobs and howls, preferring whole venison hearts, herring, pike, perch eggs, the souse that Grandmother boiled down from an enormous pig's head on the wood stove.”

That sort of thing. “I still remember the mosquito-bite scab on the dirty left knee of the little girl who put out my eye with a broken bottle on a cinder heap at the edge of the woods in 1945. We were playing doctor. The Tigers were in third place, and Hal Newhouser was going to pitch that day. On the way to the doctor, our car smelled because I had left a bluegill in the trunk behind the tire but was afraid to admit it. When I was in the hospital, my parents brought me herring, the odor of which repelled the nurse. I thought I'd look like the little pig that lost its eye to a rusty nail protruding from a pen board. The second board from the bottom on the north side. For several painful months, the blind eye shone like a red sun in my head.”

Again, that sort of thing. Luckily, we eat in the present tense, else we might travel further into madness. That goes for fishing, too. When you combine fishing, eating, and a little drinking, you are riding the cusp of sanity as you did, quite happily, the schoolyard swing or that rope at the swimming hole that arced you out over a deep hole of cold, clear water, where you dropped down on startled brown trout whose fingerlings were speared by the kingfisher perched on the elm's bald branch. Jerry Round jumped from the bridge top and died, driving his head into his body. Naturally, I thought of turtles which Vince Towne purged in a washtub before he ate them. He told us that fried turtle would make our peckers grow big, a comment about which we had mixed feelings.

Fishing and eating, not without a few drinks at day's end. Hundreds of years ago, a roshi admonished his students not to prate about Zen to fishermen, farmers, and woodchoppers, since they probably already knew the story. Because I live up in Michigan and don't much like ice fishing, I've been going to the lower Florida Keys for a little winter fishing since 1968. With ice fishing, you dress up bulky like an astronaut and stare through a round black hole you've spudded in the ice. The “spud” is the tip-off that you're in the wrong place—it is an enormous forty-pound chisel. The sandwiches we brought along used to freeze in our pockets, and one day the wine froze at twenty below zero.

The question at hand is, “Are the Keys the same or as good as in the old days?” This is an especially stupid question that I have been asked countless times by dozens of people. My answer, “yes and no,” is usually unsatisfactory except to the timid, so I add a little gingerbread, to wit, isn't the past the silliest of tautologies? Have you forgotten Mircea Eliade's blessed “concrete plane of immediate reality"? Didn't René Char tell us not to live on regret like a wounded finch?

Where have any of us ever been that some nitwit doesn't tell us that we should have been there before? They are only pissing on a fireplug to establish territory in the face of recent arrivals. In Aspen, at the Hotel Jerome, you will always meet a stockbroker with an overbite much envied in London who is eager to establish that he was there first. I've developed a good tactic: wherever you are, say that you were born and raised there, but infinitely prefer living in Detroit.

The fishing in the Keys is about the same, but the food is better. There are more fishing guides, but the water is scarcely cluttered. I wouldn't return again in March, when college students on spring break flood the town of Key West. They invariably march around in groups, puking drunk, reminding me of the Nazi youth that cursed the world. They are all apparently the soul children of Ronald Reagan and should be packed off to Daytona Beach before they further destroy the community. If you like this sort of thing, you can save a lot of money by hanging out in a college community after a football game.

Far from this caveat is the notion that much of the food used to be quite awful except for what was served at Rene's, down on Duval, or in the better Cuban restaurants such as El Cacique. Now you can eat better in Key West than in any town I can think of in America fifteen or twenty times its size. Of course, there was a period in the early seventies when you might fly-fish for tarpon on three hits of windowpane acid backed up by a megaphone bomber of Colombian buds that required nine papers and an hour to roll. You weren't exactly ready for fine food when you got off the boat. What you had in mind has still not been determined.

There is something in the character of flats-fishing in the tropics that diminishes the appetite: a mixture of sun, heat, fatigue. You are fly-fishing in the shallow water of a river that is fifty miles wide, and casting only to visible fish. The energy expended in the relentless staring into water is exhausting. You are utterly immersed in the act and dare not let a single extraneous thought enter your mind or you'll miss the fish. It was upsetting this year to find that I have become much better at fly-fishing now that my drinking has vastly moderated. A hangover, simply enough, internalizes the quality of attentiveness, and you're looking inside at your myriad fuck-ups rather than outside at fish.

Not that I couldn't eat adequately, only that I'm usually a multiple-entrée type of guy, and I came to know the certain sadness of watching my wife, two daughters, and son-in-law eat more than I did. The tradition of piggery carries on, I thought. Chef Norman Van Aken's Mira is a grand place, with a first-rate wine list devised by Proal Perry. You should buy Van Aken's book, Feast of Sunlight, published by Ballantine. For day-to-day excellence we chose Antonia's, eating rather elaborate meals there three times in two weeks, though you can order simply from the appetizers and list of pastas (including stone-crab claws and mussels in a cream sauce on homemade linguine). Frankly, I find no fault with Antonia's. In a dozen visits I've never met the chef, Phillip Smith, nor the owner, and not a single visit was an expense-account item. There were no disappointments, and the serving staff is deft and unobtrusive.

We also frequented Louie's Backyard, whose upstairs café is informal and beautifully decorated. One day, chef Bill Prahl will become as inventive as Van Aken. The menu could be called “nouvelle Cuban,” and Prahl's squid rings with citrus aioli are exquisite, as are the Havana pork roast and the shellfish zarzuela. Downstairs the atmosphere is more formal but the food, prepared by Doug Shook under the direction of co-owner Phil Tenney, fine indeed. I prefer this area for lunch when the fried-chicken salad is available, along with onion rings made from marinated Spanish red onions. One day a shellfish gumbo beat senseless anything Louisiana ever offered me. A short drive up the Keys to Cudjoe to Rick Lutz's Cousin Joe's will give you a taste of what the area used to be like, only the food is much better.

Back in Key West I can also recommend Café des Artistes (unbelievable desserts), Dim Sum, the Crêperie, and Kyushu. For a relief from the pricey and somewhat formal, we returned frequently to the Full Moon Saloon for the hottest chicken wings imaginable, grouper and conch sandwiches, conch chowder, and conch fritters, as well as more elaborate meals, all turned out by chef Tom Sawyer. (I keep mentioning chefs for the same reason you tell folks who wrote the book.) I eat breakfast at Dennis Pharmacy on Simonton because it doesn't limit you to the nutritional vacuum of bacon and eggs, offering a number of Spanish soups, including red bean, and pigs’ feet. For sandwiches for the boat, go to Uncle Garlin's Food Store out on Flagler, where the meatloaf is better than Mom's.

Curiously, I didn't gain an ounce in two weeks. At least I don't think I did. I defy the mechanistic world of scales, banks, lawyers, dentists, and I wouldn't balance a checking account at gunpoint. My aide-de-camp handles all of this except the dentist. A scale is meaningless when some days you feel light and some days you feel heavy. I have chosen the weight of 135 pounds as appropriate and have stuck to it. You might ask the local farmers who see me running in the dawn mists well ahead of my panting bird dogs. Once, at the Denver airport, a bald girl in an orange dress told me that I could be what I wanted, so it's 135, period.

Back to the old days, the late sixties and early seventies. I don't miss all of the stuff that made me feel bad, and gentrification, wherever it takes place, tends to wipe out all but a charade of the indigenous culture. It can still be there, but you have to look for it.

I miss the fighting roosters crowing at dawn, but not the cocaine jag that enabled me to hear them. I miss feeling the thrill of the possible future so adumbrated by despair and empty pockets, the night thick with the scent of garbage and flowers, the fecund, low-tide odor of our beginning.

Now I go there just for the fishing and, secondarily, the eating. My family likes it, and it's doubtful I'd chance a trip without them. There are the ghosts of those I cared for who did not survive the behavior the rest of us survived. But it is the water, the life we can only visit and barely comprehend, the thousand life forms of the flats, imperceptible unless you care to learn, a saline mysterium. This year there were two beached, rotting sperm whales on the flats facing Snipe Key, their skins too tough for the seabirds to feed on. I wondered where those whales were born, where they traveled on this bloody journey, what they felt when they died together far from their natural home, all of it quite beyond the range of my speculation or imaginings, the vast, brownish, sun-blasted hulks resting on the lovely flats. Some locals had cut out their valuable teeth with chain saws, but this fact seemed singularly puny, however coarse, compared with the inviolable beauty of the seascape, the whales resting not in peace but, as all of us will, in inevitable resignation.

1989