Casual observers on the causeway, people in loaded vans and station wagons with out-of-state number plates driving the tail end of Interstate 95 south from Miami to where the turnpike dwindles to Route 1 and stutter-steps across the Keys to Key West, American families looking out open car windows toward Florida Bay, suede gray above the mud flats, greenish-blue where channels cut intricate pathways in and around the tiny, mangrove-covered keys that dot the bay from the causeway to the Everglades, observers who are kids wearing Disney World tee shirts and quarreling in back over who gets to use the Walkman, dads and moms in Bermuda shorts, tank tops and rubber thong sandals, sunburnt Dad, his Budweiser hat pushed back on his head, wishing he could take time to stop by the side of the road and fish from the shore till dark, and Mom, with her new Ray-Ban sunglasses on, catching her reflection in the side mirror and turning quickly away from the aging, worried face she sees trying to hide behind the movie-star glasses, these people in an expensive hurry to have fun before heading back to their sad, workaday, clock-driven lives in Cleveland, Birmingham and Bridgeport, their lives of high-tech retraining programs, day-long prowls through suburban malls to stock the house the bank keeps threatening to take away, lives with life insurance, dog food and kitty litter, lawn mowers, orthodonture, special ed and school-desegregation programs, lives that on the outside seem stable, rational, desirable, but on the inside persist in feeling strangely fragile, out of control, compulsive and boring — people with such lives look north from the causeway as they pass beyond Islamorada and Upper Matecumbe Key over open water toward Moray and Lower Matecumbe Keys, and they see the Belinda Blue in the distance heading full speed across the basin from Twin Key Bank, a charter fishing boat, a converted trawler glistening white and pale blue in the midday sun, her stubby bow breaking the still water of the flats into crystalline spray, men in bill caps holding beer cans and fishing rods and chatting animatedly on the afterdeck, a tall, suntanned man in white tee shirt and captain’s hat up on the bridge at the wheel bringing the boat smoothly off the basin into Indian Key Channel, and the people in the car, kids and Dad and Mom, all think the same thing: That man up there on the bridge of the fine white and blue boat should be me. I should feel the sea breeze in my hair, the sun on my arms, the flow of the boat through the soft Florida waters beneath me. I should have the rich Northern fishermen on the deck below grateful to me for my knowledge and experience and the reliability of my craft. I should be that man, who is free, who owns his own life simply because he knows whether to use live or dead shrimp for bait, jigs or flies, and where the bonefish feed, he knows where the basin narrows to a channel deep enough to bring his boat lunging in without touching its deepwater keel against the mudded bottom, he knows at sunup whether a squall will blow in from the northwest before noon, and he’s been able to trade his knowledge for power and control over his own life. His knowledge is worth something. Not like the knowledge we own, we who look enviously out the windows of our cars. To us, our knowledge is worth nothing, is merely private information, the names and histories of our family relations, our secret fears and fantasies, our personalities observed obliquely from the inside. We exchange our knowledge for mere survival, while that suntanned man in the captain’s hat up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue — out of Moray Key, Florida, it says on the transom — that man rises above mere survival like a gull lifting from the sea, like the thought of a poet soaring toward the sun. Oh, Lord, wouldn’t that be a wonderful life! we think. But we do not say it, not exactly. Mom says, “I read where all those fishermen now are smuggling drugs. Because of the recession and all.” And Dad says, “When I was a kid up in Saginaw, all I wanted was one of those boats. Not like that one, more a cabin cruiser type. You can buy a damned house, what one of those things costs these days.” And the kids say, “Why are we going to Key West anyway? What’s there? What’ll we do there? Why can’t we go out on a fishing boat instead?”
